It’s honestly not an exaggeration to say that I might pass out at graduation this Sunday from some heat-related illness due to all of the things I’ll be carrying.
That sounds like I’m looking for an excuse to brag, but I swear I’m not.
However, while that seems like a subject I’d have a lot to say about… I kind of don’t?
It was a lovely luncheon that Dr. Andi Stein and other members of the Comm Department put on, where I joined 25 people being inducted on account of their “excellence in academic work.”
It’s a sweet little resume filler, and I got to say hi to a few faculty members while I was there. Plus, there was food:
The enchiladas weren’t special, but they were free!
So who am I to complain?
Unfortunately, the luncheon was kind of downplayed because I had to leave within the first fifteen minutes.
It’s not that I wanted to just dine-and-dash, but my Cognitive Psychology final happened to be scheduled at noon on the same day where I had a fancy event at 11:30 a.m.
As soon as that final ended, I had to cross campus to finish the arc I established yesterday by picking up parking passes for graduation.
Everyone understood my need to scram, but I still felt bad about it. When there are only 24 other inductees it’s not easy to slip out unnoticed.
It all worked out by the end, however. I got the tassel and my psych final wasn’t horrible (I self-calculated getting an 80 percent at the lowest), which means I’ve officially completed my psychology minor requirements.
Though that doesn’t mean I’m done with school just yet.
And just like that I’m officially done with the last class for my Psychology minor.
My online final for Comm Law — the class I’m worried about — should be opening soon.
Once that’s out of the way, I’ll dive headstrong into my Gaming in American Culture paper.
So there are still a few steps, but I’m that much closer to getting my degree.
Unless of course I die of heat stroke at the ceremony, in which case I suppose this will all have been for naught.
But you all know I can’t die at the ceremony. If I did, there would be nobody to write a cringe-filled blog post about what an amazing time I had celebrating my academic achievement to bury deep-rooted fears about transitioning into the professional world.
We Rochlin children celebrated by getting my Mom breakfast donuts (as requested), went out for lunch and then had fancy home-cooked pasta for dinner. A very food-focused affair.
Spending the morning and afternoon with her (as well as the night with my friends losing hours to Minecraft) left me with no time to write a blog post. Though it was all a nice stress relief…
Because as you can see from my baggy-eyed Featured Image, finals and graduation anxiety are undoubtedly taking their toll.
When I wasn’t with Mom yesterday, I was working on my last few college assignments. Ever.
For instance, the Final cheatsheet for Comm Law:
It’s technically not a requirement, but the cheatsheet for my midterm was extremely helpful. So making this one seemed sensible.
… Especially considering I get extra credit for the selfie.
Eating the pain away.
Taken at lunch, with a cameo by Mom’s arm. Because taking a break in the middle of eating to do homework is the perfect encapsulation of my life.
Comm Law is arguably the biggest stressor, as it turns out that is going to be a cumulative exam. Even though it’s online and we have cheatsheets, it will undoubtedly be a nightmare.
More than Cognitive Psychology, anyway. I should theoretically be studying for that now, but the first two exams were so easy that I don’t feel compelled to kill myself here.
Which I’ll have to leave early to take my Psych exam.
That event will get me the last pieces of hardware for my graduation attire, which means I’ll have to finally have to figure out who should do my professional Grad photos.
However, I’m currently more concerned about parking for graduation. As I found out, the tickets I secured for my family do not cover their parking at the event. I needed to get a separate parking pass for that — and that deadline was at the end of April.
Had to make some calls while I was waiting to hand off that sweet Gladeo computer so it could go to a better home. Editing videos, as it was meant to be.
Throw in my semester textbook return, getting a legal document notarized (like a real adult) and going to the gym, and you’ve got my scatterbrained mentality for the day.
At least once Psych and Comm Law are out of the way, life should slow down.
As far as my assignments go, I’ll still need to put together my Honors Project — which I’m working as I write:
Oh, and let’s not forget that my Dad’s birthday is coming up.
So that’s the whirlwind I’m currently cycling through. I keep trying to remind myself that once I’m through this week I won’t have to worry about college ever again…
But frankly that seems to freak me out more.
Instead I’ve been trying to drown out the incessant thoughts with more Games Done Quick speedruns.
If my life were a series of Sesame Street episodes, the word of the day would be: Meetings.
Pretty much as soon as I woke up, I joined Mom at a local Starbucks to have breakfast with Tatjana — the wife of Magic Moreno, who I spoke to for Gladeo not long ago.
Worth reading if you haven’t.
Breakfast was a nice, quiet opportunity to relax and sip down a little coffee. Both of which are very important the week before Finals and graduation.
For those of you who don’t know, GDQ is a series of video game marathons where games are played for record times, under conditions ranging from basic 100 percent completion to multi-player races and even bizarre hacks like randomizers.
All to raise money for charity while showing off cool tricks. Definitely worth supporting.
GDQ aside, after breakfast I made my way to Fullerton for the semester’s last CSUF Society of Professional Journalists meeting.
We ate pizza, discussed what did or did not work about our events and elected part of the board for next year. Most of the current group is graduating, so it’s a big old passing of the torch.
My girl Kristina, who is not graduating, will be taking over as President. And I know she’s going to kill it.
Guess I’ll have to update all my social media descriptions pretty soon to reflect all this graduating/moving on from things.
That’s certainly what I started doing last night.
In the meantime, why don’t you go back and read the thing I wrote about my Smash Bros. Cinematic Universe if you haven’t! That was a fun thing to pull together and it could probably use some more hits.https://t.co/F0k6HrkxCe
I’ll get back to that eventually. In the meantime, from SPJ I went to my next meeting in the Honors Center to try and complete a few more graduation requirements. Namely getting my Honors Project title page signed off on.
Which I did:
Now all I have to do is compile the stuff I’ve done so I can officially turn the damn thing in and move on.
While in the Center I had a lovely chat with Dr. Simoes as well. We spoke briefly at my presentation, but today he was more than happy to congratulate me for getting the project through this next step.
He even told me he’ll be buying a copy of my book once it’s published — so long as I sign a first edition for him.
It was very sweet.
After all of that I came back to Redondo and set up a meeting with Michelle to give back that lovely computer I’ve been holding onto. Too bad I never got it to full working condition on account of internet issue, but it’ll be much happier with a video editor where it belongs.
Once that was done, I went to probably my most important meeting of the day:
A meeting with the treadmill.
Because with all of this graduation stress on my shoulders it honestly feels great to go burn some calories and let off some steam.
Highly recommended stress relief, folks. Especially if you can watch some dope GDQ runs while you’re running!
To be fair, I mostly haven’t used it up until now for two reasons.
First being the obvious fact that I just haven’t had a whole lot of time to play as the semester has progressed. But also I’m just a stubborn baby that tried to convince himself his janky left Joy Con was still usable, despite a significant drift.
In retrospect I don’t know why I was such a stubborn baby. The Pro Controller is actually a solid accessory!
Not only does it fit comfortably in my hands, but I appreciate the grips not being made of the same material as the semi-transparent body, meaning they don’t get covered in fingerprints.
However, I did immediately come across some trouble with the concept of using a more traditional controller for the Switch…
It doesn’t work with every game.
I notably found this out while trying to play some Pokémon Let’s Go Eevee with Aly.
She was complaining about the drifting Joy Con, so we tried to use the Pro Controller.
Turns out you can’t use it to do things like throw Pokéballs without the same gyroscopic technology, so they just didn’t add any functionality for the external apparatus.
Cool.
On the bright side, I’ve been able to properly try out the device with a pair of Indie titles I picked up again:
Both Wizard of Legend and Enter the Gungeon received recent updates, and I’ve been playing them to avoid slamming my head against a wall from all this work.
They both add a bunch of new content.
Wizard has a new locale called the Sky Palace (similar aesthetically to The Minish Cap‘s Palace of Winds, much to my nostalgic pleasure), new enemy types and a bunch of additional spells.
Meanwhile Gungeon got… Basically tons more of everything.
It’s amazing to me that such an already stuffed game has been filled with an almost imperceptibly large amount of extra content again. That’s good service if I’ve ever seen it.
The funniest thing about playing both of these titles in quick succession is how different the control schemes are, which makes it difficult to swap between the two.
For instance: In Gungeon, item pick-ups and general interactions are done with the “B” button, while shooting and dodge rolling are done with the triggers. But in Wizard, “B” cancels out all interactions and every action/magic command is done with the A/B/X/Y buttons.
But this difficulty context switching is only going to get worse tomorrow. Because we just found out that Nintendo is dropping the Super Smash Bros. Ultimate 3.0 Update:
Joker is finally here with all of his funky Persona 5 music (and a ton of really well-done fan service by the looks of things).
Sakurai is appeasing his hordes of complaining fans by adding the Stage Builder we all thought was gone. Now with moving platforms!
Clips can be edited together and posted online via the Nintendo Switch.
Move over Adobe Premiere Pro, turns out I could have been learning how to edit video in Smash Bros. all along! That’s the future of journalism.
Frankly the only “bad” part of this whole update video is the fact that no teaser was dropped for the next DLC character. Nintendo could have kept us strung along for years if they doled out teasers for new fighters one at a time.
Yet that’s not even a reasonable “bad.” The fact that all this content is coming deep into the game’s life-cycle shows it has a god damn ton of longevity.
It’ll be rough switching between all those control schemes, but it’ll be worth it.
In case any of you genuinely wanted that question answered, I can assure you that I have, in fact, been working hard.
Next week is my Comm Law midterm. A totally online exam, but one based on a class where the workload has been far larger and more time-consuming than I had expected going in.
The nicest thing about the exam is that my professor pretty much let us know it’s intended to be an open-note test — or at least she expects us to treat it as such. After all, most of it is going to be application of all the information we’ve learned rather than a definition-driven evaluation.
However, she added that she doesn’t want us to necessarily be flipping through our notebooks for the entire exam.
Because she knows just as well as we do that it can be a stressful experience.
Thus, to incentivize pre-studying we’ve been offered extra credit to create a single 8 1/2 x 11 cheat sheet, take a “selfie” with it (with as much creativity as we desire) and upload the picture to an online forum before taking the test.
My Featured Image of the day is that very selfie. Wearing my brand new Frog-in-a-Car T-shirt.
I figured what better way is there to represent myself than having a thick, detailed page of notes that I’m ignoring in lieu of some Tetris?
What’s that? You don’t believe that I have a full-page of detailed notes based on how far away it is in the perspective of the picture?
Well, you’re right.
Because it’s actually a front AND back page worth of detailed notes:
The front side was a bit off-the-cuff when I first put it together, which is why it looks so left-end dominant.
I tried to fix that more on the back side. It helped that there were less diagrams and more Supreme Court precedents to simply list off as we moved farther into the semester.
Some of you might not find the clean, clinical and small font pencil-only approach beneficial to a study guide very helpful. Personally, I really like to pack in as much detail as I can.
In fact, I essentially shoved every detail I could onto this page to the point that I might not ever have to open up the first half of my Comm Law notebook ever again.
A notebook with ~150 pages worth of notes that I packed into one, at that.
That’s a spicy-a notebook.
It may have taken me all afternoon to transfer all of this information over, but I’d say it was well worth it to have a condensed study aid tool.
Especially given that just the act of copying all of my written text a second time is as powerful a way to study as I can imagine.
That’s really all I’ve done today, so I figured the cheat sheet would make for as good a blog post as any. The project fits well enough into my narrative of enjoying the class as a whole that it seems appropriate.
I just wanted to end this off by giving an extra special shout-out to my photographer, Alyson. Because one good picture deserves another in return:
Someday I’ll move on from talking about early semester school-related things. I promise.
However, today is not that day. I spent all afternoon doing homework and have nothing else to blog about.
Silly as it might sound, I actually do have a good amount for this only being the first weekend of the semester. Probably as a result of my seven classes, many of which only meet once a week if at all.
To be fair I’m not sure the content of the homework itself is necessarily why it has taken so long. A lot of these assignments fall under ‘first attempt syndrome.’
You know, that sensation where you’re more apprehensive going into the first of a thing? Happens all the time for exams especially in my experience, and even real life things like shaving or going on dates.
The most egregious example of that first attempt syndrome with today’s homework came out of my Comm Law class. My professor’s TITANium assignment portal is a bit hard to grasp for first timers like me, and at the end of the mini-documentary I had to watch there was a quiz.
Doubling down on that anxiety.
Her quiz system being somewhat strange didn’t help. We all got three attempts to take the quiz, and two tries at each of the fourteen questions.
It’s really generous all things considered, and for that matter the documentary-watching portion had a fill-in-the-blank note sheet available online. Something I haven’t seen since Mrs. Mata’s AP Psychology class back at Redondo Union.
So I guess my Comm Law professor is just really nice about her assignments.
… Though that alone isn’t the full story. See when I say two tries at each question, that apparently doesn’t mean full credit if you answer correctly by the second try. Instead it’s a system where there are 20 points for those 14 questions (scaled so every one offers a point or two points), and each wrong first try results in half credit.
Thus, despite getting every question right by the end of my first attempt, I had a 15/20 for second guessing three questions.
While I feel the general lack of clarity there is somewhat underhanded, I can’t complain too much because we were allowed to use all three attempts to average out a better score. After the first attempt I got 100 percent on the two following, bringing my score up to 18/20.
It was a lot of extra time and confusion, but the ends justified the means.
Especially considering every right answer came with a snarky response, like calling the Supreme Court racist bastards for their Dred Scott decision, or poking fun at Antonin Scalia’s quote about “never dying” from well before his death last year.
The rest of my homework has been more straight forward. For my Senior Honors Colloquium I simply had to make a game plan for the semester, and I’ve started to distill down my resume for my Internship class’s required Career Center visit.
The only other stand-out so far is my Gaming class. By our next meeting I have to read the first two chapters of this lovely book right here:
An anthropological study of World of Warcraft? What’s not to enjoy!
I feel obliged to give my friend Darlene a shout-out here for offering to help pass along a few of the books I needed for this class, even though it didn’t work out. She didn’t own Night Elf or Coin-Operated Americans:
Can’t blame her on either front considering the two bookstores my Mom and I visited yesterday didn’t have them either.
We wound up going to Amazon to find and order them, and miraculously they’re already here.
Guess I’m just further evidence as to why brick-and-mortar stores are going out of business. Kinda wish the book stores put up a bit of a more competent fight.
The funny thing about these assignments is I really didn’t have to put as much effort into them today as I did. I quite literally have four-day weekends to do homework this semester.
But I just get the feeling that the mentality underlying that procrastinating statement might get dangerous with so much dense work coming soon.
Finishing more of my homework now gives me time to focus on the important things going further into the weekend. Like video games, racking up hours for Gladeo or writing my novel.
I did tell Dr. Perez I’ll be trying to write about 20 pages a week, after all. I’m hoping to get myself in a state of mind that will better facilitate the extracurricular work going smoothly.
Only time will tell whether I gracefully succeed, I suppose. But with the sheer number of mental checklists I’m making already, I get the feeling we’re off to a good start.
As promised earlier, my time to go radio silent for finals has come and (hopefully) gone. This weekend was just a bit too full of work for me to spend extra time coming up with blog post topics.
That said, it was a very productive weekend! I finished my nine page paper for Evolution and Creation:
Finally finished my last big research paper of the semester, so that’s 3/6 commitments done.
Which considering how much I was dreading the assignment, the fact that I banged it out in a day or two was wonderful — and I got a lovely talking point out of it.
Then on Sunday I took my online Visual Communications exam. Was a bit harder than I expected it to be, but still squeaked out with an 84 percent…
… That was immediately balanced out by an exceedingly curved 110 percent on Exam 2. Not sure how it happened, but it means I’ve retained a high A in the class.
I also spent time putting my study guides together for two Psych exams. One of which, Learning and Memory, is officially over and done!
I got an 82 percent, though I can’t complain because even that score retains my A in the class.
Thus, all I have left for the semester is my cumulative, non-curved Sensation and Perception exam and a presentation on my aforementioned paper.
Then I am free.
I’m going to try to do a blog post every day during finals, probably culminating with a semester-in-review sort of thing. I’ve found that having some distractions to keep the stress of exam season balanced out has been especially helpful during this semester’s class cycle.
In fact, the rest of this post will be talking about the media I consumed this weekend to break up all of my studying and writing woes. Hence the Thanos reference: Studying and fun in perfect harmony.
I have TV, Movie and Video Game stuff to talk about, so it should be (mostly) fun! Plus this keeps me from the existential dread of my next exam for a wee bit longer.
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate
I want to do a full-scale post all about Smash in the early days of Winter Break, so I’ll keep things brief right now.
Ultimate has been my ‘play a few hours a night’ de-stressor, and boy have I needed that. The process of unlocking every character one-by-one was a great experience of gradually forgetting and being reminded of how many fighters there are in the game.
Yet the biggest thing to discuss (especially with online servers still being kind of trashy) is the sheer amount of love and care that went into the game’s references. The Classic and Adventure modes are a joy to play through because each fighter and Spirit has their own thing to make them unique.
There’s too many nice things to say about this sequel. On top of being a gorgeous piece of animation (with special accolades to the mass-character physics of a plot-relevant spoiler toward the end of the movie), Ralph Breaks the Internet presents an interesting take on the digital world that has strong characters, ever-present metaphoric theming and super tight narrative structure.
The movie also exceeds due to a rare blend of reverential and reference-filled, self-defacing humor that I would have never expected Disney to approve. Especially for the Princesses — who I’m sure you think you know everything about thanks to the ads, but I assure you are a beyond wonderful mix of fan service and commentary.
It helps that my Dad worked for Disney, so we laughed a lot at the jokes they were putting down.
If you haven’t seen Ralph Breaks the Internet, do yourself a favor. It’s not as video game-heavy as the first, but what it offers instead is just as good if not better.
Bohemian Rhapsody
Talk about a movie with a great set-up and wasted potential.
Bohemian Rhapsody is a biopic about Queen lead singer Freddie Mercury, but as my Dad aptly pointed out it winds up being more of a timeline on the success of the band than it is the trials and tribulations of Mercury’s life.
Don’t get me wrong, Rami Malek is wonderful as the lead character, surprisingly so considering how used to him as a psychopathic introvert from Mr. Robot.
The rest of the cast is good too, and the cinematography is very pretty. Plus, it’s hard to go wrong with a soundtrack composed of Queen songs.
But the narrative of the film falls really flat because it glosses over so much of the potential personal drama in favor of the band’s story. I swear, there are a number of scenes missing between Mercury and his father that would make a pay-off scene toward the end that much more impactful.
Bohemian Rhapsody is far from the worst thing I’ve seen this year. It’s kind of perfectly average, disappointingly so.
But the worst thing I’ve seen this year probably goes to:
Venom
Wow. What a hot mess.
You know it’s bad when the best part of the movie is a totally irrelevant post-credit scene previewing another movie that I would have had much more fun watching.
The only thing Venom has going for it is Tom Hardy as the titular character’s host, Eddie Brock — but even then he’s given nothing to work with. Half of this movie feels like it was left on the cutting room floor. It literally meanders until a relationship between the two that had APPARENTLYbeen developed without us knowing about it arrives.
Then we’ve immediately got the unearned climax to hit.
The whole experience is also generally unpleasant because of clear editing issues like awkward jump cuts. Maybe if the dialogue was better and the characters were likable I wouldn’t have noticed so readily, but because we got things like this:
It was hard to stay engaged.
Venom has been beaten to death so I won’t abuse the poor horse. Instead I’ll just say… Go watch Nando V. Movies’ fix for it instead.
Big Mouth
I can’t give you all a full review of this one. I only watched a chunk of the second season with my sister, so I’m working entirely off that.
That said, Netflix’s Big Mouth is an… Interesting experience. It’s a show all about young teenagers going through life changes, with puberty given physical form as “hormone monsters” that work off of them in a variety of cliché coming-of-age scenarios.
The premise of a physical embodiment of puberty is interesting enough to work through all the clichés in what might otherwise be a typical school-age comedy — alongside a heaping helping of gross-out and mature humor. There were about as many moments where I said, “damn that’s pretty accurate” as I cringed at something uncomfortable (like most of the musical numbers).
If you think you would enjoy a Family Guy-esque adult comedy, but a little smarter and more fresh, Big Mouth is worth checking out. I’ll probably go back and finish season 1 before season 3 comes out.
When I wasn’t playing Smash Bros., I’ve spent the last two days trying to get a jump on the last four pieces of my fall 2018 commitments. Namely the last essay for my Evolution and Creation class.
Granted, the process of buckling down and focusing has been made slightly more difficult by the constant Discord reminders that most of my friends are officially off because of different schedules… But hey, that’s what distractions and isolation are for.
Particularly distractions and isolation with regards to the headline of this blog post: Changes of scenery.
Don’t you love how masterfully I tie in these themes and draw attention to them for extra padding and lampshading?
My change of scenery for the day came early this morning when Mom asked me to come out to Lakewood with her. While Aly went to school, we brought some of her musical instruments to their usual shop for repairs and upkeep.
After that we hung around at a local Starbucks; a nice, quiet little spot to work on homework.
But also with at least a little bit of Smash Bros. because… Yeah it’s addictive.
I actually just unlocked every character for normal Smash battles and am well on my way to completing the World of Light adventure mode. It’s a blast, even if it came at a very inopportune time.
Anyway though, sitting around Starbucks was productive to an extent. Yet the most interesting part of being there was this Christmas-themed decoration:
Look at this thing. It’s kind of gaudy and over-the-top, but also aesthetically pleasing in a way that I can understand why it was made.
The coffee cup tree is just trite and inoffensive overall, but the reason I wanted to point it out was because I found it hilarious to see such a blatantly Christ-centric symbol used as decor here when just a few years ago the world lost its shit due to red cups.
The wishy-washy nature of Internet-era overreaction is truly a sight to behold, is it not?
That being said, because my time in relative isolation these last two days has offered me the chance to get a sizable jump on this essay I previously believed was going to be a nightmare, I figured I should talk a little bit about it.
This essay is about Deism, the religious school of thought that considers a God having created the universe only to step back and let everything run on its own accord. It was popular during the Enlightenment especially, and caught my interest handily during my time in AP European History back during Sophomore year of high school.
As a result I decided to focus my research paper on it. Though this specifically dives into contemporary thoughts on the religion post-evolution emerging as a result of good old Chuck Darwin.
One source I discovered talking about Deism in relation to a post-evolutionary “modern setting” (being 1898) had such a fantastic little tidbit that I figured it would be worth dedicating at least half of a blog post to it.
For context: In a journal called The North American Review, an auspicious Walton W. Battershall submitted a short piece as comment to an earlier story published. His comment was about “The Efficacy of Prayer in the Light of Evolution.”
The important aspects of the writing to pull for my paper were his discussions of prayer being a placebo of sorts. Something that provides a positive benefit to the praying individual just because of the possibility that it might receive a response from God, even if it likely wouldn’t. He goes on to undress Deism for distancing God to the point of making that possibility totally unattainable, but you can read the whole thing here if you want.
The important aspects of the writing to pull for this blog post is a line I’ll leave completely out of context just for the sake of how incredible a piece of prose it is.
Just the thought of this clearly reverent man talking about God’s pitiful, throbbing ‘Fatherhood’ is so hilariously phallic that it made my night when I found it yesterday.
So much so that I felt compelled to share it with the world. Good old 1898.
That’s about all I’ve got for you today, as I’ve got to get back to finishing that essay. Only short breaks for blog writing allowed in the Rochlin house this weekend.
Luckily, after this weekend is three days of finals followed by freedom. Boy is that freedom going to be… Smashing.
I do actually have some fond memories of playing Burnout games on the PlayStation 2 with my dad that I could probably talk about some day.
That’s just not my plan for right now.
No, instead I just wanted to briefly touch on a more depressing, real-world form of burnout: School burnout.
The end of this semester is kind of killing me with stress right now, guys.
We only have two weeks of regular classes left at this point, and after that there are three days worth of final exams I’ll have to take. So we’re hitting the last stretch of fall 2018.
That means all of my teachers are stepping up their games with a number of incoming deadlines and attempts to squeeze in as much information as possible in a short amount of time.
Obviously this post is just here for me to vent on everything I have going on that’s contributing to stress, so let’s lay it all out.
In the next week or so I have two major papers due, as well as a couple of smaller two-page papers to write.
One of those major papers is almost done, but the other one I haven’t really started on… Yikes.
At least one more quiz tomorrow in my Sensation and Perception class, though probably another one coming next week if I’m being honest.
By the way, last week the professor of that class introduced at least six more lecture PowerPoints online to fit into only four more lecture sessions AND let us know his cumulative final will not be curved — nice guy.
Whatever other homework I need to get done that will be assigned in the next two weeks.
Three exam finals, one of which being a cumulative test as I mentioned, as well as a fourth exam that’s a case study analysis for my Mass Media Ethics class.
But let’s not forget about all the other responsibilities I have lining up!
I’ve scheduled out at least three interviews for Gladeo in the near future to focus work on.
A potential sit-down with a family friend about a new potential job opportunity that I could take on. Not yet scheduled.
My friend Tiana wants me to help her edit another one of her papers, which I’m more than happy to do but don’t know if I have the cycles free — and the thought of turning her down due to time management almost stresses me out as much as adding helping her onto my workload…
Wanting to fit in continual trips to the gym into my schedule so I don’t fall off that commitment, especially after moving boxes the other day made me feel less confident about the progress I’ve made thus far.
Trying to keep up writing a blog post a day.
Yeah this blog does stress me out, in a similar way to going to the gym. It has become an obligation for me that I feel terrible about skipping, especially after things like my dad complimenting my commitment to writing during lunch with a family friend yesterday.
Just generally thinking about girls and wanting a relationship but feeling like I don’t know if I have the time to commit to one (more of a deeply personal grievance).
Plus a couple new video games I own thanks to Hanukkah that I have not gotten the chance to start yet.
Probably the lowest rung on my priority list, but it’s there.
Like I said, I actually feel really bad when I have to miss writing something. Yesterday I was simply too buried in a small mountain of homework to get around to writing anything, unfortunately.
So I wanted to write something up today for the ten of you or so who read this stuff regularly. Even if it just amounted to me barfing up all the obligations that are stressing me out for the next couple weeks.
If I’m going anywhere with this post besides making it a ventilation system for my stress, I suppose the through line is my asking for forgiveness ahead of time if I don’t get to writing as often over the next couple weeks.
… Though knowing the way my brain works, I’ll wind up writing a lot here anyway in place of taking extra time to study. Because it’s a decent stress reliever and my priorities are weird.
Also because I love you all. Especially when you stick with me for things like this.
My perception of Daylight Savings Time changes every year depending on what my class schedule is like.
For instance, last year I barely noticed the time shift during the Fall semester. Probably because 90 percent of my time outside of classes was spent in the Daily Titan newsroom, where seven or so hours kind of blurred together day-in and day-out. Nobody realized when the sky changed outside when we were so wrapped up in work.
The year before that I do very distinctly remember having a later class in University Hall where the time shift made a serious difference when leaving for the day. At one point in the semester I walked out of class and it was suddenly dark outside, whereas it was light the week before.
Kinda jarring stuff, not gunna lie.
This semester has been much more akin to that jarring transition. However, more delayed than it should have been.
I have two late classes this semester, one on Tuesday and one on Wednesday. My Tuesday block class got cancelled this week however, as Professor Rizzo wanted to give everyone the chance to vote.
Wish my Psych professor had the same idea… But oh well. We’ve got a day off for Veterans Day next Monday so that should make up for it.
Because I wasn’t in school until 7:00 p.m. or so yesterday, I did not see the difference in lighting. However, I definitely did see it tonight when I left my Visual Comm class.
Normally I wouldn’t give too much of a second thought to the time shift. Sure it got a bit colder and more awkward getting to my car in the dark, but nothing too crazy.
I guess DST is in my head a bit more often lately thanks to Prop 7 on the ballet this year. A proposition which passed with 60 percent of the vote.
Now that it’s passed, our state legislature will be able to vote on eliminating Daylight Savings Time all together (by making it “permanent”) if a federal law is enacted first.
After 21 years of experiencing it, I can’t exactly imagine the time shift just being gone all together. I know that it’s already gone in states like Arizona, but the biyearly change feels so ubiquitous.
How would you feel if DST went away — if you live in a place where that happens of course. I’m kind of curious to know what sort of public reaction might come out of it.
P.S. — Yes, this is kind of a space filler post. I’m trying not to expend a lot of effort with a second exam to study for tomorrow.
Though my exam today went well, considering I got a 91 percent on it. So I’m not very nervous.
Just the usual amount of nervous.
As an added note, Fire Emblem Heroes has a new banner and a totally new game mode coming out tomorrow. But I probably won’t be talking about it tomorrow. Have to head to bed early so I can sleep up for my exam, and then at night I have an awards ceremony to go to for Aly.
I’ll probably talk about that on the blog tomorrow, save Fire Emblem for Friday.
Jason's Blog - Work in Progress 