Friday, September 12, 2008

...like a chicken with its head cut off.

Life went from busy to nearly-out-of-control-losing-my-mind busy (wow, that WORD was busy).

Since the last time I updated (read "really updated"), school has started back up for me here at Pitt. I really love it here: there's such an atmosphere about it. Everything from the buildings like the Cathedral of Learning to the faculty and staff - all is wonderful. Well, actually, I can't say that. But we'll come back to that in a bit.


Anyway, school has also started up for my siblings. In fact, we all started the same day (the 25th). To be honest, this fact alone has made my life a living hell - even trumping my college homework - over the past two weeks. Between my brother needing help with geometry and the twins needing help figuring out how to work the PA Cyber school online program PLUS all of their homework, I barely have enough time to do my own. It's actually resulting in a lot of last-minute (what I like to call) "puke-up" homework where I pretty much BS my way through the assignment to get enough length on it even though I probably didn't do the reading needed to write the essay/paper/short answer well. Alas. But I am apparently good at it though, because I haven't had any poor gradings on them yet.

On the other hand...

I don't think one needs to be a Hindu to believe in the idea of Karma, which is (as one definition reads) "the effects of all deeds actively create past, present, and future experiences, thus making one responsible for one's own life, and the pain and joy it brings to him/her and others." I usually see this mostly in the teams I end up on when playing volleyball on Thursday nights: I get on the elite team at the beginning of the night and we dominate every other team, laughing in their faces and making them kiss our big toes (okay, I embellish); then Karma kicks in and I get stuck with the clumsy, uncoordinated people of the group, and we lose every game.

Anyway, back to how this relates to school.

I'm taking a Statistics course and my teacher is positively off the wall. On top of being down-right scary looking, she's flighty, absent-minded, and clueless to the fact that all the students know it and are making fun of her. I missed my very first recitation for this class due to circumstances outside of my control. I told her this and asked if there were a way to make it up. She told me to just wait a week and go to the next one. I did this (already a week behind in homework, mind you) and lo and behold! No one was there! Apparently, they moved recitation and didn't tell me. So that's two weeks of homework in the hole. Finally, I am able to make it to the third week. The TA is Hungarian and very soft spoken, so I had a difficult time making out what she was saying over the two air conditioners in the room. The period seemed short: she spent the first 15 minutes milling about jotting things on the board and the remainder of the class was spent showing us how to take a survey on the Stats website and assigning a quiz to us (which I ended up taking and definitely bombing). I met with her afterwards to schedule a meeting to get me caught up. The guy next to me was nice enough to give me the website with the homework syllabus on it. I was ready to pull all of my hair out.

So one bogus class out of five isn't bad, right?

...right? :-(

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