WARNING - THIS POST MAY CONTAIN FOUL LANGUAGE

As if any of my posts DON'T contain foul language. In fact, I have a bit of a reputation to maintain, such that, when I was off work, one of the staff who was replacing me told me that she tried to drop as many "F-Bombs" as possible, but she didn't think she'd met my quota.

Anyhoo, on to my rant.

All term, I have loved my math class, and excelled in my math class, and even when I thought I bombed a test, I truly didn't. I liked my teacher, in fact, I found him adorable, not in a sexy prof kinda way, but in an *I'd like to take him home and keep him in a room with fresh soft cedar sawdust and feed him small pieces of fruit* kind of way. And try as I might to find a way to turn off the clicky noise on my camera phone so that I might secretly take a picture of him and post it on this blog, I can't. So I have resorted instead, to finding a picture of Kip Dynamite, who I may say, bears an uncanny resemblance to Mr. Besler, minus about 15 - 20 years. Use your imagination.




Last Friday we were supposed to have a big midterm, worth 18% of our grade. I studied my toosh off, and even saw my lovely granola tutor an extra time that week, to be extra prepared. Additionally, I left work a few minutes early such that I could be at class early, stress free, and ready to dazzle with my miraculous math capabilities. As I neared the classroom, I knew something was awry. Students milling outside the door with both panicked and blissful looks upon their faces. The professor wasn't there. Class was cancelled. No exam.

(*This is the part where the cursing begins*)

What the fuck? No midterm? No prof? No word about what the hell was going on? While many of the students clutched their pencils and ran for their lives, I stayed in the class room talking to a few other students, until I was confident this really was real. He really wasn't showing. But what now? When will the midterm be? Monday? Tuesday? Is he obligated to give us some notice? How will we know?

So I went home, did other assignments, worked away, studied more math, saw the granola tutor another time, and then went to school on Monday. There we were again, sitting there, wondering what the hell was going on. 5-7 minutes goes by, and suddenly, in rushes this guy who looks like Geoff Daniels in Dumb and Dumber, and sounds like he's trying to make a funny voice. He tells us our midterm is about to begin, and then slaps the paper down on the desk in front of us. I'm kinda stunned, but pull out my pencil as fast as can be, and start crunching numbers. The girl who sits next to me is a heavy breather on the best of days, and she has a cold. This invigilator guy spends the entire time pacing around the room, and writing how much time we have left on the chalk board about every 3 minutes. This is all very distracting. And of course, since he arrived late, we ran out of time, and the majority of the class didn't finish the exam. Personally, I didn't even get to the last 2 problems, each worth 5 marks (test was out of 50).

Tuesday rolls around, and Teach is finally back. He has had a death in the family, and has been responsible for making arrangements. I'm very very sorry to hear this. He has a stack of miterms in his hand, already been marked (it normally takes about a week to get them back). They have been marked by the Geoff Daniels guy from yesterday. He has marked them differently than Teach normally marks them, so accordingly he has scaled them by adding 3 marks to each test. And that didn't make much fucking difference, cause the entire class bombed the test. And then Teach, visibly upset, had the audacity to stand up there and berate us for not studying enough.

The following are my issues:

-rescheduled the test with no notice
-invigilator was late to class, thus reducing time to write it
-invigilator was distracting to people trying to write the test
-someone other than the person who has marked the 3 previous tests marked this test

3 marks are supposed to make up for this?

And the kicker is that now he wants to schedule a 1.5 hour make up class for the one where there was no teacher, and he's scheduled it right in the middle of my fucking work day.

What the fuck?

Letting Go

On February 25, 2003, I joined WeightWatchers. I lost, officially, 26lbs, but unofficially, I think closer to 35lbs since there was a time I just didn't weigh myself. I had this pair of jeans that I looked shit hot in on my 20th birthday, and then quite promptly porked up and couldn't even squeeze my fat ass into them. I kept them for 4 years, and when I finally fit into them again, they were so out of date, I immediately threw them away. It felt pretty fucking good to say, "These pants fit me now, but now they're ug-lee! Out pants, out!". I think I cut them up and made them into a skirt I sometimes wear. I also kept a shirt, not for quite as long, but a cool-cat cool shirt. It didn't fit when I was fat, and hey, 26-35lbs later, it still didn't fit. Seems my muscle composition had shifted all around, what with me being more active like, and that shirt just didn't want to fit over my lats. Dang. So, I made sure it went to a good home, and it really does look quite fetching on the lovely Tatjana.

To the point. I reached my goal weight in September 2003, right around the time Paul (who has requested I start calling him T.A.), so right around the time T.A. and I started dating (no, there's no reason behind the name change, just something he decided over the weekend, in the car, on the way to the grocery store. "Hey, Babe, do you think you could start calling me T.A.?", "Uh, why?", "No reason, I just think it sounds cool".)I was finally invincibly thin. Ha! I had conquered my fat, my flab, my flubber, my blubber, my rump, my rhind, my pork, my spork, my spam. You get the point. I had done it. I was amazing. I could eat what ever I wanted. Within, oh, I don't know, 6 months, I had gone up at least 15lbs again. So I re started the plan, re committed, and just about a year ago, I reached my goal again. I even went below my goal, and decided I would try to hit 10lbs below goal, but that started to make me feel sick all the time, so I cut out that nonsense.

So, letting go. I have been at, or below goal for nearly a year. I have stopped using the resources I pay for. I think it's time to cancel my membership with the wonderful people at WeightWatchers. I have cancelled my membership. I am panicking. I don't know if I'm ready to let go. Can I do it? Can I maintain without the aid of a service I stopped using at least 6 months ago? I'm going to try. I'm going to keep up my weekly weigh in's at home, but without the neat little chart that shows me where I began, and what I accomplished. I'm going to keep telling myself mentally, that salad is 0pts, that oreo is 2pts. Make the right choice. And I'm going to pretend that the after school snack I just ate wasn't 11 pts. Without the pts calculator, I'll never know. It'll be my little secret. Only me, and my ass will know. And everyone looking at my ass. So please, be a good friend, take a look at my ass every once in a while, and let me know how she's a-lookin.

I'm letting go.

(Note to self, find before and after pictures to post. Then I can direct all the 'you lost THAT MUCH?' inquiries here.)

(Note to everyone else. When I just ran this through the blogger spell checker, it suggested that I replace the word 'Tatjana' with the word 'Datsun'.)

Whirling Dervish (wurl-ing dur-vish) n. 1. A mystical
dancer who stands between the material and cosmic
worlds. His dance is part of a sacred ceremony
in which the dervish rotates in a precise rhythm.
He represents the earth revolving on its axis while
orbiting the sun. The purpose of the ritual whirling
is for the dervish to empty himself of all distracting
thoughts, placing him in trance; released from
his body he conquers dizziness.

Gregangelo's Whirling Circus Dervish.
n. 1. A circus version of the sacred dance combining
ancient, contemporary, and futuristic media. The dance
depicts the creation of the Universe through a spinning
series of fantastic formations, metamorphoses, elaborate
costumes, and rhythmic dance. 2. A figure of speech
used in reference to one who exhibits vigorous energy.

Updated updates

1) I still have not spotted the owner of the beastly pink hummer. I've tried, oh, how I've tried. I typically arrive at school at about 13:25, and it is not there. When I'm leaving at about 14:35, it has appeared. Does the driver have a 1:30 class, a 2pm class? What? There is one teeny little fake n baked blond girl who routinely breezes into math class about 5 minutes late . . . hmmmmm.

2) The IUD is settling into it's new home quite nicely. Uterus was pretty pissed off about it for about 5 days, but I think she realized that the IUD is here to stay, so she settled down. Thar she goes, thar, thar.

3) Turns out I didn't bomb my math test after all. I got 84%! Not quite as well as I would have liked, but hello, I didn't even think I passed it. Glancing at it when it was returned today, I was on the right track for all of the questions, and yes, number 6 COULD be solved by factoring and then using the zero product property, but alas, it couldn't be solved the way I was going with it. Why? Because 3 x 5 is NOT 8. No, it's 15. Geeze. And the big bad word problem, I was doing it perfectly, only for some unknown reason, instead of writing the number 25 down (as in 2500/25) I wrote the number 125. Where that 1 came from, I'll never know. So then the answer, which SHOULD have been the square root of 100, which is 10, turned out as the square root of 20, which is 4.somethingsomething. Blah. Reasons not to write your math tests in a state of bleary wide eyed tireness and complete panic all at once. But I did have a nice chit chat with the prof after class, who said he sensed the panicked state of my quiz, but boosted my fradgile little math ego by saying that at least my math is strong enough that I can be that rushed and panicked and still salvage the test. He thought it was silly that I'd been depressed and embarassed all week. Still, I'm going to see my math tutor TWO times next week. A little math therapy.

4) I just had coffee with my ex boyfriend, ConstaPle Doug (who inspite of having checked his badge for the correct spelling, still used the P when signing his emails), and wow, does he ever look young. I wonder if he looked that young when we were dating? No, younger. Still cute as can be, but my cradle robbin' days are ovah. Especially now that he has a gun.

That last one isn't really an update at all, but I thought I'd throw 'er in anyhow.

Ta Ta.

A quick note to let you all know I've changed the settings on this, so you now don't need a blogger ID to leave comments. Comment away!

Ga-Rumble

Grrr grrr grrrrr. I felt like the biggest rock star in my math class up until yesterdays mini-midterm. I made the classic mistake of spending way too much time on one problem, and then knowing I was running out of time for the rest of the test, panicking and doing a really sloppy job of it. I even was trying to solve word problems in my sleep last night. Okay, this is only 1 of 5 tests we right this term and I scored in the high 90's on the first two, and still have 2 to go, including the big final, so I'm still in a good position to come out of it all with an A, so long as I dust myself off, admit this was just 1 bad midterm, and carry on. I'm almost a little embarrassed though, like I want to send my prof an email and say, hey, I studied, I really did, I just couldn't remember the formula for difference of cubes, and I had to figure that out, and factor the heck out of it before I could carry on with solving rational expressions. And I KNOW that number 6 was not supposed to be a quadratic equation. Oh, or was it . . . could it have been solved using the zero product property? FUCK!

I am taking a small amount of comfort in the fact that all of this frustration is coming from a girl who only 10 years ago (only . . .) got a whopping 9% on the math 12 provincial, and flunked the entire year. Now I've faced my old nemesis head on, and am actually succeeding, and not only that, ENJOYING it. Wow. That boggles my mind. To further that, the frustration this time around comes from KNOWING where I went wrong, and desperately wanting to fix it, not from knowing absolutely fucking nothing, and feeling like I'm drowning in a sea of curly brackets.

There are not enough hours in the day. I do not get enough sleep. I wake up every morning and wish it were the weekend, and I didn't have to get out of bed. It was an insane idea to go back to school and work full time all the while (though I'll readily admit that while I am over worked, over tired, and stressed out, I am also happier than I have been in years. Perhaps since I lived in New Zealand and first experienced serenity. I am by no means serene right now, but quite satisfied).

Friends, brace yourselves for next term when I will attempt to tackle math and chemistry simultaneously. I will be a whirling dervish.

Contest Contestant

In the spring there was this contest on the Food Network that I wanted to enter, but didn't. It was called 'The Superstar Chef Challenge' and the winner would get an opportunity to sit down with Food Network executives, and pitch and idea for their own show. I didn't enter, mainly because I was too embarrassed to have any of my friends tape me for the necessary 5 minute video of cooking/ loving the camera. Many friends offered, don't get me wrong, the support was there, I just didn't get around to it. Paul kept bugging me about that, saying that if I was going to do it on TV, I should be able to do it in front of him. I maintain that it would be easier in front of strangers. I know this is true (for me anyways), because when I teach courses I have no problem getting up infront of a group of strangers and making an ass out of myself, but if there is anyone I know in that group, it's another story.

So anyways, the contest finally aired, and I kicked myself hard for not entering. I thought I could have done as well as any of the 6 finalists they had on TV. The winner did have formal culinary training, which I do not, but I thought she was perhaps lacking some presence, and since I have not (yet) seen a show on the Food Network Starring her, I guess the executives agreed.

Now a second chance has been granted. They're doing the contest again. And this time, I'll enter, I swear I will. I have to have everything in and done by December 15th, so now it's brainstorming time. I have to create a 5 min tape of me cooking my 'signature dish' all the while hamming it up with the camera. I also have to send in a recent photo, a release form, and 100 word answers to 3 questions. I have decided on one friend who I feel alright about filming me, and since we've taught together before, I feel comfortable doing ass-making type things in front of her. Plus, she's got oodles of free time on her hands at the moment. So now I just have to figure out what I'll make, and how I'll squish it into 5 minutes, or how to edit a video. It's all very exciting.

Yippie-I-yee my IUD

Well, it's done, it's in, it's there. I got a quicker-than-expected appointment with the specialist (thanks to some string pulling by Dr. Mom) and yesterday had an appointment for a simple consultation to discuss my post-clot birth control options. We discussed a special progesterone only birth control pill normally prescribed to breast feeding mothers, the depo-provera injection, which wasn't really an option at all, the Mirena IUD, which in addition to being an IUD, also has a slow release progesterone hormone in it that is released over a five year period, and the regular plain ol' copper T type IUD, the ParaGard. I went with the basic one for one main reason: 1) There are no hormones in it - while the Mirena is said to be slightly more effective, it also can have the side effect of making your period stop altogether. I'm not cool with that - as much of a pain my period can be, I like the assurance of it's presence. So, the consultation ended, and the nice doctor asked when I would like to get it, I said the sooner the better, and she said how about right now. Okay! So she injected some freezing into my cervix, which probably hurt more than the whole insertion, but maybe that would have been a different story had my cervix not been frozen. And then quick as could be, it was in. Wow. I feel a bit weird now knowing that I'm wandering around with a foreign body embedded in my uterus, and even weirder knowing that I have to check frequently to ensure my uterus doesn't reject and spit it out. And for you visual folks, here's a picture of the little bugger