droopy

It's been raining for about five days straight now, each morning marked by that depressing gray edge around the windowshade that tells you even before you've blindly slapped at the alarm that today is going to be as dim and dark and droopy as the saturated branches of the trees outside. October is still clinging to the last vestiges of color, but can't hide the fact that it's slowly succumbing to the bleak no-man's-land that is November.

I've never had a problem with rain, even extended periods of it. My tolerance, however, varies in direct accordance to how much time I'm able to spend outside, which, as you might not expect, means that the more I'm out in it the happier I am. Sadly though, this week has instead found me boxed in white-walled rooms with the sort of cubicle-esque fluorescent lighting that exhausts you via osmosis when it isn't stabbing your eyes out. My sister gets migraines if she's exposed to it for too long. I just get grouchy.

The marathon four-hour shift working at the Writing Center today - nothing burns you out faster than getting the one impossible paper right at the end of the day when all you want is to get home. The first few sessions weren't so bad; I'm currently acting as a conversation partner for a Ukrainian woman visiting her Ph.D. candidate husband here. She'll be in America for three months and wanted to work on her English. The trouble is that when she can't think of a word (which is often) she will simply stop talking, so I have to constantly come up with new topics. And because she seems to have no activities outside of occasionally doing things with her husband, it's as exhausting for me to be imaginative as it must be for her to translate. Ran through a few standard freshman bio labs, reminding the kiddos to put Figure captions on the bottom and Table captions on the top and never, ever list the materials used, proofread a few more of the never-ending stream of endowed scholarship thank-you letters, and just as I was getting to the point where smashing a window, leaping out into the rain, and running down the street yelling "FREEDOM" in a passable Scottish accent (sans blue face paint), in comes an ESL student with a five-page paper on Plato's Republic with no discernible organization whatsoever, and so riddled with tense and grammar errors that it was barely readable. And I didn't even have the option of shuffling it off on one of the other tutors since we were full up. Ye gods.

Interviewed with ExxonMobil yesterday afternoon in lieu of sitting through Design lecture. Not too harrowing an experience, mostly the standard "describe your problem-solving technique," "what was an experience that challenged you, and how did you go about it," "what are your greatest strengths and weaknesses" sorts of questions. Possibly the comfort of having two job offers already on the table lulls me into a state of complacency, but I also like to keep my options open. Another two interviews scheduled for later in the month - it's that time of a senior's career. As if the joys of HYSYS programming and acrylic acid plant design weren't titillating enough.

Live music and dollar drafts at Open Mic night, preceded by repeatedly impaling a variety of foam targets with arrows at high velocity, make Wednesdays bearable. Tonight, however, I have only anchoring the news and getting beat up at hockey practice to look forward to.