The letter of the day is H

Today's post is brought to you by the letter H, as in Hilarious. This weekend was fabulous, full of hacking, wheezing, and mutual enjoyment of the Mongolian Death Flu. Some highlights:

• Woke up Sunday morning with a terrible earache. Lost my balance quite suddenly, leading to a rendezvous with the porcelain throne. My very first vertigo spell! (applause)
• Diagnosed with an acute alien parasite invasion in the inner cavities of my skull.
• Spent the day half-enjoying great cinema and half-screaming in pain.
• It was the most memorable Easter Sunday of my life.

Not having use of my right ear has led to more than a few dizzy spells. Wobbly antics ensue when I look around, read, or attempt to walk in a straight line. Still can't hear out of my right ear... I inadvertently had a hilarious conversation with a woman who was asking if I spoke Spanish (I couldn't hear her in English, let alone in a foreign language).

I discovered a few things today:

• BYU has bred a new species of human: the rare (but somehow populating) sock-bearing Croc wearer. 
• BYU students are more than willing to leave valuables out in the open when going to the bathroom. It's as if they have never lived in the ghetto slums before.
• BYU girls have no qualms about offering desserts to complete strangers on the street at the unholy hour of 8 pm. See "ghetto slums" reference.

My, what wonderful things I'm learning in the higher education system!

Welcome to my mind.

Enjoy your stay.

The letter of the day is G

Today's post is brought to you by the letter G, for Grateful. I am very grateful I am on the downward slope of this cold. The rest of mi familia has come down with a mild plague, necessitating a quarantine in my home.

Despite the congestion, cough, pounding head, and need for an endless supply of tissues, I enjoy being sick. Well, there was that one day in the course of my illness where I wanted to die. But other than that, it's not the end of my world. You see, something odd happens when I get sick: my anxiety switch gets turned off. It's the strangest thing, really... When my body is consumed with a feverish battle against microscopic invaders, my brain cannot afford the extra energy required to be in a constant state of worry. The numb brain that comes from a lack of oxygen (thanks a million, sinuses) makes critical thinking a moot point, but it also stops the invasive thoughts that stem from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

Why is that? What connects rational thinking and reasoning to anxiety? Perhaps the ability we evolved as modern humans to analyze the world around us beyond "Where is the food?" has also given us the potential to fear the future, to obsess, to compulsively worry about things that haven't happened yet. Unfortunately, my genetic code is missing the anxiety off-switch. Somewhere in my exons, a blueprint for a calming enzyme went missing long before I had anything to worry about. My fight-or-flight keeps running, like a light that I forgot to turn off before leaving for work. My gut muscles continue twitching, ready to tense up should the need arise to bolt from a predator. My jaw stays clenched as I await news of impending doom that won't materialize.

Relax, you say. Just chill. Think of somewhere peaceful, go to your happy place. How I wish I could. I wish I had the ability to feel completely safe, completely protected. Only then could I relax. I understand now why excessive sleeping is a symptom of severe depression: sleep offers an escape.
When you are unconscious, the only things you have to fear are your dreams. If they begin to overpower you, you simply wake up. There is no waking up when you have an anxiety disorder.

Welcome to my mind.

Enjoy your stay.

The letter of the day is F

Today's post is brought to you by the letter F, as in Futile. Your attempts to pass your class without making an effort to learn are futile.

Spoiler alert: I found the "compare your scores with other students" button on my online gradebook. My stress level dropped like an anvil when I saw the average scores of those in my classes. Vain? Perhaps. But the undeniable fact is that I can only feel good about my progress if I know that I'm doing better than most. I wonder when that habit started...

It's not like grades matter until high school anyway. I'm trying hard to convince others (and, admittedly, myself) that grades don't matter at all. But getting a straight-A+ report card in middle school was like winning the lottery. I will treasure that faded piece of paper forever and ever.
I would be lying if I denied the fact that giving kids scholarship money based on their GPA isn't a totally reliable system. Some people such as myself (thankfully) are good at testing. We don't need to study very much in order to do well in school. Our writing skills are up to par for our grade level. We tend to "get" the concepts faster than other kids. But we also aren't always the most hard-working, either. A lot of students go crazy and devote their whole lives to school just to get a grade, and they often miss their mark anyway, disappointing themselves.

When I become a teacher, I want to drill in my students' heads that college is nothing more than an expensive last year of high school, repeated for five years or so. My high school teachers felt the need to convince us that college would be very, very difficult, which caused me incredible fits of stress and anxiety. Like I need more of either. But it made my initial transition into higher academia a total bummer. I made my assignments so much harder than the professor intended for them to be. I forgot to chill, to enjoy being independent. And I ended up going home a month in with a panic disorder. What a grand payment for all my hard work in high school.

Grade school doesn't teach students how to be good at college. It teaches you to do whatever is necessary (cheat, lie, cram) for a good grade. Nearsighted much? That unfortunate habit carries over to college, where students far too often skip class until the last week and cram for the final exam. Really and truly, I thought that was just a television myth. The students riding the 9:15 bus with me to their 9:00 class proved me wrong. How I would love to stand next to them on the first day of their career, post-graduation, and watch them slowly realize that they don't know anything. $25,000 in student loans, and they know nothing. I don't want to be that person. Hence...I am studying as I go.

Dear half-hearted student on the bus...

I will see your late-night party and raise you an A on my Biology midterm.

Welcome to my mind.

Enjoy your stay.

The letter of the day is E

Today's post is brought to you by the letter E, for Excel. As in the need to excel.

Is it odd that I think my slightly scratched-up voice from my cold is more interesting and attractive-sounding than my normal voice? Does one's own voice even have a sound to it?

What a relief it was to get an A on my Book of Mormon midterm. As hard as I try to distance myself from the obsession with perfection I have cultivated over the last 20 years, it haunts me still. The need for high scores, the need to qualify for scholarships I won't get anyway... they follow me to the testing center. My report card is intertwined with my very DNA. It's a dangerous way of life, and I don't like it. But I don't know how to stop.

I had an interesting experience today. Being ill, I decided to go home and nap between classes. After about 18 minutes of semi-peaceful rest (rarely does it approach total relaxation) the neighbors turned on their music. Loudly.
The anxiety games began with full alertness (buh-bye nap), followed by a pounding heart, topped with the familiar feeling of being flipped off by our dear freshman neighbors. I am quite sure they aren't inherently evil... They just haven't learned respect for others. I truly hope they do before leaving BYU.

This is a typical round of anxiety games for me.

Welcome to my mind...

Enjoy your stay.

The letter of the day is D

(Note to reader... This is my continuation of the blog formerly known as Brought to You by the Letter AWESOME. I started that blog in 2010, and now we are in 2013. Do try to follow along.)

D is for Dark... and Foreboding (ignore the F). As in my future. As in considering that life goes on after the end of this semester, my cozy, warm, perfectly outlined semester. Two years--TWO YEARS--of working up to this, and I have finally found the college student within me for only a fleeting, shining moment. My desk, my chair, the zen calendar photos I disassembled many years ago (now hanging on my wall); all going to disappear at the end of April. What then? A new room? New roommates? A new walking route to campus? Will that even be possible in the frying-pan heat of Utah June? SWEET MERCY WILL THERE EVER BE CONSISTENCY?

No. No there will not be consistency. Because that is not who I am. I float, I tiptoe, and I disappear when the time is right... like Batman. I am not meant to be in one place, and I wouldn't know how to handle that, if given the choice of permanence.

That revelation is unsettling to me. I don't like change (Take note... I'm openly admitting to it). Change means things are no longer under my control. It means things will undeniably fall through the cracks, things will be left behind, things will get broken. For someone who strives for the ideal, those things are not acceptable. It terrifies me. I'm afraid I will be hurt in some way by change. Where did this come from? Why do I feel this way? Oh, wait... it's my anxiety disorder. Yeah...

What a lovely dark post. It really reflects the hour of the day and my mental status (grazi, head cold). How did I go from freakin' hysterical (in my long-gone youth of 2010) to the grim reaper? Well, at least in my mind I'm funny. If I'm not, I would appreciate you keeping your comments to yourself. I'm still working up to a decent level of self-esteem. I'm so much more confident in my writing than in my speaking, and I don't do much speaking these days...

Ah, well. I ought to go to bed. It's late (10 pm? Are you nuts? You're in college! Live a little!) and I'm tired.

Welcome back to my mind. Enjoy your stay.

The letter of the day is C

Today, class, we will be focusing on the letter C, as in Confusing. Our studies will be centered around unlearning everything you already know about school. We will begin with the essay. The essay, as you all know, consists of an Introduction, a Body, and a Conclusion in five paragraphs. Well, even though this is what you have practiced since first grade, it no longer applies. You are to "stretch your abilities" to write without a rigid structure. M'kay? Also, the forbidden temple of Wikipedia is now an all-access arena. Are we all on the same page now? Good.

Ashley and I had our first cleaning check on Thursday. Growing up, I would've rather not moved around as much as we did, but by doing so, I did learn how to make a room look show-perfect. Thanks to my mother and to Fly-Lady, I can whip-clean a room in about 15 minutes using only baby wipes, tissues, and H2O.

The amount of dust that can accumulate on a storage shelf over the period of a few months is astounding. Dust, consisting of tiny skin and hair flakes, is nothing more than a collection of microscopic body parts. Sleep on that.

In Psychology 111, our professor read us an extensive list of words with definitions (that may not have clearly applied to those words) at the beginning of class. We were instructed to remember them without writing them down. I was skeptical of our abilities to do so. At the end of the class session, he read aloud the definitions of the words, and we would reply with the corresponding word. I think I got all but two correct. "Think about that over the weekend," he said. So, I did. I was reading part of our assigned chapters later that day in my room when I realized that we had effectively participated in a demonstration of "chunking". This is the memory process that allows us to remember multiple items at once by dividing them into related groups. Because of chunking, telephone numbers are easy to memorize. I couldn't believe the fact that I had read information from a book, used it in class, and connected the two applications to come to a conclusion about the subject. So... I learned in college. I'll be darned.

Had dinner at Legends Grille with my peer mentor this week. The food was not spectacular, and the "big-screen TV" aspect did not phase me; I don't watch football. But it was a good chance to think about something other than homework. Later that night, after I had met with my Dinosaurs group to finish our cladogram (dinosaur genealogy based on acquired characteristics, not lineage), I sat and talked with Liesl and her friend, Kika (a journalism major) for a good 30 minutes. Then I walked home. I felt, for the first obviously recognizable time, like an adult.

Yesterday, after the Neurology study, I went to Jamba Juice to get a smoothie and a pretzel. The time was all mine. New, slightly uncomfortable, and refreshing. The experience, not the smoothie, for those that were wondering.

At the close of this session, let us consider the words of a great philosopher: "Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?" I think each of us has a subconscious desire to be the one in the pineapple.

The letter of the day is B

Today, class, the letter we will focus on is B, for Baffling. After 12 years of formal education, I just realized that in the typical grading scale, you earn an A, B, C, D, or F. F does not come after D, but it DOES stand for Fail. Logic at it's finest. At BYU, you can earn an A, B, C, D, or E. E does, in fact, come after D, but does not stand for Fail. And thus begins the long list of confusibilities that BYU has presented thus far.

For example: The syllabus. The all-important, holy grail of college upon which every single aspect of the course is reliant. The syllabus is the umbilical cord that connects you to your grade, via a bribe or two to the TA. The professor will hand you a syllabus. You accept it. And your relationship with said professor ends. All you will need to know about the course is on the syllabus, they say. Or is it? When you have a class of 500 students, your only hope is the syllabus (you cannot expect the professor to give you time when 499 other students also need it). So what are we to do about the assignments that were on another mystical document posted under a broken link somewhere in the vaults of BYU's randomly designed website? I have no idea, really.

Well, listen up, you assignments that are not on the syllabus. You can run, you can hide, and chances are, I'm not going to find you. But when you show up after the due date, I cannot promise we will still be "besties" afterward.