Even past overwhelmed now...

I probably shouldn't have joked about fish last time, because the day after my last post, I figuratively got swallowed by a whale. Well, actually, I think the whale dropped on me first and then swallowed me, but at any rate, let's just say it was dark and depressing.

The eventual upshot of this is that I am now currently about a week behind in all of my classes except one (and that one is mostly because the professor issued a revised reading sheet because HE was running a week and a half behind). In one of my behind classes this doesn't really matter as much because I've already been grilled, but in the other one (the hardest class of all) I hadn't been called on yet. I emailed the professor and explained the situation to him and asked him to please not call on me for the rest of the week while I got things sorted out.

Well, he didn't get the email.

He called on me today (my first day back in class) and I had to say (in front of 100 people, give or take) that I hadn't had a chance to read that case yet. He moved on to the next victim and I sat there feeling stupid and bright red and cursing modern technology that can't deliver an email properly.

And then we moved on to the next case and he called on me again. "Have you had a chance to read this one?" I just had to shake my head and feel even stupider and bright redder. (Have I mentioned that my own personal version of hell is being publicly humiliated by being made to look stupid for all eternity? Well, that and being forced to watch all Will Ferrell movies -- with the exception of Stranger than Fiction.)

After class I went up and told him I'd sent him an email that morning and promptly started to cry (UGH) from embarrassment and the afore-mentioned whale issues. He apologized profusely and expressed his sympathy and we worked everything out, so I'm, in his words, "fully absolved" and he doesn't think I'm a slacker or anything like that.

But what is still making me squirm (and what will probably make me squirm for several successive four-o-clock-in-the-mornings to come is that now almost 100 people think I'm a slacker. And they don't even know that I had a more-than-good excuse.

Current number of actual recurring nightmares experienced while awake this week: Two.

I guess that's what I get for mocking fish.