Oh My! Sunday, October 8, 2006

Where do I start? It has been about a week since my last entry and that should let you know how my week went. This entry will be composed of a bunch of random stuff that I jotted down during the week that was interesting.

Language barriers are interesting because usually every incident is totally different. One guy in my course speaks English as a second language and he does not understand some of the vocabulary that I use. I know that I sometimes use slang words, but I try to explain myself when appropriate. So…we were all doing an exercise in the lab and I called this guy a nerd because of something he did. He asked me what a nerd was and I told him someone that was really smart, liked school, and clarified that we were all nerds for studying DNA profiling. He sent me an email later that day stating, “thank you for the name you called me ‘nerd’, another English word I didn’t know but know I do. Have a nice weekend.” I replied back, “a compliment in all respects.” I didn’t think much of it, but the next day when I opened my email I received this interesting reply from him; “it is non of your business though. No hard feeling.” What does that mean? I could not figure out why being a nerd was none of my business and why there was a possibility of hard feelings? I did not want this to go on for the whole semester so I just asked him what he meant. He said he went home and looked up nerd in the dictionary and it said nothing that was good. I told him that it was not an offensive term and sometimes society puts an alternative meaning on words. It was like he didn’t believe me! He went on to say, “so you are telling me the dictionary is wrong?” I said that it could be used that way, but that was not the way I used it. Why would I insult myself? Anyway, it is all good now and I think next time I will just keep my mouth shut!

This week was a little overwhelming when it comes to school. It was my first week and I was not expecting it to be easy, but it was fine. BUT they were nice enough to give us all of our assignment for the whole semester. This can be seen as good or bad. It was good because we can plan everything out and start doing some research. The bad thing is that we have to start planning our whole semester and doing massive amounts of research. I really don’t like writing essays, and that is quite a large majority of my coursework. We currently have three 2500-3500 word (~10 pages) essays and one 5000 word (20 pages) essay for the semester along with other projects and presentations. I do not think I have ever written more than an 8 page essay. This semester is going to suck and I have no clue how I am going to do this. We received all of this info in two days, so everyone was overwhelmed. Our professors also gave us the plagiarism scare, over, and over, and over. I would definitely say that the highlight was when one of my professors told us that we need to spend about 90hrs of personal study outside of class. This pretty much wiped out any “social life”, scratch that, “life” I was going to have. This just seemed like a massive number to me so I did some math…
Total hours in a week = 168hrs
Minus personal study - 90hrs = 78hrs
Minus 8hrs sleep a night - 56hrs = 22hrs
Minus 18hrs of class a week -18hrs = 3hrs
That’s right folks, I have 3hrs a week for personal hygiene, eating, traveling to and from class, going to the bathroom, etc. Did I mention it is a 20min walk to class each way? I am already in the negative. My teacher is not getting 90hrs a week and I will not be getting 8hrs of sleep a night. Please remind me again why I pay to go through this???

Being the NERD that I am I bought a pedometer just to see how far I walk on the average day. Because I know you care…it is about 7500 steps a day which is about 2.5 miles for me. It is not a lot, but it is interesting to gauge. One day, this week, I had quite a few steps; I left my umbrella on the bus when I got off at the library and had to run to the bus station so I could get it back. I am cheap, and there is no way I was going to buy a new umbrella.

Speaking of being cheap, awhile ago I bought some chicken that was not cheap, $8 for 4 chicken breasts. I was going to use 3 of them this week, so I set them out on top of the stove appliance to thaw. In retrospect this was not the greatest idea I’ve had, but did not think there would be any problems. Wrong! A girl used the grill and that partially cooked my chicken and melted the bag to the chicken. I was calm, considering that I now spent $8 on one chicken breast. Oh well, I learned my lesson, mistakes happen, and I will not assume others will check the surroundings before using the stove.

I went to the open market this week, not scheduled into my “3 personal hours”, but I did not care. It was great! I did not buy anything, but found some good deals and lots of fresh fruits and veggies.



The best thing about school this week was our last lecture on Friday was cancelled. We were all so happy! We were having a guest lecture, but his lecture materials got taken away by the cleaning people. The question is who paid the janitor??? I felt bad for the speaker because he had his notes, books, CD-ROMs, and all of his materials in an evidence bag and the janitor took it away. I wonder why did the janitor grab an evidence bag? If it was not in the trash it should not have been touched? Our group was pretty useful with our “extra” hours and went to the library to do some research on the Human Genome Project (4000 word essay due at the end of the month).



I went to a baptism at my church on Saturday for a guy named Emerson. He speaks mainly Portuguese, but I talk to him in Spanish and we understand each other… for the most part. Anyway, it was great because the Spirit was so strong, so even if you did not speak Spanish or Portuguese, you could feel the Spirit testify to you.