Major Change

In my last post, I mentioned that I changed my major. I suppose I can talk about it. 

(Ok, before I start that I have to talk about how Blogger is annoying me right now. There are only 6 fonts, the one I like doesn't stay between posts. Same thing with size. And whose dick do I have to suck to get a line spacing button? I may need to switch to WordPress.)

During the Spring Semester, I started to get deeper into the program. I had all the heavy math classes and math adjacent general ed classes too. I got very stressed out. I dropped one class and it didn't really help. It got to the point that I was questioning my degree program. 

Now, this wasn't the first time I had questioned it. But I did finally analyze why I picked Math in the first place. And there were a couple of reasons. None of them were about me or what I wanted to do or what I'm good at. 

I originally picked that major because I wanted to make the biggest impact. Service to the community. For one, there are a lot of bad Math teachers out there. They may know how to calculate stuff, but they have no idea how to teach. I think this is a big reason why kids hate math. If they have no confidence in their ability, they will struggle and hate it. Also, we need more women in STEM. It might help if girls had more STEM teachers that are women, it might help.

The other reason I picked Math is that I have been trying to prove I'm as good as the boys my whole life. Part of this is how my mom treated me and dressed me before my brother was born. She raised me kind of boyish. There were girls that tried to make me prove I was a girl because I always had boy clothes on. Of course that all changed when my brother was born. Then I was told to wear more dresses and he was the favorite. Now she wonders why he does nothing and expects handouts.

So for the longest time, I suppressed everything girly. Slowly I've shed most of that nonsense. The last to go was vocation. 

I bought into the idea that the hard sciences are masculine and the soft sciences are feminine. Which is nonsense since men have been trying to keep us out of all of them for generations, and women were the 1st coders. And who cares if I do something girly anyway. We need to stop gendering jobs.

Once I unpacked that I realized that I  missed writing papers. Getting a grade for my opinion is pretty great really. And while Math concepts are interesting, I really don't care about the computation. 

I am, however, still very interested in Astronomy and am doing independent research studying Seyfert Galaxies. Let me know in the comments if you want me to write for days about Active Galactive Nuclei. And we still need people to report on science if we're ever going to get the public to value it again. 

Who's NOT in the Christmas Spirit?

I'm not.

Usually it would have hit by now. It's late these days because of the stress of school. I just can't focus on anything else. 

Well this year school ended a week later than previous Fall semesters. Also we haven't put up the tree for the last couple of years. We got a 2nd printer that had to go somewhere. Also, the first year we had the cats I don't think I slept much just trying to defend my ornaments from kittens. I'm not heartbroken about not having the tree up. Maybe one year we'll figure out how to hang the tree from the ceiling. Might need a shorter tree.

But all of the sudden it's five days before Christmas, and Isabelle is getting over being sick and Sarah is sick today. 

I guess I should get to wrapping presents.

Sitting at my desk for 8 hours

When gaming..

It doesn't seem like a big deal to sit at my desk for 8 hours straight. In fact I've gone much longer only getting up from my chair to get food or go to the bathroom. But yesterday I worked that long! I never thought I'd need to get away from my desk. I mean, I worked so long I finished one audio book and got halfway through another.

Sure there's plenty of times I don't want to sit at my desk, but those are usually just about totally being in love with the idea of the couch. After all, I have a laptop there.

It seems weird to complain about working for 8 hours straight. I used to do it all the time. The difference I think was that that job was a lot of driving around. I spent at least half the time driving. Even on the day I mostly stayed in the office, I still buzzed around the office in the morning and still had to deliver a thing. And I had to print a lot of stuff which meant getting up to go to the printer.

Doing computer maintenance for 8 hours straight was "woah".

I'm Done

I'm Tired

I learned recently that previous Fall semesters ended a week earlier than this one. I'm not sure exactly why they have extended the semester a week, but I'm tired. I'm ready for this to be over already.

I gave my speech today. I did decent. Now I'm having trouble giving a shit about the rest of it. Maybe I just have had a tiring day and I'll be better tomorrow. That will be too late for my Calc take home quiz, but my professor drops the worst two grades. So I can afford to only get it half done.

Anywho, here's to hoping tomorrow is better. 

Ella

Public Speaking

It's Not That Bad..

I guess. The next hurdle I have with finishing the semester is in my Communications class. I have a speech I have to give on Wednesday. I should feel prepared at this point But I don't really. 

I do feel more prepared today than I did yesterday since I practiced, which is good. But it's not perfect and it will go over the time allotment if I freeze at all. 

No pressure.

This semester has been lousy with public speaking though. It was expected in the Communications class, but I thought I'd only have to do one. It turned out that I had to do one group presentation and one solo one. I've already done the group part. What was unexpected was the presentation I had to do in my astronomy lab course. I had to find an asteroid, see if it was ever going to hit Earth, then present my findings. It was mostly fun. 

Also I'm going to have to present in my astronomy research group. I'm not even totally sure what I'm supposed to present on, I guess what I've done all semester, which isn't much. It turns out, writing code for a language you've never seen before takes a bit when you only work on it for 3 hours per week. For the record, it's a one credit class so I'm only supposed to work on it for that long.

Anyway, hopefully my itchy skin will calm down when I get all these speeches done.

While we're on the subject, why is speech spelled with 2 'e's when speak is spelled with 'ea'? Even while knowing how to use English, I'm not sure I'll ever understand it. I even know when to use 'whom', though I don't always use it when I should because I'm afraid to sound pretentious or something. We live in strange times.

Anywho, catch you later,

Ella 

It's Fine Until It's Not

AHHHH!

So just to make everyone is up to speed, I'm a college student. We're coming up on Christmas so that means we're also coming up on the end of the semester. So it stands to reason that I'm stressed out. The problem is I never really learned how to deal with that.

I just stuff it down in an attempt to forget about it. The problem with that strategy is that of course it never really goes away. At this point I have varying physical manifestations of the stress. 

It started at 18 with psoriasis. I have various spots of skin that look red and irritated that flakes. THey get worse when the stress amps up. When I quit my job last year it got better but didn't go away. Now I'm getting them on my forehead, not cool.

Sometimes I have gastrointestinal distress. No need to elaborate on that further.

The newest thing is hives. Weird itchy bumps on my skin. My new best friend is Benadryl cream. it was a few here and there at first but today I noticed my whole shoulder is covered in them. This is why I'm writing about this. 

Growing up I was told that I had to be strong and strong women don't complain. I'm not sure if all that was expressed in words or just inferred, don't complain; complaining is a weakness. So I did what I thought I had to do; I stuffed all the wrongs and hurts and injustices into a little ball and put them away for later.

Except later never came.

Mainly because no one ever said what to with it later. So it adds up. At this point there is 36 years of stress bottled up inside. Well maybe not that much. I'm sure I've gotten over some stuff. 

The problem is all the things people say to do to destress hasn't worked. I've talked about this before with my wife but I'm not sure she knows how to help me. 

So I'm writing about it. Hoping it will help. Maybe tomorrow I'll talk about my impending speech, or impending Calculus final. AHHHHH!