Laughter Through Tears

While solving an exercise in cognitive psychology, it occurred to me (for no good reason!) that there's no proper English word for פרשיה. I mean, you could use "affair" or "scandal" or various other synonyms, but I don't think any specific word can capture all the connotations put together, not to mention the equanimity I associate with the word. Well, the latter probably has more to do with contemporary Israeli politics than anything else.

Anyway I am wearing a hat with bunny ears and looking up articles on habituation. Also I have not yet caught up to the most recent episode of Lost Girl, I think I'll wait till Monday after lab/pilates and watch two in a row, that's always nice. Watching a Canadian show means you have something to do even when the US quits everything to do Thanksgiving shopping (I assume that's why all the US shows didn't have anything new this week). Nothing can be bad when you have chamomile tea.

ETA: Shit that font looks terrible bold.

Whoops I forgot to update my journal in almost two weeks. No idea why. I've still been checking my DW basically every day.

Stuff that happened in that time:

Got a Twitter (here), at the behest of a couple of Israeli friends. There are massive fiscal-related protests in Israel right now and Twitter is one of the online epicenters of news and discussion. A bunch of my tweets and retweets are in Hebrew, just so you know.

Finished my very last piece of work for the semester, which was a mock research proposal that turned out more complicated than I'd anticipated.

Watched Green Lantern a couple of weeks ago and found it fairly dull, having not enough aliens and not nearly enough shiny explody green stuff -- too much talking and ~character drama~. Watched Captain America last night and found it much more enjoyable.

The new light rail in Jerusalem opened. I was on it yesterday to get to the movie and so far it is pretty terrible.

Wrote a bunch of anonymous fic, and also made a bit of progress on my absurdly late help_japan fic. It will be sad, I think, but perhaps bittersweet. It is also getting my mind on perhaps writing some more VM fic, after I finish it. Right now, though, finishing it is my top writing priority, and then getting a good beta.

Things that are still to happen:

In a week I'm flying to Atlanta with my brother for DragonCon. Eep.

Finishing an anonymous WIP that I've been working on all summer and spring and posting it to AO3, possibly after extensive editing/beta. This is a thing that is going to happen.

When offices at uni open again, calling the life sciences secretaries and figuring out whether my lab request was approved. This has to happen before I sign up for classes. Then I have to sign up for classes when, yet again, I will take more courses on my first semester than I am comfortable with, due to 'constraints' (had to look that up on morfix).

Foot. Down. No way am I signing up for god_tier, even if the rough draft period ends after my exams. I am way overcommitted and in fact should probably drop out of remix_goes_wild. I have a lot of original fiction on my plate, not to mention school and exams, plus I foolishly started writing a multi-chapter fic with no commitment, but obviously I'll berate myself severely if I fall behind anyway.

I have a perfectly lovely mumble mumble top secret original fiction story to be working on, there's no reason for me to join a big bang. Not like they're short on participants, either.

Self: Wanting to do everything and then accomplishing nothing is one of your worst vices.

Dear self,

Just because you are giving a presentation about bipolar disorder, doesn't mean you have to address anything and everything that your listeners might have heard about it. If you try to cover everything about bipolar disorder, you will never get to the research.

Love,

Self.

PS: The second-to-last minute is also not okay, so stop congratulating yourself.

I'm sort of shocked at how spoiled I am right now. Yesterday I forgot my laptop's charger in the computer lab, and then I forgot to hibernate the laptop before I went to sleep. The lab opens after my first class starts, so I couldn't pick up the cord until after class. Accordingly, I left the laptop at home and took notes by hand. This was cause for great angst.

True, my notes by hand aren't as good as typed notes, and I'm probably going to have to edit them a bunch for clarity and write in the correct terminology when I fudged them. Nonetheless I'm pretty impressed that after having this computer for barely a year (and resisting getting it to begin with) I already have difficulty imagining going back to folders. How bizarre. I still sort of can't believe I'm the sort of person who owns two computers.

The weather is horrifying. I mean, I am glad that it's actually winter, and very glad that it's raining given the horrid deficit in fresh water. But! This dust is just ridiculous. Everything is covered in a thick stain of damp dust, the air tastes foul, and I keep coughing up impressively gross phlegm. Ugh, just, so disgusting. For objective reference, this super-gross thick black-red cloud is right on top of me right now. Our thanks to Tel Aviv uni for providing the infographic.

Actually, I better screencap that for future reference. ( Dust cloud of death )

Anyway physiology was canceled today probably due to the professor inhaling a ton of dust and so I bailed and I'm holing up at home drinking tea. I should get started on my homework, because I am horribly behind on SPSS and I know nothing. Probably I will loiter online and look for hilarious DW posts about the weather, since apparently all the Israelis are posting about it.

This post is an optical illusion. I am actually studying thermodynamics for my biochem quiz tomorrow, not posting.

So this week's fannish5: Five of your favorite characters are going to a Halloween party. What costumes are they wearing?

My first thought was CrossGen characters, which is bizarre, because they went out of business about six years ago, so why would they pop up before more recent fandoms? Anyway, the thought of Giselle in a classic black witch's costume is too hilarious not to share. But for reals:

1. Kenzi from Lost Girl dresses as a harlequin clown, because there is nothing scarier than clowns.

2. Astrid from Fringe dresses in a gown and wimple which she did not buy in a Renn Faire, obviously, because she doesn't go to those, and whatever her loser ex told you to the contrary is nothing but a vindictive lie. She does look good in velvet, though.

3. Veronica Mars dresses as Carmen Sandiego FTW. You know she played the hell out of those games when she was twelve.

4. Jamie Madrox from X-Factor would dress as Cyclops if he wasn't afraid Cyke would toast him for his troubles. So he dresses like Indiana Jones. Not because Terry has a crush on Harrison Ford, though, because that would be weird.

5. Faith from BtVS has probably never been to a proper Halloween party in her life. She doesn't really get how the concept works and so Dawn makes her wear a classic purple Batgirl costume, which is truly a WTF choice. Halfway through the party she changes into one of Buffy's minidresses and they end up duking it out and spilling all the punch.

I'm dying to know how I got a factor of 20 points in mechanics, six months after I wrote the test, without having filed any sort of appeal. Especially since factors are traditionally given when the overall score curve is abnormally low, and this test had an abnormally high curve. It's like the grade fairy popped in and decided to raise my lowest grade.

This naturally prompted a very untimely examination of my test papers from this term, which reminded me how I hated some of my classes. Well, a lot of my classes. I hope I can start next term a little less disgruntled. I'm not really worried about my grades anymore, but I hate treating school like an awful chore. I love biology and I want to study it, it should be something I enjoy. Ish.

Anyway, Biot-Savart. Right?

So the first organic chemistry test was one of those exams where I come out feeling pretty good, I wasn't overly flustered by the questions and I had high hopes for getting a good grade. This despite the test being on a Friday morning after a full week of regular classes, one week after another big test (chemistry #2), and after having crammed vast amounts of material into nine weeks of classes, 3-4 times a week.

I got a 66.

Now I'm studying for the second exam, with the hopes that enough cramming and a better idea of what's expected of me will lead to an 80+ grade. Of all the exams I took this year, this was probably the most fair, and the lecturer and TAs went out of the way to leave us with excellent study aids.

I'm looking at my test paper (when I can decipher the notes, not easy) and rereading the lecturer's presentations, and I can't believe some of the mistakes I made. I might have lost as many as 10 points just because I didn't draw the resonative forms for each stage of the reaction, in one question. I forgot the transition state for one of the elimination reactions. I forgot the difference between activating/deactivating and resonative/inductive effects. I hate this post-exam feeling of "WAUGH HOW COULD I MAKE SUCH A FOOLISH MISTAKE". It is the one thing I dread most about exams, right now: that even if I come out feeling good about it, a couple of weeks later I will have this huge HEADDESK moment.

My genetics score ought to be showing up in my inbox sometime before Wednesday. Meaning, in addition to studying and catching up on all my enantiomers and such, I might have a very unpleasant surprise to deal with. A surprise with no digit 9 in it. :( In other subjects, an 80 might please me, but in genetics I'd end up dissatisfied with anything less than 90.

In other news, the weather has reached new heights of boiling. Today I didn't bother even opening the shutters, because I don't want to let the hot air in.