I'm ... not sure what I am. I've been sitting here trying to figure it out. My mood and my state of mind can change in the space of a second for the tiniest reasons. I guess I'm on kind of a sliding scale, mood-wise. I don't instantly flash from hot to cold, but I still feel myself progressing pretty quickly from one to the other. I don't know if that makes sense or not.

I'm restless. I know that one for sure. I feel like I'm trapped inside my own skin sometimes. I'm not a fan of tight spaces -- I tolerate them, but they generally make me uncomfortable -- and I get this feeling sometimes that feels a lot like I do when I'm in a tight space, restricted, like the air is getting thinner, restless like I need to bang on the walls to get out. Except the tight space I'm stuck in is my own head.

Time feels slowed down too. I know a big part of it is that I HATE my degree. It's going to sound weird, but what I hate most is how indifferent I am to my courses. I don't care enough to be embittered by them, but I don't care enough to take them seriously, I don't care enough to do more than the absolute minimum, to get engaged in class, to do the supplementary readings, nothing. When I'm interested in something, I'll devour it, and I'm interested in a pretty broad range of things. Literature, history, art, philosophy, psychology, politics, music, just about anything except what I'm studying now. What's weird is that as part of my French degree, I've studied just about all of those things. I take French literature, philosophy, history, linguistics, all of which interest me individually but within the frame of this degree, I don't know, I just can't make myself care. I'm in my third year now and there's no way of changing my course so all I can do is either start over (which I can't afford) or plow through it for one more year. It doesn't seem that bad and I keep telling myself the next year will fly by, but the last few months have absolutely dragged. Every second that I'm in the classroom feels like an hour. And yet, with the things I do like, time does fly. I make time every afternoon to write, and I can go for 2-3 hours without noticing time passing until my coffee gets cold.

I'm glad that I have something to be passionate about. I'm glad that no matter how depressed I get, I have yet to lose that particular fire. Sometimes what makes me sad is that I don't have more time to write. It should bother me that doing my homework feels like a waste of time while if I've gotten even a paragraph of my own writing done, I feel like I've had a productive day. I just can't motivate myself to do anything else. I want to, it's just that the thought of any of my school work makes me feel hopeless, hollow and sometimes physically sick. The only reason I haven't dropped out completely is that I NEED an undergraduate degree to get into a creative writing program. I need to survive another year of this -- the dread, the inability to connect with my classmates who are all so much more engaged than me, the boredom, the indifference -- if I want to get to what I REALLY want. Until now, keeping my eye on the bigger prize has seen me through, but every day it gets harder and harder. Even the homesickness has gotten worse. From the beginning I've told myself that I'm Canadian, that just because I'm away from my country doesn't mean I'm cut off from it, that I can and will go back and that after I'm done with my degree I can go back to Canada and never leave again, if that's what I want. All of that used to comfort me through even the worst of my homesickness, but lately it's not helping as much. I miss my friends, my family, my culture. I miss everything about it and I'm just itching to go back, although I still have to get through another month here before I can.

All I want to do is sleep. Sleep and sleep and sleep until I graduate and get the heck out of here.