Sometimes The World Sucks

This Thanksgiving, I will give thanks that I am no longer in a class with Amie. Unfortunately, Thanksgiving is a ways off, and I've still got to endure one more class with her before exam week starts. Wow, can she derail class discussions. How can you turn an overview of the themes in Kafka's Metamorphosis into a discussion of druids? How? I was there, and I still don't understand the process. And then I had to ditch my lunch plans to talk to the professor about essay topics, which I didn't get to do in class because Miss Motor Mouth was doing her "I'm really thinking hard and might have an epiphany any minute" face, and the professor bought in to it and actually spent thirty minutes trying to untangle her thought processes.
I ripped the knees out of another pair of jeans. Between them, my eight pairs of jeans have nine patches. One pair is basically patched from shin to mid-thigh. This is not good. I tried to sew a patch on to the latest rip, but quit after the second time I stabbed the needle into my flesh right above the thumbnail. Crap like that is why I don't lend out my sewing kit. It's seen more blood than a surgeon's scalpel.
Velocity got out of intensive care today. Her handlers released a brief clip of her propped up in bed, but they're still keeping the media circus away from her. God, it's heartbreaking. Her face doesn't even look like her face. The clean new costume she's wearing makes it even worse somehow.
There was something in the news about Vector again. He was posing with a firefighter and wearing a shit-eating grin. I didn't bother reading the headline.

This Is Not My Homework

My campus is weathering the storm pretty well. We're a tough crowd. The dining hall, showing a rare sense of humor, is serving chicken soup, which is actually pretty good for a change. Classes go on, even though they are sparsely populated. Amie is coughing so hard that I'm surprised her entire respiratory system hasn't come loose. I'm actually impressed, since she's the mouse-sneeze type who never seems to have bodily functions in public. Rest assured, she does. Despite her racking coughs, she is still taking notes in that perfectly round indecipherable handwriting. I can't tell her letters apart. Class discussion is kind of strained, since pretty much everyone has a sore throat.
I'm technically in good enough shape to do the mountains of catch-up work I need to do, but I'm coddling myself for a bit longer. I don't want a relapse. By which I mean I am a lazy, lazy procrastinator, and blogging is far more fun than reading postmodern drivel. I've been keeping up with the news feeds all day. Vector finally put his money where his mouth is, and is taking over Velocity's job until they can find a long-term replacement. That means he's got a hell of a commute when there's an emergency back at headquarters, but the guy can go supersonic, so I don't feel too bad for him. I guess the rest of the Lightning League can pick up the slack while Vector's picking off the solar vampires in South Carolina. I really hope they can get hold of Warbird fast, though. Baron Dynamo (I forget his real name) gets out on parole pretty soon, and I'd rather have Vector closer to the West Coast, since Shining Citadel has turned into a frigging quarantined ivory tower. I know they can't afford to risk the planet-movers and star-smashers getting a sniffle in case there's an imminent threat of world destruction, but seriously, way to turn your back on us mere mortals.

Countdown

I'm in the library, pretending to study, and wondering which of the people here could be superheroes or supervillains. Nadine might be. She's got that mysterious silence and classical profile. It's funny; the 'strong, silent' stoic character is fascinating in literature, but pretty boring in person. I feel like she's kind of cheating in the class we have together - when the professor asks her questions, she's always got a succinct, snappy answer. But it's like pulling teeth to get her to participate, and it feels like she's not pulling her weight in class, just coasting and doing the bare minimum. That's not a typical flying-below-the-radar hero tactic, more like a distracted-by-nefarious-plots attitude. Meh, maybe I'm just paranoid. She sits next to me, and I'm kinda hoping she hasn't noticed my temperature problems. I've more or less solved the issue by wearing more clothing. If someone notices the long-sleeves-in-blistering-heat thing, I'll just say I'm anemic or something (and it might even be true). I can warm my hands up to a normal temperature by wearing gloves or putting them between my knees or under my arms for a while, like I used to do on cold days. So I'm guessing (yay pseudoscience!) that I've got some sort of atmospheric effect around me, since my internal body temperature is perfectly normal. There's no freeze machine in my guts, so I've been visualizing it as a kind of minty fresh aura.
None of the others in my classes strike me as the super type. I know there's no 'type' to have powers, but there is certainly a type that uses them, and I doubt my classmates would ever go active in the super community. Even if Amie has world-ending godlike powers, I'm not sure exactly what she could accomplish with them. Especially if they rely on willpower. She only ever speaks in questions, and only uses about half her voice, so it's always soft and kittenish. She can't answer a single question decisively. I almost wish I had x-ray vision, just so I could stare through her skull and see it is, in fact, packed with cotton candy. I'm betting it's pink.