Snow: Makes The World Go--Pause.

"A hundred bodies fill this room.
And all their faces overdone.
Pain is foreign, foreign to us."
-- Meg&Dia (Something Real CD)

So besides the onslaught of massive amounts of flaky, dainty white snowflakes, the stoppage of classes, the usefulness of the U of T Snowline and the missing of certain tutorials... a lot has happened that the snow will never hinder. For example -- the upcoming death-threat. The funeral toll. The chemistry golem. The CHM139 Midterm. It's all on its way. And yes, all this exciting hubbub takes place on -- you guessed it, folks! -- February 14th, the day all single people dread. Well. Now, all U of T freshmen in the Life Sciences can despise the couples-only day even more. Tres chique, n'est pas?

It's even sadder to know that all the greatest pre-Spring movies are coming out on/about this time. Jumper, being one of them, will be sorely missed and its viewing will be pushed into early-Reading Week. Which reminds me -- post-CHM139 midterm -- of how much there is to do. Both physically exhausting and mentally exhausting. Yes, this involves an overhaul on my working habits (i.e. a start on BIO150 papers and other undulating essays) and the crazy, badass supah-fly bouncing-off-the-walls kind of fun (i.e. having casual lunch dates with friends long lost in the midst of anal retentiveness and vile assignments).

So hang in there. Study hard.
Know that knowledge is power.
Power corrupts. Corruption is evil.
Be evil. For the midterm, anyway.

See you on the dark-side, muchachos.

Calc Exam: "Let's never speak of this again."

"Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater."
-- Albert Einstein

Let's skew Einstein's quote, take it completely out of context, and replace his name with mine. For anyone who found the test difficult and heinous, you're not alone. I was suffocating (more like a mild form of dyspepsia). After the first few questions, I realize just how defective MAT135Y is as a course: none of the past tests, nothing that was worth focusing on, was really on the test. A load of the biggest bullshit was on it -- in short, stuff no one thought was worth fiddling over was on that written form of mental homicide. Absolutely ridiculous.

It'd be nice to pass, to be honest. A sympathy pass, hopefully. (Are you reading this God? Or better yet: Prof Lam -- are you getting my telepathic pleas?) For anyone who found it easy: up yours. Honestly though, that's great -- good for you. Seriously. But! Keep that tidbit of info to yourself, or else you'll find many glares and a thousand daggers headed your way (figuratively speaking; though the wind does a well enough job portraying a thousand daggers, as it whips your face red, as you walk down St. George Street).

I wasn't intending to find out if calc was the Career Killer, the Jack-the-Ripper of university. But I got my whiff of failure today and absolute helplessness. Have you ever felt like you were completely powerless? Utterly speechless and without the ability to dictate your own actions? This test pretty much abducted me, threw me into a cell and instructed me to dig my way out with a plastic spoon. Helpless and hopeless. Oh so wonderful! (Please note the heavily-laden sarcasm.)

Lucky for me, I had Grey's Anatomy and Whose Line is it Anyway? to look forward to. They always make me feel better. That and a good, warm cookie. Oh thank you very much, dearest mumsy.

Off to bed.
I'm not going to speak of this again.
I'm going to glare at bio and chem.
But I'm not going to let this soil my to-be-established exam mood.

MAT135Y has numbers. We are numbers. But not really.

"I try to avoid looking backward and keep looking upward."
-- Charlotte Bronte

So I'm sitting here and I'm wallowing in my own lethargy, post-French oral miderm. I stared my math notes straight in the face, and all they did was stare back (menacingly, mind you). I've memorized only two trigonometric identities and the graphs are varying and splicing themselves inside my photographic memory. I'm looking at the previous tests and whistling inappropriate things to no one in particular; I'm feeling very lazy and very vulgar about this MAT135 term test. In short: calculus smells. Terribly.

As much purpose as math has, it is one of the most variable subjects out there: variables all over the place, limits and asymptotes -- there is no definitiveness in this course. All you know is that you will never know enough to know what is necessary. As a certain person once said, math is too vague, too ambiguous to be liked; whereas chemistry (CHM138H) is more practical and understandable; the concepts are pliant, yet embedded and firm. There's no, "If x is equivalent to ya^2, then it is most certain that if you..." (Though I'm pretty sure Prof Anthony Lam [such a funny man] would disagree and find a way to correlate a lot of things, including the un-correlatable, to calculus.) The ifs and buts of society rest on the shoulders of Calculus and all those who linger by its side. (No offense to anyone that really loves the course, though secretly, I'm shaking my finger at you and wondering why.)

Maybe calculus is the Career Killer. Who knows. (I don't intend to find out.)

I'm looking back at the previous post and I'm thinking that maybe I lacked humanity when I wrote those words. I wrote what was on my mind, which is all UofT really asks (what is in your mind; is your IQ good enough; are you smart enough to be here?) us for, but I forgot to add a bit of sympathy. We are numbers, yes. We are thoughts, yes. But we also are people, and being subjected to the harshness of the cold and the harshness of reality has blurred that warm ideal. We live, we breathe and we hurt. Let no one, no institution take that realism from us.

To quote Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice:

"If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?" (Quote Act III, scene I)

And we do bleed. We do laugh. We do die. All that jazz. Numbers, as much as we are, we are not. By regulation and by standardization and by nameless-facing, we are numbers. The university looks at us with bar codes and bills, and in a sense that is who are to them, but we're not. Give yourself the freedom to be a face and a person, which you are. The previous post was a bit cold, a bit unforgiving, and a tad bit too brick-in-the-face. It was my way of coming to terms with brutal reality; I took every aspect into account, except for the fact that we aren't machines.

Enough of this madness!

Back to trigonometric functions, The Hospital's Rule (yes, the Hospital, as in the test wounds your ego and you end up there), the MVT (best known to me as fab minus fa over ba), and all that jazz.

Oh curse you Pythagoras, Archimedes and Euclid.