I've already mentioned here how I was sort of terrified going into my current calculus class. Never having ventured very far beyond algebra 2 in my high school's subpar math curriculum, and also having had to cheat just to get into this class, I was fairly concerned about my prospects for passing, and I believe rightfully so.
As of late though, it's seeming more and more that my concerns were for naught, as on the latest quiz (not a test, seemingly) I achieved the highest score out of the class of 30. I got an 89, and the class average was something like 45. That's quite abysmal.. the only conclusion I can really come to here is that either everyone else in this class cheated in far more egregious a manner than I to get in, or that the teacher is terrible at her job and isn't really teaching anything successfully. The reason that particular reason wouldn't have really affected me is because I actually learn the material myself after class - there are usually sizable stretches of time available to me after this calc class, which is in the morning.
What a sight..
I was really pretty shocked to see this. It had me feeling super narcissistic for a few minutes until I managed to rein in my raging sense of extreme pride. "It's just a calculus 1 class man, like goddamn relax" is what I told myself. Despite that I rode the high the entire day, reveling in something I've never gotten to experience so concretely before (none of the other grading platforms I've used in the past have had this feature that lets you see your grade superimposed on averages and whatnot. Crowdmark is out here doing god's work, instilling massive insecurity in people with poor grades. Anything for the sake of the top 1% though am I right..).
Whatever the underlying cause of the simply incredible academic performance on display here, the teacher has had to majorly slow down the pace to try and fix whatever teaching-fuckup she may or may not have committed. That's great news for me because it just means that my life is basically infinitely more stress-free than it was in my first week.. things have gone from sky-high cortisol to nearly as low as they were when I was in my senior year of high school taking what was basically a freebie credit - financial literacy.
I'm getting okay grades in the other class I was worried about - english composition. Ironically, the single class that I gave the least thought to has turned out to be the one where I'm actually being left in the dust somewhat. That class is chemistry, which I hate with... something resembling a passion. I have three different types of chemistry periods throughout the week - a lab, the normal class, and a recitation. The class itself isn't so bad other than the fact that you have to use paper and I've somehow still neglected to get a calculator for it. The recitation sort of sucks because they go quickly on like ten practice problems and that's the entire thing - I work horrifically slowly under pressure and with things like conversion factors my mind simply can't string things together fast enough to feel comfortable. There's also the fact that they try and make you learn new material through a series of short videos on aleks, rather than actually teaching it in person at a reasonable pace. I've learned legitimately nothing from having to sit through those videos - the words come in one ear and out the next.
Finally there's that lab, which I know I won't be able to adequately express my hate for. It's a casual three hour stretch - not exhausting at all, and when you combine that casual brevity with the most confusing instructional setup ever, you get something that is just so irritating and tiring to the point of inducing hopeless forfeiture of a good grade, despondency, and surrender in general. The lab instructions aren't in some canvas module, instead they're on a separate platform that you have to find in the syllabus. Once you're there, you have to open the data entry part of the lab in another tab and constantly switch back and forth as you frantically attempt to comprehend what the hell it is you're supposed to be doing and fail to find all the obscure glassware required for you to successfully distill the mythical essence of pure pain.. no teachers will come to your aid, because there are none. Only two "assistants", who are just grad students doing it as a gig pretty much. So while your progress is held up by the search for a "12mL tapered bicubic uranium pipet", the only guidance you can hope to find is some vague description of the location given to you by a nearly equally lost peer.
If you successfully get past the data collection phase, you can leave and the lab report is your homework. Unfortunately, filling them out is one of the most tedious processes known to man. "Significant figure hell" describes it quite well, I think. And they're always asking you to "list three objectives", and "describe five processes you learned about", like let's keep it a buck we just measured a fifth of a liter of water, boiled it, and then deduced that the temperature plateaus at 100C. Truly marvelous, I usually have no idea what to put in those fields.
There's also the matter of PPE. There are never enough medium size gloves, I'm dwarfed by my labcoat, and the mandatory-at-all-times goggles painfully crush the bridge of my nose.
When life gives you halyomorpha halys #
I was suffering through mowing my backyard on labor day, and as I pressed in against the encroaching wilderness at its far edge to mow the ever-evolving border (nearly flaying myself on thorns and branches in the process, as always) I not only got a spiderweb in my face but also was assaulted by the cilantro-esque stinkbug smell. "Ew", I thought, and bravely pushed on to finish the meaningless chore that is mowing one's lawn.
As I decapitated a few more 25 meter long rows of grass, I noticed that the smell was persisting somewhat. I didn't think anything of it though since I assumed it could've been on the lawnmower or bleeding out in the grass. A few more rows and the smell was gone... but it had been replaced by another sensation. It felt like there was something under my shirt on my chest, but I was unperturbed. "Probably just a fragment of one of those branches I was being ripped apart by earlier", I foolishly presumed. I peeked under my shirt and was met with a terrible sight - a single specimen of halyomorpha halys perched between my pectorals. Bugs don't really take away my appetite or gross me out, but stinkbugs are a special exception to that rule. I guess in that way their despicable little defense mechanism is sort of effective, although it may also just cause me to go to greater lengths to exterminate it. I flicked that motherfucker off of me promptly, especially disgusted this time by how I was rubbing my chest earlier trying to get what I though was a bit of wood out of my shirt. Yuck.
I'm by no stretch an entomologist/insect nerd, but I ended up reading the stinkbug wikipedia page after that. It turns out that stinkbugs are invasive, which makes my hate for them burn ever stronger. They've been proliferating across the eastern/midwestern united states for the past 27 years, and in the last decade they seem to have notably grown in their reach. They've been a fairly constant feature of my life so far, and the idea that the population may actually just be getting started sort of scares me.. if I were ever to become an eco-activist, this would be the cause to spur me to action.