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Wednesday 27 October 2010

Academic Flounderings

Sorry I haven't posted for a while. I started college in September and I've been in quite a weird but wonderful place since then.

Aside from the mission of recalling long since defunct brain cells into action; I've had to cope with my pitiful social interaction skills and exercise constant restraint in order not to completely embarrass myself. This of course hasn't always been as successful an endeavour as I would have liked.

On my first day I was told off for smoking on the grounds and asked to move away. An incident which was later to peeve me even more when I learned that my sixteen-year-old stepdaughter has smoking shelters at her college, but apparently we at The Adult College can't be trusted not to inflict cancer on the odd, innocent passer-by or burn the building to the ground with a wet cigarette end.

My confidence was further hindered by the computers. I can use a computer but it only takes one minor incident for me to become a dithering, flustered wreck. I tried to log on to the virtual learning environment (When I was in high school we had textbooks and a library of encyclopedias), but apparently there is another person with the same name as me who attends the same college, and I inadvertently hacked her account. I coped with the hacking situation quite well but then the computer wouldn't print, so I calmly logged out and moved to another one. As I bent below the desk to switch the computer on, the screen that the person sat next to me was using promptly went off. I had switched her off mid essay, how to make friends and influence people eh?

I had hoped that if I could excel in my essays and portfolio, it might compensate for my social and technical ineptness. But trying to write an essay on the significance of culture is not easy when you have four children reenacting a scene from this years' nativity play outside the bedroom door (Charlie isn't even in the damn thing!). I don't think rehearsals are going very well because I'm quite sure that neither Prince Caspian nor Super Mario were present at the birth of Christ.

Having yelled at Stig to guard the door and told the children that the only circumstances in which they are permitted to come within a mile radius of me is if their eyeballs are bleeding or they have misplaced a limb, I get back to my essay. But I can't concentrate because I am now feeling guilty for becoming an angry old witch and all I manage to accomplish is repetitive strain injury.

To add insult to injury, one of my assignments is to write a personal statement for an application for a place at university, in which I have to demonstrate competence and basically lie about how great I am.

I'm now six weeks in to the course and I have actually managed to occasionally converse with my fellow students. I even offered to organise the half term piss up in an ongoing quest to be sociable. We are going out tonight and though I am quite looking forward to it, I am prepared for the fact that it will inevitably backfire and I will end up pissed and friendless wandering the streets, having made a tit of myself again. Watch this space :s