I stayed late at work on Friday to do some studying and I was here for much of the weekend as well to the same end. I've now been at my job for more than a week straight. I'm having issues figuring out times and such. I think I have test today. That's about as far as I've gotten with scheduling. I also have a presentation to give on Friday for which I've planned not at all. But Friday is so far away. Isn't it? That's the problem with the holiday season: everything feels like a marathon. And despite my disinclination for running, I'm jogging along as fast as I can between events. If I can just avoid sleeping between now and Friday, I'm sure I'll get everything done.

In other disorienting news, I had gone more than two weeks without any soda at all until last Friday. I bought a Diet Pepsi on Friday to help keep me awake through a marathon study session and drank it at about 9 pm. At 3 am Saturday morning, I had the most uncanny and horrible experience of knowing myself to be awake but being unable to move or do anything about this. A quick Wikipedia check marks this as probably being "REM atonia," a perfectly normal part of the REM cycle in which your motor neurons aren't firing. It's perfectly fine with being the usual thing so long as you aren't awake for it. Not fun. Needless to say, I didn't sleep especially well as a result of caffeine and paranoia about that event. The good thing about caffeine is how quickly you can adjust to it. The next night, I saw Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (phenomenal, by the way) and drank 44 oz of Diet Coke and though I behaved like a speed freak for a few hours after, I slept just fine.

( Just some stuff I've been doing. )
And that's it, really. No, I take it back, I did do one thing recently: I accomplished my new year's resolution! As of last week, I'd seen 52 movies in the theaters this year, and I still have three weeks of year left to go!

I was looking to see where I declared my resolution on my LJ, and I can't find it. I did, however, find this list of movies I thought I would see this year. AND I SAW MOST OF THEM. In fact, the only one I didn't see--and I am still kicking myself for it after having seen how glorious it was on DVD--was Drive Angry. Depending on reviews for Ghost Rider 2: Ghost Riderer, I will go see that next year. There needs to be a balls-to-the-wall insane Nicholas Cage movie released every year. I will be there on opening night, I tells you.

But yes, I saw every single other movie on that list. I'll do a year-end review, let you know what's worth checking out or not. Not all of those movies were great. Or even all that good. It was still a fun experiment. I'm a little exhausted by it, but at the same time? It's nice to break the cycle of making movie outings "a thing." I do THE MAY MOVIE and that's something of a production. (My own fault, really.) It's nice to turn to a few people and say, "Hey, wanna go see a movie?" and just do it. It's a little bit of recaptured youth. Going to the movies, despite the soaring ticket prices, really isn't all that expensive. It's easy and fun and it's a frequent generator of fantastic outings. (Oh God, Priest. OH GOD THE THREE MUSKETEERS.)

I don't think I've studied enough--I know I haven't--but nothing more has been going in. I am so, so nervous, even though I think I know enough to do well. Gah, I want this test over with. I think I'm more nervous for it being an hour before the test than I will be, studied-well-enough or not, at the actual test.

Part of the nerves may be about having to ask the teacher afterwards for a recommendation. Part of the nerves is probably from my admittedly insane plan to do a lot of my running around after the test on my bike. Here's hoping I make it out alive.

Not that he's, you know, ugly, just that he shouldn't be able to pull off this hair better than I do. And yet? That is my experience so far this morning. I caught my own reflection and was all, "....Top Dollar? Are you having a bad hair day? Oh, wait. It's me."

Le siiiiiiiiigh. I have a presentation to give in just over an hour, and I looked at the slides that I sent my professor, and, naturally, they've been lightly chewed around the edges in the transfer from her computer to mine despite the fact that I sent her a pdf of what the slides should look like, so she should KNOW that something is off. I mean, I lost the fun stencil font (standard with Mac versions of MSOffice!) for the title, and, worse, the fungus' genus is no longer capitalized...? I have no idea how Latingenusname latinspeciesname went from that to latinGenusname latinspeciesname. I mean, what part of losing a font should even do that?

SIIIIIIIIGH. I just have to hope the video is working better.

Studying fatigue. I has it. Mostly, just fatigue, what with all the many weekends being dedicated away at an alarming rate. No, seriously, people asked my availability, and I looked at my schedule and said "July" with no exaggeration. April is promised away, as are three of four weekends in May. June? HAH. First weekend is my lab retreat, then my GRE, then getting applications together for school...

...for which I need to study so I can pass this, the class I'm sure--this time I'm sure--is the last one I really need for a good application to most schools. But I can't. I've gone over the material so often, in such a recent period of time (once a day for the past few days, with on-and-off studying the week before), that I'm not retaining more, and I'm getting bored by it even though there's plenty I don't know well enough. So I'm stuck half-panicked by that but unable to persist through. Damn it, I should have spread this out more.

At least I'll know to do that with the final. I'll have no choice to cram things in the weekend before. Did I mention all my weekends are gone until July?

As in, here goes nothing extra possibly getting fit into my head before this monster of a test. Previously, I had been quite wrong about my potential for test-taking in this class. This time, I've tested myself with practice exams and my "good" score was still several shades shy of a D. Yippie. It remains to be seen if I'll do as poorly as I'm expecting, if the rest of the class will fall into similar despair, and, if they do, whether the thing will be curved. I wonder if being away from "real" school for so long has made me into more of a grade-grubbing, freaking-out-about-score crazy person, or if I was always like that and the constant grind of studying took the edge off because more tests = less stress for any given test.

Man, I am no good at this school thing. Why do I want to go back again?

So, apparently, the test was a psych-out. I did tolerably well--I got the exact class average--and all the questions that had me despairing were both misleading and evil. For instance, we were given a molecule made up of 10,000 glucose molecules and asked, given the way it was constructed, to number the reducing ends and determine the reducing power of the sugar. There were three or four questions in this vein, suggesting, if you read into the psychology of such a question, that there should be some complicated answer. You don't keep asking questions about this unless there's an interesting or varying answer. I kept looking and looking and looking and all I could come up with was that it had one reducing end and, as a result of having one reducing end to 10,000 glucose residues, it basically had a reducing power of 0.

Turns out, that's right. Do you see what I mean about it being misleading? There was another question where the bulk of the points went to drawing the molecule and then there were two more questions: 1) Are there any reducing residues? and 2) If so, which residues are reducing? To my logical mind, you don't ask that follow-up question unless there are reducing residues. But there weren't. So I felt like I must have been missing something major when I wrote 1) No, and 2) None of them. I wanted to write "...none?" 'cause that's how I felt. I thought for sure I'd screwed something up majorly. Nope. Psych!

I can breathe a little easier now that that worry is off my mind. Just in time to start panicking again for the next midterm! Joy of joys!
 

I was supposed to do nothing but study this weekend. I even drove up to the middle-of-nowhere house so that I could be as far removed from the internet and video games that might distract me from my studies. I did okay, but I'm not yet satisfied with my progress on studying for my test tomorrow night. I won't be, really, until I take the test and get a grade so I can judge both a) how hard the tests will be, b) whether my studying method is appropriate for the tests I'm to be given, and c) how well the rest of the class does relative to me. That last is important, seeing as Biochemistry is a subject likely to be stocked choc-a-block with serious nerds whose lighter schedules give them a distinct advantage in terms of securing time to study, and who are more likely than not to be either pre-meds or related-science majors, both of whom are of the study-to-death, grub-for-every-point archetype--that archetype absolutely RUINS some class curves.

So, I was supposed to do nothing but study. I got five-six hours in on Saturday, more like 3 on Sunday. I just cracked. I needed a break on Saturday night, so I went to see Let Me In. It's fine. It's serviceable. It's the same goddamned movie as Let the Right One In but in English. Perhaps I would have enjoyed it more if I hadn't seen the Swedish version first. Perhaps--and this seems more likely to me--I'm more forgiving of movies filled with ponderous silences that are filmed in other languages in which I can pretend thirty seconds elapsing between bits of dialogue could be the norm.

While sitting in the theater for Let Me In, I was seized with the notion I should see Devil, and so, the next day, I did. Seeing two movies in a weekend? What, am I back in high school? Devil, by the by, is disappointing only in that it wasn't worse. It was a middling-to-okay thriller. Not having M. Night Shyamalan in the actual movie was a big step in the right direction. I admit to being biased towards disappointment more than most, however, as SPOILER (not really) the Devil was not, in fact, the elevator itself. That would have been too awesome. Also, the building got a bad rep despite the fact that it was really just the elevator that was misbehaving. And, as I may have mentioned, it wasn't even the elevator's fault, really.

That was my weekend. On the plus side, I seem to know the structures of most of my relevant compounds for the test. On the minus side, well, I did waste several hours (and dollars) on movies that were only eh-level of interest to me. I think the growing unease I have about the test is making me antsy--anything for a distraction. I predict that I'll get home tomorrow afterwards and not give a rat's ass what I do since there won't be any pressure on me not to do it....

I'm out the door for my Stats final in a few minutes. I think I'll be okay. Keeping my fingers crossed, though, which hurts because I burned half of them last night cooking. My fingers on my writing hand. Geeeenius, I be it.

At least I had no huge anxiety dreams last night. I did dream that the burn on my pinky swelled up into this huge blister, but other than that, I just dreamed that my brother sent me an e-mail with a picture of a crowd at a football stadium. He'd enlarged one area because he couldn't believe who was sitting in the crowd: it was either my cat, Wally, large as a person, or Lu Bu from Dynasty Warriors. Either one would probably not be fun to attend a game with--Wally because he's large and skittish and would freak out on you, and Lu Bu has those head feathers that would really ruin your view...

Okay, enough. Test time. Ciao!

For those of you who have ever wanted to know how not to brush off an entirely too-harsh thing with "humor," here's how not to do it:

Do not say, after saying this and getting back a panicked and penitent response, "Couldn't let you off the hook without even a little preaching, could I?

That date will not cause me any serious extra work.  Better that you took the course than
not.  So don't loss any sleep."

Sigh. If I hadn't said I would talk to him at class, I'd totally skip it tonight...