My Other Life – College

I’ve been back at school for 4 days now, I love it. I missed this place so much – the place and my friends and my life here. I’m feeling a lot better than I was 5 weeks ago, let alone a week ago. I still get tired really easy though and I can’t seem to stay asleep for more than 5 or 6 hours at a time (although something tells me that’s due to more than being sick…)

Anyways, classes started yesterday. Mondays are really going to hurt me – 4 classes, 1 three hour lab. In all, a total of 8 hours of class on Monday. Tuesdays are much better with only two classes which the first one doesn’t start until 1. Wednesdays are repeats of Mondays but with no lab, Thursdays I only have 1 class that doesn’t start until 2:30 and Friday I only have 3 classes with no night class. So really, Monday is pretty much the only crappy day of the week. I’ve been to all of my classes now and I really think I’m going to enjoy them all.

Gen. Chem 2 – Having a younger professor is great. He realizes that none of us are chem majors and isn’t requiring us to know ridiculous details. He gives us note pages which are printouts of the overheads and today he gave us about 4 pages of review from last semester. No longer do I have quizzes every week and I’m actually going to have homework assigned, which actually makes me happy. Hopefully I’ll get a better grade in this course this semester.

Modern Physics – I’m going to love this class. We walked in yesterday, and the first thing we were told was that everything we’ve been taught in the last three semesters (or 3 1/2 years for me of physics) is a lie. Our first ‘extra credit’ assignment is to explain why it’s all been a lie! haha… that’s just great. He’s also going to be giving us blueprints for a time machine so we can travel to the future. What an interesting class…

Math Physics – What can I say? It’s my two favorite subjects, math and physics, combined into one course. Not to mention the course is taught by my adviser and quite possibly one of my favorite professors I’ve had so far.

Modern Physics Lab – This is going to be a very interesting/intense lab. Thankfully I only have one lab this semester versus the three I had last semester. But the labs seem very interesting and the subject matter is intriguing in itself. Also, at the end of the semester we each have to give a 20 minute talk on a topic of our choice. I’m actually excited for this, to get to explore in depth a topic of my interest in physics.

Algorithms and Data Structures 1 – Okay I lied when I said all my classes were interesting. This one will hopefully pick up, but the first class was extremely slow and boring. This is my two hour night class, two days a week. It’s the first course in the computer science minor sequence so I had to take it. I’ve already had 1 1/2 years of programming so I know a lot of what we’ll be learning. So let’s just say this will be an easy/relaxing class compared to my others.

History of Christianity -  My intro to Theology course, I’m taking it with a friend which is nice. We had our first class today, it’s going to be reading intensive, but only 1 paper and two tests. The subject material seems very interesting though and the professor is extremely into what he is teaching, which I really like. One thing in particular that I’m excited about for this class is that we are all providing him with what he calls ‘no limits questions’. We can ask him any question pertaining to religion, turn it in on Thursday and throughout the semester at the beginning of each class he is going to answer all of our questions.

~ JenJen ~

365 days gone…

About two hours ago I was not in the right state of mind, I got mad at my mom, yelled at my phone, shut someone out, yelled at my dog, and started crying. Thank goodness for the weirdest movie I’ve seen in a long time ( I highly recommend seeing The Fifth Element if you are looking for something different to watch ) which distracted me enough to calm down a little bit. Instead of the typical New Years Eve post, this is a long rant, getting a lot of stuff off my mind and trying to figure out exactly what set me off tonight.

First off – this whole being sick thing, sucks more than I can express. I hate being told I might not be able to return to school, that if I am allowed to return to school I won’t be able to do band or go to basketball games, I’ll only be able to classes and that’s it. DON’T TELL ME I CAN’T DO SOMETHING. I can do whatever I set my mind to, and I will do it. Sickness isn’t going to halt me from what I want to do. Being told I can’t do something angers and frustrates me more than anything, and I think this might be the root of all my issues right now. I think what started me in a bad mood today was driving in the car with my mom to the chiropractor and her reminding me that ‘while I need to prepare myself to return to school because that will keep me less stressed and that’s what is going to help me get healthy, I also have to be prepared for the doctors to tell me that my liver isn’t healthy enough for me to return to school, etc. etc. etc.” Well, you know what? I can’t afford to miss a week or more of school – don’t tell me that I know better than to say that, and yes I do know better – BUT, in order for me to get healthy, I need to be mentally satisfied, and sitting in my bed watching tv and reading books isn’t doing that for me. Sure the break from school is nice, but I need to return to learning and doing work and being with my friends. THAT is what is going to help me.

Anyways, enough about me being frustrated with being sick.

Secondly, I’m sick and tired of my father trying to talk to me. Why can’t he understand that when I said I needed time and that I would talk to him when I was ready, that meant that I don’t want to talk to him?! I wish he would just get a clue, that sure I appreciate the holiday wishes, but seriously, I can’t deal with it. He sent me a text wishing me a happy new years, and I exploded – yelled at my phone and mouthed off to my mom when she checked on me shortly later. And to think I had begun to think about fixing things with him…. then things went down the drain.

Thirdly – it’s New Years Eve, okay fine, It will be New Years Day, 2008 in less than an hour. And I’m here, sitting in my bed, with the news on, and my dog asleep next to me. I’m not even sure if I will still be awake when midnight hits. Thank you mono. Another year is gone, another shitty new years. I should be surrounded with my friends and family – the ones I love. Instead, I’m alone, okay, my dog is here, but he’s asleep. Last year’s new years eve sucked, but this one, just tops them all.

I could go on with things bothering me right now, but I’m not really in the mood. I got most of my anger out in that first paragraph about being sick as I’m sure you noticed. I’m guessing these past few hours, being angry and all worked up, is not helping me get better at all. But oh well I guess. Hopefully I’ll get a good nights sleep and be in a better mood in the morning.

To finish this post, my 2008 resolutions:
1. GET HEALTHY AND REMAIN HEALTHY
2. Continue to go to mass every Sunday
3. Stop ‘looking’
4. Move on
5. Read all of the books on my ‘to read’ list
6. Work on being less stressed
7. Work on that thing called confidence
8. Try to be happy
9. Stop pretending
10. Achieve all of my goals and dreams which remain unspoken

Yes, I know… almost all of those resolutions seem impractical for me, but hey, a person has to have some direction, right?!

Okay, I need sleep. who knows, I may just keep my eyes open long enough to see the clock hit 12:00

~ JenJen ~

ps – I’m sorry.

Back Down on Earth

So. After about a two hour freak out/Calm myself down session, I’m relaxed. I’ve been really sick for about 3/4 weeks now and I just found out that I have acute mono – i.e. a really bad case of mono. Just great. At least it explains why I’ve been feeling so shitty for so long and constantly exhausted. I have to go back in on the 8th to get another blood test and they’ll let me know then if I can return to school, classes start on the 14th. My chiropractor is going to try and do what she can to help me get rid of this and get better faster so that I will be healthy enough to return to school. So all I can do now is get a lot of sleep, relax and not stress out. hah… that’s just funny for me to say. I think stressing out is my specialty. :-/ Oh and to add to the mono, my liver is apparently not in good shape from being sick this long… so I can’t take any medicine with alcohol in it… which pretty much rules out practically all medicine if my memory of medicine serves me correctly. Joy! At least I don’t really like taking medicine anyways!

The next two weeks seem to have a lot of sleeping, reading, tv and movie watching in store for me. Hopefully I’ll be able to see some people sometime soon or I may just go crazy. The post I wrote like two weeks ago about being lonely? Yeah, well I’m back to that point again. It pretty much sucks. I apologize in advance for any excessive annoyance I may cause anyone.

Maybe another post will come soon…

~ JenJen ~

edit: It’s about 11:30, i’m bored and slightly tired… so, I was looking mono up online and now I’m confused as to why my liver is ‘not in good shape’. Everything I just read said that hepatitis causes liver failure and all the websites say to take Tylenol and other medicines similar to it to relieve any headaches/pain. I’ll have to ask my mom what the doctor said again in the morning, but it seems weird. I did read on the Tylenol bottle though that the active ingredient in Tylenol is known to cause liver failure, so maybe that’s what is causing it? And Tylenol doesn’t have alcohol in it… what?! I’m confused. :-\

Necessary, to Gain Control Over My Mind

I hate my body and my mind right now. Not in the normal ways that one would hate their body/mind though. My body has attacked me with sickness and is making me feel like complete crap. I haven’t eaten anything of substance since Monday, I have no energy, I’m exhausted, my throat hurts, my head likes to start pounding randomly, i get nauseous constantly, and my back and neck won’t stop hurting. Onto my mind – as soon as I wake up from any amount of sleep, I start thinking about all the studying I need to do, the laundry that needs to get done -  but I have no energy to do it, the formal is tonight -  but I’m worried I’m going to feel miserable throughout the whole thing and be stuck there, etc. Once my mind starts and never stops, and thus I’m writing this in hopes to de-stress a little so that I can have a relaxing day of studying, resting and getting ready for the formal, while still leaving plenty of energy to get me through the night.

Right now, I just want to be back at my house, in my room, curled up in my big bed and sleep the entire day. :-\

~ JenJen ~

Plagued with Lonliness

In general I dislike feeling lonely and for the most I don’t usually get this feeling. However, whenever I am sick, the feeling never fails to emerge. I’ve been ‘sick’ for the past two weeks or so, but nothing major that prevented me from doing the things I normally do. Tuesday I went to the health center and I apparently have a sinus infection and a viral infection and was given antibiotics and robitussin.  Within less than 12 hours of taking the medicines I was worse off than before. It seems my body decided to shut down and let the medicine do their job. But in the process, this left me feeling nauseous, my head pounding, the room spinning every time I got up and bright light and loud noises giving me headaches. Needless to say I’ve been in bed since 11am Wednesday morning. :-/ I’m feeling a little better today, but the room spinning still happens whenever I get up. My plan is to just sit in bed all day studying for my finals, taking any breaks I need to. But back to the reason for this post, yesterday I got so lonely. Sitting in my room with the tv on gets old and boring after a while. I couldn’t really read or study, my head hurt too much and my eyes weren’t focusing well. This left IMing people as my only way to not be bored. Usually I can deal with just that communication but when I am really sick I just want company. As the saying goes, misery loves company. Last night I tried to go to bed around 9:30 and after an hour of tossing and turning and extreme pain throughout my entire body I just wanted company. Needed to talk to someone, do something to distract me from the miserable feeling. I came online and talked to some people and that was nice, but just wasn’t the same as having someone to talk to in person. I dislike feeling dependent on anyone, but I guess I just have to accept the fact that sometimes you are dependent and you are allowed to feel dependent on people, especially when sick.

Well that was a good distraction from the little bit of studying that I accomplished earlier. It’s now 1pm, I need to study more and start my ridiculous electronics final. (Not very happy with my professor at the moment)  I should also shower, since I don’t have to walk up to the third floor to do so anymore! Hopefully the room won’t be spinning when I shower… gah

~ JenJen ~

The Exception to the Rule

Please forgive me for any errors or words that don’t make sense. It’s about 7pm, I’ve been awake since 3:30 because of my sinus infection and viral infection. The medicine they put me on apparently wears off after 4 hours and my body at that point decided it didn’t want to sleep anymore. Today is not going well. haha After getting less than 4 hours of sleep, I went and took my thermodynamics test, and I’m almost positive I failed it. Just great. I’m certain that taking the optional final (covering 12 chapters!) is now in my best interest. So instead of 2 sit-down finals, I now will have three, as well as a take home final which I’ve yet to receive. Anyways, this post is a distraction from my stress, not about my stress… I digress.

So last night, while at dinner, the topic of conversation turned towards how guys should treat girls. The quote from the night that made me think about this post was – “they always say that guys should follow the girls’ father’s example. treat them the way their dad treats them” My initial response was yeah, I like that guideline, so to speak. But not even a minute later it hit me and I immediately said, yes, but there are exceptions to the rule. Everyone started laughing and just agreed that yes, there are exceptions to every rule. `The conversation continued on as normal… But throughout my night of sitting around feeling like crap, the thoughts kept floating around. While in the shower I realized that I seem to be the exception to the rule a lot of the time in my life. Unfortunately I thought of this post last night before I was this sick and I seem to have forgotten all of the specific examples that came to my mind, but the general idea is that I feel like in many ways, I’m the exception to the rule. One broad statement for this could be the way I’ve handled everything in my life – the typical person wouldn’t be as strong and wouldn’t have reacted the way I have done in many of my situations.

I’ve been trying to decide if being the exception is a good or a bad thing… or neither? In the case of last night’s topic of conversation, being the exception to the rule isn’t a good thing. I wouldn’t want any guy to treat me or any other girl the way my father treated me. However, I do agree that girls should be treated the way their father treats them, if their father treats them right in the first place…. so how do you determine if the father is treating them right? I don’t know the answer to that. But for those guys out there reading this, my suggestion to determine if the father is doing right, is to think to yourself – would you want that man replacing you as the father of your child? If you would allow him to take care of your daughter if you were gone, then he is doing right to his daughter and you should follow in his footsteps. I could ramble on more about this father topic, but I’m not in the mood to deal with that part of my life right now. I also thing being the exception to the rule can be a good thing, I don’t have a concrete reason why, but I feel like there has got to be a good reason for being the exception to the rule. Everything I come up with is a bad reason, from something bad occurring during every finals week of my college experience so far to a year plagued with the deaths of loved ones to being sick almost consistently with no definitive disease! Any thoughts as to whether the exception to the rule is good or bad are more than welcome!

So this post has become more of a pain to write than I thought it would. My brain is hurting. But some good news from the day is that we now have hot water coming from our shower and I was able to move my diff eq test to tuesday. Hopefully I’ll sleep well tonight and wake up feeling better and able to study tomorrow. With that… I’m off to be a tv junkie for the rest of the night and eventually fall asleep.

~ JenJen ~

Hate me, I’m the one you need

I’ve been posting a lot lately… I guess a lot has been on my mind. Some stuff I still haven’t been able to write down here or even express to anyone. I guess it would be helpful if I could figure out for myself what I’m feeling, instead of expecting others to guide me through my thoughts.

<sickness rant coming up>

I am really cautious of complaining about being sick, ever since my one friend put things into perspective for me, but right now, I am seriously sick of this. I haven’t been feeling great since I returned home. I had an asthma attack last Sunday, allergy induced, and it was one of the scariest things ever. I couldn’t breathe. Anyways, lately my allergies have been worse than I’ve ever had them before, I’ve been really tired, and have had the worst headaches ever. Today I slept off a headache during a 2 hour nap from 3:30 to 5:30… which is now causing me to be awake probably until 2ish… which is bad considering I have to be awake at 7:30 to drive my mom to work so that I can have the car to run errands/search for a job. The headache is back though, so maybe I’ll go to bed soon in hopes of sleeping that one off as well. ugh.

<end sickness rant>

In other news… my friends here at home think that I think I am too cool to hang out with them now… they just don’t get it. I want to just to explain it to them, but I don’t know how to explain everything. Only one friend truly understands me, her and I are like emotionally the same, understanding things the other goes through. I’m glad that even though she is staying at school this summer, she is only 20min. away and I’ll be hanging out with her a lot!I was looking at some pictures my friends from school posted online from senior week, I realized just how much I miss them. These three months are going to be really long and I wish they would go by faster. Hopefully I’ll get a job soon and that will help pass time. I’m also excited for my summer sisterhood with the girls. We decided that in order for us to keep in touch with each other, we’d write a letter each week to another girl and send a picture or movie stub or anything along with it, and then during band camp we’ll put everything together into a scrap book so all of us can read the letters. So, since there are 5 of us, each week I’ll receive a letter from a different girl, 3 from each girl throughout the summer. I think I’ll actually go write my first letter after I finish this post!

The only other thing of which I wish to discuss tonight, would be that of music. Since being home I’ve taken a small step away from listening to music, but am slowly getting back into my habits of listening nonstop. There is something about songs, the ones that I really like, and listen to over and over; they make me feel something that nothing else can. Sometimes they remind me of a person in my life, of a thought that I had, a dream of mine, a secret I keep inside my heart, or of a situation I had been in. Listening to them remind me that there is a life I have to live; I can’t dwell on the past or on the future, only on today. Sometimes the songs remind me of a sad part of my life, but regardless, I leave my listening of music a happy person, excited to live and excited to see what life has for me. For an example, I’m a band geek, guilty as charged… and currently I’m listening to cadences  (thanks TB) they bring me back to school, to all my band friends, to all of the fun I’ve had this first year in college, being crazy with my friends. But specifically, these cadences bring me back to those long Friday nights and Saturday afternoons, playing at the football games (so what if our football team sucks?)… us girls all had our seats on the benches… same spots for every game… us crazy band kids having our weird traditions to go along with the drumline’s songs/cadences… ridiculous half time shows… crazy drum majors… I hate football, but I love wasting away the days with my friends and with band. These people, this organization, is what has made my first year of college so amazing. Without them, I don’t know where I’d be after my first year of college. Wow, haha, I did not mean to go into this much of an explanation, guess it just shows how much music is a part of my life and how much songs/cadences really mean something to me.

Alright, off to write my first sisterhood letter of the summer!

~ JenJen ~