Posting

Wow, it's been a month? It's amazing how little has been going on. I did have my 26th birthday, which was pretty non-noteworthy. I got Blue Planet DVDs from Alma to accompany the Planet Earth she got me last year, which was nice, and my parents got me both a subscription to The Economist and the Rosetta Stone software for Tagalog, which I really need to get started on. So I got everything I really wanted, which is always nice.

Class has started up for this quarter and my time is already running pretty short. I'm just praying that as few Cubs playoff games as possible are scheduled on Monday and Thursday nights, although I'm also praying, of course, that there are as many Cubs playoff games as necessary for a title. If the expense of that is me having to watch a couple on DVR, I could live with it. If a potential World Series clincher was on one of those days, maybe I could make an exception (we get one free skip).

Politics are making me ill. I really just need to avoid this garbage until Election Day. And no offense, but if you're voting for McCain you're probably an idiot.

What self-respecting classic rock station would play Gordon Lightfoot?

On Saturday, I was in the car when the Drive - WDRV, 97.1 FM, the classic rock station out here - played Loverboy's "Working for the Weekend." Now, I have no specific objection to the song itself, but... classic rock? This is right up there with WCBS in New York starting to play disco alongside the traditional "oldies." (The title of the post is an approximation of a quote from my dad upon hearing a Lightfoot song [possibly "If You Could Read My Mind"] on Philadelphia's ostensible classic rock station some time in the late 90s.)

I had my first exam for Intro to Psychology tonight; pretty sure I rocked it, unless the professor is the hardest grader known to man. 55 points available, so that multiplies out to 110 - meaning that if I did as well as I think I did, an A+ is not out of the question. I should probably avoid getting ahead of myself here, but the point is I'm happy with how it went. Gotta get those As.

They're wafer thin!

I bought Girl Scout cookies from a coworker whose daughter is in the Scouts, and they arrived today. Three boxes of Samoas, one of Tagalongs - which went right into the freezer - and one of Thin Mints. I remember when Samoas were changed over to Caramel Delites and how disappointed I was - but oddly, both cookies actually still exist. I thought it was some sort of PC thing, but apparently it's just two different bakeries. Why they need two different ones, I'm not sure. Anyway, Samoas are the superior cookie. They're darker in color, so you get a bit of a richer flavor off the caramel, and also the supporting cookie is white rather than yellow and a bit hardier against the teeth. Yes, I just wrote about Girl Scout cookies like they were wine.

I'm going to try and eat them over as long a period as possible, because Girl Scout cookies are just hideously bad for you. I had a theory that they only sold them once a year because if they were available year-round, people would start thinking about just how ridiculously awful they were from a health standpoint. I mean, you get 15 Samoas per box - more than a quarter per cookie these days, not that it's not worth it - which is five per section inside the box. If you eat one section, that's your saturated fat for the day. You're done. I mean, that's coconut for you, but ye gods. Tagalongs aren't a whole lot better. Is it fair that things which taste so good should be so bad for you? I know that's how it usually works, but I say no.

One thing that I will definitely need to do if I'm going to eat a lot of cookies is get back to the gym. It's been a while (and I've been paying the fat tax in the meantime, figuring I would get back soon), mostly because I've had various acid reflux issues, a problem which I seem to recall noticing at the gym in the first place. I was hoping to see if I could get the problem fixed before I went back, but I just don't think I can hold out much longer; also, losing weight is supposed to help relieve heartburn by taking pressure off that whole area, so it could be a case of killing two birds with one stone if I can really get serious about it. Alma has switched onto a schedule for spring quarter where she really won't be down in Chicago at all during the week, so that may enable me to put Monday and Wednesday towards the gym, though of course that gives me no nights to relax during the week. But then, that's why there are weekends, right? Besides, I've spent most of the past eight years relaxing every night during the week, and look where it got me. (I should clarify the above - I'm not trying to imply that Alma was in any way a cause of me not going to the gym, merely that she was often down here on Monday nights and so I was seeing her on those nights rather than doing anything else, not that I would have preferred to do anything else.)

Anyway. I'm going in to bed "early" here, since I have my first exam tomorrow. It's a lot of stuff to remember, so wish me luck.

I'm alive!

Gosh, it's been a while, hasn't it? Something like four weeks, in fact, which I think is the longest posting break in BigFlax.com history. But I have my reasons. #1, of course, is that between working full-time and going to school two nights a week, there's not much time to blog. And then #2 is that between working full-time and going to school two nights a week, there's not much worth blogging about, either.

To answer the obvious question first: school is going fine so far. The first exam in Intro to Psych is next week; I'm really looking to maintain as high a GPA as I possibly can, so I'm definitely shooting for As in these first two classes, which ought to be doable. Anyway, it's a start.

I've also been sick recently, so I spared you a week of "ohhh, this suuuucks" updates. I'm still shaking off something which first showed up on Friday the 15th, knocked me out over the next few days (to the point that I missed Monday and Tuesday of work that week, and only through sheer force of will dragged myself to class on Tuesday night), and has pretty much been lingering in sporadic cough and intermittently stuffy/runny nose form ever since. At this point I'm probably at 90-95% health, or at least 90-95% of my usual, which may or may not actually be "100% healthy," but the last 5% of illness has proven tough to shake. I could probably stand to sleep a little more, which would probably help, but it's hard. To get as much sleep as I'm "supposed to," I would need to go to bed around 11pm every night, which just. Isn't. Happening. I could barely get to bed by 11 during the period when I was getting up at 5:30 for work.

What else? Well, due to my combination of work and school commitments, and the fact that (also due in large part to same) I have watched pretty much no college basketball this year, I'm actually not going to run the Tournament Challenge, for the first time since 2000. Maybe if people want to get an ESPN group together or something just for bragging rights, that'd be cool, but I'm not feeling collecting money, organizing and updating brackets, etc. Just too much work, this year, with everything else going on. This news will undoubtedly please Alma and any other readers who give zero shits about college basketball, although it means I'm going to have to find something else to post daily about if I want to keep up my usual March volume. In 2006 I made 28 posts in March. 28! Please note that it is highly unlikely you will ever see me make 28 posts in one month ever again, for any reason.

This winter has been kind of soul-sucking, which may also have contributed to my lack of posting. Alma's car got stuck on a patch of ice a week ago Tuesday; I went up on Wednesday night and attempted to use some traction-creating plastic things I found at Target, but they didn't work. We ended up going to Ace on Saturday afternoon and getting an ice chopper, and Alma sat in the car while I chopped at the ice around the right front tire so that once I got part of it stripped away, she could try to back out of the space. It still took several attempts and I eventually realized that the problem was not just the ice behind the tire but in front of the tire as well, oddly enough. Alma took some pictures which maybe she'll post on her blog at some point. At any rate, that whole struggle was emblematic of the winter as a whole. It's just snowed a ton, and when it hasn't been snowing it's been really cold, except for like the one weird day when it wasn't. I couldn't be more ready for spring to get here, although I suspect we're not going to hit 60 degrees until about May 20th.

So that's what's been going on. Slogging through a shitty winter, working, and getting used to going to school again. Not much more to say than that, I suppose, but hopefully I can get back to posting a bit more often than once a month, lest you think I've gone all Matt Pearl on you.

I won't need my high school diploma anymore

As most of you are probably aware by this point, I'm going back to school. I got into Roosevelt for a second bachelor's degree, majoring in psychology, and classes started yesterday night. (I'm still working full time while taking, at the moment, two night classes a week.)

It's pretty weird to be back in a college environment. Since I never did work study or anything like that, my education and professional periods had been pretty well separated - I graduated Northwestern in December of '04, but didn't get my first full-time job until May of '06. Yet now I'm working 40 hours a week and taking two classes, and in future semesters that may even bulk up to three. It's going to be a challenge, no doubt, but I think I need a challenge. Much of my life up to this point - particularly where school was concerned, but really with a lot of work-related stuff as well - has been kind of built around what the easiest thing to do was. I coasted through middle school and high school, getting good grades in the classes that came more naturally and not working particularly hard at the ones I decided I wasn't very good at (basically, anything involving math). When I went to college it wasn't because I had a plan for my life, it's because I was 18 years old and capable of getting into Northwestern. 18-year-old kids who can get into prestigious colleges generally go to college. So I went to college. The fact that I majored in radio/TV/film tells you a lot. I mean, at the time I legitimately thought that my career could be as a video editor, or later as a film critic. But these were things that I liked to do for fun; I didn't work very hard at them because I didn't feel like I should have to, and I didn't work very hard at anything else because what did anything else matter? I got the social part of the college experience - really, pretty much every significant friendship I still maintain (there aren't that many, of course) derives from college - but I don't think I got nearly as much of the actual education experience as I should have.

When I was home for Christmas, my mom told me a story about when she was teaching philosophy in college in the mid-70s. She said that the students who were the most eager and interested were not the bright-eyed 18-year-olds, but rather older women going to college after having skipped it earlier in their lives (that being an era when it was considered a woman's job to get married and raise a family, of course). The women going to school with the benefit of additional years, if not decades, knew what they were there for; the kids just went to college because kids go to college. That's how I feel right now - with the benefit of additional years, I've learned a lot of things about myself, and I head back to school now with this in mind. It's going to be a challenge, but for once I think I'm actually ready for it.