Good news, tumblr.

As expected, studying as actually A Thing this time.  Today will (is) be(ing) spent setting my pace to something a bit more rapid, so I think that by tomorrow I’ll be at my old standards.  Two weeks is cutting it a little bit close, but what I’m going over is all old, previously-studied material.  Hopefully the information is still in my brain and, best-case scenario, most of what I need will be remembered as I read through my notes.  Worst-case scenario….. Well, a final grade of ‘B’ will still be better than what I received last year.  More motivation for me, I suppose. 

Back to work, I guess.

Sup tumblr.

On the 14th I have my Bio exam, worth 50% of my mark.  I did really well on my first midterm (worth 15% btw). I got an A….  Or a high B+; I’m not quite sure the listed grading system can apply to individual tests or if some sort of curve throws things off and it only works for the overall mark…  Anyway, my second ‘midterm’, I somehow, I don’t know, forgot how to study.  I remember being so excited that I finally had a good study method down (I only lost marks on things I specifically remembered going, ‘eh, fuck it’ and passed them by with only a vague understanding in hand) and that I could totally ace the course if I kept my act together… which led of course to, two weeks later when studying for my second midterm, me comparing each and every proceeding fact-remembering to how it felt to study the first time around.  This quickly escalated to me overthinking the fuck out of each mental step of remembering things, which led to me switching my study strategy twice (simply repeating things in my head over and over, a shadow and mockery of how memorization actually works, to sort of casually going over a subject in my head with a strangely Bill Cosby-sounding thought-voice hoping that I was somehow mistaken of my ability to memorize and had to ‘ease it in’)…. Which led to me nearly having a panic attack while desperately trying to remember the steps of the Krebs cycle or how many chromosome pairs result from meiosis.

I would like to say that this doesn’t happen often.

Needless to say, I got a terrible mark on that exam, worth 25% of my final grade if I haven’t mentioned that yet.  And it was just yesterday that I finally calmed myself down and realized, “oh hey, that thing I do when I remember things?  Which results in me remembering things?  Yeah, that’s what I’m supposed to do!” And it worked, just like it did with my first exam.

And wouldn’t you know it, today I woke up and it was like my brain was fighting tooth and nail against me.  I hate myself a little bit more each time I say this to myself on days when studying just doesn’t come, but I honestly could not focus at all today.  I knew the ‘remembering’ feeling, but it felt like every time I tried to remember something, I would fall just short of it.  Ever try moving your foot in the early stages of it falling asleep, where it only mostly follows your commands to move, but not quite?  That was me up until about half an hour ago, today.

But, I won’t bore you with the details my whining.  I’m sure at least one of my reader (singular) knows intimately what I’m talking about.  (That is a lie, this post is going to be 100% whining, fyi) (well, by that I mean I will continue to whine about today, not the thing up there I was saying a certain someone knows about)

So yay, I have a whole half hour to study before I have to leave for work.  To study the thing I should have finished the previous Tuesday.  The thing that should have taken me maybe two or three hours to study, at the most.  The thing that has been holding me back, making me lose a week of studying.  But then, even if I had gotten that stuff down, somehow, my “herp derp how do i shot basic mental processes” bullshit would have not allowed me to progress past that point.

So yeah.  Nearly an entire week’s worth of studying time is gone.  I thought that I would be angrier, but I just feel kind of depressed.  Depressed and disappointed in myself.  Honestly, how do you over-think remembering to the point where you no longer know how to?  If every little bump in the road didn’t make me feel so fucking anxious, and if I my confidence in myself didn’t vanish at the drop of a hat, then maybe I wouldn’t be in this fucking mess to begin with.

tl;dr: the past week has been frustrating because I somehow forgot how to remember.

I am going to be in some serious shit next week.

The other night I was looking through the remaining material that I needed to study for Monday, and I came to a worrying conclusion: I did not have enough time to cover it all.  Even if I requested an extension on my CS assignment (which I did, by the way), I would still not be properly prepared.  So, after a few hours deliberation (resulting in mild sleep-loss), I decided that I needed to call in work.

I should have worked today and tomorrow.  Now I don’t.  On the plus side, I have more wiggle-room.  But now, my employers probably are NOT happy with me at all.

This had better be worth it.

So I have another midterm in Bio coming up on Monday.  It’s worth a quarter of my total mark.  Last time, about a month ago, I managed to barely get an ‘A’, and I felt that I had done the best with the time I had… I mean, I was studying bare-bones, basically, with only a week’s preparation.

In my defence, I thought that I had more time.

Anyway, I had two weeks this time, but a good deal more to study.  On top of that, I had this weird thing where I was convinced that the memorizing I was doing wasn’t the type that I had done one month previous, making it difficult to get into the “know All The Things” mindset that I needed for this midterm.  Sooo…. I might have fucked up a bit in the last couple of notes….  But, at this point I NEED to study my labs and review the notes that I haven’t yet.  Whatever I’ve studied is either there or it isn’t.  With luck, I’ll get a B or B+, but I doubt that I’ll get an A.  Oh well!  I have finals in a month so I’ll take a week off and then go back to intensive study for three weeks.

You understand now why I celebrate the completion of exams with drinking.

You know, it’s not even that I simply love getting drunk, or that I straight-up crave liquor (though alcoholism runs in my family, gotta watch out for that)…  Really, it’s the one time when I can eat fatty food and not worry about calories, or stay up until four in the morning without worrying about how that is going to affect my day, or even just that I have a few day’s rest before going back to devoting almost every waking hour to school and study.  All that matters is that I no longer think twice about whether the person on Facebook will HATE ME FOREVER when I post on their wall, and that I go on AIM and have silly conversations with my friends about Homestuck and genitals.  Occasionally at the same time.

Wow.  I just read through that, and holy shit am I anxious about a lot of things.  I should…. maybe see a doctor about that.  Anxiety is not fun!  Drinking to deal with that anxiety is even less fun.

Except, screw that for now; I just spent forty-six bucks on peppermint schnapps and chocolate liqueur and I intend on enjoying them, dammit.  It’s not as much liquor as it sounds like: two bottles, twenty bucks each.  And only averaging on about 20% alcohol content, making them worth about… nearly a liter of standard liquor, pound-for-pound?

Not that I’m counting.

I don’t really know what the two taste like together (That’s called a ‘polar bear’ by the way), save for a vague memory I have from a few years ago.  I just know that they’re good.  See, I can’t actually check to see if this shit’s legit because of this diet I’m on.  It’s great; I’ve lost more than twenty pounds in the past two months.  The catcher is that you CANNOT consume more sugar than is found in an apple, nor more carbs than found in… a burrito?  Or something, I guess?  50g carbs, 20g sugar, bottom line alright?  Guess what ferments into alcohol?  Sugar!  If I bump myself out of this diet, I get the brain-fog the next day and that shit is POISON because of my exams.  And because I have a few day’s worth of notes and a CS assignment to catch up on after my exam, not to mention the 3 weeks of study shortly thereafter, I can’t really enjoy my liquor until fucking Christmas.  

So you know what?  I will be drunk and I will be talking to my friends online and I WILL make a fool out of myself, and I am going to love every minute of it.  It’s all that I’ve got.  

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go to bed so that I can study tomorrow before work.

Oh shit, that’s right; I have a tumblr.  With any luck I used that semicolon correctly.  My grasp on how to use semicolons in grammar has slipped considerably in the past couple months since I began taking Computer Science at the U of M.  I’ve found that, when I’m writing something down in point-form, I have to put conscious effort into not ending each separate statement with a semicolon.  Is that the equivalent to dreaming in French while attending a language course?  More like, it’s the equivalent of reading Homestuck and discovering that you’ve been adding more ‘v’s and ‘w’s than are strictly necessary.

I’ve noticed an unfortunate trend in my CS class: The assignments worth whatever-percent of my total mark have, in all but one case, been assigned during (and due shortly after) one or two weeks prior to major exams in my other classes.  See, this ends in one of two ways: a crappy, incomplete program that gets me only 70%, or a really good program with a structure conceived in the wee hours of the morning out of desperation that earns me full marks plus bonus.  There is no gray area.  Same thing happened on my recent CS exam actually.  Desperation and only a brief, vaguely recalled experience with the structure wanted got me full marks.  You can probably tell by now that I get my most thorough studying done the week prior to an exam.

Now that you’ve read my musing about the correct usage of a semicolon and an experience that every other student also goes through, we can move onto the big stuff:

I didn’t actually have anything to go onto actually.  This has been just me vomiting out onto my keyboard whatever happened to be going through my head at the time.  I’m going to bed in an hour so that I can get up early enough to study before work, and I’d rather spend that time playing Warcraft than thinking of something else to ramble on about.

I have a tumblr now!  I’m not entirely sure why, but here we are.  It involves Homestuck and Radiation.  I won’t bother figuring this out now.  Tomorrow morning!  Slash after 6 pm.  I have labs tomorrow, see.  I guess this is a blog thing and I should post about things in my life?  Okay, uh… Jegus… shit, okay…. I got nothing.  Homestuck?  I guess?  fuck it, I’ll post something tomorrow.  AND NOW YOU HAVE TO READ THIS