Angst Du Jour and Wrath of O'Donbridge

Before I smother you lovely people with another heaping dollop of Angst Du Jour, I need to take a paragraph to thank everyone who commented on my last post. Your encouragement and cleverness and loyalty are so overwhelming... I am wholeheartedly grateful for each and every one of you. Gigantic e-hugs go out to: an anonymous commenter, Jack, another anonymous commenter, Ida, Jess, Cate, seurat2, Sarah, Katie, Robyn, Kate, Anila, Alice, Hope, taraupshall, Dinah, Katie, beangirl1389, Melody, to_thine_own_self, Ginny, Emily, Nicole, VTBurninator, Katie, Ravenclaw2313, Arletta, Sarah, Brianna, Sarah, Emily, Olivia, another anonymous commenter, BenCracknell, Caroline C, Susie, another anonymous commenter, dare2bxabigail, the apple that astonished paris, European Girl, Morgan Leman (email me at hayleyghoover@gmail to discuss meeting up!), ginger jones, RhianonLives, two more anonymous commenters, and Catherine.

There. Now that my all-consuming appreciation and love for you is out of the way, I can continue to bitch and moan. It's the second day of my third quarter of college, and I already have a nagging stress headache. My class schedule is a chaotic mess, and I'm not totally sure which courses I'm dropping, which I'm picking up, or what the heck I'm doing.

I left my first meeting of Geography in a good mood, because the professor is an adorable Appalachian man with a thick Forrest Gumpian accent, and he seems easy enough to enjoy. My only worry is that our entire grades are made up of three tests, each of equal worth. I'm terrible at taking tests. I could write a beautiful ten-page paper, no sweat, but when I'm asked to answer fifty multiple choice questions, I'm guaranteed to freak out and gnaw on my pen until ink explodes in my mouth and I drown in a puddle of failure. But there's no required textbook for the class, and the teacher told us a story about some girl losing a toe in a treadmill accident, so maybe it won't be so bad.

However, not even the cheeriest blood-and-toelessness story could have put my mind at ease enough to endure the wretched History course I mistakenly signed up for. It took place in the evening, which was my first mistake: I'm kind of like the elderly, in that I can barely stay awake after 5PM most days. I found myself having to bounce up and down and tap my fingernails just to keep my eyes open, and probably would have fallen face-first onto the desk and started snoring, had the professor not been suffering some form of Tourette's. While he ranted about Portugal and... ugh, whatever else it is he talked about (I couldn't really tell you), he seemed to be searching for any opportunity to scream the world "POWER!" mid-sentence. Yes. Imagine being me, exhausted from traveling and already past her nap time, slowly drifting off to white noise....

"Blah, blah blah blah; Portugal, blah-blah, blaaah..."

...and then hearing, "in pursuit of POWER!!!" and jolting upright and to full attention. This happened at least twelve times in two hours. Needless to say, I'm in the process of finding another class of equal difficulty but more coherence, which meets at a more reasonable time.

But if you think Pyscho Power Man was the worst of it-- like I did-- then you are wrong, wrong, wrong. Because nothing will ever compare to my first encounter with my Health teacher, O'Donbridge. I am calling her that because she is a hybrid of Dolores Umbridge and Rosie Donnell. Oh, how I wish I were kidding.

I was one of the first people to enter her lecture hall this morning. Without making eye contact, she shouted through the silence, "Sign in and take a seat! In the front! And yes, I always talk like this! I talk loud! GET USED TO IT!" Taken aback, I prepared to "get used to it" and opened my bag to retrieve a pen. I'd switched purses about an hour before. I, uh, didn't have a pen. Greeeat.

"Excuse me," I said, figuring I might as well try talking to her before writing her off completely. "I'm sorry, but do you have a pen I could borrow to sign in?"

O'Donbridge did her best impression of the Charles Manson mugshot smile, like she'd been waiting all morning for her first victim. "Okay," she said, handing one to me, and eyeing it as if she expected me to run away with it and sell it on the black market or something. I smiled as sweetly as possible, and tried to save face by saying, "You'd think I could remember a pen for a class! I guess I had an airhead moment--"

Then, in a tone of voice that usually accompanies kindergarten flashcards of one-digit numbers, she cut me off with, "Yes, you need pens for classes. Take a seat. I'll assign your place next week*."

I sat down in a suck-uppy chair in the front row, in hopes that I wouldn't be cast off as both irresponsible and easily intimidated, and tried to maintain a neutral-yet-interested facial expression while O'Donbridge went on for an hour about course requirements. To make a long story short, we practically have quizzes and papers due every single day. I have a heavier workload for HEALTH than I would in the History Class of Doom. Oh, and in between assigning us a first day test and announcing that we are required to purchase an EIGHTY-DOLLAR TEXTBOOK THE SIZE OF A COUPLE TISSUES TIED TOGETHER, WHICH CANNOT BE BOUGHT USED OR SOLD BACK AFTER THE QUARTER, O'Donbridge preached about how organization and responsibility are the most important skills in the entire world. And, of course, she said this while looking me square in the eye.

So. Yaaaay. I'm now almost as worked up from talking about O'Donbridge as I was in her presence, and that's saying something, because her blouse was see-through and I had to see her frumpy middle-aged bra the entire time. I... yeah. I'm going to go eat a bagel.

Chipotle burritos this year: 13
Subscribers: 26,228
Nail color: "Plum's the Word," Sally Hansen Salon Manicure**

*For those of you still in middle or high school, thinking, "Do teachers really still assign seats in college?" the answer is no. They do not. Unless they are mentally ill.
**Also not a picture of my hand, Jess.

P.S. Today is Mike's birthday. It'd be lovely if any of you would like to say something nice to him on twitter. He's pretty freaking awesome.