My Crazy Thoughts: 10/01/2004

This is like the only time I will ever blog about pro football.

The Packers Won!!!

< /bush >

Had a dosage forms exam today. The thing about Dosage Forms is that he lectures for 2 weeks, and then a couple days before the exam he reviews last years test. While the topics are similar, the exams and lectures really don't have much to do with each other. So of course there is a last minute preparation. Because we don't really know what the exam is about until he goes over it. The concepts on the exam are a lot more complex than anything he covers in class. When test time finally rolled around today I didn't think I was going to ace it or anything, but I thought I had a decent handle on the information.
My response to the first question was, "Huh?" I got the next few. And as I continued to turn the page my one constant thought was, "Who made him mad?" Seriously I didn't study this. We didn't talk about this in the lectures. It wasn't on the old exams. Any of them.

Other than that things are finally slowing down. Time to take a break. Of course, the next exam I have to study for is a doozy of a biochem exam. All those metabolic pathways, 4 weeks of lectures. TCA, Electron transport, gluconeogenesis. glucagon and epinephrine inhibition of glycolysis, reaction thermodynamics, pyruvate dehydrogenase, all those complexes, all the different glucose metabolisms, the rest of glycolysis, more CYP450, glycogen, glucogon, and many moooore.

But as I was saying. Finally a little break. No exams next week. 2 presentations though, but for 1 I just have to make the powerpoint and then I'm done. And the next week I have that biochem exam, and then nothing else for the rest of the week, well, lectures, but that's it, and a brown bag, but then that's really it.

Tomorrow we are doing an osteoporosis screening. We won't being doing bone density, just risk factors, so hopefully some people will let us do it so we can get credit. I actually really enjoyed the first one (hypertension).

Last week I shadowed a 4th year. It was really interesting. I really enjoyed it, it really got me thinking about what rotations I want to do and whether I want to do a residency. I think I do want to do a residency, it would be really good experience, kinda being a real pharmacist but still aloud to ask questions and learn a lot because I'm actually working in the field. On the other hand, all the programs I have found ( which hasn't been many, who has time to research stuff that's not required?) require you to do clinical research type work or big conference presentations and stuff. I'm not really into that. So it's a toss up really. I think it really depends on what I want to do when I'm done. If I'm going to do retail then I probably won't do one. If I do hospital (which I'm now interested in because of my shadowing) then I will really start to look into it. It's so hard to get information here, I never know who to ask and when I do it's like they are too busy to give me anything other than, go here look at this. But it isn't all the information that I want.

I'm having a lot of problems pronouncing drug names. A LOT. Nadolol, metoprolol, propranolol. I can say propranolol except when I have to say it after the other two, which I can't say. I don't know why, it's a syllable boundary thing. Or a problem with which one gets an accent. I don't know. either way I can't say them, or really any other drug name. I'm going to make a great pharmacist.

Nikky is lying to me. I don't know why. But I know that she is. She isn't very good at lying, and it doesn't take a private investigator to know. You don't even have to be paying attention. I don't know why she would lie to me. She moved out of the house like a year ago, it's not like ever had any control over her anyway. My job this weekend was to watch the house and make sure she was okay on her trip back to school. To make sure she wasn't being scraped off the road with people trying to track down family and finding none. But she is not at school. I don't know where she is. Or why she thinks I care other than knowing she is safe.
She called me last night at like 10, to ask if it was okay for her to stay where she was and watch a movie or did I not want her to come home late. I told her I didn't care, but if she didn't want to stay then she could tell them I didn't want her to. She was home in an hour. So why would she lie now? I've been tired of her for a while now. It's worse today.

"Someone should tell her she shouldn't wear white after labor day." Do you think anyone follows this anymore? I mean, I can understand for formal occasions, but for everyday stuff, do you think people actually think this? Because if they do, people probably talked about me today. Lori said this to me about a girl at the movies last week. She was wearing white pants. I don't think white pants are a good idea ever. I mean, no matter where you sit, when you're wearing white pants, it's going to be dirty. But I really hope other people don't sit around thinking this about other people. Because they probably think this about me all the time. As if I'm some social misfit, who doesn't have the class to know that you shoudn't wear white after labor day. I just assumed it was an antiquated social rule, that no one followed anymore. Now I have to walk around making sure to make note of who is wearing white and whether they seem proper enough to know if the rule still applies. I mean, it really doesn't matter to me, but I would hate to seem fashionably without.
Tomorrow, I'm going to rent Fairenheit 911. If they have it here. This being Citrus County, I imagine the Old farty republican's already tried to ban it or whatever. Or maybe they will be all out of copies.
I printed so many powerpoint slides that I felt guilty and ordered more ink for my mom's printer. Probably 100 pages. I'm so behind in biochem, I really need to catch up. That's what I'm doing tomorrow, that and catching up on PBD and Dosage forms. Yeah, I'll be busy.

So I went home this weekend. I think I really needed it. Really, really. I guess I'm going to have to work on getting out of this place more often a little harder. This city makes me crazy. I can't imagine why everyone would be okay with the dirt, and the traffic. And I don't know how other people manage the class load without the breaks. I'm baking brownies for the multicultural dinner tomorrow. If they had given me advance notice that I would need to make something I could have made something a little better. But I got the message yesterday after I got back. And I don't have the stuff or the utensils to make most things, and I'm not buying it either. Went and hung up the flyers for our screening today. We are doing it wed. The person I'm supposed to shadow says friday isn't a good day, and wants to do it Thurs, but we have an exam and I hate to do it then, but I guess as long as it is in the morning it will be okay. As if we weren't busy enough with all the stuff on our calenders we have to schedule stuff ourselves, I actually have to pencil things in. Who'd a thought? A couple weeks ago Nikky asked if I wanted to get my ears pierced with her, and I told her I couldn't do it until the second week in November, and she was like, "what?" Anyway, she got hers done this weekend, I didn't. I need to be able to sleep this week whenever it is time to sleep. But I think I will get it done--second week in november. I sometimes think I'm living my life for the second week in November.

Schedule this week:
Tuesday:
Stuff from 4-9
Wednesday:
Hypertension screenings 11-1; ICS presentation 5:15-7
Thursday
Probably Shadowing for an hour or so in the morning; PBD exam

On a nice-ish note. My grade on the second PBD exam was enough to bring me up to passing, now if I can just hold onto that. Maybe do a little better next time, that would be nice. Still doing pretty well in Biochem. Which I think is very interesting because most people are more worried about their biochem grades. Not that I'm not worried about it, just not as worried.

So...we are now officially wireless. High speed non the less. Very exciting, for me anyway. It only took a router, a usb/ethernet adapter, a call to roadrunner, two calls to linksys tech support, and several hours of messing with it to get it to work. So now when I come home maybe I won't get as behind--or rather stay as behind. I will be able to catch up a little while I'm here. But I haven't done that yet.

Went to dinner and a movie with Lori tonight. Olive Garden was good! Lori seems to be doing good. I think she is sad that she's going to be alone for a while. And I don't mean alone as in no one will be around, just that she won't be "with" someone. But she seems to feel really good about the decision. Like she is sure that it was time to move on. And I think that regardless of what else happened, the second his body made contact with hers and left a mark, that was it. That was too much. She now has a restaining order. Good for her. Hopefully things will calm down soon and she will be able to move on with her life. But I'm really glad she didn't stay in a relationship with someone knowing that she wasn't happy in it. Relationships can't always be candy and flowers and there are going to be some arguements and tense times. But those should be few and far between if you are with the right person. If it is the right person then each person is willing to bend for the other enough so that there aren't that many disagreements. And it never works if only one person is bending.

We say "Shall we Dance," it was very good. Very funny, and in a way that I didn't really expect it to be. I would definitely recommend it. There were several times when the audience was laughing so hard we could hardly contain ourselves. The person behind us snorted at least twice.

School is crazy. I can't imagine how I'm going to survive the next four years. I am taking it one day at a time, if I think about much more than that I will go crazy. Especially if the keep springing things on us at the last minute.

Tomorrow I have to go back to school. Bleh!

I'm not even going to try this time I'm just going to start complaining. Because I seem to have a lot of complaints. I bullet them so you can keep them straight.

If you are going to announce that we can't use graphing calculators on an exam then announce at some point before 2 hours before the exam, when I'm already on campus. Also, when you see myself, and a number of other first year students, sitting in the office study area working out calculations and clearly preparing for the exam WITH their graphing calculators, please let us know about this. It is not nice to send an e-mail and then immediately run out of the office and lock it before we recieve it. Also, you did NOT tell us ever that we couldn't use them, you said we couldn't have any programs, and during the first exam when you checked our calculators for programs you didn't act like it was a problem. Also the professor of the course said that we could have scientific calculators but we couldn't have programs, I realize that scientific and graphing are different NOW, but the important part of the statement was that they couldn't have programs, my calculator didn't have programs, and I would have been more than willing to show you this. At least don't tell me AFTER it is too late to do anything about it.
Don't move a presentation up when you specifically tell the people at the main campus that it is not moved up. Especially don't do it during a week when we have 3 exams, and presentation and a quiz already scheduled. Don't wait until the day before things are due to then cancel that presentation. Look before you leap or something like that.
Don't act as if everyone is retarded and you are clearly correct. We realize that you are well educated because you are our professor, please realize we are well educated because we are here. Obviously we are capable of reading. Don't act as if everyone must not have watched your lectures because we don't know what is really going on. If someone tells you that all the people they have talked to at a campus are not sure of what is going on, please do not act like we all must not have watched you lectures.
When I send you an e-mail and post a question to the discussion board please e-mail me back, even if it is just to say that question is not on the exam. Especially if the answer is something as simple as M-1sec-1. I am not able to go to your office monday morning to ask the question in person, please take this into account before you ignore my e-mail.
When someone is mugged in the middle of the day on campus because the campus is in the ghetto don't act as if everything possible is being done because you called a security agency to see how much it costs to hire a couple more security officers. Again we are not stupid, we know that if we were on the campus of a university rather than just a hospital in the ghetto the incident would have been all over the newspaper, and there would have been immediate changes made, other than an e-mail being sent telling us to walk to our cars with other students.

And to end all this fun with a little bit lighter, I would just like to say how absolutely grateful I am the the second year student who lent me their calculator before the exam, and in fact offered it without me needing to ask. I can't put into words how much stress this relieved. Also, I understand that the directors of the campus did everything they are capable of to make campus safer, they alerted us immediately about the problem. I am more upset with the administration from the main campus acting as if there is not problem. I like being on a satelite campus because the people who work their seem to actually care about how we are doing. I think a lot of the stress comes from always feeling like we are out of the loop and not getting the information we need. The head bone is not connected to the neck bone. So when you make announcements like the one tonight after the week we have had, we simply can't help the uprising.

I'm going to now try to take a zen like approach to my education. Everything is okay and will come out even when it comes to carma. Or something like that.

I'm having a horribly awful time making myself study.

So today was an interesting day. I got a lot done but not really. I went to the review for biochem, but since I hadn't watched the lectures that he was reviewing I didn't have any questions. Only like 10 people showed up. So there weren't many questions at all. But I think in the long run it will help me, it made me more familiar with the material in any case, and I learn better with interaction. Then I came back to my apartment. I was going to finish watching the end of a lecture I had started last week, but then my mom messaged me and I got distracted so I didn't. Then it was time for me to leave to meet with my practicum preceptor. We set tentative dates for our community screenings, and now all we have to do is find out if the materials will be available. And make a brochure/handout/thingy. So then I finally watched the end of that lecture and then 3 more. And then I was going to watch the G'ville review, but my connection got slow. I have no idea why it would be fine all day and then get slow at 1am. There should be less people on the network right now. One thing I am noticing about this apartment is that the walls are very thin. Thinner than they were in the dorms. I can hear EVERYTHING. The other night when I was studying for the PBD exam my roomate had friends over and I could hear EVERY word they said. And they were talking about stupid stuff, and sexual conquests that simply were not at all likely to have occured. And then the next day when I woke up there were shirts scattered all over the floor, they had decorated them with puff paint, and were letting them dry. You know what they said? SLUT (single ladies united together), or something like that. But the night before there was a guy out there, so I can't imagine how much enjoyment he must have gotten out of the evening. Anyway...Back to the walls being thin. I can even hear things outside. Like the other day there was this ice-cream truck and the music was so loud in my room that I went looking for my cell-phone even though I knew it didn't make that kind of a ring, and then I was looking at my computer to see if it was doing it. And my biggest problem lately with the thin walls. Someone needs a new battery. About every other morning or so someone spends what must be half an hour trying to turn the engine over in their car. I guess eventually they do get it to start, because if not it would be very cruel to torture me every morning at 7am. Don't even get me started on that unGodly hour. I live on the third floor, can you imagine how thin the walls must be so that I wake up to someone downstairs trying to start their car? Yeah not the kind of place I want to be in a storm.
So yeah, the unGodly hour thing. This morning the review was at 9:30. so for traffic I left at 8:30 (well probably 8:45, it was too early to be on time). When I left there were kids waiting for the school bus and I was like, wow, it is way to early for me to be up.
Luckily it is the weekend, and therefore, hopefully the person who needs the new battery will not need to leave so early in the morning. If they do they may have a very tired person opening the window and yelling at them. I mean come on people, when I needed a new battery I got one. I did it just last weekend as a matter of fact.

Also today the biochem homework was due. I HATE excel. I don't think anyone can understand how much, well unless they had to do the assignment. I got so many phone calls today it was crazy, I never get phone calls. And people were sending me messages, and e-mails. And at 5:00 they just stopped. Note to the biochem people: This is not an excel class, if you want us to figure out rate constants or km or Vmax or anything else, then just give the assignment, but don't make us learn very specific, otherwise unusable functions in a programs that most people don't know how to use, beyond making a simple spreadsheet. I mean, how many people know how to make a graph, with a trendline, that shows the equations, and is extended backward so that you can visualize the x-intercept? Or even know why when you try to do 1/3 that it tells you it's the 3rd of January and doesn't care how many times you delete it and retype the values, or how to chage the cell format or what to change it to? Well a few more people do now, but it wasn't necessary to do the work, except that we had to do it in excel.

So...What is done so far:

All the biochem lectures covered in the exam.
PBD presentation research (which is all I have to do so I'm done)

What I have to do this weekend:

Finish ICS presentation, and outline (I have to present this one, but I won't practice until the day of)
All Dosage Forms lectures that are on exam
Study for Biochem
Study for Dosage Forms
Begin PSR exam (which looks like it's going to be a pain too) Does anyone else hate pubmed?

Yeah. I can do it.

So...Let me tell you about my day.
It wasn't soo bad really. I'm sure nearly every day next week will be absolutely HORRIBLE. I went to campus early, got there 1:30-2:00. Sat in the office at teh cubicles asking people as they walked in if they had done the homework. Everyone was SOOOOO helpful. I'm finally done with it, well, I didn't do the extra credit but that is because I don't know what the difference between Km and Km prime are. I have not idea how to make a prime symbol in this thing. So for that assignment I learned more about excel than I did about Km and Vmax or the M-M equation. I will call it that for short, because I have no idea how to spell it and I'm sure no one actually cares. So I'm practically a excel pro and probably going to fail the biochem exam because I spent time that I should have spent preparing for the exam doing the damn homework.
I think the frustration is getting to me and coming out of my mouth. I'm not quite able to watch my language all the time. Not that it is that bad or anything, but normally it's not bad at all.
So let me tell you about next week.
Monday: BIOCHEM EXAM
Tuesday: PBD PRESENTATION
Wednesday: DOSAGE FORMS EXAM
Thursday: ICS PRESENTATION

I am SOOOOO behind in my lectures because it turns out that I did terrible on the first PBD exam so I dropped everything to study for the second one so I could bring up the grade enough that I wouldn't have to worry about it for the rest of the semester. So did I get a good enough grade? Probably not. I guessed on so many answers, at least everyone else feels the same way, but a lot of people did very good on the last one and I didn't so that puts me in a different boat.

We didn't even know that we were going to have the TWO presentations until recently. When we did our presentation for PBD this week I asked the people who were grading us when we would find out our topics for the next one and they acted like they didn't even know we were having another presentation next week. But they posted our topics finally so we have to do that. And we went to ICS today thinking we were doing a lab only to learn we were getting our topics for the presentation next week. I was like wait a minute we aren't supposed to present until next week. And she said it was because we started respiration in PBD and he wanted us to do our ICS presentation (which are on resp. problems) at the same time we were going over that unit. And I was like thank you so much for letting us know so we could prepare. In case you didn't notice we had like 50,000 hurricanes this year and most of us are already behind because of that, we don't need you pushing things forward with absolutely NO notice.
So this weekend, watch a bazillion lectures, study for biochem, research cystic fibrosis, research asthma, and make sure to watch Dosage forms lectures so that I can study for that next week just in time for the exam. PLEASE I think I need a little more work to do.
Tomorrow we are having a teleconference review session for biochem at 9:30, so I also get to drive downtown in rush hour traffic tomorrow.

I'm sure you are all very happy to have heard me complain again.

I should be studying but I've been studying all day. And really I've only managed to get more behind. I have a ton of lectures that I'm putting off. I decided that in order to make the nearly literally Bazillion pages of notes I have more manageable I would just type up the answers to the learning objectives. I'm currently at 12 pages typed (times new roman, 12 pt, single spaced). So that probably wasn't the best idea. I really just need to do well enough to make up for my terrible grade. So pray for me, I'm going to need it. I still have a problem with things falling out of my head right after I read them. But hopefully with all the typing Some of it has stuck in my head. Hopefully.

Lori called a little while ago. To tell me that she moved out of the house, she is now staying at her parent's house. Gene pushed her against the wall, so she left. She wanted me to let Brook know that she had left in case Brook wanted to talk to her. More on this later. Anyway, I was really surprised that she moved out, she has always been really big on "marriage is forever," so it must have been pretty bad. But I am very proud of her for leaving him. So many people just stay, and think things will change when they never do. She didn't really sound upset, like I would have expected. Just very depressed, and she didn't seem to want to talk much, but I know I'm not the best person to talk to when it comes to stuff like this.
I felt bad about calling Brook up basically just to say, "hey, how are you? Guess what?" And I didn't really have time for a real conversation, because I'm supposed to be studying enough to make up for the grade. Anyway, I talked to her she sounded really good, it's been forever since I talked to her. I told her right away because I hate it when people wait until we've been talking for a long time to bust out big information. She had just got back from school, and was freaking out about work she had to do, so we didn't talk long. She did say that she was surprised because she had just been at Lori's house for this candle light thing that lori put on (like a tupperware party, but for candles) and everything was fine, she said Gene was in and out and it seems normal. I couldn't go to that because while it was going on I was taking an exam or giving a presentation--I do both so often I can't keep them straight. Anyway, I was stuck up here in jax. I can't wait until I don't have to live here anymore. I really want to be home. It's home.

Okay, more studying.

Just wrote a whole post, and when I posted it disappeared, I hate when that happens, so to sum it all up, I did terrible on the PBD exam, but good on the biochem exam, and I think I already posted about doing very well on the med. chem. exam. We have another PBD exam Wed. So I'm hoping to do very good on it so it will even out my very bad grade. The immune stuff is crazy, I get everything confused and forget stuff. So I have all day tomorrow to straighten it out. Now, I need to contact the person I'm supposed to shadow.

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My Crazy Thoughtsmy thoughts on various topics.