A trip on the other side

Everything in life is all just an interpretation of what you see, feel or remember. I always make fun of Amanda for the crazy dreams that she has at night and how random her mind's reconstruction of her day is. Well, I thought I'd share an experience of my own from last night. Keep in mind that yesterday morning I finally did a mass memory dump onto 10 pages of biochemistry exam, vomiting all of my knowledge onto the paper in a hope that it will self-assemble into the correct answers like a micelle.

Amanda and I struggle to decide each night if we'll leave the dog out or in, based on whether or not there's things for her to eat while we're asleep, or how she was the night before or whether we want to actually get a good night's sleep. Last night we decided to leave Betsy out and it was the beginning to a crazy night.

I passed into a feverish state of anxiety release around 11.00 pm by my own guess. MSU was losing by 20+ points and I didn't have the heart to watch our seniors leave the court like that. What felt like an hour later, Amanda was yelling at the dog and waking me up. More sleep. What felt like every 5 minutes for the next hour, I struggled through biochemical pathways on a blackboard in front of a ghoulish-looking professor. Every time I got something wrong, this professor would punch me, abusing me for my neglect to the little details, even as simple as a misplaced hydrogen or misspelling of the acyl-succinyl complex, which was his fault as I remember (true story - he typo'd it on our final).

I finally came to to find Amanda yelling at me to wake up and punching me. Welcome to reality! I was even more confused why she was so angry with me and spent the rest of the night confused in my sleep as to why she was so mad at me. But apparently I had put the dog away earlier per her request and Betsy was out and running around; Amanda was worried we had apartment intruders. Imagine my confusion this morning when I asked Amanda why she was yelling at me and hitting me so much to find out that I'd been walking around and putting the dog away. And I thought it was just about my biochemistry. I'm so glad to be done with that.

Exam Hangover

I think I coined the term "exam hangover" today as I aimlessly wondered around the building, trying to determine exactly what I could do that would truly be productive. It's like those Saturday afternoons where you wake up and flop onto the couch just to watch bad HBO and eat potato chips in some effort to replenish the salts that you wiped out of your body the night before.

But this is worse. The class this morning literally bolted out the room after lecture and I can't help but wonder if those weren't repulsion forces exuded by the professor. He's a great guy, but the only thing worse than a 1 hour exam that took some students over 2 hours to complete last night is a professor who walks in the next morning and says it was one of the best he wrote. Clinging on to my A as long as I can, I'm reduced to waiting for the next week and a half until I know the results or the backlash of 90 minutes of brain racking last night.


Without question the most difficult exam or evaluation I have ever completed, I felt like I had done very well with it until I started hearing Jess talk about her answers today. She and I had many of the same answers but she is convinced hers were wrong. Given my previous tendency to misread directions and misunderstand questions, I can only cross my fingers and pray that I answered the questions that were actually on the page instead of mis-reading them and giving correct answers to things that weren't asked. And I thought I had a 90.

So I wait. And I try to focus on something else but fail to wrap my mind around anything. Hence the exam hangover. Credit to mobuck.com for the inspirational image.

The Idiot Line

So let me tell you a true story about my parking lot experience this morning. When I got out of class a few minutes early, I walked back to the OSU Med. Center parking lot where I always park in the morning. Most people don't show up till 9 so it's great for me and then I always get to make one person's lucky day by giving them a spot when I leave.

Up near the entrance, the traffic flow splits to go one way or the other and most people have little ingenuity or ability to think, let alone outside a box or other containment device that's less thick than their skull, so they stack up and just wait for a parking spot to free up. This can take forever, especially if you consider that there's very few parking spots opening up and that the smart people would roam the lot looking for the spots rather than waiting on the guy at the front of a line to see one and leave. It's impossible to describe the stupidity of this line.

Well, today as I walked into the lot, this girl started gesturing at me through her window. I was like, well, whatever, and pointed in the direction I was walking so she would know I was freeing up a spot. She rolls down her window and asks where I'm going. "Four rows down on the far end". We're talking about still a 3-4 minute walk down there on the ice. She then motions for me to come over. Thinking I could finagle a ride to my car, I walked over and then what she said shocked me, "You need to walk up to the front of that line and tell the person waiting for you to follow me so that they will get a spot and this line will move". Mind you, she's not even pulled into the line yet but I have deduced that this might truly be the biggest moron yet because she knows I'm opening up a spot and still, she's going to get into the idiot line to watch clouds float while telling me that I owe it to her to go get the guy at the front of the idiot line and take him to my spot.

My response after being dumbfounded for a moment was, "No, I'm walking over to my car". She replies, "Well, where are you parked?". I tell her again. She asks if I will lead her to my spot. "Well, will you give me a ride?". She hesitates and I gave up on her and started walking. As she rolls up her window, I left her sitting there. By the time I was in my car and pulling out of the lot she had finally found me and my spot, which was now filled by a car who had a happy driver with half a brain. Who are you that you thought you had the right to tell me what to do?

Finals

Hmm... where to begin? Let me just say that we had a pretty busy weekend this past weekend. Saturday alone included helping Amanda's parents host a Christmas party and then attending 2 other holiday parties that evening as well. Combined with a long Friday night, a long week prior and then a hurried hodge-podge Sunday with Christmas tree shopping just west of Zanesville and the Columbus Holiday pops concert, we've been everywhere and done near everything. And somehow I managed to fit some serious studying in there as well.

I credit Amanda with driving most of the time, thus allowing me to do my studying, and then God for somehow helping me remember stuff that I've been forgetting all quarter. The exam this morning went great and I didn't expect it to. I have been so worried about it ever since a month ago when I took my last midterm and I feel enormously relieved to get it off my chest now.

So before I delve into the next bout of studying with my statistics notes (non-existent) and my 2 pages of permitted cheat sheets, I wanted to get some ideas out of my head and onto the screen for your perusal.

Starting with some outstanding BBC news from last night, there was a fun little article about some people stranded in England enjoying the cold weather in style. We've had our own bit of snow starting last night, but nothing compared to this.

Russia probably would've been better off just sharing our GPS system, because crashing the launched satellites into the ocean doesn't quite seem productive to me. I love how they casually announce that it probably landed somewhere near Hawaii. No biggie, right?

No laughing matter, considering some tourists were injured in the attacks and a German died, but "alternative food"? That's putting it pretty plain, eh?

No exams, just puppies

I don't blog daily, but when I catch a lucky break, I can throw a few blogs together to summarize what I've been thinking about and doing for the last few days. Since I knocked out my biochem exam yesterday morning, there has been a feeling of tremendous relief in me. I am not happy with my performance on the exam at all, but I am glad to be done with it after 2 weeks of studying.

Puppies seem to just control people's minds, more girls than guys. I don't think there's a day I don't hear someone cooing over a little dog (even if it isn't a puppy) and talking about how cute it is. This now goes for my wife as well. I finally agreed that we need a dog around the place. I would like one that barks at strangers, and gives me more motivation to take fun walks outside beyond the daily trek across campus every day. I can't speak for Amanda's plans with the dog, but I think that having one would be good for both of us and we're ready to add more difficult pet than our fish Jensen to the relationship.

Finding dogs, easy. There's millions out there for adoption. Picking a dog can be just a little harder. As I previously stated, girls typically seem to go crazy over puppies. As she scrolled through adoption sites, there was barely a dog she didn't think was cute, and trust me, if she didn't think it was cute then it was butt-ugly. I was worried we'd never be able to settle on a dog the way she got excited about all of them, but it turns out that finding one is more important than exactly which one it is to her. So now we're starting to sort through dogs and narrow out ones we really like. It seems we have good taste, because so far we've been luckless in actually being the first to even visit a dog we liked.

In honor of our efforts to find a dog, I will be adding the "daily puppy" to my blog sidebar. This, and searches of your local animal shelters are a good way to start looking into what kind of a dog is good for you as well as then finding dogs to look at for possible adoption. Good luck!

Rough morning

Thank God for Mom answering her phone this morning. If she hadn't my bad morning would've gotten so much worse. Mom was my only option for a ride down to campus at 7 this morning so that I could attempt to make it to the biochem exam that I have been studying all week for. Despite being 15 minutes late for the exam, I was able to finish as well as I could and then get back to the grad office to sort out what to do with my car.

I haven't heard yet the exact damage on Mabel, but I do know from Mom when the tow truck arrived that the left tie-rod was entirely broken. For those of you who remember my nightmarish driving conditions this past winter through 2 major winter storms, it's a good guess that the main damage to the car occurred the night I was sliding and correcting for ice as I flew backwards down the highway after a spin-out. I'm just glad that I was able to make it home last night and that this morning I wasn't left stranded somewhere besides the comfort of home. Thanks Mom for picking me up!

Grad Life

I thought I'd talk a bit about my life in the grad office. I know it's probably not my best choice to blog out my frustrations where the people I'm frustrated with can read them, unless of course what I say in print I would be willing to say to their face.

Basically, there a few people I think are really great people, and I like them a lot. Then there are definitely 2 people I can't stand at this point. Kill this morning was a combination of those as well. It's frustrating to be treated like a child and yelled at by a professional peer when I didn't do anything wrong. This is beyond a simple misunderstanding because it was treated as more than that. Approach a person with animosity and don't expect them to be your friend long. Approach someone who bailed your project out all summer long and you're not likely to get a smile out of me again unless you trip and fall on your face. And to top that one out, I was doing exactly what every other better-trained worker than myself had been doing and continued doing after you tried to be an ass and make and example of me.

This frustration also goes toward the person who thought they needed to call and interrogate me last night about their assumption that turned out to be falsely based on greed and poor life choices. It was cool when you were trying to be adult and address your concerns and rectify your misunderstandings. But when you turned it into a session of asking the same question multiple times and trash-talking other people who used to appear important to you, it was way out of hand. Move on, get over yourself and try to find meaningful relationships among the ones who still treat you with respect, such as what I've tried to show you.

On that happy note. I've gotta head out to work and study for Biochem. If you want a happier blog entry, go to the one immediately chronologically prior to this.

Study break

In case you wondered if I am taking graduate school seriously yet, you would be happy to know that I have done nothing with my spare time tonight except study. I'm blogging right now just to freshen my mind and wake up before I go to reading 20 pages of biochem. Of course, this will have to change because I have a few thank yous to send out, a zucchini that desperately needs shredded before Amanda revokes its residency privileges and some salivettes to return to school, but I decided that I really needed to focus on this stuff tonight to get a better start on the Friday midterm. I am a strict non-believer in rote memorization as the primary source of education and understanding of materials, but I don't get a choice so it's back to work I go. I can say that this is one of the more reputable wikipedia pages I've dealt with in the recent past.