Lucy's Progress

She's coming along quite nicely:


Ok. For those of you readers who aren't familiar with anime...or the special brand of crazy that is cosplay...all shall be revealed in a later post. Basically, I am dressing up as characters that I like at a convention devoted to anime. Yes, sort of like those Star Wars geeks...Trekkies too. I will post photos of the characters I'm cosplaying as well as pictures of myself in the finished costumes as soon as the costumes are finished, which will be soon!

There you go, a very basic and undetailed explanation of "cosplay."

Tatting.

This is the result of my first tatting! I used a pattern in a book called "Tatted Snowflakes" by Vida Sunderman.

1 shuttle, red size 10 crochet thread


My second tatted piece: "Bejewelled Snowflake," also from the book, "Tatted Snowflakes" by Vida Sunderman. I made a silly mistake in the starting ring: I made seven picots instead of six. I didn't realize my mistake until the last stitch of the piece, so I just left it alone. Ooops! lol

I'm really loving tatting. It's super fast and easy (so far, anyway!)

I have been sewing. I have two dresses for cosplays which both need the hems finished (one of which is the yellow number from my last post) before I call them "finished!" I'm really excited about Anime Central! And I LOVE the characters I'm cosplaying! Nerd squees all over the place.

Nearly done with something

I'm very close to finishing this yellow dress. It's for my Asuka cosplay (from Evangelion). All I have to do is finish the hem and also the ends of the shoulder straps. I worked really hard on this, adding special touches that make it a more "professional" job (full lining, invisible zipper, hand sewing in places etc..). I wanted it to be cute in real life as I intend to actually wear this on a semi-regular basis, despite it being made as a costume.

ACEN is approaching very quickly!

Weeks

For a few weeks now, I have gotten up in the morning (if you can call it "morning") harboring the same feelings. I don't want to get up. I don't want to do anything. I don't like who I am or what I'm doing. I feel like I continue to make the wrong choices in my life, as though it were my hobby to always mess up, spazz out, or run out of steam and sanity. Most importantly, I feel stupid. Feeling stupid is the worst kind of feeling for me because I have wasted a lot of time trying not to be stupid.

And, honestly, I'm sick of trying. There are things I am good at, being a graduate student is obviously not one of them. And before anyone says that graduate school is a lot of stress on everyone and I shouldn't be so hard on myself, have it be known that I am not a full time student, I do not have even a part-time job, and I do basically FUCK-ALL all day long. I have two classes, one of which has only one assignment (no tests, quizzes, final, etc...), and I am overwhelmed. The funny thing is that I am overwhelmed not by the class with the constant stream of busy-work type assignments, but by the one in which I have only one due date for the entire term. The term is almost over. Have I made any progress on that one assignment? No, of course not.

Of course not.

When is it due? I, honestly, am not sure. I skipped class last week because we were supposed to "talk about" our papers. Since I would have nothing to say, I avoided putting myself in a situation in which I would look like the idiot I undoubtedly am. I thought I would take a week to actually make some progress and then go to class this week...prepared.

Let's just say that I'm thinking about skipping out again.

I am batting out of my league. I played T-ball in grade school and not very well. The puzzling thing here is that I don't really want to do well, but rather feel like I should be doing well--at least as well as my peers. I feel like I have no place from which to start, appearing out of nowhere with nowhere to go--no sense of direction. So, I stay where I am. I feel stupid. I cry.

I've always felt stupid and I've always been crying.

And I know that deep down it isn't about school. It isn't about school at all.