#the fact i had to mechanically parse the correct answer like it's a math word problem... probably says something about me

[suppuration]

SO TRUE BUT HEY

[cosmosogler]

hi guys. i went to class today but otherwise wasn’t productive at all. 

i got up a little late and zoned out in the shower out of exhaustion, which was the opposite of what i actually wanted to do. i kind of gave up on preparing lunch and just put in some of my instant oatmeal. i did eat a little more at breakfast though. that kept me going until lunchtime pretty well.

on the bus today it took 25 minutes to travel 2 miles because of people just walking out into the road without checking for buses or giving cars a chance to get out of the stop sign area. by the time we got to the physics building i had died and my body had decomposed into a skeleton.

class was fine. the first two, i mean. i actually... almost followed the classical mechanics lecture today. i feel like i’m sort of catching up, but since i’ve gotten my first assignment back the grades DO NOT reflect that feeling. 

i got a 50% on the first quantum homework. apparently a lot of other people did too but i didn’t... feel like i was wrong in the same way that everyone else was? even though i had the same things written down, as far as i was aware, people looked at my work and said “no you gotta do more than that.” even though people who scored higher than me had written less and with less detail, AS FAR AS I COULD TELL.

that was the most frustrating. jennica wrote less than me, with no math (i didn’t exactly have a lot of math but i at least explicitly wrote out what i was trying to get at), and she scored more than twice as many points as me. but i guess she included some magic word that meant she got it more right than me? it’s so frustrating to not know why the grader liked someone else’s work more than mine. our answers looked identical to me but i guess there was just some key word i was missing that was magically worth twice my score.

actually basically all of my classmates want to dispute their grades. they were going to talk to the grader about it tomorrow. i still scored the lowest out of anyone though and also they were pointing out why my answers were more wrong than theirs despite the fact that i had written basically the same thing, which i had taken to be the correct answer because we all reached it fairly separately.

i wanted to sit in a chair and curl up and whine to an empty room about it but instead i went out for “krishna” lunch with my classmates. i ate about a quarter of a plate. luis was kind and bought me a ten-meal package deal and said i could just pay him back later. it was really good, but i didn’t have much of an appetite. i thought it was kind of funny that i was praising how good the food was and when i put down my plate i had eaten like 30% of its contents when everyone else had clean plates.

oh, i made a really good joke at luis on the way over to the lunch event. when we were leaving the physics building i finger-gunned at him and said something like “bingo-bongo, let’s get some food!” and he looked at me and said “i have never in my life heard bingo-bongo before.” and i said “oh, in arizona it’s, it’s a big thing, it’s-” and then i cut myself off because i had to laugh. 

he kind of laughed too but i’m not sure if it’s because i was laughing or if it was because he understood that i was very obviously and very badly lying to him.

when we were about done eating i stood over by keegan and harrison and we were talking about random stuff. i started asking wildly strange theoretical questions built up out of weird what-ifs we were posing. like we started talking about teleporters and what that means for an individual’s life or consciousness. maybe i was getting a little bit out of hand. i asked, if two people shared a consciousness (due to teleporter cloning), what would happen if one got on a rocket ship and went at light speed for a while and then came back to earth. would they both experience a weird time dilation? would one “half” of the consciousness have more input than the other for the duration?

keegan said “luckily we don’t have to think about that because it’s not real.”

i was kind of put out but i answered with “if we didn’t think about things that weren’t real we wouldn’t have much physics.”

but i still felt dumb and awkward! so that’s a plus. i told him and harrison i was saying nonsense anyway. we walked back to the department with jennica.

i know my sense of humor is weird and not always easy to parse... i have a lot of trouble explaining why something i like is so funny. i have trouble explaining some logic leaps i make too. my thought process is like a weird black box where conclusions jump out and i can’t always remember where they came from or how they got there, but they are conclusions i made so i stick to them!

it helps to write out my thoughts. it helps a lot. when i can see the thoughts i just had i can better explain the relationship between the sentence i just said and the one i’m about to say.

going back and re-reading my old journal entries is wild though. it feels like someone i don’t know wrote them. even when i clearly remember the events and the thoughts i was having at the time, seeing those thoughts written down is really weird.

usually my first reaction is “man, that person is depressed. and very, very strange.”

um... after we got back i played ping-pong with jennica. i think i choked at the end of the game and lost but i don’t remember honestly, it was real close. jennica complained that i am way better than she thought i would be. then harrison got up to the table and we made dumb tennis jokes and compared the paddles to how you would hold rackets. we had a lot of fun screwing up our backspins.

then i played melee against keegan for a little bit. i made a lot of mistakes by trying to press all the buttons at once from panic. i ran out of steam after 30 or 40 minutes and just sat on the couch and stared at my computer screen for a while instead until e&m class.

e&m was annnnnnn adventurrrrrrrrre. we got our quizzes back. 50%!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

after we went over the quiz answers the professor said that if anyone wanted to dispute their grades we had to come up to the front of the class and leave our tests on his desk and come talk to him about it after class. i looked around and literally no one got up so i shuffled uncomfortably in my seat and decided to wait until the end of class to talk to him about it. THIS WAS A MISTAKE.

i took notes on the lecture diligently and left myself notes to clarify things i remembered from the last time i took this class. i think it might start to click for me soon. well, i tell myself that. there’s no guarantee. and even if it does click that doesn’t mean my grades will improve. so maybe that means i won’t understand after all.

anyway after class i brought up my quiz to talk to him about it. he was explaining stuff to other students at the board and there were a few people just milling about. this becomes very important in a minute. 

so i brought up the quiz and i said i’d like to talk about the grade i got and maybe come to a better understanding of the material. the professor told me that he had told everyone to bring their disputes up to the front of the class. i explained that i got nervous because no one else stood up so i decided to wait until the end of class when he’d be answering questions anyway and maybe we could talk during his office hours.

he said “you have to come up when i tell you to come up. this isn’t part of your accommodations.”

i kind of blinked? i knew he had said something that made me feel bad but the “feel bad” hadn’t quite hit yet. and the immediate “stomach drop” feeling i didn’t understand until i talked to the other grads about it for a few minutes.

like... the one-liners are really demoralizing. “i could tell just by looking at you.” that’s stuck with me. why would realizing i was the only student who wanted to dispute grades, and thus waiting until the end of class to talk to him about it instead of doing it in front of everyone, make him decide to bring up my accommodations letter and its contents? in front of these other students?

like, he said that! in front!! of other!!! students!!!! that’s supposed to be confidential!!!!!

i don’t know what to do about it. i was really upset... this hasn’t happened with professors before. usually it’s just mom or dad or grampa or whoever. i don’t understand where these comments are coming from.

i talked to him about my grade during his office hours. i had to wait over a half hour. i talked to two of the undergrads that were waiting outside his office door. we were trying to figure out the posters of his research he’d put on the walls. they were very badly designed. the first one was just a lot of jargon that we had to talk through. we sort of figured out the second one, but there was just so much wrong with it that i can’t even summarize here.

anyway the office hours. he wanted to look over my quiz himself since i made sure to condense my concern into a single problem that i knew had been graded wrong. so he started going over the problem with pen. i wanted to explain to him some of my notation beforehand- but he interrupted me to tell me "you go at a hundred miles per hour, and i’m sorry i only go at 20″ and kind of gave me a look, like “i’m sorry that’s not fast enough for you.” 

he started... asking questions about my notation while he was grading! and left a lot of really dense marker lines where he didn’t understand something i had written down. when he asked out loud what a mark i had made on the paper was, i hopped in real quick to say “that’s just a one-” and he cut me off with a loud sigh and then a deep breath, like he was just barely holding in an anger explosion. so i sat while he asked questions about things that would be clear once he read the next sentence, and made marks on my paper that he would cross out when he did get to the next sentence. it left my work very cluttered and covered in crossed-out marks.

he gave me the hundred-mile-an-hour comment again at the end and i thanked him for his time. there was a person waiting behind me. if i had been able to answer his questions (even just as they came up!) we could have finished sooner and wasted less of the poor kid’s time.

i went home after that... i was too tired to deal with anything. i called mom because my insurance isn’t covering all those sessions i had at the hospital over the summer and if we don’t get them to cover it in a week then my family has to pay the full price. even though insurance previously said they would cover a certain amount of sessions and i attended that many sessions and not more than that (even though it was less than standard). 

i told mom about the weird comments i was getting from the e&m professor and about how much trouble i was having trying to eat and she told me to try harder to be less stressed.

JUST!!!!!! TRY!!!!!!!!!! HARDER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

ok anyway i made dinner and burned my fingers and then i bummed around on the internet for 3 hours and now it’s 10:30 and i have to go to bed so i can get up in the morning and teach for four hours straight and call a million doctors and figure out paperwork and and and and

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