Sing It, Edith

I realized today that I reach a point where I'm so stressed that the gloves come off and I make questionable decisions for the sake of making decisions. One of the better ones was picking a lecturer for my course, who's supposed to be charismatic and lectures about a topic (the evolution of radio in Britain) that I know approximately nothing about and will gladly outsource to someone else. In contrast, one of my bad decisions was trying to book flights to Manila all day, being snapped at by a woman who insisted I wouldn't find a better price than the one she was offering over the phone, and then buying a ticket that was $40 more expensive from Expedia out of pure, unadulterated spite. I definitely spent about $400 more than I intended (which I'll probably regret at some point), but it's worth it to have the dates I wanted, a single layover in Abu Dhabi, arrival and departure times that aren't around 2am, and actual plans instead of a giant question mark on my to do list. Deciding to break for coffee and multigrain toast with strawberry jam was a good choice; taking an hour off to read the Guardian was probably a bad choice. You get the idea.

I was especially hellbent on making progress today because I have my meeting with the Warden tomorrow at 9am, and last time, I tried to explain to him why I thought it would be a good idea to teach myself Spanish via podcast instead of listening to Alanis Morissette all the time. I don't think I made my point forcefully enough, because he seemed unconvinced. So tomorrow, it'll be nice to have concrete plans, even if they were partially formed out of malice for someone I've never met and ended up costing a small fortune. I'm going to keep that to myself.