I started summer classes this week. Composition 1 and Music Appreciation. Summer 5-week classes contain the same amount of material that a typical 16-week college course would take, making them much faster paced. I didn’t really understand what that meant in terms of workload until I began the assignments for both classes.
I quickly realized that it wasn’t realistic for me to do two summer classes right now, and ending up dropping Music Appreciation after my girlfriend observed I was having difficulty with the abstract concepts. The material of Music Appreciation wasn’t what I understood it to be; I was expecting much more of a “historical perspective on music” type of class, but the assignments involved a lot of listening to melodies and being able to describe them with the correct words. My girlfriend, who is a music major, tried to help, but I was asking her questions about abstract “vibe” based concepts such as exactly how many octaves up or down does a melody need to be described as “wide range”, and I realized I was not the kind of person that could take this class over a 5-week period, much less with how much else I have going on…
I like the Composition class, at least. I am really glad that my professor seems to have a similar opinion to me on English classes in primary education; that the assignments are often restrictive and stifling. Grammar is one thing, but the style of an essay should not be… so… predetermined. I’ve always been told I’m a good writer, but I never felt that way with the criteria that my work in middle and high school was graded with. I have, like, 4 to 6 assignments I need to be working on at one time (again, compressed summer class) but I am able to get through them.
An interesting activity we did was “freewriting”, or writing nonstop for 10 minutes. The purpose of it is to get used to writing without having to worry about editing at the same time. I really felt this, because historically I have spent a lot of time on my blogposts here re-reading and editing them before I post them. It’s my blog, it doesn’t have to be perfect.
In other news, to make a long story short, my girlfriend is practically homeless right now through no fault of her own. She most likely has a traumatic brain injury of some kind (although we have struggled to obtain a diagnosis) and has had frequent seizures as a result. I have been her primary emotional support with this lack of housing, and am continuing to transport her to and from social support services like I did when she had a place to stay. These services have definitely helped her with her medicine – she isn’t really having seizures anymore, which is great! She is working on finding a job, which will allow her to support herself (obviously, she couldn’t when she was having seizures on the job).
But… it is a little frustrating how little progress we have with housing support programs. It just has the feeling of the government, and in some cases our medical system, throwing pills at her and doing nothing else. I know institutions have their specialties, and I don’t expect a hospital to house her long-term, but it feels shitty of them to say, in essence, “you’re mostly on your own there” after you tell them you have nowhere to go. In reality, they are able to refer her to a plethora of homeless shelters, but if you know anything about San Antonio, you’d know that the shelters here aren’t especially safe places (that said I imagine many cities with poverty-stricken areas could say the same). Some of the city-funded institutions we’ve looked into are directed at people who are homeless and have drug addictions, and these shelters have problems with crime, even violent crime. We don’t want to deal with that. Beggars can be choosers when it comes to their safety.
There are programs that are designed to assist with housing instead of rehabilitation, but the wait list for the local housing authority’s voucher program is one to three years.
On the bright side, however, she is currently safe in a hotel, and she has a phone plan now, which will allow her to communicate with potential employers. She has a job lined up, and hopefully she will be able to begin working as early as this upcoming week. We are working hard to get out of this situation, I assure you.
We have received some donations from friends and I have continued to work Uber to make money for herself and I. We are super grateful for the donations, but the reality is that they go by fast. Three meals a day is expensive when you have little income. Her being able to support herself is the primary objective in all this, and I believe in her. ❤️