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.