Tuesday, September 26, 2006

AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHSSSTTRRESSSSS

So I walked into my Master's supervisor's office the other day and asked him how his weekend was. He said, "it was good, until I read your paper." Ouch.

It's one thing to be hard on me, and critique me because he has high expectations of me, which is a good thing, but now I'm ruining people's weekends every time I hand in a haphazard paper. I'm feeling a little pressure up in here. I'm panicky, i'm breathing weird, i'm exhausted--I think McGill is trying to kill me.

Leah McLaren, in last weekend's Globe and Mail, wrote an article about stress--she does yoga, she meditates, she drinks wine and rants with her friends, she goes for long walks and runs, and she is so busy trying to relax that she forgets to relax. According to her article, 55% of Canadians feel 'extreme stress' about various things in their lives--the highest stat in the world. We are apparently being coined, annoyingly, the 'Stressettes.' I prefer the "Age of Anxiety" or "Generation Why?" but I guess McLaren does write chicklit, so she can pick her own annoying term.

Anyway, after this little experience with my professor, I told myself it was okay, it was for the best, and that I can handle it. I went for a jog, did some meditation, listened to some music, and then called poor unsuspecting Cheyne and burst into tears. The poor guy had no idea what to say, and in the state I was in, he could do nothing but make it all worse. "So you wrote a shitty essay. Who cares?" he tried. All I could say was, "...you think I wrote a shitty essay?"

I got myself the hell off the phone for a little Cristina and Alison love and called him back when I could stop acting like such a girl. I feel better about the whole thing now if just because I have Alison, Cristina, and Cheyne doing their very earnest best to make me feel better. And they do. Leah McLaren can keep her stressettes. I'm keeping my own anxious, wonderful, friends, who don't say stuff like 'stressettes.'

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