Torture

Hullo, kids.

Long time, no see lol.

It’s been a very, very, very long week for me of not sleeping, barely being conscious, pushing the limits of brainpower to cram for 3 exams back to back to back, and I’m glad to have a three day weekend ahead of me.

Fucked if I don’t need it.

All of this explains why I’ve been so quiet lately. First came my microbiology lab exam. These are worth a lot of points, and what we basically had to learn for it was how to identify different bacterial species by looking at how they grew on different media. So we would get questions explaining changes that happened to the media as the bacterium grew, and then asking what genus and species it had to be. It took ages to study for that and feel completely prepared for it, and I barely slept for days beforehand, making it to the test on Halloween feeling prepared… but very sleepy.

And sick. Very sick. Two days before Halloween, I made a huge mistake and slept through my pill time… and then didn’t even notice I’d done so until noon the next day, Halloween eve, if you will. I took my pill then, horrified at what I’d done because of how painful missing pills gets, but it was surprisingly painless, which might explain why it was so easy for me to forget for so long. That night at 12:30 am, technically Halloween morning, I had to take my next pill on time, and I was concerned that it would make me sick. Mind you, my pills have always made me feel nauseated at some point or another, and of all the side effects possible, that’s the one I usually get, if I get any at all, yet I had never actually thrown up no matter how bad the nausea got. As a matter of fact, I hadn’t thrown up since I was 8 years old. I had 12 years of no throwing up to enjoy, and I have a slight phobia of throwing up, so this was fantastic to me lol. But then came Halloween. I woke up ready to take that lab exam, and almost couldn’t move for being so dizzy. I could barely walk straight, and I was looking at an hour long ride in the car that made me want to vomit. Like… really. I grabbed a Diet Coke on my way out the door, knowing that I needed the caffeine and that I also have always been able to quiet nausea if I’m drinking something… but I didn’t make it far into that drink when I realized it was a bad idea. I probably had 3 sips before I gave up on the venture and wanted to die LOL. There were a few times when I thought we’d have to pull over on the side of the highway so I could throw up, but I made it to my first class before the exam puke-free and thought maybe I’d be fine after sitting in a non-moving seat for a while. Wrong. It was half an hour into class when I had to leave to throw up in the sink of a nearby bathroom. What’s funny is that I never realized you could throw up Diet Coke LOL. That’s all that was in me at the time, along with stomach acid (is this gross? LOL), so it kind of just tasted like really acidic Diet Coke, and I’ll take that over pure stomach acid any day. But it was not pleasant, and I knew that I couldn’t leave school to go back home because I had that exam, and there are no make-up exams for this class. You miss it without getting into a car accident, and that’s it. You miss it. So I had to stick with it, and I managed to feel a lot better ten minutes into this bathroom run after washing my face and running some cool water over my wrists to get my temperature back down. And then I was fine for the whole rest of the day, so that was great. I was feeling well enough to make a 100% on that lab exam, so it was totally worth puking for the first time in 12 years LOL. Although, if given the choice, I hope to never throw up while I’m supposed to be in class again. Now I know how all the pregnant women in my classes must feel…

With that out of the way, I had to concentrate the whole weekend on French homework, even though I knew that the next week, this week, would mean taking a microbiology test and a biochemistry test on Wednesday and Friday. I have a huge midterm for French coming up very soon, and the other two tests had to wait a little so I could actually do my French work and learn it as I went. It’s an online course, so we do online homework, and it’s easy to just breeze through it and not learn anything if you don’t focus… but I really am trying to learn it. It took a long time for me to get it done because I was still so exhausted from the week before, losing sleep to study for the lab exam, and it was difficult to stay awake long enough to concentrate on it. But I finished it with time enough to begin studying for the microbio test on Sunday. It was nearly 7 chapters of complete information, and when we had to know every single minute detail. Sometimes I think this class is a joke. It’s really an overview class, so you don’t learn anything in depth, but you learn lots of general things and you have to know them all. It’s ridiculous. I’m not entirely sure who thought it would be a good idea to put 7 chapters on one exam and then ask us to know 25 different organisms that cause different diseases like malaria and chicken pox, and then ask us to memorize every table and figure we find in the book, and then ask us to know every mutagenic agent used in labs today and exactly how they mutate DNA, and… yeah. All for the same exam. Plus 7 complete chapters of more information. I spent all of Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday studying my ass off for that exam, and by the time Wednesday rolled around, I did not feel prepared. I resigned myself to my fate, though, and then was surprised at how easy the exam was compared to the last micro exam LOL. I wouldn’t call it easy, but the professor asked for less specific information and more general ideas, which I would think are more important in an overview class, as opposed to the specifics. I left the class feeling pretty decent and mostly just glad to have it out of the way. I hadn’t slept properly in days and needed one less thing to spend my time on with the biochem test quickly approaching.

Once I got to the lab, sleepy and trying to wake myself up with iced coffee when it was freezing (for me) outside LOL, I talked with some friends about the exam we’d just left and we all thought the class as a whole is ridiculous, so I was glad to not feel so alone LOL. But the biggest victory came when I was in the lab. Right now, we’re working on unknown bacteria. Last Wednesday, we were given a test tube with 3 different bacteria in it, and we were told to use whatever methods we could to identify them, so we were continuing this process. Remember C and my rant about his clingy-ness? Well, that’s not his only downfall. He was leaving me to do most of the work in lab when we had to work in pairs, just sitting around and letting me complete the work and then basically stalking me when I left the lab, having done nothing but ask me retarded questions the whole time. I was thinking about telling the professor about it so that she’d fail him (haha), but then I thought I’d rather watch him flounder before he failed.

Yes. I am really that cruel.

Sometimes there’s nothing better than watching someone like C writhe about in pain and terror. And I had an excellent time watching him when he had no idea what to do to figure out his unknowns without me doing it for him LOL. Last week we basically just streaked media with our bacteria so that we could get single colonies and use them for experiments, so he had no trouble there… but then this week we had to start the tests, none of which he actually did himself because it was easier to let me do it. He was still trying to figure out the first of seven tests when I left the lab an hour before it ended. He is so fucked LOL. I LOVED it. I didn’t say anything to him about it, but I had no greater joy than watching him fuck up a Gram staining procedure so badly that it was the only step he’d done when I left his ass to figure it out. And, mind you, Gram staining is just what it sounds like. You take specific dyes and pour them on the bacteria in a certain order to stain the bacteria and look at it under the microscope to see what kind of cell wall it has. That’s it. We were looking for purple-stained, round bacteria to do tests on, and he couldn’t find them, likely because he was doing the staining incorrectly LOL. I’m not sure if he ever got past that point of the tests, and I really don’t care right now. I’m just glad he had to struggle.

Yes. I’m getting coal for Christmas. Oh noes.

I got home from all of that, glad to have the time to study for biochem, only to find that I was too exhausted to do it. I was also, however, too tired to sleep. This happens to me a lot when I push my limits by cramming all night for exams, and I had done this twice in one week, so I was already out of it. I tried to study what I could, but it wasn’t much, and the material we’re being tested on isn’t something you can just breeze over sleepily and learn. It’s hardcore and difficult to figure out, and I couldn’t give it the attention it needed. So I gave it up to try to sleep again, and I couldn’t sleep. I slept for 3 hours the whole day, and that’s counting a nap and what I actually slept that night before school the next day. By Thursday, I was ready to cut class to stay home and sleep, but attendance is mandatory for the class I wanted to skip and I thought it would help me stay focused, so I went. Mistake LOL. I should have just stayed home. I was completely out of it the whole time I was there and I got home and just wanted to pass out again, whether I got to study for the biochem exam or not. I slept about 5 hours, and then I had a boost of energy when I got up and saw that I scored a 96% on that microbiology exam. Nice LOL.

But even that wasn’t enough to keep the momentum going. I couldn’t concentrate on anything but wanting to sleep again, so while trying to learn all the enzymes and substrates of glycolysis and gluconeogenesis, I was thinking of how wonderful it would feel to be unconscious for a while.

And that’s not on the exam LOL.

Looking back, I know now that I should have just slept, but I was convinced that I had to study and I stayed up thinking I could do it… and I couldn’t. I was just at a breaking point and couldn’t do it anymore. By the time I took the test today, I was ready to nap on my exam LOL. I was exhausted beyond belief, and I did not feel good about taking the test. I’m sure no one else did either. About half of us had that micro exam on Wednesday, and the other half of us (not me) had to take a genetics exam right after the biochem exam, so not many people had time to devote solely to this class. The teacher doesn’t curve, though, so this brings none of us any benefit. The exam itself was horrendous. The professor has usually been good about writing decent exams, but he pulled some of his questions out of thin air this time. Things we never learned showed up, and things we barely touched on showed up, and I kind of just wanted to die. Again LOL. I did my best, though, and I’m not happy with the score I got from it. Only the answer key to the exam has been posted, and I think one of the answers is wrong on it, so if it is, then I missed 7 out of 25 questions and got a 72%… or, if the key is right, then I missed 8 out of 25 questions and got a 68%. Both grades are C’s.

And I am not happy with either.

But my average with both is a solid B, and I’m hoping to bring that up with the last exam, which we take in December sometime. But that doesn’t mean I get much of a break. I did the work in my head and figured out that I don’t have a single free week until the semester ends.

I am not liking this one bit lol. And it means that there may be some more breaks like this until it quiets down in mid-December. Thinking about it makes me want to take a nap LOL.

And, if you made it all the way through that, I might as well reward you with a story about sperm and sandwiches. In biochem, I sit in between two guys, neither of which are cock suck vibes guy, who I barely see these days. When the class began, I used to only sit by one guy, and the seat next to me would be filled by anyone who wanted it. One day, cock suck vibes guy wanted it, and do you want to know what happened?

A man in a business suit came up and took the seat right out from under his nose.

If looks could kill, he would have been my first murdered victim LOL. I was PISSED. Being that close to having cock suck vibes guy sit next to me and this asshole comes up and steals the seat from him. Fuck. And then this guy, after dashing my hopes, wants to talk to me.

It would have been only too easy to go for his jugular LOL.

But I talked to him, and he wound up becoming a regular in the seat next to mine, sandwiching me in between two guys. It was about this time that we started talking about fatty acids in class, and the way you draw them kind of looks like a balloon. A big, round head, and a long, thin tail coming off of it. The professor was drawing it on the board, and his hands shake. I’m not sure what disease he has, but he’s lost control over the shaking, so when he draws things, where there should be straight lines, they look like waves. So he draws this big head and wavy tail, and before he even finishes it, he looks back at us and says…

“Ummm… don’t confuse this with anything else that might swim and make babies, okay?”

Hahaha… When he moved away from his drawing, it looked like a line drawing of sperm LOL. We all got a good laugh out of it, and I was still laughing about it when I got to the car to go home. This business suit guy wound up driving next to my car for about 20 minutes on the highway, and I thought that was kind of odd. I’d never seen him driving that way before, but whatever. I put it out of my mind until the next class when he was once more sandwiching me between himself and the other guy. He asked me if that was me on the road the day before, and I laughed when he said he’d been trying to look in his mirrors to see if it was me and couldn’t really get a good look because my dad, who drives me the long way to school, was in the car with me and he didn’t want my dad to think that he was checking me out LOL.

If you met my dad, you wouldn’t want him thinking you were doing that either, so this is totally understandable LOL.

I said it was me, and I saw him, too, but I didn’t notice him trying to look inside my car, so my dad probably missed it, too.

And just to scare the bejeezus out of him, I threw in…

“But I can go home today and tell him all about you, and how we talk about sperm while I’m sandwiched in between two gentlemen.”

He might have dropped dead from fear LOL. I thought it was great lol.

“You n-need to be careful th-throwing around that sandwiching and sperm stuff!”

Do I?

I don’t think I do LOL.

I wouldn’t really tell my dad anything like that, but it was funny watching this guy squirm after stealing cock suck vibes guy’s seat, and I let him run wild with the ideas of what my dad would do to him for a few minutes, should I really tell him such a story LOL.

Yes.

Coal for Christmas, indeed.

<3 Goldy <3