May Days

The semester ended a little over a week ago, and I've been home since then, as the dorms closed eight hours after I finished my last final. Finals were stressful, as always, but I did finally manage a 4.0 semester, which I was happy about because it means that the trendline of my GPA has a statistically significant R^2 value. I made a graph of my GPA since I started college, not including summer term or the CIS German classes I took in high school, to illustrate this point, because I don't think people have really understood exactly what I mean when I say that my grades were trending towards a 4.0 this semester, although I'm not totally sure what this observed trend means with regards to my remaining 4 semesters. I'd like to think that my GPA will max out and achieve steady state at 4.0, but I highly doubt that as all of my Chemistry electives from here on in will be courses designed for graduate students that they allow undergrads to enroll in for major credit. Also, advanced labs.

So far, being home for the summer hasn't been as bad as I expected, but it's only been a week and the [SiblingBots] have yet to finish school, so it's been quiet around the house on the days I'm home. I have also successfully managed to be out of the house most days, as I have been going to campus nearly every week day to work in the lab, which is nice because it gives me something productive to do, and gets me out of the house at a reasonable hour. I like being on campus during the summer, because it's quiet and it's possible to enjoy the mall without there being several thousand people around, which also makes it significantly easier to find seating in Coffman. Campus during the summer is green and peaceful, and so far the weather has been nice enough to sit outside and enjoy the sun without significant amounts of wind or exorbitant heat.

This pretty much sums up how I feel when I'm at home (via)

It has been kind of weird being home though, because, to a certain extent, it feels exactly like last summer, when I was going to campus for summer classes and wandering around feeling sorry for myself when I wasn't in class. A couple of times now I've been driving and a song will come on (yes, I do listen to music when I drive, Imaginary Readers, as crazy as that seems, I just don't listen to the radio) and I'll have this flash of feeling, like absolutely nothing has changed in the past year and I'm exactly where I was last summer, which always leaves me kind of thrown. I know that it's just that I'm at home, and I spent all of last summer having lots of strong feelings about some things, so I'm bound to associate some of the patterns I have fallen back into with those feelings, but I don't really like it, because, in fact, a whole lot has happened in the past year and I don't feel the same way now that I did then, despite the fact that I'm having (different) feelings about some of the same stuff/people. It's weird to all of the sudden be experiencing old emotions, especially ones that aren't all that great, because for the most part, I've been feeling pretty decent lately, and when that happens, it brings up a lot of old insecurities and issues that I don't really want to be dealing with right now, because they aren't actually relevant to my current situation, and are generally bringing my down.

Despite all of my whining, there are some nice things about being home, including getting to spend time with [SisterBot] who I've gotten fairly close to recently. It's nice to talk to her, particularly since we both have the same issues with the [ParentalUnits] and [BrotherBorg], and it's nice to be able to talk to her about stuff that other people don't get because they didn't grow up in my family. Like about how [MaternalUnit] saw the Marvel comics shot glass set [Львица] gave me for my birthday and automatically assumed I would be using them for storage, because I don't ever do shots or drink when I'm not at home with my parents (which I totally don't if you're reading this [MaternalUnit]).

Anyways, this summer has started out okay, and I hope that it continues that way. Mostly, right now I want [Keeper of All Knowledge] to get back from Wisconsin so I don't feel so pushy about asking [Totally a Cat] to hang out, but there is a strong possibility that any weirdness between [Totally a Cat] and I recently is completely in my head. I should probably also stop reading books about fundamentalist Christianity, because that just doesn't seem healthy, and several people now have thought that I meant I was thinking about converting when I told them about said books. (Rest assured, Imaginary Readers, I am not going to convert to fundamentalist evangelical Christianity because that just wouldn't end well for anybody involved, and if I ever do, I give you permission to kidnap and deprogram me because it really would be for the best).

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Stressing Out

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Not sure which I like more...(via)

Yesterday was the first day of finals, which meant I had my calc test Monday afternoon as all the calc finals are always from 1:30-4:30 on the first day of finals. It's kind of weird to think that I am now completely done with calc, after four semesters, given that I've always had a math class. I like math, especially calculus, but there's no more for me to take without it being scary math major classes that require proofs and other annoying bits of abstract thinking. Granted, I will eventually have to take Quantum Mechanics which is mostly math, and there will be plenty of math to do in my remaining classes, but none of them will be actual math classes, and that makes me kind of sad. But not sad enough to be a math major.

Anyways, finals always bring an inordinate amount of stress with them, and this iteration is no different.
I just want this week to be over so I can be done with what has increasingly become a very long year, but I also don't want it to be done, because being done means going home for the summer, which is something I'm not particularly looking forward to. It's not that I don't like my family or anything, it's just that I don't like being home, and the fact that every time I talk to [SisterBot] she tells me how much this summer is going to suck doesn't help. Apparently [MaternalUnit] and [BrotherBorg] have been at each other's throats lately, and when they fight, there's no where in the house where you can't hear then scream insults at each other, which is, needless to say, rather stressful, particularly because they then tend to both be in foul moods for the rest of the day, which they have no problem taking out on everyone else. That, and I just found out that my parents are in marriage counseling, which I know probably means nothing or is a good thing, but I would rather not find out about it via a text from [SisterBot], who figured it out because they kept going to 'appointments' together. I generally don't like to find out about such things from my 15 year old sister when she asks me if I know anything about it. Regardless, things have just been tense lately whenever I go home or see my family, and I am not looking forward to the better part of three months of tense when I'm home and guilt about not being home enough from [MaternalUnit] when I leave to avoid the tense.

All of that added to the fact that when I'm home for any extended period of time I tend to get restless, anxious, and a little bit depressed mostly from having a lack of anything productive/constructive to do, and I am not looking forward to spending this summer at home. In a effort to rectify the situation I'm trying to figure out a way to not be home much this summer, which seems like it will be feasible as I am working in two labs on campus and [Keeper of All Knowledge], [Totally a Cat], and [Who Needs Sleep?] are all going to be in town for at least part of the summer, so I'll actually have people to do things with. There is already a fairly largest list of things we are planning on doing this summer, but we'll see if any of them actually get accomplished. They range from the fairly easy to accomplish like bra shopping and going to various restaurants around the cities that we have been talking about for a while, to the more ambitious, such as going to a strip club, to the oddly specific, such as getting drunk on champagne and jumping off relatively high things with umbrellas (I think this is refering to something that happened on Gilmore Girls, but I'm not sure).

More relevant to a previous post, but rather perfect (via)

Anyways, the last two weeks have been fairly stressful, what with the standard end of the semester fair such as exams, papers, and finals, but also because of some interpersonal things that have happened lately which are far beyond my control but still rather unpleasant and not helping. And stress, I have found, is highly correlated with my mood and how I am feeling in general. The more stressed I am, the more ground my insecurities gain, and the more I have to struggle to not hate myself constantly. It's a vicious cycle wherein the more stress I feel, the less I sleep, and the less I sleep the more tired I am, which makes me more stressed because I can't focus on the work I need to get done, and the more stressed and sleep deprived I am, the harder it is to quiet that part of my brain that is constantly spinning down the rabbit hole of my various insecurities. And it doesn't help that stress makes my face break out continually until well after the stress has ended, and my somewhat persistant acne is one of my big body issues along with my weight.

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For a variety of reasons, I was feeling rather bad the other day, worse than I've felt in a while, and I had to remind myself that it was mostly because I had two finals that I hadn't really studied for coming up. Stress has a tendency to sneak up on me and manifest itself as really insecure days and insomnia rather than as the sinking feeling of dread or twitchy nervous energy that I generally associate it with. Sometimes I don't even really realize just how stressed out I am about something until I can't sleep for several nights and/or hate myself for a day or two, but generally once I identify what it is that is causing me stress, or just that it is stress rather than genuine self hatred that I am feeling, it abets to the point where I can deal with it normally, usually by studying if it's about exams, or doing whatever it is that I've been putting off. It's one of the few emotional things that I am able to really handle in a healthy way and suppressing it isn't my default setting, so I guess I've got that going for me. I've taken two of my three finals already, both of which went well, and I'm not worried about the third given I actually study for it at some point, but I would like to actually be done, because like I said before, this has been a long year, and I am so sick of dorm food that I may just live off pretzels and hummus for the rest of the week.