Unsolicited Advice

So as soon as I set out to write a series of book reports -- a series of anything, really -- life slammed in on me. There's a bunch of stuff colliding messily in my head right now, which makes it difficult to get any of it out. I've been limping along, but I really need to get better at determining in advance what things I need to drop and when, rather than letting it get to the point where I just need to let the next thing fall, no matter what it is. In the meantime, I've given up, called out of the one thing I thought I was going to get accomplished today, and am holed up in my room to try and get some of this shit done. One of the things eating my attention is that a friend is going through a messy breakup. Or, rather, she should be going through a messy breakup, but she refuses to let go of her horrible abusive relationship. The details are unimportant, but, as Dr Nerdlove says, assholes gonna ass. Every time it happens -- which is often -- she runs to us, her friends, ...

When I was a kid, I had no friends. There were a couple of other kids whom I was told were my friends. In retrospect, none of them liked me or wanted me around, they were just forced to include me because my mother wanted to gossip with their mother without interruptions. The one whom I was told was my "best friend" didn't like me to the point where she ignored me at school, but she was the kind of kid whose mother picked out her clothes and hairstyle every morning, and she got clocked with a hairbrush if she protested, so clearly she couldn't do much to stop it. The message this sent was that friends were people who would tolerate you when you were there, then roll their eyes and start running you down to others whenever you weren't. So far as I can tell, this is how my mother actually believes friendship works. She consistently behaved this way with all of her friends, back when she had them, and sailed merrily onward with her siblings once my sister and I aged...

I am still in the slightly-overdramatic juris doctor 's class. Classes. They're intense but useful enough that it's worth killing myself to get through them. They're also bringing up a lot of uncomfortable stuff about my educational history, and how I handle a classroom environment. I learn best when given as much information as possible right up front. I joke that I learn everything via cryptography, because that's actually the standard procedure you follow when trying to decrypt an unknown message in an unknown system: Gather as much cyphertext as possible, put it in a big pile, and then sit down and stare at it (or get a computer to stare at it) until patterns jump out. I often make better progress starting out in the advanced class, as I've done here, and then doubling back to the foundations course once I have some experience. Most beginner classes are streamlined and pared down until you're learning only the thing that is directly relevant at any given...