this time of year does things to me

you think i'm talking about the christmas music, my red and green attire, the shopping, the holiday greetings and gay happy meetings, the should-be/would-be snow that has come and will come ......

no.

that is not what i'm talking about.


i'm talking about the what i saw referenced on facebook as the 1% of the semester that holds 99% of the stress:

finals.


for me, it's not even "final" tests. it's the final deadlines, final projects, final realizations that everything from the entire semester has to be turned in or ...........................else.


if you know me pretty well, you know that starting on december 1st, i wear red and green every single day until after christmas. honestly, it's mostly to get me through the end of the semester. and this year i've really needed it more than any year before.

i don't know where my head has gone, but it's definitely not in real-life. or at least in my real-life.
my mind is constantly swirling from one course to the other, trying to find the best way to analyze and summarize information or create a representation of my growth as a future teacher..... all of this at the same time. everything at the same time.

life is still going. it never stops. crazy things are always happening. so i need to get my head in the game.
{oh gosh, ....i just had high school musical flood into my head}

today in a class, i was chatting with some classmates. of course we were all discussing how badly we wanted to graduate and how we felt soooooooo old. one girl claimed she was probably the oldest in the entire class. i told her that wasn't true, i was probably the oldest. i asked her how old she was. her answer was twenty-three. quickly, she asked me how old i was and i replied the same. she asked when my birthday was and we all discussed birthdays. then she said the year.

1988.

then it clicked.

"wait. ............... 1988? i was born in 1987."

simultaneously they said "then you're twenty-four," as i said, "i'm twenty-four!"
i'd been so stressed this week that i'd forgotten what age i am. instead of all this work making me more intelligent, i feel like my brain is working slower. i'm getting dumber.

oh well. ha. at least i remembered sooner rather than later that i turned twenty-four.

i hope that this time of year --- weather it's finals or crazy weather or crazy shopping or crazy people --- is treating you well!