Winter Semester Eve and Other Things

Blah, school starts tomorrow. Starts at 8:30 and goes to 5, to be specific. Hooray for long days.

There is so much I want to say, and all of it I want to say well. The problem is, that takes some time and if I want to be up at 6:30 tomorrow, I need to go to bed in an hour. Holy crap. I can't believe I didn't post at all during the break, and now it's about to bite me for it. I have so much crammed up, and don't know how to get it out. Well, there's one way to get it out - FAST. So here we go.

In the last post I mentioned I wanted to touch on the "social, monetary and academic varieties". So here I go, touching on just the most significant points I wanted to mention.

Social!
Being fairly introverted individual (to put it mildly), when I got accepted and told people I would be attending school there was one thing that got mentioned more than the others: "You'll meet so many new people" "You'll make friends" etc etc. Ie, everyone is expecting me to magically become more social. Well, guess what? It didn't work. Imagine this - before I started school I had 100 'social points', all of which were distributed to the different friends and relationships I had. Maybe 5 points here for a coworker, 25 points there for the best friend, lots for my roomates, some for my boss, some for family, etc. The more points, the closer and active I am in that relationship. Ok, ta-da, I start school! Take the total number of points, remove half, and thinly spread the remaining quanitity between roughly twice as many people as before. Yes, I met new people. There are even one or two relationships that will carry over into the winter semester. But it really disturbs me how far I've fallen away from the people I held close before I started school. I've probably talked with my best friend less than a dozen times since September, and we haven't really spent any significant time together. I have very little idea what's going on in the lives of the people I live with. If not for going home over the break, I would still not have a clue what was going on back home. HOORAY FOR MEETING NEW PEOPLE AND BEING SOCIAL, AMIRITE?!?!

Monetary!
The good news - I landed in the black for 2009. The bad news - just barely. I spent roughly 10 months of full-time salary in less than four. Lovely. My car has been costing a bit more than I had anticipated, and around early December I decided I needed to compensate for this somehow. I looked through my finance records and found that the last time I spent money on myself was in early October for a $2 bag of chips. Before that? I bought $7 worth of candy for a cousin's birthday in early September.

This puts me in an odd position. On the one hand I think to myself "I save so hard the rest of the time, so maybe I can afford spend just a little bit this once". On the other hand, I can't afford it. Sure, the money is there, but just barely. And it's hard to justify spending it. Birthday money? Paid for a month of parking. Christmas bonus? That replaced the shot distributor in the car. Christmas money? Ok, I broke down here and spent $20 on cheap Steam sales, buying games I probably won't touch for the next four months. The rest of it, though, went into the (rapidly shrinking) savings account. There are two books I really wanted to get myself for Christmas, but that ain't gunna happen now either. Sigh. It sure is a depressing battle to fight, I'm not sure if I can winning. It's a hard blow when you realize that all that hard saving you've been doing just doesn't cut it.

Looking over my year-end totals, I did an OUTSTANDING job keeping my entertainment/non-essential spending in check. I spent just over $1000 over the past 12 months, and a solid $250 of that was birthday and Christmas gifts for other people. I just don't know where else to trim the spending.

Fun fact, my little sister makes a higher hourly wage than I do as a page at the library back home. Government/municipality gigs pay pretty well, so ok, fine. The real kicker here? She isn't even out of highschool yet. I've been with this company for four years and counting.

Academic!
Overall, I did pretty good in this category. Some would probably say I have a GPA to be proud of (Want to know what it is? Too bad, I don't care to disclose that information). And, I guess, looking at it I feel a certain degree of satisfaction. But at the same time, I know I could've done better. The odd tweak here and if I would have done that project a lil' different there... Definitely room for improvement. I put a lot of time and effort into my final drawing project. I was doing pretty well in that class, but I was really hoping for an A. I hadn't gotten yet and I know I'm fairly weak at drawing. An A would mean... That I really accomplished something, that I was really improving, and that the hard work would amount to something extraordinary. At last, 'twas not to be. Yeah, I did well on the assignment. But that was a bit of a blow - I don't know what I could've done to do better.

On a related note to Academics, the workload. 24hrs a week in class and 30-40hrs of homework. I'm pretty sure I put in a bit more time than a lot of other students, but I still think that it would be a significant amount anyways. I don't know how many times people lectured me about priorities and finding time for myself and blah blah blah. I know that as a first year student (even though I've already done a year of post-secondary) everyone with a greater amount of education is entitled to instruct me on how I obviously have poor time management skills, etc.

The really good line is "Oh, well as a first year they're just piling more work on you anyways to see if you'll stick it out. Next year will be way easier." Fun fact: Every single 3rd or 4th year student who I've talked to or done a presentation to 1st year classes has informed us that the 2nd year is even more intense.

"Ah, but it's just the first/year semester, so most of it is just getting used to how things are run." Ok, this is a valid argument... For the first month of classes. After that... What else is there to get used to? I know where all the classes/facilities are, what supplies I need, how the class is run, what my instructor is like, and what is expected of me. There isn't anything else to adjust to.

But still, when I declare that no, I can not spend the evening out because I have homework, everyone tells me "You need take time for yourself!" What time? It's like they think I just kinda float my way through my school work, taking my sweet time... Seriously, where is this extra time supposed to come from? Is it just supposed to appear? Or maybe, just maybe, I actually have that much work to do that I can't afford to humour you and spend a night out during the last two weeks of the semester as exams approach and every single class has a final project to get done. "But it's your birthdayyyyyyyyy..." You know what? Screw that, no one cares. I have better things to do. Just because my priorities don't line up with yours doesn't mean that what I need to get done is any less important. Then the inevitable "Well, when I was in school I made time for x and y and z..." Oh what's that, you spent about 15hrs in class? And you wern't working part time? Gee, I wonder where you got the time to go do all those things. Argh. I swear, it's apples and oranges sometimes.

And for the record, I spent the evening on campus plugging away at a project that I ended up redoing anyways.

Other
Over the break I had the opportunity to do a few things for the first time since August. I watched two-and-a-half episodes of Top Gear (the Bolivia special was absolutely fantastic), sat through two movies (even though I sketched my way through them), played a soprano sax for a bit and PLAYED VIDEO GAMES. The new Super Mario Bros is absurdly fun. Batman: Arkham Asylum is nothing short of a masterpiece, I had a mile-wide grin the whole way through. I really feel bad that Beatles Rock Band had to stay back at home, it sucks that I probably won't get to play it again. I wish I had the opportunity to go into detail and properly review these games (I even beat Arkham Asylum), but I can't. It really bugs me that I won't get to pick up the last two again for a while, they were so good. But maybe after ~four months of not playing anything, it wouldn't matter what I played - I'd still be blown away. But I honestly think that out of all the games, I could have hardly picked better ones to spend my limited time on.

Anyways, like I mentioned, my drawing sucks (Please don't argue with me here. When two of your professors, both of which sit on the review panel for the program you want to apply to, tell you your drawing is lacking... Chances are it is). So I borrowed Keys to Drawing by Bert Dodson and challenged someone from school to draw 3 pages in the sketchbook every day over the break. And, as of tonight (being the last day of my "break"), I'm glad to report that I've worked the entire way through the book and amassed some ~75 pages full of drawings. On the one hand, I feel a bit better about my skills (even though I know I still don't stand up to the other students at school), but on the other hand... It darn-near ruined my break. Three pages a day works out to roughly 2hrs of drawing (at LEAST. Way more for some of the books' exercises), and it just turned into one more thing to do. Yeah, I enjoyed my winter break. It was nice to spend some time with the family. But it was bit busy, I was sick, and (thanks to the drawing goals) there was always something hanging over my head to get done. Sigh.

I'm tired and stressed. I guess it's not fair to say that the break wasn't as nice as I wished it was - I think I had pretty unrealistic hopes for what it would be in the first place. But looking at my sketchbooks and paystubs, I certainly can't say it wasn't productive. Looking at this blog, though, there was more I wish I could've done. I also still need to clean my room, and I desperately want to sit down and play my sax and/or ocarina for an hour or so.

Sigh. Well, here we go - four more months. Time to put away the games and TV and any more long blog posts. They'll still be here once the summer rolls around, right? I just wish I was going into this feeling a bit better about things.

As my grandmother says, "this too shall pass"
-Cril

I learn as I go
To float far away
Into silence
And just watch your face
And find some kind of grace
In that quiet bliss

Can I stay
And say nothing
At all
At all

Rob Dougan - Nothing At All