What About Finals Week?

The semester is coming to a close. I'm in the middle of the week before finals. It's now Wednesday morning, 3:25 AM. I've gotten a good amount of work done today, but there is just plenty of other work that I have given up on because I have pretty much lost all hope. Like, how the fuck do I make a video essay?

At this point, I just CAN'T WAIT for finals week to get here. I only have 2 finals, and only one of them is test form. The other one is a take-home essay that is given and handed in the day before finals even start. Now, this week is another story.

I have been up until at least 4 in the morning each night so far since sunday, I have crew practice in 3 hours, which means I will be getting up in 2 1/2 hours, and I actually am at the point where I can't actually feel the fact that I'm exhausted anymore because my body is now just used to trying to ignore it. My body is probably yelling FUCK YOU FUCK YOU LET ME SLEEP, but I have these earplugs in. They're a brand new model. they're called the "last week of classes addition."

I thought it was finals week where everyone wanted to tear down that fence at Cornell so they can jump off a bridge. Guess not. Not for me at least. Between tomorrow (Well today, technically) and Friday, I believe it is 4 essays due. And I don't mean 4 essays that are well in progress either..

Cheers to the day.

Less getting, more giving

I'm terrified to say it, but I think that the time have finally come. My family called me yesterday to ask me the same old question: What do you want for Christmas?
I pondered and pondered and finally slugged out: "Uhh some new clothes I guess?"

The fact is, this was a lie. I don't want any new clothes. I really don't want anything. I have a month off for winter break. What else could I possibly want? All I want is to see my friends and party, and I'll be doing that for an entire month. I also want to be able to row, which I will, but I don't know how much I would consider my workouts a gift.

Anyways, I think the time has finally come in which all I'm really thinking about as far as gifts go are the gifts that I'm getting my family. I've been making the transition into this stage for years no, but it has come slowly. In high school, I began to only want clothes and music for Christmas. A couple years after that, I started to not care as much about gifts and begin to think about what I would get my friends (Because they're way more important than my parents right?).

Now, the time is finally here where I think about the town awesome college town I live in now and think about all the cool shit that I could get my parents for Christmas, and it actually excites me. Crazy to think about.

Guess after 19 I would hope that it doesn't seem that crazy.

Isn't it only a basketball game?

Many college basketball junkies out there may have witnessed the Cincinnati-Xavier basketball game this past week. If you did, you witnessed an absolute blowout by Xavier on their home court. In this case, you also saw a massive bench-clearing brawl after one of the cincinnati players decided to punch on of the Xavier players after he felt he was shoved.

This is where I wish I could just look inside one's head to see the actual though process behind what they're doing. The only way I can imagine it going through his head is by first recognizing everything that is going on around him.
"I've played like a pussy, we're down by 27 points, and we're on the road"
Next..
"He did just shove me"
Next..
*Replays first step*
Finally..
"I'm gonna hit him"

It just baffles me as to what he thought he was going to get out of this. Do you think you're going to be able to quiet down the crowd by punching the player on the opposing team that has outplayed you all night? Do you think that's going to make the crowd think twice about disrespecting you? Or, do you think it's actually just going to give them rightful reason to make an asshole out of you as you're escorted off the court by security and into the locker room. I think the third one sounds about right.

But the real problem is this. We are at a point today where every kid that finds out they have some skills throws everything out the window besides playing AAU. The thought of too many kids today is, I don't need school, I got my AAU team and my coach is gonna get me to Kentucky or Syracuse. I wont have to go to class, I just have to go for a year, maybe two, then go get paid $10 million to go shoot a basketball.

This process just makes bad people. It's simple. They make one dimensional, stupid, bad people.
It turns good kids into idiots who don't have enough common sense to realize that they should finish the game and go back to the locker room when they are down 27 points to their rival on the road, instead of looking for the closest opportunity to prove that, while you can't make free throws, you can throw a punch.

Mono during winter break....Let's get get hammered, right?

So last Monday I went to the doctors because I was feeling pretty and low and behold, I test positive for mono.
Fucking wonderful.
What this means id that all the time for the next month or so, maybe more, I will always have a runny nose, sore throat, aching joints and an outrageous headache. And what will have an even bigger presence than all of these things put together will be my fatigue. Since Monday, I'm pretty sure that I've slept for an average of 15 hours a night. Most of the time, that's enjoyable, but 15 hours of sleep isn't enjoyable when you wake up after it and you feel like you just had a 3-hour night of sleep. It's a real let down.

Apparently this is what it will be for the next month. It also means that my rowing career will probably go to shit for about a month as well.

However, what I think sucks the most is something that is sad to realize it matters to me most...

"No drinking for at least the rest of the winter" the doctor says!?!?!?!?
Correct me if my thinking was wrong, but I was counting on drinking to be the only bright spot of my time of sickliness. Might this be the sign that I have a problem? It could be, but if whether or not I'm judged for it, I think I should get a little sympathy; I have needs.

Apparently I wasn't too up to date on my mono knowledge. Apparently it inflames my liver, so something like drinking, which pounds the liver even more, pretty much makes it exponentially dangerous.

BUT, here's my theory. I feel like if I take the rout of reverse psychology, and just get blackout drunk every night (Not just really drunk, like actually blackout), the gratuitous  amount of alcohol in my bloodstream will actually destroy the bacteria, curing me.
I just have to sacrifice my liver. And those are a dime a dozen anyway.

This was all a joke by the way, I would never do this. I plan on taking care of myself and getting better.

But if someone out there is willing to sacrifice their liver in the name of science, I feel like this idea is worth a shot.

Celebrating Roommate Month

It's 3am, and I feel like now is the time that I learn the true meaning of friendship. I'm sitting on the toilet at 3 in the morning in the stall next to the stall that my roommate is puking in. It's also Thursday (Well, now technically Friday), so my roommate, who will remain nameless at the risk of people finding out just how much fun he has on Thirsty Thursday, has had an interesting night. 

I've gotten a few weird looks, sitting here on the toilet as I wait for the proper time to decide that *blank* has had adequate time to empty his bowels and drink him back into the dorm room. It's always funny to see that I never need to give an explanation. I simply get the look of sympathy from them at my situation, and a look of admiration as they look on the stall of my puking friend. In all seriousness, they are really impressed. I'm pretty sick at the moment, so I didn't go out tonight, but I myself will admit that most times, I'm pretty apt to go out on Thursdays and have a drink, but I can't really say that I've ever actually gotten to this point...on a Thursday that is. I guess I've just never been as thirsty as everyone else. 

Nope. Instead, sickly little me has been in the dorm room all night watching Skins reruns and eating microwavable chicken nuggets. One may think this whole situation aggravates me. It does a little tiny bit, but that's only because I'm sick, and I have a class that starts in a little less than 5 hours. Outside of that, I really don't mind it at all. What would I have to talk about when I go home for break if I didn't have to do my homework sitting on a toilet in a bathroom stall every once and a while. After all, that's friends are for.

This man is lucky I love him.

First semester almost over already? Color me excited.

It's 5 minutes until Thursday, and my week is over once the weekend starts, so we'll call this week just about over. That being said, I have just one more week of classes then one week of finals until I go home for a month for winter break. What a crazy thing to think about. I feel like I just got here. 

A lot of things have happened over the course of the first semester. I had made and lost friends. I've worked my way up the ladder in a sport I've never done before. I've realized that the cold in Ithaca has been, to this point, completely overblown and overrated. My grades have gone up and down. I like to think that the grade in the class that I write this blog for is staying decent (And it depends on your definition of "decent"), but it might not be on account of how behind I am on the blogs. I've had one consistent independent throughout my entire first semester and that has been my weekends. The weekends are their own entity and I never know what to expect from them but, at the same time, I know everything to expect from them. That might be a curse and a blessing.

I think the most bizarre thing has been making trips home for vacations and discovering that my bed at home is not as comfortable as the one at school. Telling my Mom this was the wrong move, for all sorts of reasons. The most comforting thing going home for these breaks has definitely been the fact that my douchebag friends from home have not become bigger douchebags since we all left for school because they think they're the shit because they've been at college for a few months partying. We've all been doing that...

But luckily, they're the same douchebags, who I love. I just hope they stay the same for Christmas.

Maybe Google+ is good for something after all

I've been really skeptical of Google+ throughout the entire semester. I still am. I think facebook is just so much better. If you had invented facebook, you'd have invented facebook. If you didn't invent facebook. Then you probably just invented google+.
Ha. Ha.

Turns out, it's good for something after all. I don't want to take any credit away from my professor, because her comments are no doubt, at the end of the day, what turn my papers into presentable pieces of work. But I would definitely say that before that, what really helps me get past the initial wanting to just drown instead of going back of one of my shitty first drafts, is the feedback I get from my peers online. They tell me the simple things I want to hear. The things I want to hear are something like, "I might change this around a little bit," but they're usually mixed in with a little bit of, "Dude me too!" or "I totally get that" and shit like that. I don't know, it's nice to hear.

Once I get past these little things, along with everybody's comments constantly reminding me that I should probably use cited sources in a research essay, then I can move on to my Professor's comments. And at that point, they just seem a little more manageable, which is nice. I should probably get to doing that now...