commotiocordis

But also, there is No Time in my life when I don’t have something I should be doing. Something scholastic, usually, as my MCAT scores sucked on this self-timed practice one I did, which scared me all to fuck because my MCAT scores were what I was counting on to get me into medical school since my GPA isn’t impressive and I’m at a podunk state school (also, why does Word want to capitalize “Podunk”?).

Time management is really biting me in the ass atm. Even just trying to conceptualize what I should be doing when (not helped by the fact that the email system we switched to at school that has all my Outlook calendars I made on the old system refuses to connect to the Outlook program on my computer and give me them back).

( A list of what I'm doing (or not doing) lately: )

Met with the chemistry coordinator for my orgo service thing finally today, though, which I'd been putting off finding the time to do to turn in these forms because they were already late and I'm a wuss. She was uber nice. She's pretty old (60 at least, though I'm not good at guessing anybody's age, especially older folks) and reminded me a lot of my two grandmothers combined--sort of looked like my maternal, but had a slight southern accent like my paternal. Glancing at her bulliton board, it looks like she teaches mostly chemistry for non chem majors, which could be fun. It'd be like teaching high school chemistry--you could do a lot of the fun stuff because it's not like these people are ever going to need to know how to identify 1-propyl 4-chloromethyl heptene on the spot. Not that anybody would ever need to (even if you were a chemist, I'm pretty sure you'd have a second to look it up), but still.

Kinda disappointed about the MCAT/GRE practice thing tomorrow—the gay/straight alliance at school’s having a barbeque that I wanted to go to in the afternoon. Considered just taking the MCAT and going to the barbeque, but no. Shall be responsible. Also wanted to take the LSAT again, but it's at the same time as the MCAT, which is too bad, because the MCAT is going to make me want to slit my wrists, but the LSAT and how I rock it is a decent ego boost. (Acronym translation just in case this is baffling: MCAT=medical college admissions test, the pretest for med school. LSAT=same thing but for law school. GRE=same thing but for generic graduate school; more like the undergrad college admissions tests that have english and math and writing and such.)

I'm in the library atm, plugged into the wired connection on the tablet because I haven't downloaded the wireless update since I wiped it a few days ago and reloaded XP Tablet on it instead of the XP professional I had before that wasn't giving me the tablet functionality regularly. When I tried to load XP Tablet on top of the XP-Pro, like you can do with most Windows OS, it stalled on the install, so I had to reinstall regular XP Professional which ended up with me having one XP-Pro install that worked and one that was stuck halfway through being written over by Tablet. It worked fine like that for a week or two, but eventually the whole mess of things got to where I had to boot into the second OS under safe mode to not bluescreen out and blech. It worked, but was annoying. Going to see if I can get the tech people here to decipher their own instructions for setting up the new university mail with Outlook, because they don't work. Frustrating as hell; I've tried it I don't know how many times on the tablet under various hard drives and OS installs. But because I don't have the wireless (tried to download the update, but the wire here is so freaking slow--we're talking sub-dial up speeds for some reason), I've got to get one of them to come over here, which means unplugging my computer and bringing it over to the desk or leaving it here and going to get one of them, and it's just been less work to stay here and keep typing.

Shall do now, though, as bleakone's probably out of class in a few minutes and we'll be going home where hopefully, I can await the return of Tosh, the computer that was stolen by the fucktards at the Toshiba official repair depot for, from the day I sent it off to today, 36 days. And refused to do anything about it when I called and asked them what the fuck was up with them lying to me and saying 7-10 days. I get that it was on hold for parts for two weeks (sort of--shouldn't the official Toshiba place *have* all the Toshiba parts?) and that wasn't expected when they gave me the estimate, but 7-10 days after I sent it off they hadn't even put it on the repair desk, so that's bullshit.

ETA: Tosh is here! The screen works, the keyboard has been replaced, the fucktards wiped it like they said they wouldn't, but I backed stuff up so I'm not that pissed. What does piss me off is that they didn't replace the screen. In fact, they made the artifacting and little bruises and dead pixels worse. Idk what to do now. I think I'll call tomorrow or Monday or something and see what they say, because there's a whole circular bit in the middle of the screen where it looks like the pixels are half blue. (Most noticeable on a black screen, natch.) This was not there before. Displeased.

O. M. F. G.

Marburg hemorrhagic fever, imported case, UNITED STATES

LOL at how they retrospectively diagnosed it, though.

Atm, I'm in the first floor of the biomedical sciences building while my gel runs upstairs because I've got a shitload of work and no time to do it. I've been getting maybe 4 hours of sleep each of the last three days, which doesn't make me happy as with my 8 and 9 am classes, I was trying to be in bed by midnight. Yeah, that worked until I got, idk, actual homework.

And now I'm swamped, between the lab and mock trial right now. The former is new and weird. Though this is only my third day working in there, so it's understandable, and I am really getting the hang of things because I know what I'm doing, just not where everything is, LOL; keeping the notebook is the hard bit--I'm not sure how much/what to write out. As there's a large continuum of detailedness in procedure, especially since it's all written out for me already as standards and I only really have to mark down changes I make (different buffers, annealing temperatures for the PCR, etc.) And I'll definitely have enough to actually write it up when I'm done, but I'm not sure how much the supervisor wants in terms of that kiddish bullshit regarding actually enumerating every item you ever even think about touching in the materials section, etc.

MT is. . . interesting. We're just prepping every witness just in case, which is what I'd been advocating forever, but now we have enough people to do it. I'm pretty much pissed at most of the people, though, as they just jumped in on Sunday so they could get to go with us to Columbia for the competition. And worried, as I've never heard any of them do anything mock trial-y. And one of them not even talk, really. I'm worried about him the most, as he's not even in Phi Alpha Delta (the pre-law fraternity that's sponsoring the MT team) and. . . doesn't really strike me as intelligent. I mean, at all. But as a result of this last-minute thing, we don't have an overall case strategy, nobody's working with each other to coordinate examinations (because sometimes you've got to make sure somebody says something earlier so you can get in what you want later), etc. So we're pretty much going to get our asses kicked, which I severely dislike. Because I'm good at this mock trial stuff, but I'm having to spend all my time just trying to get everybody (or even some of everybody) in the same room at the same time. We had both of the other lawyers and one of my two definitely-going-to-be-used witnesses not show up to the meeting on Sunday, so I can only hope that they didn't just quit on me or something. I don't understand why people here think they don't have to make any kind of comittment--it's only since the president of PAD intervened for me and started browbeating people that anybody would show up, since I've got no incentive/disincentive to enforce to ensure attendance. But seriously? Nobody seems to get that you've got to make the meeting times fit, you can't just say "oh, I've got work, can't show"--it's called asking off, seeing as how MT'll be over in a few weeks, it's not like it's going to be forever.

And I've got my microbiology test tomorrow that I'm going to fail since I still can't get the book (they're out at the bookstore; they offered to order me one, but I'll be damned if I'm paying the new price much less also the "having to ship it in" fee that I've heard they tack on)

And a psychology test that I'm going to spend all of 5 minutes looking over stuff for because I'm fairly certain I can take this class's final right now and pull at least a 97% but still adds to the stress

And chemistry lab (and thus in-lab quiz and writeup) tomorrow.

And journal entries due for Hero and Quest reflecting over material I haven't actually read all of. These being that which I was up until 1 and then from 3:30-6ish doing two weeks worth of last night (and it actually did take me that long, because of both the ADD from hell that's decided to be a bitch this semester simply because my doctor moved to Wisconsin so I've got no way of getting my meds for it reupped again), but it turns out that even though we didn't have class at all the third week, we've still got to do one.

And to add insult to injury, I was all excited about lunch today because it was some French theme and one of the counters was going to be fruit and cheese dessert. Which I thought might mean decent fruit (berries and such instead of the standard apple/orange/pear/banana/grapefruit rotating selection they've got of fresh, and nasty mushy sugary frozen/canned other fruits). With no interest in dinner (chicken strips and mashed potatoes/macaroni and cheese in both dining halls, blech--since they're for some reason killer popular, that's all it would have been at all the counters and in both places on the same day, which just seems stupid to me), that was going to be it for me for the day, but no. That dining place has a power outage.

And the chairs that I'm in in the computer lab have the most worthless backs in the history of chairs. Which would be okay if you just didn't use them, like stools; painful but doable. But no. The seat is slanted backwards so as to tip you back towards the back, which then leans so far back that I'd probably fall asleep if I stayed that way for more than a few seconds.


On a less-whiny (okay, still whiny, but different topic) note, House last night. How long after all the hoopla was that last scene supposed to have taken place? They didn't establish any kind of time passage, I think, which is fail. Because really? Not so much with the sexing after all that medical shit goes down. (Plus, erm, not really a fan of the 14.)