I am feeling like crap. I did terribly on my physics homework, I ate too much candy, my mom's not home. I am stressing. I wish I had someone to talk to right now. Blogger will have to do instead. I am tired. I am tired of worrying. I feel like I have to control everything- I have to do the best presentation, I have to be nice, I have to get up and exercise and not eat junk food, I have to pray and read the Bible, I have to read these books that will enrich my mind.
I wish I didn't feel like I am the only person in the world. I used to have this whole impression of what the world was about, but it's gone now. I don't know how to be. I wish I could go back to being an observer looking down at the the world and not a badly faltering participant. No I don't......yes I do.

So busy. I am really starting to get that nervous end-of-the-year feeling. I've got presentations to give, tests to take, homework to e-mail, documents to write. I registered for the last courses I will take at this place. Well, hopefully. It all feels very final, not nearly as final as a graduation, but getting there.
I bombed my physics test. Sixty-three percent. I got this really easy question wrong and the professor even mentioned my stupid mistake to the whole class. Everyone laughed. That's what I get for not studying and not going to class a couple times. I do not understand buoyancy. It is a miracle to me how an object can float in water. I thought I learned this in high school. Apparently not.

I turned in the SRS today and I actually felt like we did a good, professional job this time. Those grammar and formatting mistakes were finally corrected. I felt really proud when I turned in a bound copy of the document to my professor, like it was the Constitution or something. I don't know- I guess I love to work and as a student this is my professional duty.

What a day. I am glad it is over. All I have wanted to do today is to climb back into bed and sleep some more. I had to work with this guy from my group and it was utter torture. I felt like I was doing all the work, and forcing him to go along with whatever I said, and I was nervous the whole time about what I was doing. I hate to work in groups where by wanting to revise something you end up hurting people's feelings, i.e. I want to correct this stuff but I don't want to tell you that I want to change it because it makes me seem like a jerk and it makes you feel like crap. I know we try to maintain some kind of professionalism, but I myself tend to take things kind of personal and I know it can hurt when someone doesn't think your work is great. This other guy in our group is like, yeah, go ahead and change it, you're going to change it anyway. A vote of confidence? I don't think so. More like apathy. I wish our group could agree to be gung-ho or agree to not care. I wish I could just let everyone else do all the work and not care. Like that's going to happen ;). Still, I wish that I weren't so uptight about the whole thing.
I am not very resourceful. I hate, hate, hate to ask people for stuff. I don't have friends in high places. I am out of the loop, so out of the loop that I have created my own loop. This bothers me only on certain occasions when I am found alone once again in the computer lab or I have trouble with assignments and don't have anyone to turn to for help. Maybe it's not that people hate me, it's just that they don't really seem to like me. It is a rare thing indeed when someone goes out of their way to say hi to me or seems like they really want to see me when I bump into them in the hall. I guess it was just a bad day.
In other news I have to finish my arch assignment tonight. I am really dreading it and once again I have put it off to the last minute. I also took a physics test today and I think I bombed it. I couldn't remember whether v stood for volume or velocity. Actually, I'm pretty sure it stood for volume. So what about velocity? Oh no. Anyway, so there's my school life, briefly. Good thing it's almost over, otherwise I would quit.

My attempt to wean myself off caffeine lasted all of 20 hours when I suffered a severe headache and caved in when the temptation became too great. Mom's like, hey, let's go buy some sodas. I'm like, no, no, I'm trying to get myself unaddicted. Hours later, still suffering, I am in Mom's car at the 7-11 waiting for her to return with two 12-packs, one Pepsi and the other Diet Pepsi. Ah, why did I cave? And why do I know I will face the same headache tomorrow?

Forrest Gump is on right now, which is funny because I was just thinking about that movie a few days ago. Forrest Gump used to be my favorite movie, but I really don't know why. It's not like I lived through most of the stuff in the movie, or if I did I don't remember it. It's a movie that is a mish-mash of a lot of things- humor, drama, wacky through-the-generations cultural references, Southern sayings, and cool music. The characters are memorable- Lieutenant Dan, Bubba, Jenny, Forrest, Forrest's Momma- and they're surprisingly complex. I guess that's why I like the movie, in a nutshell.

OK excuse me for saying so, but I am experiencing some serious PMS. Why is PMS such a cliche when it feels so real? It's not like my emotional crisis is any less real just because it is caused by hormonal surges. Sometimes I hate being a woman. Anxiety is hard-wired into our brains. Women are statistically much more likely than men to get depressed. On the other hand, men are more likely to shoot things than women, lol. It bothers me that a woman is constantly judged on her looks. If you're not attractive to men then you don't matter as a person. But that's the world for you. And then men act as if women's wants are mystical and dismiss them as something they just put up with rather than real concerns. Take the movie "What Women Want" as an example. Why is it that women are seen as totally unreasonable because they want a basic amount of love and respect? Women are inherently sensitive; men are inherently insensitive. It's all in the viewing.

It's April 25. Tinseltown is opening on the westside, so that's the highlight of my entire day. It's almost May, almost time for my birthday. Yay- we're going to Vegas. We as in me, my mom, and my aunt. I'll be 21, which means I can gamble and drink all I want, not that I really have an overwhelming desire to do either. I've managed to go this far without drinking, why do I want to start now? Maybe I'll have like one drink just to prove that I can.
I have actually managed to be somewhat productive today despite getting up at 9 am. I started on my architecture homework. Usually that is like pulling teeth with me. But no, my program is up and running. I have also been doing some career research stuff, like looking at job listings and grad school programs on the Internet. I change my mind about my plans frequently. One day I say I am so tired of school that I can't wait to leave and never come back. I want to get out into the real world and do something that actually matters to people's lives. Oh yeah, and make money.
The next day, I'm like, well, what's two more years compared to my whole life? So I'll be poor for a couple of years, but that's OK. Despite what I say I like being a student for the most part - not having to stick to a set schedule, being able to work from home a lot, and I like doing research. Two words: summers off.
Both options are kind of daunting to me, and one doesn't seem more natural than the other. Job market: I have no experience. I know some stuff about programming, but it's mostly not practical job skills. Also, the job market stinks right now, especially here in EP. I would probably have to move somewhere else, something I am uncertain about.
Grad school: I would have to scramble to get in and to get some money, and I really hate that kind of stuff. GRE, writing essays, getting letters of recommendation, bringing up my less than stellar CS grades and lack of extracurricular activities. My worst fear is that I'll get in to grad school and I will fail miserably. I have kind of breezed through my undergrad classes without doing much work but I have a feeling that's not going to cut it in grad school.
Third option- the wildcard. Go for something off the beaten path. Things I have given some thought to - business, journalism, tech writing, the Peace Corps, traveling around until I decide.
Right now it's really a toss-up. I wish I could just decide so I could at least make some kind of plans. If I don't decide, I'm probably going to be unemployed sitting around at my mom's house watching TV all day, and as tempting as that sounds, ummm....no.

Hey I'm back again. My work is done for now- the document is done, with some glaring errors still, but done nevertheless. I submitted my physics homework over the Internet and after a few tries I got all the answers right. I am thinking about going to see a movie, maybe Anger Management. It sounds funny and I need a break from this mind-numbing routine. That's about it for now.

Time for an update. I am getting really behind on my work. Group assignment due tomorrow and I am finding it hard to believe that we can finish every detail tonight. I can't believe what a flake I am. I space out sometimes and I contradict myself all the time. I took a two-hour nap today when I have a million things to do.
I went to visit my dad yesterday. He had knee surgery. My dad is hardly ever sick, so it was weird to see him sitting there on his bed, in a huge black leg brace, watching TV. On one of his legs, they wrote in black marker NO, so that they wouldn't cut into the wrong leg. And then he threw up in a bucket while we were there. Yeah, so funny. But he seemed OK, maybe a little groggy, talking and laughing with me and my sister. Poor Dad, I feel so bad for him.

I have had a bad morning. It started late last night, actually, when I realized I have a physics assignment due Wednesday that I didn't even know about. I also have an Arch assignment due Monday. I got up at 7 AM hoping to get through some of that pile of SRS crap that I have to work on. Not much luck there- I was back in bed at 8:45!
I gave my 4-minute speech today and it went well. The professor actually complimented me on it. What a relief. Still, there's so much to be done. SRS due Wednesday. Physics Wednesday. Arch. Monday. Last day of class is less than two weeks away. AHHHH.

Hey, wouldn't it be cool to post every hour, 24 hours a day? I heard about a blogathon like that for charity or something, but that was about a year ago. Even when I'm crunched for time I always want to write something deep and heart-wrenching for every blog post, when I should stick to the mundane because you can't always be deep, sometimes it's like what I had for lunch and how I slept last night. Actually, most of the time, but I try to extrapolate it into some deep thought when it is really brain farts.
I watched this TV movie based on the book Ice Bound. The book is really cool, if you haven't read it you should check it out, Ice Bound by Dr. Jerri Nielsen (I think that's how you spell her name). I've always wanted to try something like that, not get cancer, I mean live somewhere remote like the South Pole.
I always thought I'd be the adventurer in the family, but strangely enough, it is not me but my sister who is moving to Alaska, and my other sister wants to go to China. For a while I flirted with the idea of backpacking through Europe, but the practical side of me always wins out, I mean, the expense, the frivolity of it. A lot of my fears center around how would I tell my parents that I'm going to backpack by myself through Europe. It's something that rich kids do, kids who can afford it, not people like me.
I have this secret dream of writing the next On the Road. Travelogues are my favorite kinds of books. Blue Highways, Out of Africa, Peace Corps stories even. Truth is stranger than fiction.

Back at my good old computer again, ah, how I wish I did not have to be here. My mom gave me a really big hug before I left and it seemed like she actually wanted me to stay. I wish I could have stayed, too, had yet more food and talked and watched a movie on TV but no, back to the old friendly PC for me.
I love my family, just being around them and feeling like I belong there. I can look at my cousins and remember back to when we used to jump on the trampoline together when we were kids, and I know that they remember, too. We cook outdoors and have too many drinks and eat too much and it is fun. Easter means cascarones, though those were kind of scarce this year. You can actually buy them ready-made at the store now, which is kind of crazy.
I got to see a sonogram picture of my cousin's unborn baby. My grandma and aunts and uncles and I watched Animal Police or something like that on Animal Planet.
My dad bought me an Easter basket, something he does every year, even though I am 20 years old this year, almost 21. My mom got me a card shaped like a cross and $20. I have good parents, that's for sure. TINSTAAFL except when it comes to my parents.

Once again I am popping out of my pants. Size 16 and I'm popping out of them. I gained 10 pounds? How did that happen? Hmmm........I wonder.
I feel lousy. I have given up on my body. All I ever think about is wow, I'm fat, I need to lose weight, as if just by doing that all my problems would go away.
I remember this picture of me taken when I was about 16. I would post it here if I could, but I can't, so I'll just describe it. It was taken during an Easter egg hunt. I was wearing khaki pants (size 4) and a gray shirt. It was so windy and my hair was flying. I had this big smile on my face for some reason. I always think of that as the best I've ever looked. Size 4? They were a little tight, I guess, but still.
And now, this. I feel relegated to being an ugly girl for the rest of my life. Even at a size 4 at age 16, I wasn't really pretty. Not ugly, but average, I would say. I've always had horrible fashion sense. I bought two gray-blue shirts and wore them for basically my entire 10th grade year of high school. Jeans and a
t-shirt, except for Sundays when I would wear the khakis. I would wear my hair one of two ways: down or up in a ponytail. Both ways looked equally bad. Never wore makeup. Always parted my hair straight down the middle. Dirty white tennis shoes to complete the look. Yeah, that was me, the high school geek stereotype.
So now that I'm 20 you'd think I changed some. Still got the jeans, though now they're a little bigger, still got the T-shirts but they aren't *all* gray anymore. Same dirty shoes. Same hairstyle, though I think my ponytail has improved. Ever the geek, but now I'm fat as well as nerdy.

It's 10:35 on Friday night and I'm listening to the title track of Moby's 18 album. I can't think of what else to do to ease my mind since I ate the last bit of Rocky Road ice cream. Blogger and Moby- what a combo. It's the "I'm depressed" special.

It's a pity party and I'm the guest of honor- All right, more stuff from my mind. I met with my group today. I was almost embarrassed to meet with them because I felt like I had done such a horrible job butchering up our assignment. Ah, come on, at least I turned it in. Not like the other groups did such a great job.
I feel like I always say too much. I wish I could just say very little and have the things I say always be right. Every sentence would be some wonderful platitude, and I would never think back to something I have said and think that I was totally wrong and I must have looked like an idiot.
I want to be right, so I act like a know-it-all. The things I know turn out to be wrong, or worse, I make something up to make myself look smarter. Open mouth, insert foot. Come on, we can't all be right all the time. Stupid things will be said, stupid things will be done, misunderstandings will occur. The things I say are rarely, if ever, 100-percent accurate. Eighty percent max. Still, it seems like everyone else who is worth anything says intelligent things. And me, I say things that are weird and sometimes spaced-out, pseudo-intellectual, lacking depth, anxious to a fault. Yeah, I'm supposed to know everything....but I don't.
I revel in the hard times (yes, there have been hard times), the days of depression and death, the days of addiction and psychological disorders, the days after the divorce. Days when I've had no friends. The weeks of sickness and stress and there's no way out.

Just back from my mom's house. Survivor turned out to be a crappy recap show. Darn. I was looking forward to it. So we rented The Tuxedo instead. Cool movie, Jackie Chan is really funny. And dinner was good, too, roast beef, baked potatoes, and a tossed salad. See ya tomorrow......

Thursday afternoon and I am not feeling so damn tired now. It's humid, cloudy, windy, and dusty. It's a day where the dust just kind of hangs in the air. My allergies are acting up again. I feel like Chuckie on Rugrats sometimes, you know, the kid with the perpetually-stuffed-up nose.
I thought that we had some kind of spectacular Easter vacation coming up but it's a bummer of a break. I have a speech coming up on Monday and a group meeting on Friday. I'll get to see my family on the weekend, so I suppose that's a positive, but overall I was hoping that I could really truly kick back after last weekend's work marathon. Sadly, not to be.

I am downright lethargic. I literally almost slept through physics class- it was 1:30 and I was still in bed. Now I am craving some fast food. I want something spicy. Yum. I also want to rent some videos. For some reason, I want to see A Streetcar Named Desire. But I don't know if I will buy anything because cash funds are once again running low :-(.

So there I am at almost 2 AM and I e-mail my team members because I didn't get any of the e-mails and attachment files that I needed. It sounds stupid, but my inbox was too full, and right when I needed it the most I reached the limit. And this girl absolutely amazes me and instantly becomes my personal hero. First of all, she's actually *awake* at 3 in the morning, second, she checks her e-mail, third she not only e-mails me all the stuff that I need, she puts together the rest of the document, and e-mails it back to me.
I, on the other hand, feel like a first-class idiot. Sure, I'll do everything, guys, I'll finish up by 8, I told my other team members. Yeah, right, I knew I was in over my head. I'm so disorganized it takes me forever to finish anything. I can't even find the files and then I put them in and then suddenly it *has* to be perfect. In the process of *perfecting* I delete the template header and footer and the cover page becomes a giant mess. It takes me an hour to put the page numbers back on the thing and make something that passes for a cover page, and it still looks off somehow.
If I can't even put together a freakin' MS Word document how am I going to program this thing? How many CS majors does it take to screw in a light bulb? I am continually amazed at my lack of common sense.

Thank the Lord I have slept.

I feel like crap. No matter what I do it's not good enough. I took on too much and I feel exhausted. I feel like such a screw-up, it's like I am dependent on everyone else and can't do anything on my own. I haven't slept and I feel like a zombie. I've been up for VH1 Insomniac Music Theater like 3 or 4 days in a row. It's like the more I do, the more I mess things up. I claim to be a perfectionist but I'm really a worry wart. I wish for a vacation and never to have to design a piece of software *ever* again as long as I live.

It's Sunday evening and I feel spent, even though the work is just beginning for me. I spent 3 hours with my group today to prepare for the software requirements specification which is due tomorrow night. Yes, tomorrow, my friends. As in tomorrow, complete, with all requirements that our software system needs to perform.
One of the group members has missed not one but two meetings in a row, and that upsets me. The thing is due in less than 48 hours. I don't want to be a tight-ass but come on, man, let's get with it. I think I'm going to be up late tonight. Again.

All right, I cleaned, give me some credit for that at least. I've got it down into a routine now- First I clean my bedroom, then I start on the kitchen, go to the bathroom sink, shower, toilet. Last thing is to sweep, and mop. It's pretty gross sometimes- my roommate is pretty bad about taking out the trash and doing dishes and stuff, and since we both have long hair there is hair everywhere. Also, I found two tiny brown spiders on the floor. Gross.

Three emtpy Coke cans, an empty styrofoam container, empty Cranberry Apple Raspberry juice bottle, Tuesday's version of the EP Times, a blue plate with two congealed drops of Ranch on it, pile of dirty laundry and my unmade bed hovering four feet above it all.

I got six hours of sleep last night. That's enough to make me cranky. I dragged myself out of bed at 7:30 so I could be at the lab at 8:30 to do my group work. Then no one shows up for our 9:30 meeting. The biggest assignment of the semester is due Tuesday morning, and no one shows up and I am getting angry. I think I just need to go back to bed.

It's late and I'm a little tired so I'll try to keep this short, lol. I woke up late, at almost 9. I went to class at 1:30 and both my lab partners were absent so I ended up working with this guy I didn't know. Then I started studying for my SQL test in database class. I think I covered all the bases on the test, but maybe a couple of details were off. Then a two-hour group meeting. I didn't even realize we had been there for two hours because I got so caught up in it. I get annoyed at my group members sometimes because I think we sit around too much. I always want to cut to the chase and not be timid about discussing things, but it's a fine line between "discussing things" and offending someone. I've had times where I didn't agree with what someone said at all and have just gone along with it. I've also had times where I sensed that my group members weren't on the same train of thought as I was. On one hand, I don't really like being criticized, but on the other, I wish they would just tell me what they think so I wouldn't have to guess! I think we get bogged down in the details, and I always want to say, we are making this too damn complicated.

I have studied Object-Oriented Programming over and over again and I feel like I know it like the back of my hand. However, there are some lingering doubts about it in my mind. Is it really a revolutionary idea or is it just a buzzword that people like to throw around? My personal theory is that it is a school of thought, a trend, but the ideas it is based on are sound.
I had a really hard time figuring out OOP when I first learned about it. I had spent a whole year learning about C++. Every program I ever wrote was based on these little function calls. Then we get to OOP (but we didn't actually call it that in class) and I was totally lost. It sounds funny now, but the constructor method really confused me. And not having to pass around variables was odd, too.
Done right, OOP is a good idea. But if you're trying to make Java into C++ (something I tend to do a lot), then it just makes things more confusing. I wrote a program for my architecture class that simulated hardware components and it made such perfect sense to create a class for each component. Before that I wrote a program to simulate a context-free grammar and it turned into a C++ program wannabe. It was a huge mess. Almost every method was in one class, so it was not modularized. Standard input in Java is really awful, too, and so is parsing (but it's a headache in C++, too). Anyway, that was a bad experience, and I guess it probably could have been done better with some more planning.
I think I'm just tired of learning about OOP and it being presented as the model of programming. In ten, twenty years I'm sure something else will replace it, so what's the big deal? Until then, I guess I'm stuck with Java because, for better or for worse, it's what I know best.

I think I'm losing it again. I actually put in a "full day", an 8-to-5. I am tired. I am sick of talking to people, being around people, running into people that make me nervous.

OK so I'm going to write about what's on my mind. I'm trying to stick to one topic in my blog posts- see previous posts. But that's not really how I write at all. I have the attention span of a five-year-old, really. I go from the computer to the TV back to the computer, turn on a CD, read a chapter of a book, do my homework, kind of a rotation of all those things. I guess it's a college thing :). So I've been doing a bunch of crap. Let me slap myself a couple of times here- I watch so much TV. My apartment is such a mess. Why can't I even clean the sink? I stayed up almost all night last night. I finished up my report comparing Washington, D.C., with San Jose, CA. Give me a break. They basically have nothing in common. To think of actually moving to either one of those cities is strange. Washington is cool and everything, but wouldn't it get old after awhile? Same with San Jose. Same with anywhere, really.
I wrote a bunch of stuff about my dad and about the divorce that I don't really want to post yet. It's not coherent yet, it's just a bunch of emotional stuff, things I remember. I want to really try to get down what actually happened into a somewhat complete account. But I don't even want to think about it too much. It's painful and it's in the past. I need more time to work on it and then I might consider posting it.
I read something in Carolyn Hax's advice column in the Washington Post: Overeating is a form of self-mutilation. I guess I already knew that, but that word, mutilation, is really strong. When I hear mutilation, I think of people slashing their wrists or cutting off body parts or piercing their tongues. I suppose overeating is no different from other forms of self-destruction in that you are seeking some kind of twisted comfort by intentionally harming yourself.

I'm turning into a redneck (lol) - Today was all about pure country. I rented Songcatcher, a movie about Appalachian mountain music (also about lesbians, but that's another story) and then I flipped on the TV to Nashville Star, or whatever it's called, that show that's American Idol meets the Grand Ole Opry. That's actually a pretty cool show, different from American Idol because the contestants actually write their own songs ("Greyhound Bus to Nowhere", "You're the Best Thing That I Never Knew I Wanted") and some even play instruments. Ah, the joys of a Saturday night ;-). All I need to do now is put on my cowboy hat and boots and drive my truck down to the ranch.

We meet again - I ran into one of my old crushes yesterday. I didn't say much, just some stuff about church. I asked what he was studying, and he said English literature with a minor in education. It made me wish I hadn't waited until seven years after I met him to try to get to know him better, but, hey, at least it's a start.

To renew or not? I love my little apartment so much. I've had seven blissful months here of the independent life, coming and going as I please, visiting my parents or not, not having to drive through rush hour traffic every damn morning, having a place to rest and relax between classes rather than go to the computer lab. To give it up is going to be painful.

So here we go, another week, the earth keeps on spinning, I'm getting closer to the end of the semester and closer to finishing school. I went to a career fair yesterday and there were a few engineering/IT companies there. I passed out my resume but they weren't hiring any new grads anyway. I have a feeling that the choices are going to be difficult, and I'm going to have to decide whether I really want to stay here or not. I would probably have an easier time getting a job somewhere else.
My dreams of becoming a writer are evaporating- dreams, poof, gone- and soon I'm going to be just another worker bee, a corporate drone. At some level I want that, just to make a nice income and have benefits, stop depending on my parents, work an 8-hour day and go home and relax in front of the TV and have fun on the weekend. Yet.....well, I guess I always thought I would be different, that I would want something more and do something great and important and all-consuming, but I still haven't figured out what that thing is yet.