aspartame makes my face numb

Why on EARTH am I consuming aspartame, anybody who knows my aversion to it would ask.

Because I'm a good South Beach slave. Yum, sugar-free jello.

Forget the consequences, I'm living in the 21st century and my body is pounds of pollution and plastics already.

Especially now. In a very "radishes in the cupboard" moment, I burned all my pots and pans. I keep them in the section below the oven, which in electric ovens is a good storage place. Mine, however, is a gas oven and that is the broiler section. So when I was trying to broil salmon last week, the horrible stench that I thought was new oven smell - nope, it was the glass on the lids shattering and the plastic handles reconfiguring and the teflon coating turning to something even more carcinogenic. Of course I didn't realize it until I went to use said pots the next day. The stench is almost gone, nearly a week later. Oy vey. This is what happens when my mind is on other things.

I have a stalker, which is the point of this. She creeps me out. (No, not the eyebrow-shifting Australian snob, who laid in wait for me to walk to Russian together today but I blew him off with a "nyet.") The first time I spoke to this stalker, it was pretty evident that she'd listened to everything I'd ever said in her vicinity and that she had attributed meanings to them that I generally didn't have. You know, like I'm the doll and she's the voice. I was avoiding her before that anyway, just because I didn't get the best vibe from her. I hear my mother's voice in my head that says I'm being unfair, she's a nice person, and maybe I just don't like her because she's not very attractive.

My mother's voice continues to be very wrong. Now the stalker is regularly upset with me that we're not best friends. She tried once to bring me candy, and slapped the guy next to me who ate it when I gave it to him. "You're not the one whose love and affection I'm trying to gain!" she snapped at him. Yeah, it was a SWF moment. She's moved closer to me in the two classes in which she could to be sitting WAY too close to me. Yesterday she insisted on poking me without stop until I snapped, "That's the reason I don't teach 8th graders anymore!" Today I was talking to somebody else and she was talking about me literally behind my back, repeatedly using my name and attributing things to me that I have no conception of. All I heard was, "I had to come to class because I sit next to [Insert My Name Here], and I knew she would be upset with me if I didn't come to class." Upset? Please. In that DO NOT CARE SPACE. Earlier this week when I went to Spanish class and sat down near where a bag was she said, "I knew you loved me! You're sitting next to me! You pretend to hate me, but I knew you loved me!" I replied, "I never gave thought to any of that at all. Still don't." I don't know her bag and I don't care where I sit. LEAVE ME ALONE!

Those kinds of things one at a time, I can take. Like when Color Ankh girl (she has an Ankh tattooed on the back of her neck) said one day to me, "Where are you going?" "To class! Late!" "Fine! It wasn't like I was going to ask you to come with me anyway!" - that I can handle because she's usually really normal and that's a joke - we usually have nice conversations and she wears pink cowboy boots and has a sex vibe so thick she had to be a burlesque star in her last life. But this stalker chick, it's this constant attention that I do not want.

And after surviving the indignities of student body elections, now we are voting for Prom Queen and King at the Barristers' Ball. Several of my classmates are skipping class next Friday in order to get ready for the ball. Son of Deepo-Provera Inventor said, "I'll be up all night so I have to nap all day. I can't be bothered to come to class then!"

I feel ... old. Some of my classmates I like and find them enjoyable, but the whole society is creepy. I spend as little time there as possible - seeking to escape into a world of sanity and reality, not surrounded by 23-year-old Midwestern boys looking for a Mrs who likes anal, and approaching all females to find out who she will be. Not surrounded by professors with drinking problems. The drinking culture is OVERWHELMING. It's not just the kids who miss class because of hangovers or who manage to stumble in still green at the gills - we've been told numerous times that the best things happen professionally with a drink in one's hand.

Well, if I were still 23, then I wouldn't mind so much because I used to put away quite a lot myself. But my liver is already pickled and I have to worry about thyroid issues and uterine masses and potential cervical cancer and blood sugar levels and cholesterol and all sorts of other things. It's not that I'm really so old, it's just that I'm different. I don't want to be a part of a world that revolves around drinking and excludes everybody who isn't one of us. Just as my classmates build taller and taller walls to keep out everyone who isn't a lawyer, I deconstruct all the walls to keep finding non-lawyers in my life.

I still have to get a a really high-paying job when I graduate, but I'm going to have to get hired on merits other than my off-color jokes at the cocktail parties.

Hopefully my face won't still be numb then.