I keep thinking today is Friday. But, sadly, it's not. There are still two more days of classes before the lovely, lovely weekend.

My parents just called. From the freaking Dominican Republic. Lucky. It got really cold here again. I naively thought that since the temperature had reached 70 degrees that it would stay warm here, but I was very wrong. I swear I'm just going to move to Florida or California, with or without a job.

Yesterday in Senior Seminar we critiqued my story, which is always hard. It's difficult to listen to your classmates tear apart something that you've worked a long time on, but in the end it's usually all beneficial. And everyone has to go through it. I always like to read everyone's comments when they hand their copies of my story back to me, with the exception of one person. Let's call her Noreen. Because that's her name. She's about 40 years old, and there have been several occasions where she's almost cried in the middle of class. That's fine, I mean, some people are really emotional. The thing I don't like is that whenever we're critiquing a story, she's so rude about her comments.

One of my english teachers in high school once told us that it takes 17 positive comments about a person's writing to make up for one negative comment. Almost all of us in the class realize this, and when we make negative comments about someone's story, we usually follow it with something good. It's just common courtesy. Not Noreen, though. She has no problem saying that there's no character development, the dialogue sucks, or that there's no plot. The only thing that keeps all of us sane, I think, is that we all realize that when she says something she's usually the only one on her side. So, we kind of listen to her comments, nod politely, and go on with the discussion.