Dancing with the Universe

It's a beautiful day outside... and I'm spending the entire day doing homework.

Again.



One of these days I'm going to snap, rip my notes to pieces, scream obscenities at my teachers, and ride off into the sunset. I'll live in a remote rural area, eat almost exclusively food I plant myself, and reread the same fifteen sf/fantasy books over and over. And that will be that.

Over the past week, I've been working to cut refined sugar out of my diet. I realized that my thinking was muddy, my energy was low, and I generally felt like crap... and I was aware of the fact that I really wasn't eating well. Lots of sugar, lots of HFCS, lots of refined carbs. Generally, if I go back to a meat-and-veggies existence, I think more clearly and I have more energy.

I haven't been completely successful yet -- the cravings have been hideous this time around (it baffles me that people don't believe me when I say I get withdrawal symptoms from sugar). I've been eating huge amounts of vegetables and other okay things, just eating almost all the time, because the cravings are so fierce and I'm not giving in to them. I'm still trying to kill the urge to go out and buy a tin of cake frosting and eat it straight.

The cravings usually go away within about ten days. In the meantime, I've been feeling much better, like I can actually think and get stuff done rather than lie around the house. This is good.

At least, until this morning, when I realized that my eyes were stinging because caustic skin oil from my face had made its way into them -- I'm in the middle of a detox cycle. I'm listless and fatigued, and too paranoid to leave the house. This is bad.

Summary: cutting sugar out of my diet has shifted my metabolism back to the point that I no longer feel like crap, but it's also shifted my metabolism enough that I've started to lose weight again, and the toxins stored in the fat are making me feel like crap. My usual way of slowing down weight loss is... to eat more HFCS.

Great. Now what?

My credit union ran me through setting up a captcha image and security questions yesterday.

Unlike some people I've heard from, I don't consider that to be a huge hassle, given that more security is good and it took me only about five minutes. I'm a very visual person, so the image thing works for me. I'll probably remember that picture when I'm sixty and the current credit union website has long ago crumbled to its component electrons.

What bugs me, as it does with all sorts of places that use this now, is the "challenge questions". Are these always written by idiots?

( more ranting )

I wonder whether there's a "law" that resembles the following:

No matter how bad a situation is, it can (and likely will) get worse. (Also known as the "F*** me harder" rule.)




I hope the rest of the year isn't like this week.

I've been fighting with my wireless drivers.

It feels like I'm always fighting with my ( wireless drivers. )

I cannot adequately express my hatred of this class.

We have to draw double-reciprocal (that's 1/x vs. 1/y) plots of the given data, figure out the apparent slope and y-intercept, then plug them into one of five different equations that all look the same. Which we have to have memorized. That's ignoring all of the equations for the constants involved, which we also have to memorize.

We have to look at the resulting plot and decide whether it's an example of competitive, non-competitive, mixed non-competitive, or uncompetitive activity -- the only differences are the slope of the lines and where they intersect (at the x-axis, at the y-axis, in between, never). If all those terms sound very similar, it's because they're really fucking stupid descriptors for what's happening.

I can't use my calculator to make a coherent graph based on points, only based on functions. If she doesn't provide us with graph paper I will bite somebody.

Oh, and she still wants the exam to be done in pen.

Edit: There is a review question telling us how many amino acids are in a certain protein, and asking us to calculate the length in Angstroms of the resulting coil. This would require memorizing 1) how many amino acids to a turn in a coil, 2) how many Angstroms to a turn, 3) the fact that this protein is different, and 4) the number of Angstroms to a turn in this protein. I don't give a tinker's damn that a turn of this particular keratin is 5.1 Angstroms in length rather than the usual 5.4 Angstroms -- I have enough actually relevant things to worry about.

If she puts something like that on the exam, I will have to choose between kneecapping her, or just giving her Hemingway on why memorizing shit like this actually hurts learning. I'm thinking about three pages worth of handwritten essay. In pen.




I've lost the battle to not stress over this exam.

The fact that an article suggesting that the Democrats might have an edge in the elections, simply because they have prettier candidates, made it onto the front page of the Washington Post is bad enough. But reading the article made it worse.

... [R]esearch has shown that voters who are easily swayed by social trends tend to favor more attractive candidates. Conversely, people who resist social trends prefer unattractive candidates.

Aaaugh.

Could someone with a more formal knowledge of logic please put a name to the fallacy in the second sentence? The sheer idiocy is making my eyes bleed.

The rest of the article is horrifically shallow. Read it at your own risk.

or is that kneecap?

I am currently at home, tending to my wounds. It certainly was an eventful day; ( I hope some of those events are not repeated. )

Other than being bruised and tired, I'm in pretty good shape. The quarter doesn't look too scary -- a bit of a challenge, perhaps, but it should be. Not overwhelming. And I hope it gets less tiring. School does tend to agree with me; I eat small amounts more often, and exercise far more, so I get a bit leaner and my stamina goes up. I wouldn't complain if it happens again this year.

After hunting for Wilson icons, I have come to a few conclusions:

1. Wilson is a lot less popular than, say, House. Or Cameron. Or Chase. Or just about anybody except Foreman.


2. All the Wilson icons are crap.


3. Cropping really is 90% of photography. And one person in ten can even come close to doing a decent job.


4. The other 10% of photography is getting the right shot. Three people in twenty can even come close to doing that properly.


5. Oh, and color adjustment? The hidden talent of good photographers. Don't ruin a good photo by turning the white lab coat neon shrieking blue.


6. People love cluttering up good pictures with unreadably tiny writing.


7. Combine the four above items and you'll see why my eyes are bleeding.


8. Someone has compiled an entire database of Wilson's ties.


9. It is absolutely frightening how much really bad House fanfic is out there.


10. It's even more terrifying that a significant percentage is House/Wilson slash.

I have about four icons out of the countless numbers I've looked through. I'm done, I quit. I'm going to have to do my own, I guess -- I have a couple that are halfway decent, but nothing that says "you found it". Sigh.


I need a shower after just scanning some of the house_wilson story summaries. Ugh.

Savagely depressed. Have been for most of the afternoon and evening. Not a chemical exposure that I can recognize; may simply be motherfucking PMS again. Not fit for company.

Staying submerged in fiction for the moment, have taken some pills that might help. If it's PMS I should be okay by sometime tomorrow.

That is all.


Edit: I should be okay by sometime tomorrow. In case you were wondering.