Last one!

So I didn’t blog post last night because I completely forgot! Which is incredibly weird because we’ve done in every Sunday for fifteenish weeks! So that was an epic fail haha I wasn’t even doing anything at all last night except for knitting. This is our last blog post, which is kind of sad. I think I already wrote about this but I really enjoyed blogging a lot more than I thought I would. It’s a way to vent about anything I want and it’s nice knowing that someone else/ my entire group is reading it. With this I also got to know three of my other classmates really well and I know that I will continue to bug them for the rest of our four years here!

It’s almost Christmas, which is so exciting! The same as Thanksgiving, it’s weird how much more the holidays mean to me and I’m kind of assuming everyone else, now that we’re away from home. It’s weird to think that now one of the few times I’ll get to see my family during the year, from now through the rest of my life will be during holidays. It’s going to be especially strange when I stop coming home for the summers.

I now like going to school away from home a lot more than I did when I first got here. It’s nice to come home to an entirely new group of friends, now I just have double the friends, which is pretty cool. I still sit and think about how everything would be if I went to school in my hometown with all of my old friends. I sometimes get jealous hearing them all talking and laughing about the same experiences and wish that I too could have a stronger bond with them. Oh well, I think next semester is going to be ten times better because I won’t have that awkward first few weeks. I’ll know what I’m doing school work wise and know what to expect. I’m also going to try to get a lot more involved like I was back home, I think that will help a lot! I can’t believe I have yet to do an hour of community service since I got here, when it was the story of my life last year. That and theater took up more than half my life back home and I’m not participating in either.

I’m going to try to get into theater stuff here, I thought I had too much stuff going on at the beginning of this year to commit but I’ve realized the more stuff I do and the more time I spend doing other things, the more productive I in turn become. I think I might have an 8AM everyday next semester but I’ll be done at 11:30 every day, which in my mind is totally worth it. Right now I have an 8AM MWF and don’t finish with class until 4:00. Granted, I have a three-ish hour break between but, it just makes for a really long day.

I’m nervous for finals, even though I only have three left! Which is fantastic, I was so bitter over thanksgiving break that I would have to study but now I’m finished with three of my classes! Score! I have the project for this class left, and then a calc and chemistry exam. Chemistry blows my mind, how some of this stuff comes easily to people is beyonddddd me. I’m hoping though that at some point next semester we start hitting stuff that’s new to both me and everyone else so I feel more even with the chemistry team here. I hate how some people have already learned this stuff, it makes me feel like I’m worlds behind. I’m completely determined though to pass chemistry with flying colors just to prove some of the snotty, “how did you not know that kids” wrong. I will be done with everything by next Wednesday as 9:45 AM. Haha and there will be nothing else I can do about anything.

I didn’t study or do anything this last weekend. I had four exams and two quizzes last week, so I just chilled the entire weekend. I’m starting to regret that a little bit just because I could have done a little bit of something… especially like this post. I did knit a lot though. I’m knitting my mom a scarf for Christmas, typical. I’m going to attempt to make it look really cool though, so watch out! I don’t know what to do for my brother and my dad though, my parents said we weren’t going to do any presents this year for Christmas because we’re going to the Caribbean. I have no idea why my parents decided that we should go there, we’ve never done anything close to that before, but I’m excited! Except Christmas shopping for my family is one of my favorite things to do especially wrapping them. I live for wrapping Christmas presents. I stay up until three or four in the morning sitting in our basement hidden in a room watching hours of Christmas movies, tangled in ribbon. It’s ridiculous how much joy I get out of those hours of wrapping things.

I love how it snowed here this weekend and I hope we get some snow in Ohio for when I’m home. It makes winter and Christmas so much better. Winter’s my favorite season-in case you wondering. And I’m excited for break, I’m just going to work all the time, or try to work all the time! I’m trying to work four nights a week, because I adore all the people at my job, so I completely don’t mind going. My restaurant job only sucked during the school year because I would leave for school at 730 in the morning and get home from work at 11PM, because it was too long of a drive to go home between work and school/practice that woud end at 3:30 or practice until 5:00. Other than that it’s so much fun to go when you have no school work to worry about.

I wish you all a Merry Christmas! Happy holidays and whatever’s appropriate! I’m going to continue demanding group meetings even after this class is over, so get ready! Seee YUH! <3

Hokie Bird Holiday!

I cannot wait for thanksgiving! !! ! I’m sure the same goes to you guys too! I just can’t wait to be home in my house for more than two nights with my family. And I’m so excited to live my old life with high school friends for a week. It’s going to be so comforting and I will be completely ecstatic to see my best friend Cate.

Cate and I have been going to school together since first grade and we became best friends in seventh grade. Everyone else that went to our school lived a good twenty minutes away, but Cate lived across the golf course fairway; a short five minute walk. Therefore we did everything together, we drove to school and sports practices together, watched tv together, and most of all ate lots and lots of ice cream and junk food together. One of us would go to the other’s house every day and now it’s been nearly four months since we’ve seen each other! Our reunion is going to be epic. It will be so nice to be around people that I can completely 100% be myself around, I have friends here I like a lot but, it’s just different.

With regards to my family though I miss them so much more than anything. It’s weird coming home from here though because, I feel like a guest in my own house. I guess I sort of am, it’s weird growing up yeah? It’s weird how much more thanksgiving means to me this year. I’ve never really been that excited for it-only thankful for the break from school. Now the holiday offers a time for me to spend time with my family something that wouldn’t happen if the holiday didn’t exist. I know from now on one of the few times I’ll get to see my family through the school year is Thanksgiving. I’m glad holidays like this exist because they truly do bring people together and I never understood that until this year.

There’s some quotation that says something to the extent of “absence makes the heart go fonder” or something like that and it truly does. I always got along really well with my parents and we’re all really close but toward the end of the year I couldn’t wait to leave them and go to school. Now I just feel like I’m away from two of my best friends, haha I know cheesy but my parents and I did everything together.

I also can’t wait to help my parents cook and bake pies and everything. I loved baking and cooking. I used to make dinner for my parents all the time and I was the head of baking club at school, so I’m excited to all that stuff again. Ah just being in my house! I’m so excited it!

The other thing is my mom and I are trying to plan a big birthday for my Dad. I had the idea when my parents came up for parents weekend. We went to the cascades and my Dad was taking pictures like he always does and somehow I just came up for a birthday idea. So my Dad is obsessed with photography and has been ever since he was little. As a result of this our entire house is filled with his photos, there are boxes of them in our basements, and thousands of them in our computers. So my idea was to create kind of a gallery opening style party for him. I want to find somewhere downtown to have it, I was looking for an empty gallery but so far I haven’t been able to find anywhere. But there are party venues downtown so I might try one of those. Anyway the game plan is to pick out a bunch of my dad’s photos and get them all printed, matted, and clustered and display them in this “gallery”. Then we want to invite a whole bunch of his friends and family to the gallery at night and have a cocktail and appetizer thing going on. So hopefully he’ll enjoy that but, I’ll be planning that over break. It’s going to be awesome planning it too because, that’s my dream job is to event plan and this will be my first stab at it! Hehehehe!

In other news though I think our holidays are going to be a little more mundane than usually because my great uncle just passed away last weekend. My mom just drove he mom up to Buffalo New York today to go to the funeral. She’s not coming back until Tuesday which is also sad because I won’t be able to see her right away when I see her. And then both my Dad’s parents went into the hospital two weeks ago and they’re still there and not doing so well, so my poor Dad is miserable. I’m trying to think of a lot of things to do to try and cheer him up but there isn’t that much I can do because they’ll still be in the hospital. I love my grandparents a lot but I feel much worse for my Dad, which is the saddest part. Hopefully they’ll get better though both of them are always like the little engine that could, they always seem to withstand everything.

Nonetheless I’m sure thanksgiving will be a great holiday as always. Just having my brother, my parents, and I all together always makes everything better. My brother too haha I almost forgot about him. It’s so weird how much better we get along now that I’m in college. He’s a junior in high school this year so he’s younger. I think just because we aren’t around each other all the time we’re not at each other’s throats. The main thing too is that we don’t have to drive to school together and that’s when we both wanted to kill each other. One of us was always late, when he wasn’t running late; I was running late, and vice a versa. We never got to school on time and which lead to detentions for the both of us. Basically the trip to school was tearing us apart haha. I don’t think he misses me that much though but, when we’re together now we can actually have a conversation. I also like taking him home with me, which I think he enjoys because he feels cool hanging out with all my older friends. So that will be fun.

I hope you guys all have or had a great thanksgiving! Get excited for our gmail CHAT! :D

The weekend update

So this weekend I went HOME! I know it makes no sense at all because we’re going home next weekend for thanksgiving. My high school theater department put on Jesus Christ Super Star and theater was practically my entire life for seven years in Ohio. So I came back for it! I also brought three of my friends from here. Austin the new boy toy (in case any of you creep on my relationship status), his best friend and my friend Erik, and my roommate Clara! Why they decided that they wanted to come along for the five and a half hour drive to Columbus Ohio, I don’t know, but they did and it was awesome.

We went to the play on Friday night, and it was okay, I feel like they’re always a lot better. That could just be though because I’m always in them and if you’re in it you probably think all of your hard work makes something brilliant. Then that night we went to OSU campus because, I live twenty minutes away from there. A lot of my friends go to OSU so that was fun and we went to one of my friends houses for a party. The people there are a lot different though, it was weird. I think it’s mostly just because of this kid’s personality, so all of friends were just awkwardly into themselves. What was really weird though was that I saw someone I went to school with in eighth grade and he recognized me. Him and I both had a little middle school crush on each other, then he left my school, and now he goes to OSU.

On Saturday I went to go visit my Grandma and everyone else slept all day, literally. We went to chipotle for lunch at 2:00Pm so I woke them up at 1:30 and then on the way home they fell asleep in my car, and then all crashed in their beds until 6:00PM. It was ridiculous but, then we went out to dinner at the restaurant I work at so it was fun to see everyone I work with. We had pancake breakfast with my parents on this morning and then left around 1:30. Now we just got back at 7:00.
So it was kind of awkward because so last week my relationship status changed on facebook right? (I’m sure you all are going to love reading about this but I don’t know what else to talk about and this is kind of a funny story) So Austin wanted to change our status within like 24 hours of us deciding we were going to date, which I thought was a little fast, but, whateverrr. He and Erik had already decided they wanted to come to Ohio with Clara and I probably four weeks ago before we had even thought about dating and so it wasn’t planned to be a meet-the-parents-trip. So I just wasn’t going to tell my parents because I didn’t want them to freak out. Especially since Austin is the first guy I have ever dated that they haven’t known his parents and him for at least five years, by my senior year twelve, so I thought they would panic. Plus the fact that he lives two floors below me in the same floor I also thought would freak them out, soooo I didn’t tell them.

And then, okay, I didn’t want to change my facebook status because I’m friends with a lot of family members and I thought that somehow it would get to them. Then I went against my better judgment and did it anyway because I decided that someone wouldn’t make the point to call my parents to tell them. Then my Grandpa happened to get sick last week and my Aunt and Uncle decided to come to Ohio to visit him. And thennnn my aunt started texting me asking me “which one Austin was in his profile picture”, she is the biggest facebook freak ever. And then I was like, “ohhh he’s this one, blah blah blah, please don’t tell my parents by the way.” And then I got the “ummmmmmm” text message, followed by the “please don’t hate me” text message. Before I could read these two text messages my phone was ringing and it was her and my mom. They were both really excited and giddy, and probably a little bit drunk, which was funny.

I went on a lunch date though with this other guy like three weeks earlier and my Mom was like “aww I’m so glad that lunch guy worked out.” And then it was like errrrr sorry Mom it’s someone else. That made me feel good about myself, haha. And then yeah, so the family was really excited to meet the new man. I also lied to my Grandma over the school year and told her I had a boyfriend and that it was this one kid that I worked with. This was because she always asks me if there’s anyone I think I could get married to and she’s also under the impression that if a girl doesn’t have a boyfriend there’s something wrong with her—this is all because she’s really old. So yeah to get her off my back I told her I had a boyfriend and then she found out that I brought my boyfriend home, and she thought I had brought home the kid I worked with, I guess because she thought that he went to Virginia Tech too. When I told her that it was someone else, she was like “Margaret! My lord! How many boys do you have?!” Once again, that made me feel good about myself haha.

Yeahh anyway the only thing is Austin slept literally the entire weekend and was only awake after 11:00PM, which is when my parents were asleep. So there impression of them is probably not fantastic, especially since my parents are morally against napping, but I think they might have understood more than I thought they would. Good story. Sorry this post is girly and I say like maybe 50 times. Hope your weekend was grand! <3

Work it Outtttttt biotchessss

By the way this is me doing my blog on Thursday, yep Thursday, look at me go! Moving on ….

Okay so during our first few weeks of English class we talked about discourse communities and the languages that exist between them, right? Yes, that happened. And I had seriously never ever thought about that before, or just in that way. I knew it happened I just never actually considered it concretely or how neat it is. I was seriously shocked when people introduced their own words and I had no idea what they meant, it was like listening to words of a foreign language. Then I felt like an idiot trying to explain what “story basket” was because, it’s one of those things that you never ever think of the real definition of what it means when you use it. Realizing that I always refer to an imaginary basket that people in my hometown pretend to wad up bad stories they’ve told and throw them into the basket is just ridiculous. It’s really cool though to realize how unique all of our little communities are.

Anyway so the other day I noticed an example of this whole discourse community language. One of my best friends I’ve actually only known for eight or so months, but something just instantly clicked between us, and he and I are better friends than some of the people I’ve known for years. But yeah so he left a wall post on my wall. Here you can read it:

"May I say hello to you as well?! hello. i did it. yay and STUFF. i am in such a weird/kinda bad mood. BUT IT'S ALL GOOD IN DA HOOD. caps lock is cruise control for cool. I have never hadthis busy of a week! for shiznets. i am sure you are have a crazy busy one as well :(."

Okay ignore the fact that it doesn't make any sense. ;)

And almost every other one of those words that he said are phrases that I say, which he had never used before I met him (well, I don't know about every other, more like but it's all good in the hood. and for shiznets). He went to a different high school than I did and so the things we said were completely different. And now I find myself saying things that he used to say also, it’s kind of neat, it’s like paying it forward with language. ;) There was something that I was going to go further with this idea but then I added this example and walked away from the computer and now I don’t remember…… I still don’t remember but I’ll go on a separate tangent.

I think it’s really crazy though that our communities are so different. I feel like the media influences a lot of the things we say and do and for the most part we all experience the same media. We can all watch Hannah Montana, can flip on Fox News, watch the Office, laugh at comedy central, and then there’s the Hills, Heroes, A Chance of Love, all of these things are probably familiar, at least through our same age groups. So when just talking about language I don’t know how we all say different things, and who invents all of these different sayings? How does one person in Connecticut begin to say something and then people start to follow it until the entire state starts to say it? Or is that not how it happens?

I distinctively remember when “Nasty” became intertwined into our slang and entered our school, as being a good thing. The first time I heard it I was seriously confused. And I mean completely unaware of what was going on, I felt like it was opposite day. My friend my senior year was like, “Yeah, it was nasty!” and I did not understand. Apparently “nasty” now meant awesome, like gnarly. And I just have no idea how that came to be. It’s not pronounced a different way, it’s not “nastay” or.. I don’t know how else you would say it, but you get the idea right? Do you all say nasty? As a good thing? All the sudden the word just started popping up all over my school. Soon it became “sick nasty” and it was out of control! I would seriously ask people what definition of the word they meant; the new adaptation of it or the old Webster version. How do things like this happen?! Except, what’s probably the most weird is now it’s completely natural and normal when I hear someone say it. I have yet to use it, but I can now clearly tell which version of the word they mean, without thinking twice. Odd.

Do people ever think of new words? Is noob a new word or an old one that has been recovered because, wasn’t n00b added into the dictionary a few years ago or something ridiculous? I think though that it would be sweet if we could just come up with a slew of words to fill in all the gaps of vocabulary. The word that I most want to exist is a word between best friend and friend. I feel like good friend basically implies best friend. I need a whole new word for that because, I have this major problem as referring to almost all of my friends as my best friends and some people call me out on it. Especially when referring to people I went to school with because I’ve been at school with them for twelve years so I’m incredibly close with them on a different level. Except with them, I almost wish I could seriously refer to them as my brothers and sisters. They actually mean that much to me, they’ve been that big a part of my life but that’s a different story. Anyway yeah word between friend and best friend, got to get on that.

In other news I used to be in love with Usher when I was in middle school more like in ninth grade. I have no shame though he’s awesome and romantic and sexy. I read an article about him when I was a freshman and it was an interview with him and he was just classy and collected and he talked nice about women and his mom. My mom even read it and decided he was just one swell man. That’s why I want to marry him, well almost; I would rather just be his best friend. Good Story bye Team! ! ! ! ! ! ! <3>

Everything from biology to picture taking to halloween... :)

I always forget that I have to do this blog until like five thirty in the late afternoon/early evening. This makes no sense because we have one due every week and we’ve had one due every week, for like the past eleven weeks. Eleven weeks seems like such a largeeeee number, but I also feel like it should be longer, I don’t know I can’t decide? I am legitimately counting down the days until Thanksgiving break. I need a break soooo badly, just to not worry about work for a bit, and to recover on some sleep, and to be in an environment that I know everything about so I’m not worried about always missing out on something. I kind of wish we had a long break like during the half way of the semester. I feel like then I would be completely rejuvenated, because I am crashingggg this week especially, or more like this weekend.

I have yet to complete any work. I started a biology lab report, started a chemistry lab report, and have been starring at the biology book on my bookshelf for like five days. I have seventy pages to read and take notes on by tomorrow. And three mind maps to do, and for all of you who have looked at me trying to cram them during English, they suckkk bananas. I’m about to kill myself and/or my professor. ALSO, because okay gettttt this! I’m so mad, my accumulative final exam is the Wednesday we get back from thanksgiving! Like fo realzzzzz, that means I have to hard core study during break, which just makes me so angryyy like why would you be such a jerk, because I’ll also still have all my other classes and such it’s not like it’s during exam week. The plus side though, tonight it my last biology mind map I will ever have to do until the end of my existence and I will never have to see this man again! And after that Wednesday final assessment I will never have to go to class again, so I’ll have like an extra week off of it. The only thing is though I don’t know if it’s worth it because I seriously feel like I’m on the verge of failing that class. I got a 38% on the first test, and 68% on the second… haha which averages out to be a fifty two, except we get fifteen percent for our mind maps and 10% for our attendance, and I’ve only missed one class. Holyyy Molyyyy this is an epiphany! I totally never thought about that! And he drops our lowest test grade! And lets all pray to the planets that I will not get lower than a 38%. So that’s 53+10+15ish (I haven’t gotten a hundred percent on all of them) so that’s PASSING. My goodness I feel like I can breathe.

So I actually really like this blogging thing, haha I kinda want to keep doing it even after the class is over, maybe not 1000 words a week, but it’s nice just to vent and talk about completely random things. And I really like how it kind of made us be friends! AWWWWWW. But yeah no it’s an awesome way to get to know you people. I’m really sad I won’t be able to take the class with you next semester, but it’s during my only mandatory one time offered class. Are any of you guys taking the same class next semester?

Oh yeah! How was Halloween last night everyone? Mine was sort of good? Except I’m kind of getting sick of going to really big parties all the time because it’s just a whole bunch of people that you don’t really talk to you and you’ll never see again probably. I miss like the small parties my group of friends used to have at home. But I was a fairy princess! Hehe like a noob, but it was fun. I’ve been some sort of winged fairy/butterfly thing for the past like six years, no joke! How ridiculous is that haha? I want to know Halloween costume details! Except okay my only problem is I didn’t take any pictures last night and no one took any pictures of me. Which like isn’t a huge issue, but it’s not because I’m craving cute facebook tags, but because I want to be able to look back and remember all this stuff. I think I get too stubborn about people just judging me or anyone for taking pictures for the sole purpose of facebook. I’m totally going to get over the fact that that happens and I’m going to start bringing my camera everywhere! Well not everywhere because that’s probably why people would think I was just looking for facebook pictures, but important things that people usually take pictures of. My new rule is anything that my parents would want pictures of is completely justified. And I feel like last night I just failed because I feel like Halloween is the college equivalent of prom. It’s the one time when like everyone gets all dressed up and takes pictures together, but I was too embarrassed/ afraid of looking like a facebook freak to take them. Haha maybe I only think that because curled my hair and looked incredibly girly. Oh well I’m officially going to get better at recording my life.

I wish I had time to do like a little bit of dairying, which I guess this is sort of like and if I took a lot of pictures, that would sort of be equivalent, but I just like I said earlier want to be able to easily look back at all this stuff. Especially because at home I find some of my old diaries from middle school and they’re so much fun to read! It just brings back all the really fun stuff from back in the dayyy haha. I also find that some of the stuff I thought was hilarious back then still really funny right now. That was a good story! Um but yes I hope you all have a splendid evening! Good luck with your work! See yaaaaa.

HOCKEY is cool

So this weekend my parents were in town for parents weekend, I’m sure like a lot of yours were, WOOO! We had fun I always like seeing them. We went to the Hokie Hockey game in Roanoke because my parents are die-hard hockey fanatics. My Mom, my dad, and my brother all play, and I was always peer-pressured to start. But my Dad’s from Canada and my Mom’s from Maine, so it’s probably completely normal. But the game was so bad, well actually it was great, but we lost in a shoot out after the other team scored a goal with 4 seconds left in the game. The weirdest thing ever though happened!

So we got to the game and we were looking at the program and my parents saw the name Travis Young. And they were like “Oh my gosh, Travis Young, he played on your brothers team!” And sure enough we turned around and there his mom was. My mom plays hockey with his mom and I grew up around this kid my whole life, because it was actually his younger brother that played on my brother’s hockey team for like six years. So he was always around. It’s so weird though, because he used to be this short completely round and roll-able red headed kid covered in freckles and now he’s the starting goalie for the Virginia Tech hockey team as a sophomore. It was really cool I wish that I could go to more of the games, and like I could probably because I have a car, but they are so far away! Roanoke was like a good forty minutes away, which is just a lot of time. I also need to find a group of people that would want to go with me! I have four seats in my car here people, haha you guys can all come/you should.

I love hockey so much and everything that has to do with it. I completely grew up around the sport. My parents always watched it on TV and then my mom and my brother and I would all go watch my Dad play hockey when we were little, almost every Sunday. I am instantly comforted as soon as I enter a hockey arena. When my brother started playing, that’s when my hockey life started. I was little and unable to stay at home and so I went to every practice, twice a week. Then my brother got really good at hockey, which just tripled the amount of time we had to go to the arena. He started playing on the travel team and then after that every single weekend, I kid you not, we had a tournament that could never be closer than two-three hours away. We went to different states; there were tournaments in Michigan all the time because they had the best sport complexes. So my life completely revolved around my brother and his practice times.

And then years after that, after I had finally breached the age that I was allowed to stay home by myself and miss all of his practices, the Columbus Blue Jackets came along; Columbus Ohio’s very own professional NHL hockey team. My dad had been dreaming about this since the day we moved here, when I was like four, since we used to live in Florida, less than twenty minutes away from the Tampa Bay Lightening arena. I was in sixth grade and my Dad had four season tickets; another layer of hockey was added onto my life. The NHL seasons lasts from the end of September to sometime around the middle of March. It is the longest season ever; which is something now I completely appreciate.

The Hokie game was really fun though, because they were obviously better than my brother’s team at home, but they were still a club team, which means they’re a lot more laid back. I like the college level hockey, and usually club more, or just differently than I like NHL hockey. Since they’re so much younger it seems like all they want to do is have fun. Hockey isn’t their job it’s just something they do because they love it. They seem to try a lot harder and their plays aren’t so structured. They dance down the ice with the puck passing it between they’re legs and spinning around players, it’s just a lot cooler to watch.

Sometimes with much larger schools, who have outstanding division I hockey programs, have a really intense coaching team. And yes, they win games, but they always seem so much less creative. I love when coaches just tell their team to go out there and have some fun. When my lacrosse and soccer coaches told me that I was just so much more relaxed and it was basically permission to do whatever I or we wanted to do to get the job done. And it really brings out the better player in you, for some reason everything just clicks better. After watching the Hokie game, it really seemed like that’s what the coaches told them to do—until they lost with four seconds left. I guess that’s when you have to draw the line, but I mostly believed that happened because they lost focus and got lazy, not because they were playing too much with the puck.

I think they should fund a bus to take students to the games and then maybe more people would go. I’m sure though since it’s only a club team, they don’t have the money to do that at all. All the players though, I believe really deserve the fan support, they seemed really good and they worked really hard. Then again, maybe they’ve just gotten over the fact that no one comes to their games. Oh yeah, if I didn’t mention this earlier, no one was at the game. There were maybeeeee two hundred people there, probably more like a hundred. Out of these hundred-ish people probably only like forty of them were students, or looked like they could be students, everyone else was just local Roanoke people and kids, or parents of players and there were fans from the other team too. Anyywyayyayayayayayayayyayayayyaay if you love hockey and want to a game hit me up son! PEACE!

For the Love of Biology

So I think I’m finally getting a hang of college, famous last words, but I feel like by my next exams I’ll be golden, not like A+ golden, but just a lot better than my first two exams were. My first exams for bio and chemistry I didn’t study enough, my second chemistry exam I studied a lot for, but now I know the only other thing I’ll need to do is practice more equations and math chemistry problems. Right now/this weekend I’ve been hard-core studying for biology, my next exam is Wednesday and I need to do a lot better on. Except I realized that I’m now spending all this time trying to understand the chapter, when that is something I should have done a lot sooner, and then I could actually study right now. It’s taken me about two-three hours to understand/summarize the important parts of one chapter, which is RIDICULOUS. But, now I know that next time I should type out my summaries, like I’m doing now, while I read the chapter for that day and seriously my life would be ninety five percent easier right now.

I’m going to blame my unsuccessfulness and need to reread every word of the chapter even though I took notes about terms the first time I read it on my biology professor, haha, just like you’re never supposed to blame someone else. But I just despise him. I’m counting down the days until winter break just so I know I don’t have to go back to his class again.

I know this whole life isn’t fair thing that everyone talks about, but I hate how much work I have in that class compared to my roommate, who is taking the same class with a different professor. Sometimes I just wish that all the homework and the exams across each course were standardized. They are in my math class and I feel like that just makes sense. My first biology test raped me, it was the hardest test I’ve ever taken, granted it was my second test in college and now I’m at a whole other level, but my roommate said hers was so easy. Hers was simple spitting out definitions and mine was about applying information, something I’ve been notoriously horrible at. And once your grades are published your grade isn’t curved according to how hard you professors are, or a grad school doesn’t look at it and say “oh, she got a C in biology, but oh it was with Buikema, he’s the hardest so we understand.”

Oh well I guess I only have six more weeks left with him and then the final exam, and like I said I’m getting used to his work load, and now I know how I need to prepare for tests earlier. Or I hope I now know how to prepare for tests earlier, me spending three hours per chapter could still be the wrong way to study and I still could just have no idea how to apply my newly acquired knowledge and then I would scream, literally.

Our student TA was talking to us on Friday during our little review session at Deets, that he’s one of the hardest teachers we’ll have, and he does it to weed out the other biology majors. I don’t understand though because, I’m NOT A BIOLOGY MAJOR here buddy, I’m just taking the class, so I would prefer to not be weeded out thank you. She also said that whatever biology class we take next year will be a piece of cake, but once again I’m not going to take biology next year and I think I’d much rather have my work load at a steady pace.

I was trying to figure out my schedule for next semester and I went to ratemyprofessor.com and searched every biology professor I could have. I picked the one with the best reviews after reading a good number of them and then planned my entire schedule around that one biology class. Whether this is a good idea or a bad idea I guess I won’t know yet, but all I know is that I was sick of dedicating so much of my life to it because, it wasn’t only the homework that was ridiculous, I went to class and learned absolutely nothing at all. He talks to fast for you to write anything down, he would add extra information to the slides that you would also try to speed write down, and then at the end of class he would just ask us some questions that were application questions, but wouldn’t show up on the test or help my brain apply it anywhere else.

I’m going to take Simmons next semester; I almost jumped for joy when my advisor told me that I didn’t have to have the same professor for the same class. People commented on how he was one of the best teachers they’d ever had, I guess all I have to do now is hope that I actually get into the class.

For the rest of my classes it took me a really long time to decide where I’m going to put things. There were just way too many decisions to make and variables to account for. I also need to pick a class that goes to the core curriculum to get some of those things knocked out of the way. I’ll have 18 credit hours after I do that, but I’m hoping that just a lecture class on psychology or something won’t be that hard. I could just be being completely naive though but really, my brain would gladly accept listening to something that wasn’t about chemicals or cellular respiration or calculus. Last Thursday I went to a seminar on public speaking just for the heck of it and even though it wasn’t that enlightening, it was the basic don’t mess with you hair or put your hands in your pockets, it was really nice to listen to something simple.

How are you schedules looking for next semester easier or harder? Or better or worse? Or more fun or less fun?