Another day, another exam

The first day back from Spring Break went off pretty well all things considered!

Last night I expressed some concern about a Cognitive Psychology exam that would be greeting me after a week of lazing around.

My feelings were mixed about it. On the one hand I gave the material zero attention over the break because I was busy hanging out with friends and doing internship stuff, so I couldn’t help but imagine walking into a nightmare. On the other hand the class’s first exam was very easy, so I didn’t feel the need to spend a lot of time studying.

Luckily the lazy side of my intuition won out.

The test was rather easy, and even though I haven’t seen the official grades come out (we took it at 1:00 p.m. today), I did my own basic calculations off of what I didn’t know and figure I’ll get a 92 percent at the lowest.

Unless I’m wrong about what I don’t know, of course. But my intuition is usually solid.

The thing that got me about the exam was how haphazardly our professor seemed to handle things. Firstly, she decided to announce that she added extra free response questions to our docket only five minutes before passing out the exam.

Would’ve been nice to get some advanced notice over Spring Break… But then again, she promised to post the kind of scantron we would need and didn’t get around to that either.

So who knows. Teachers need a week to relax too.

There was also a stretch of seven questions at the beginning of the test where every answer was “C,” which made me second-guess my choices despite knowing they were correct.

I don’t have proof that it was on purpose… But that kind of trickery always felt like a joke on behalf of professors to stress us students out.

After finishing up the exam, everything else was smooth sailing clear to nightfall.

I managed to secure my Commencement tickets, another topic I touched on last night. Even made a fun little Tweet out of it:

I’m not sure what’s weirder, the fact that I needed to watch a video and take a quiz to get Commencement tickets or the fact that they called it a graduation “tutorial.”

I know academia is a game but that’s a bit on the nose, don’t you think?

— Jason Rochlin (@jdrochlin) April 9, 2019

It was a legitimately weird process.

Spent a little bit of time in the Honors Center after that, finding out some more about another event I’m taking part in this Friday and working on my novel.

Felt good when I sent the next chunk of the story to my mentor tonight, even if Spring Break wasn’t as lucrative for the writing process as I wanted it to be. At least I’ve done something, and the more I write the better I’ll look come my presentation in May!

I also watched/listened to some cool things I suppose. The latest Mostly Nitpicking podcast on X-Men: Apocolypse. The most recent KingK video on The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks.

Lots of nice things.

That’s really all I’ve got to say for the night, though. It’s been another lukewarm kind of day with a lot of work and not much else.

Tomorrow I’ll be able to break things up with a Fire Emblem Heroes post (as exciting as I’m sure that is for you all), and Friday I should hopefully have something to write about my next Honors event.

But until then, I’ll just be here keeping up the ‘mundane day-to-day’ posts train that the end of the semester has brought out of its station.

Life never relents

As of ~7:00 p.m. tonight, when I finally returned home, I was officially finished with the fall 2018 semester.

Truly a momentous occasion! It’s been a rough one all things being equal, so I’m lucky to finally have made it to the other side of the storm. After all, there’s just one more remaining until I finally get that piece of paper. So it all comes down to this, and there’s something as exciting as it is terrifying about the idea.

… Unfortunately, as the title here suggests, not all is sunshine and rainbows despite how uplifting this freedom is.

Finals themselves were rough to get through because I’ve definitely caught the family cold, which has resulted in consuming cough drops at a rate of far-too-many per hour to deal with a scratchy throat and a cough.

It has also left me kind of lethargic, which will make it very fun to get up at 9:00 a.m. tomorrow and interview someone on the east coast.

I just wanted to make sure I got a post in, even if it just amounts to me venting about… Everything.

Probably won’t widely publicize this one to be honest.

Arguably the worst final to have to struggle through with a cold was my Sensation and Perception test yesterday. That’s the one I’ve been dreading for some time because it was cumulative and non-curved.

Yeah, it actually did suck.

Mostly because there were topics on it that he did not tell us were going to be on it in his ‘study guide.’

Then he doubled down on the frustration by handing back our final essay drafts (graded in just one week, while the rough drafts took 3 months I might add). He gave me a point less than I got on the rough draft for a number of corrections previously unmentioned, which feels pretty disingenuous.

Especially considering he also gave me an extra point for making the original corrections. So I wound up with the exact same score.

Boy I’m glad I never have to see that man again.

Luckily today was much less stressful, as all I had to do was present the findings of my Evolution and Creation essay to the class in a casual round-table. Then afterward I went out to dinner with my friend Mimi to celebrate the end of a long semester.

It was fun!

… Up until the point where my permanent retainer broke. So now I’m missing a wire behind my front teeth, and there’s just a bit of poking if I move my tongue just right.

Couldn’t get a sit-down with my orthodontist until Friday, too. It’ll be fun to deal with that for a while.

But then to add insult to injury, after my two-and-a-half hour drive home, I got an email letting me know that I did not get the internship with the Boston Globe I applied for. Much like I feared in this post from a little while back.

I know lots of people apply for these things and I’m not super upset about it, that just happened to be the cherry on the suck Sundae of today.

At least I can still relish the idea of finally sending all of these books back to Chegg.

Good riddance.

Considering I’ll never write anything better than ‘suck Sundae of today’ in my life, I’ll leave things off there. Hopefully you didn’t find this vent post too obnoxious, I swear tomorrow I’ll go back to writing about something more fun.

For now, however… I need some sleep. After all, I’ll have to be up again in a hurry.

Fall 2018 finals stress update

Originally I was planning on getting part two of my “old stuff from my desktop Mac” series out today (in spite of the fact that only 2 of you actually read the first one, come on guys I was proud of that). But then the unsung combination of homework, Super Smash Bros. and work meetings kind of distracted me from it.

The subject is kind of near and dear to my heart, so I want the post to look really solid before I put it out.

That being said, as a result I kind of didn’t have a post to put out for all of you. For most of the day I was totally fine with that, especially considering I put out that post last week talking about school stress and how I might fall behind on this blog stuff.

Except then I went to the gym, took a hot shower and realized that I would personally feel bad if I didn’t have ANYTHING to share with you all today.

So here’s my brief sharing something with you all today. It won’t be long, but it is actually a nice update.

While that “Burnout” post I linked just two paragraphs ago was a huge laundry list of stressors to work through, it really did turn out to be a crazy in-the-moment explosion of my self-deprecating lack of confidence.

Since then I’ve done other things like talk about Superman comics (a post that Scott from NerdSync actually noticed because I was overenthusiastic about @ing him, but that made me feel super good), find cool stuff on my old computer and play Smash Bros.

So mentally I’m in a much better place.

That better place has facilitated actually working through some of the stuff I had on my plate to a much more productive degree. Now that I’m out of my own head and just ranting for the sake of it, I’d say the main stressors of the next two weeks boil down to six things:

Three big end-of-term essays and three final exams.

Except wait, no longer are there six things!

As of about an hour ago, I officially turned in my Visual Comm essay:

Yeah you know, the one that I wrote a post on while doing some particularly interesting research for a while back? Wound up writing ~13 pages with two pages of references.

Hope the professor likes it — maybe next time he’ll remember my name and not call me James in an email.

Definitely not still bitter about it

Thus my big list of concerns drops to five.

1. My Mass Media Ethics final paper (also the final for that class)
2. My Evolution and Creation final paper
3. My Sensation and Perception exam (cumulative, kind of a nightmare)
4. My Learning and Memory exam
5. My Visual Communications exam (online only, not so bad)

I know this post is a bit cobbled together and padded out by referencing older things on my blog, but I didn’t want to leave you all with nothing.

Because I love you guys!

… Even if you did leave my cool Smash Bros. post out to dry.

But hey it’s only been a day, so maybe that’ll pick up with time.

Either way, hopefully this post, if nothing else, serves as a reminder that even the most stressful periods of time in the moment can turn out okay on the other end.

Yeah, that’s a good message to take away from this. Nailed the heartstring appeal, Jason.

Slow and Steady

I was pretty worried that the procedural aspects of my hematologist check-up this morning were going to invalidate months of trying to better myself and tarnish my motivation.

But, as an optimistic pessimist might say, my low expectations left me feeling pleasantly surprised. Even rather good about myself!

As I’ve said, toward the end of the summer I started going to the gym regularly. Two or three times a week for about an hour each.

I mainly wanted to feel better about myself. No real “goals” were set, it has been driven by an internal desire to look better in the mirror, feel better about myself… And hopefully not be as winded when I climb a large flight of stairs.

So far I’ve had decent results in the latter two departments, and even if I don’t personally see the difference my family has noted that I’m beginning to look a bit thinner.

In terms of tangible numbers, I haven’t been doing a lot to keep track. If anything I figured forcing myself to stand on a scale every week would just kill my motivation when the number moves incrementally.

Intrinsically I understand that weight loss takes time, of course.

I’m just worried that the raging, emotional segment of my lizard brain would see that result and get me to try quitting.

Thus today became the first real barometer of how I’m doing from a statistical standpoint. A month-and-a-half ago I was weighed at my annual physical and jotted down that I was about 207 lbs.

(A purely American metric that won’t help any of you off using that other, more ubiquitous system, but it makes the most sense to me.)

When I stepped on the scale at the start of my appointment this morning, fearful of anything above where my “starting point” was, I wound up (as previously mentioned) pleasantly surprised.

I was 204 lbs.

Now I don’t know if a net loss of three-ish pounds over a month+ is a good fraction or whatever. I ain’t a nutritionist after all.

All I know is the fact that I’ve been able to lose the weight I had through my exercising is a great sign that should help motivate me going forward. After all that loss comes without any significant change to my diet, which I know is equally important to being healthier and losing weight.

What can I say… I like cheeseburgers. Like a lot.

At least now I can confirm that I’m counterbalancing them if nothing else.

But wait, there’s more!

Honestly my morning was going to balance out that weight loss elation with the more dejected outlook brought on by finding out my last Sensation and Perception midterm went… Just okay. Normally not a problem except that my overall GPA dropped due to a lack of things in the grade-book.

But then the blood tests came back (since I was at the hematologist office), and we found out that my blood cell count is up right now!

I’m sure I’ve given this context before somewhere, but just in case anyone is unaware: I have ITP.

It’s a blood disorder with an insanely long actual name that basically means I have significantly a low blood platelet count. Around the 20s when an average range is in the mid-100s.

Ostensibly the disorder does nothing in my every day life. It just means I might have problems should something happen where I end up bleeding significantly.

When the diagnosis first came and I dealt with a rollercoaster of treatments that at one point landed me in the hospital (which was more than a year ago now crazily enough), I wasn’t very keen on talking about it.

But hey, it’s been more than a year and nothing significant has gone down. So I think I’m feeling way better about discussing the whole thing.

Long context aside, the lede I’ve been burying is that today my blood platelet count is up from about 24 the last time we checked to about 35 today.

It could just be a general fluctuation, but all progress in the positive is good progress I’d say!

Between that and my weight, this doctor’s appointment left me feeling pretty good about myself. From a physical standpoint especially.

Sure, those positive vibes led right into the mundane of going to Fullerton for one single class… But Thanksgiving Break technically starts tomorrow.

So who am I to complain?

Distractions

Is it ironic to spend time making a whole blog post about all of the things that are distracting me from the things I have to do?

Or is it just stupid?

Well either way I don’t exactly have a lot to talk about until Legendary Eirika drops in Fire Emblem Heroes tomorrow so this is what you’re stuck with. By the way, I know nobody cares but I’m very excited to see her get some more love so prepare for that.

For now, however, that entire train of thought just serves as yet another distraction mucking up my productivity tonight.

Normally I work pretty well with some distractions going off in the background. Some music, a YouTube video, a group chat, whatever it may be. Unless I get really invested in the content, audio tends to help me focus more often than not.

But right now every little possible activity and thought is getting in the way of the one thing I actually need to do: Reading another article for my Evolution and Creation class tomorrow.

Some of those things are the general senses of dread and/or inspiration in the back of my mind. Including, but not limited to:

• That exam I have next week.
• Remembering a study date(?) I have for that exam before next week.
• All of the work I’ve done running around to schedule my classes for next semester.
• That armor set I want to build in Monster Hunter.
• The fact that Shantae Half-Genie Hero is still on sale but I haven’t bought it yet.
• An interesting idea I have for my novel where I might try to incorporate mirror reflection bs into the reveal of a character actually being a dragon? But that’s a whole other story.

So on and so forth.

As you can tell the ideas are fairly eclectic, but they’re also competing for space alongside other things like making sure dinner came out okay after Mom left it halfway through the process. Or catching up on a YouTube series.

Oh and let’s not forget about that nagging feeling in the back of my head that I should allocate some time to go to the gym tonight. Except it’s already close to 8:30 p.m. and I don’t know that I want to go to the gym this late, especially when I still have some homework to finish by tomorrow.

Also, if I went to the gym it would push off my window to write a blog post for the day further, and I’d really rather not avoid that if I can choose not to. Even if that means the idea I’m writing about might be hackneyed and silly.

But what hackneyed and silly blog post idea should I write about? I don’t know, how about I scroll through Twitter a little while I mull it over.

Sorry, what was that? I’ve been on Twitter for 15 minutes? How is that possible I don’t even enjoy that service that much, where did the time go?

…

In case it wasn’t obvious, yes, that tirade evolved into me actually just describing the process of how I came about this blog post idea stream-of-consciousness style.

Because obviously here I am writing instead of going to the gym or working on this homework assignment.

Yet even this distraction has distractions. Like my dad coming home, meaning I had to put my phone down to go move my car and let him in. Which then turned into sitting back and watching Bill Maher, as we are now.

So by virtue of T.V. time with dad and the fact that it’s 8:30 p.m., I might just skip the gym entirely until tomorrow.

I’ll just finish writing this and jump onto my assignment, try to focus on that hardcore.

With potential Monster Hunter time after. But that won’t be so much of a priority that it keeps me pulled away from my work more.

All that being said, I hope you enjoyed this distraction from a distraction that’s allowed me to realize what distraction I should move onto next. If it was a good distraction for you too, please feel free to let me know.

I’d like to believe I’m performing some sort of service with my hackneyed musings.

(Also be sure to come back tomorrow when I distract everyone further with more Fire Emblem stuff, okay? Okay. Cool.)

Feeling Uninspired

Ironically enough, despite getting out of Fullerton almost three hours earlier than usual today, I can’t think of too much I feel like chatting about.

Like yeah it was great that my midterm was easy and finishing it within a half hour or so meant I could leave my otherwise three hour class right away. That was super cool.

But that’s about all I can really say about it.

Then I could also potentially talk about the fact that my Senior Honors Project is finally starting to move forward after finding who I believe will be my mentor.

But that seems like a subject which will be more interesting once my proposal is signed and ready.

So then what? The fact that I’ve begun planning out my spring semester schedule with the early registration deadline coming up? Venting about this one assignment I’ve been putting off that I have to do now? Talking about Monster Hunter again?

I don’t know. I’m not particularly feeling any conversation topic right now.

Honestly the only story I can think to tell is a funny moment on-campus today where I was stopped by some faculty asking me if I had registered to vote, because it was some kind of voter registration day.

I was kind of in a hurry to get to class and told them no because I already was registered while passing by quickly. Felt a little bad being so dismissive to them.

Except then I realized I was feeling bad about the fact that I had already registered to vote and didn’t need to waste their time. Which is kind of not at all something that I need to feel bad about, because it wasn’t like I lied about being registered.

So yeah. Go vote, it’s important.

But frankly that’s about all I can muster right now. I’m a bit tired and not too inspired to write much of anything, so this will have to suffice.

I’ll probably head to the gym, come home to work on that assignment and chill.

Hopefully I’ll have a bit more to talk about tomorrow.

Who’s that car?

It’s been a long time coming.

After months of dealing with a broken rear driver-side window, one that was stuck so wide open that it was hard (if not impossible) to seriously wash my car without flooding the inside, it became a bit of a disgusting mess.

Covered in black grime that came off on your fingers from the rubber around the doors. Coated on the back in old, ratty tape that was used to seal the open window during rainy seasons. Canvased with the remnants of squished bugs and, no joke, the waffling pattern on the bottom of a shoe that hit my side mirror on the freeway one night.

It’s a long story.

But you get the point, my car was a mess. I’m running out of C-word synonyms for covered so I’ll just get to the point.

The point being, if you hadn’t guessed from that featured image, the fact that I finally got my car washed and detailed after literal months of idle care.

Look at how shiny this boy is! I’m so proud of him.

The guys at Redondo Car Wash (shout out to them) even cleaned up the inside. Dusted all of my panels, washed the floor mats. A really stellar job all together.

Now I’ll truly be the talk of the school. Probably.

I’m not sure how much people care about seeing cars go by when it’s a commuter school and nobody pays much attention to anything on campus, but I suppose I’ll find out.

That’s honestly about all I have to say for the day. Now that I’m back home after finishing my last class for the week, I can officially declare the end of my midterm hell week.

It’s a sweet feeling, and I couldn’t think of any better way to celebrate than finally cleaning my car so I could feel better about myself.

Which is probably kind of sad in hindsight?

But hey. You do you and I’ll do me.

As far as the weekend coming up goes, I have some Gladeo-related responsibilities to attend to. Running a meeting, rescheduling an interview, all that fun stuff.

Plus I have some other school-related business like another exam next week… Because my Comm professors like to stagger things out where my Psych professors made everything happen within three days of each other.

So that’ll be fun.

Oh, and I’m probably going to do an internship application. Somewhere in between the time that I’ll be running around with my family to do some activities for Aly’s band career.

Otherwise, I think I’ll finally have a little time to kick back, play some Monster Hunter with my friends and chill.

Hopefully all of you equally get some much-deserved time to chill, because you certainly deserve it — whether you had a bad week like me or not.

Out of the Frying Pan…

Thanks to everyone for indulging me in taking a couple days off from writing these things so I could spend time with my Grandma before she left for Florida again tonight.

Yesterday especially we spent a bunch of time together going to breakfast and watching a movie before going to a revolving sushi bar to celebrate my Mom’s birthday.

If anyone’s curious, that movie was The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society on Netflix. Not planning on doing a full mini-review about it, but it was a cute little movie.

Very, very predictable. But cute.

Pretty much your typical Nazi aftermath blossoming love story. That’s a genre that exists right?

Well either way, worth watching if you like docu-drama type stuff, but I wouldn’t go out of the way for it.

I won’t linger too long on that however, because I’m not really planning on lingering too long on my blog in general tonight. I mostly just wanted to put something out justifying the fact that I missed a few days while simultaneously trying to buy myself some extra leeway for the next few days.

Because as I found out, I was a little off with dates in my calendar and will actually be far busier in the next week than I anticipated.

After taking my first Sensation and Perception exam tomorrow morning, I’ll be gearing up for next week’s gauntlet:

My first Learning and Memory exam on Monday.

The rough draft of my Sensation and Perception research paper due Tuesday.

The rough draft of my Learning and Memory research paper due Wednesday.

For some reason both my psych classes have very clearly conspired together in an effort to ruin my life for the next few days. So I’ll be dealing with all of that and might not come around to post things — unless I decide to post about some things that make me happy or less stressed or something.

Which includes things like this.

We got Halloween cereal, y’all. The end times may be here, but at least we’ll get to spend them being spooky.