Update on the state of me

I feel weird making this post, but I'm having a hard time judging how I come off to other people and I figure that it's only fair to give a warning if my behavior is strange.

I'm having a bad week. They've moved my grandmother from the hospital back home, and there's a nurse to help take care of her, but they're not intending on doing any sort of treatment. She doesn't always remember what's happening. Sometimes she does, and then she seems very accepting, almost eager, for an end, which upsets me. Sometimes she's confused and doesn't understand what's going on, which is worse. The doctors' estimate was that she has three to six months, but my mom is of the opinion that the time is better measured in weeks, if that. I don't know how to guess these sorts of things. I'm going home on Thanksgiving; for now, I'm just afraid every time my phone rings.

I haven't been steady. It's not that I'm constantly down; it's that when I'm happy, it's more like a maniac phase than anything else- I'm jittery, talk too loud, laugh at things that aren't funny, and write excited, over-enthuastic comments with slowing down enough to make sure I've spelled things right, or even managed to include all the words in the sentence. I'd almost rather be depressed, because I don't like watching myself act so far off normal.

I still don't particularly want to be social about it, because I can't guess at when I'll swing back to wanting to be entirely alone, and it's usually abrupt switches from one side to the other. I don't want to come on IM for the same reason. But comments and emails are nice, because they're easy to walk away from when my mood changes, and it's good to have other things to think about that nonetheless don't require much effort. I like being distracted, and when I'm in this sort of mood I think I'd go crazy if I didn't have some sort of outlet to be excited at. So I want to thank anyone who's talked to me lately, and say that- I don't know if I'm acting strangely enough that it comes off as weird. It feels weird to me. Just please don't take offense at anything I've done recently.

Mmm, downloads.

Ganked from kessie: Anonymous music meme.


ETA: On another topic entirely, there's a girl I went to undergrad with who is applying to graduate school this fall, and she's been emailing me for the last few months to ask questions and for advice and so on; I think one of the professors must have given her my name, because I doubt I've spoken to her three times ever. Anyway, she's just taken the GRE and wanted to know what I scored when I took it, which I only managed to provide her with after writing three entire paragraphs of "well, it's really more about the percentiles than the actual score, and no one gives these sorts of tests much weight anyway, your GPA and letters of recommendation count for much more, blah blah blah", all sorts of wordy things so that I could bury my score in the last sentence like an afterthought. Not because I'm ashamed of it, but because it's high enough that I know there's nowhere for the discussion to go after that, and I hate the thought of making her even more worried about her applications, if that's possible.

Clearly this says all sorts of revealing things about my relationship with my own grades, but I have to say that my very favorite thing about grad school so far is that there isn't any real competition for grades, because everyone's getting an A or B anyway, and it's rarely even broken down into the actual percentages. It's very relaxing to not have to do the sorts of hiding and bizarre comparisions I'm used to.