#insalubrious uncle hours

[not-this-crude-matter]

Okay lads if you've had a weird schedule this season and fallen off your Kegel routine, go ahead and pick a new time and update your app and/or calendar reminder notifications. Sure it's important to keep that pelvic floor strength up so you don't end up incontinent down the line, or forestall its onset, but if that isn't an immediate concern of yours then you do have another immediate concern and that is busting righteously. Get on your routine, my guys. You've got a finite number of days on the planet and I want as many of those nuts of yours as possible to be *chef's kiss*.

[thediabetesheroes]

Diabetes Is... by Brad Meter Boy of The Diabetes Hero Squad

"DIABETES IS..."

Diabetes is an autoimmune assassin. A traitorous coward that strikes with a sucker punch, leaving behind a dead or panting organ adrift in a sea of insalubrious self.. Diabetes is years of lancet jabs, eviscerating your fingerprints, disrupting the swirls as if to say "We're taking everything from you, even the one thing that makes you unique." Diabetes is a suspicious stare and judgmental eye from the faces of so many of those we meet. Diabetes is the sadness of a blue candle, its frenetic flickering flame pays tribute to a life lost Diabetes is the empowering color blue...as in blue circles, blue Fridays, blue heels, and big blue tests. Diabetes is the number 300 and the number 40 all within a few hours. It's pump or be pumped, control or be controlled, inject or die. Diabetes is a carbapalooza gorge-fest because you're tired of your life being measured in grams. The protest rages for hours as you devour everything like a ravenous termite in a lumberyard Diabetes is the useless advice, cured laboratory mice, a dozen meters that are not precise, as you pay the price so corporate execs can live real nice Diabetes is the endless stories from people who feel the need to tell you about their diabetic uncle who lost a toe, lost a foot, lost a leg Diabetes is an unknown surgeon in 1920's Canada who unlocked a miracle and then gave away all his rights to the discovery because sometimes humanity actually does trump greed.   Diabetes is an Einsteinium formula in restaurants and supermarket aisles as you do the mathematical dance called the carb ratio two step Diabetes is a never ending parade of doctor appointments as you try to distract your fear by thumbing through six month old People magazines. Diabetes is waking up in the morning knowing you still have diabetes and today is just like yesterday making you feel like an extra in some sort of a real life ground-hog day movie Diabetes is an online community with people who get you, bloggers who represent, strangers in common who quickly become friends Diabetes is the boy in back of a classroom, hoping he doesn't lose one more friend because their clueless parents think he's contagious Diabetes is dinner parties with the usual diabetes police interrogation as you reach for a piece of anything. "Yes, I should be eating that. So back the (bleep) off!" Diabetes is a Type 1 mother; as she prays that the finger sticks and Banting juice she's known for so long will never be a part of her child's innocent life Diabetes is a trail of used test strips that follow you like Hansel and Gretel bread crumbs as you make your way through your own fractured fairy tale Diabetes is a late night poet vomiting empty angry words in a ketone rage as he waits for the number to come down before he can even think of sleep Diabetes is every minute of every hour of every day ...and never knowing how many of those we have left Diabetes is....the ultimate suck. Diabetes is this and so much more...but mostly Diabetes is...still without a cure!

[trentteti]

Getting the Most Out of Your Thanksgiving Break

Thanksgiving is upon us. A holiday in which we commemorate an event that may or may not have happened and may or may not have been an actual Thanksgiving ceremony, in which of a bunch of Pilgrims and Puritans and Wampanoag tribe members (who had just been devastated by disease and who just got hoodwinked into giving up 12,000 acres of their land) allegedly sat down for a feast. We do this while blithely ignoring Wampanoag descendants’ insistence that this was probably a less chill endeavor than your little brother’s second grade play suggests.

Anyway, we celebrate this perhaps apocryphal account by eating foods that we deem too bland, time consuming, or insalubrious to eat on any other day. We do this while engaging in repetitive small talk with tertiary family members as the Detroit Lions play uninspired football in the background. We hope that no one brings up Bush Obama Trump. Then, after hearing the same debunked musings on soporific effects of tryptophan, we slink off to an early sleep so we can rise early to dutifully feed the capitalist machine.

So I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Thanksgiving is not that great of a holiday. But if you’re studying for the LSAT, you’re in luck. You have an out. So if your uncle, who’s on his third Wild Turkey and knows you have an interest in the law, decides to give you his hot take on judicial overreach and the travel ban, you’ll know what to say. “Sorry, I gotta study, Uncle Franky.” Or if your grandma inquires about that “nice boy” you dated six years ago in high school. “Sorry nana, I really should hit the books.” Or if your mom requests that you clean up your aunt’s casserole dish. “Ahh wish I could but these logical fallacies aren’t going to study themselves.”

In this last weekend before the big test, you may come to appreciate the LSAT more than ever. It will your way to shirk familial responsibilities, skirt political discussions with your grandparents, and avoid being trampled to death at some godforsaken Best Buy on Friday.

But once you’re sequestered from your family, then what? How are you going to make the most of your time? Follow this advice, and the last weekend of studying will be (ahem) gravy.

Nail down the strategies for each section

Ideally, you’ve been hard at work the last few months mastering the approaches for each LR question type, logic game, and RC passage, and now you’re extremely accurate on those without any time pressure. If you’re not there yet, well, you have to start by acquiring that accuracy. For Logical Reasoning, especially, you should know every step in the strategy for every question type. Period. You should have practiced this approach so much that going step by step through these is second nature to you at this point. If you don’t have the strategies down, then that’s where you should start in your review.

Additionally, you should have a pretty good idea about which LR question types you’re solid on and which you can still improve on. If you’re still having trouble with any of the really common questions — such as Soft Must Be True, Flaw, Strengthen, Weaken, or Necessary questions — or with the big, fundamental concepts — like diagramming and the logical fallacies — then go back get some review and untimed practice.

For Reading Comprehension, try to determine which kinds of questions you miss most often. Do they tend to be questions that ask you about the big picture stuff in the passage, like the main point, the primary purpose, the author’s attitude, or the organization? Or do they tend be more specific questions that ask for what the passage “states” or “indicates” or what can be “inferred” from the passage? If the former, that means you could do a better job of understanding the structure of the passage. Practice identifying how many viewpoints are presented in the passage, and marking where in the passage the conclusions to those viewpoints are. If the latter, practice tagging — making annotations in the margins of the passage — and using those to find the support to answer those questions.

At this point for logic games, it’s really important that you have all the basics absolutely nailed down. You should know how to symbolize every ordering rule and how to “read” an ordering chain to make deductions. You should know which games you should play the numbers on and how to do so. You should know every grouping rule backwards and forwards. You should know which rules are always good for scenarios on ordering games and grouping games. If you feel shaky on any of these, review. It can even be helpful to go back and re-do old games, to reinforce good habits.

So start by making sure you have the strategies down for each section. Hopefully at this point there are only a few things you still have to do review, because it’s important to get this review early, leaving plenty of time for timed practice.

Get a lot of timed practice, but take the review seriously

The bulk of your review this weekend should come in the form of timed practice. I recommend doing at least two practice exams this weekend, but if you can do more, by all means. If your schedule doesn’t give you time to do this many exams, just do one 35-minute section at a time. It’s also a good idea to focus on the more recent, more representative exams at this point — the post-2015 exams, preferably.

Also, treat these exams as an opportunity to experiment with how you distribute your timing for each section. A lot of times, a big score increase comes from figuring out how to dedicate your precious 35 minutes to the questions you have the best chances of answering correctly. For LR especially, it’s important to practice cutting ties with a question, guessing something, and moving on, without wasting too much time on that question. If you read a question and you have no idea what’s going on, just guess and move on. If you read a question, and you’re having trouble anticipating the deduction or fallacy or anything, go to the answer choices. If you can only eliminate one or two, just guess and move on. Don’t waste time on these questions. Save that time for other questions you’ll be much more likely to answer correctly. Only if you can eliminate all but two should re-read the stimulus and try to figure out which one is right.

After taking and scoring an exam, it’s helpful to do blind review of the LR questions you missed and the games and passages you didn’t do super well on. Do those questions/games/passages again, without seeing the right answer(s) or the answer(s) you selected. If you’re able to nail it untimed, that’s a good sign. You know how to do that type of question/game/passage. It was just timing/test nerves getting to you on that exam. Fixing that will entail more timed practice, so you’ll want to do another test/timed section. On the other hand, if you can’t nail that question/game/passage on the second try, then that’s a sign that you should review your notes on that question/game/passage type and get some untimed review to work on your accuracy on that.

But take some time to yourself

It’s important to work hard this last week and a half, but don’t overdo it. Be reasonable with how hard you’re pushing yourself. Don’t do anything crazy like taking a practice exam at midnight after a day of studying. Anything past 6 hours a day is kind of pushing it. You want to be well rested and sharp, both for the practice exams you take and for the actual exam. Make sure you’re eating well, getting plenty of sleep, and keeping active.

Also, if you take a practice exam next Tuesday or Wednesday and it goes really well and you felt really good while taking it, there’s nothing wrong with making that your last practice exam. End on a high note. And definitely don’t do anything on the Friday before the exam. Just relax and recharge on that day. Whatever marginal improvements you could make that last day would be outweighed by the burn-out and fatigue you’ll feel on test day. Instead, engage in some self-care, exercise, meditation, power poses, daily affirmations incantations, or just eat something tasty.

And get some of the practical day-of-test-stuff out of the way

Finally, use this last week and a half to review the mostly ridiculous rules regarding the day of the test, which can be found here. Make sure to get your Ziplock bag together with No. 2 wooden pencils, erasers, your admission ticket, ID, a snack, a beverage, and anything else you might need that they allow. It’s also a good idea to do a run through to your testing center before the day of the exam, just so you know how to get there, where to park, where to check in, and all that stuff.

And that’s it. From Most Strongly Supported and Blueprint LSAT, we want to wish you the best of luck in your studies and happiest of Thanksgivings.

Getting the Most Out of Your Thanksgiving Break was originally published on LSAT Blog

[thebookofdave]

Weddings and the best man speech conundrum

This year will mark the fifth time I’ve been a best man although only the second time I’ve done it solo.  On August the 18th, my friend of thirty-three years will finally be tying the knot. 

Nick popped the question to me over a romantic, candlelit meal for two in Sofia which on the whole probably led to a lot of the restaurant clientele getting the wrong idea.  It is always flattering to be asked to be someone’s best man; it represents both friendship and a confidence in your abilities to produce a half decent speech and to organise a weekend away in some insalubrious part of Eastern Europe (well not in my Uncle’s case but a gliding holiday in NZ was out of budget).  Most of all they’re putting into your hands the possibility of you saying something really, really inappropriate...

When I was naïve and young I thought that weddings were a joint effort from both couples, increasingly however, I’m noticing that really the man’s influence is limited to a few key areas:

A)  The choice of food; mostly because this involves a lot of tasting and since there’s a wedding diet going on, both parties can feel equally guilty.

B)  The drinks; although truthfully if this was 100% the case Tim and Alex’s wedding would have consisted of nothing but strong rum cocktails.

C)  The wedding car; given this is just the mode of transportation to and from the wedding its presumably considered to be of low overall danger and therefore suitable to be entrusted to the man.

Pretty much everything else seems to be the bride’s area of responsibility or perhaps I should say, sphere of influence.  In some ways this makes a lot of sense to me; as the best man if I get them to the wedding, dressed, with the ring; I consider us most of the way there.  I doubt my sister would have quite the same view of what constitutes a successful wedding.  

There are of course wedding details which also require precision, like the aesthetics of the room.  I would happily hold up my hands and say it’s not a talent I’m ever likely to possess.  On the other hand my friend Tim has an insatiable, nay inexhaustible eye for detail; unfortunately it’s so bottomless they would probably still be planning the wedding now if they left it to him; he’s taken procrastination to an art form.  In his particular case it’s best for all of us his wife to be took over.  Additionally there are other important questions I’m not sure all of my male friends could be trusted with; how to fit all the guests in, where to do the toasts, is there easy access to the toilet for small children, these require consideration and foresight, perhaps they are not best left to a man who forgot to confirm his plane flight for a lads holiday (Nick). 

Where brides have no control is over the content and delivery of the best man’s speech and it’s here you feel the possibility of disaster, the groundswell of tension that initiates whenever one starts.  I suspect it’s equally as worrying for the groom as well although clearly some people are more likely to suffer than others.  Nick is an endless goldmine of excellent stories, Tim was more of the background orchestrator and therefore required a lot more planning and consideration to extract the best bits for his speeches.

The style of the speech is tricky and requires consideration; what the stag do lads might find a highly enjoyable ribald story of excess might not go down quite so well with the bride’s grandmother.   That said, in my view embarrassing the groom a little is essential, particularly in my case since I know revenge could still be awaiting in wings so I might as well get the low blows in now.

  In the past I’ve done best man’s speeches where we each took different aspects of the person’s life, a section at school, at college; how the happy couple met.  I feel with a suitably enforced stopwatch this works well but it requires discipline and a little bit of practice to help with the flow from one person to another.  Timing is a tricky thing for the best man’s speech.  Too short and it looks like you don’t care, too long and everyone starts to glaze over.  I think ten to twelve minutes is probably the sweet spot but I’m pretty sure as a group we were closer to twenty minutes for Kieran’s wedding and everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves.  

There are certain topics which both common sense and common knowledge says you should steer away from, ex-girlfriends, financial issues and religion for example. Conversely there certain topics which are always a rich source of stories, school days, the university years, drinking experiences, travel cockups, invariably there’s always something helpful there.  

In the case of Nick’s upcoming best man speech it’s a question of filtering out the content down from the several hours of good material available and remembering the audience to avoid some of his less family friendly moments. I have no doubt it will be an excellent wedding and I’m looking forward to seeing all the stag do guys again.  We’re also well sorted if there’s ever a cry of ‘Is there a doctor in the house’ although I’m hoping someone other than Nick answers the call.

On the downside I’m sure revenge will be sweet for those I’ve already inflicted best man speeches upon if I ever get married; my one saving plan at the moment is to limit them to a minute each and for an extensive amount of bribery.

 On the plus side they can’t do any worse than this guy.

[not-this-crude-matter]

I don't know why I was being coy last night. Because I was drinking. Now that I'm seven hours into a shift on the lakes and sorely craving a cigarette, I will be direct: while the weather is this wonderful outside, my summer needs dramatically fewer working hours and more of both sun kissed and moon washed titties.