addicted |əˈdiktid|
adjective
physically and mentally dependent on a particular substance, and unable to stop taking it without incurring adverse effects

Yup, that definitely describes my relationship with my email. I probably waste at least 4 hours a day checking my email, two hours writing longer, more thoughtful responses, and two hours from all the times I keep my gmail open and compulsively check every five minutes. Receiving new mai gives me a giddy feeling, even if it is just spam.Usually as soon as I go back to my room, use my computer for class or meetings, or get anywhere near a computer and have nothing else to do, I’ll check my email first thing. During class my email will stay open and provide a thoroughly satisfying distraction. I think it would be much more efficient to just designate a one hour period daily to clear through email. However, I would miss out on all those “Cookies in the lounge now!” opportunities…

I’m also really bad about staying on top of my email. If I see an interesting subject that I don’t feel like reading at the moment, I will star it and leave it for later. Of course, by the time I actually get around to going back, the email is already out dated. I can’t tell you how many events I’ve missed because of that. Usually emails that require a really long response also get shifted to the starred and deal with later pile. Too bad for those expectant senders…

My friend changed his email password to something obscure and long, and saved it to his computer desktop. If he wants to check his email, he has to go back to his room to look up the password. Intended to dissuade him from compulsive email checking, instead he just spends more effort going back to find the password whenever he needs a quick email fix.

Anyone have any good tips for weaning yourself off of your email addiction?

Sunday morning during brunch, two Starbucks employees lugging a cooler came to Stern Dining and passed out free Starbucks Doubleshots. I quickly gulped down my cinnamon drink – it tasted not dissimilar from those starbucks mocha drinks in the glass bottles. That Sunday was the most productive day of my college life. With very few distractions, the energy and focus I experienced allowed me to finish my entire eleven page Chinese Lit paper in one day. By the time I finished, I was dead tired (from having woken up at 7am that day), and decided to go to bed. Only, I could still taste  the doubleshot in my mouth and feel its satiety in my stomach. Determined not to waste any more time with insomnia, I grabbed my book and started on my research project, reading until 4am. The next morning, I woke up naturally at 7am and still felt the caffeinated effects ( I didn’t even fall asleep in physics). Finally, I crashed at about 11am and slept through lunch.

Man, that doubleshot stuff really works, or maybe I’m just a sucker for Starbucks’ promotion (O! poor victim of commercialism!) I bought a pack at 12 at Costco that evening and right now am at the library with my reading to my right and a can of doubleshot to my left. It really does give you a huge immediate boost of energy, but please only use it in emergency situations. I’m no expert, but I doubt that much caffeine can be good for your health.

They should pay me to be a Starbucks spokesperson or something…

M/PT/ST: 2/5/2

What a crazy world we live in…

this is just a short addendum to my post last night: A 17 year old in Germany shoots and kills 15 people, including students and teachers from his old high school, and others along the chase away from police.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europe/03/11/germany.school.shooting/index.html

Hope everyone is staying sane in the midst of finals week studying!

Right now my ears are burning (partly because of tiredness, partly because my friend just called me a monster, and partly because I just had an angry conversation when he mentioned my ex-boyfriend).

I must be losing my mind. Today I emailed my physics TA saying that I forgot to put my name on my problem set. Small problem that was causing me minor worries. She replies saying that on the last problem set, I didn’t turn in the first page – which therefore not only didn’t have my name on it, but also didn’t have the first two problems. I went to my mailbox to retrieve it, thinking that the first page must’ve been ripped off. No such luck, the second page was perfectly stapled and there was no sign of another page being ripped off. I must be going crazy.

Luckily my TA let me resubmit the homework if I found the first page (nix – I cleaned my room last weekend, cleaned out my binder, and threw out my recycling). Instead I just had to redo those two problems. Not a big deal, but these types of small minor tasks cause me more stress than necessary. The fact that I have to remember to turn this in tomorrow subconsciously pulls at the back of my mind while I am writing my research paper about ancient Chinese medical childbirth rituals. It’s because of my neuroticism that I am going to die at a young age.

I’m also very antisocial recently. I don’t even have the time to slow down and talk to my friends for a few minutes. Today after dinner, my friend bumped into me in the cafeteria and walked with me down the hall, hoping to have a conversation with me. In my hurry, I was powerwalking and talking to my friend trailing behind me. My body language clearly said, “I don’t have the time to spend 10 seconds listening to how your day went.” I haven’t spoken to my roommate in three days. In the morning we wake up and go about our morning ablutions, when one of us walks in the room, the other doesn’t look up, it’s like we have this tacit agreement that during finals season, we just don’t have the energy to be social.

Last week, My Crush said to me, “we should talk, do you want to take a walk sometime?”
“Ok sure”
“How about next week?”

Stanford students are going crazy.

Today an Alabama man shot and killed ten people, including his mother, grandparents, aunt and uncle, and random passerbys including a child. Five heads were discovered in ice chests in Mexico.

Everyone is going crazy.

M/ST/PT: 2/2/2

Averaging five hours of sleep a day, early onset dementia, my friends think I’m a monster, how could it get any better?

If you are interested in knowing, my typical schedule these days is as follows:

7:40 am – wake up, feel very very very cold, but take hot warm shower, feel even colder after getting out of shower
8:00 am – eat nice relaxing slow breakfast of toasted bagel with scrambled egg whites and tomatos + high caffeine tea while finishing reading for research project or making last minute edits on Chinese lit paper
9:00 am – go to human physiology and physics classes
11:00 am – crash in bed
2:00 pm – realize that I’ve missed lunch, am late for lab meeting at hospital with principle investigator of research team, decide that since I’m late I might as well take my time
2:15pm – arrive at hospital to find out that meeting has been canceled
2:30 pm – the only person to attend physics section, meanwhile down a bottle of ensure to make up for skipped lunch
5:00 pm – go to Costco to pick up prescription which was promised to be ready. It’s not ready. need to go back tomorrow. Asked my friend to drive me by saying we would go to In N Out across the street, which has no vegetarian options.
8:00 pm – Study in Green library until midnight, when I take a one hour midnight breakfast break
1:00 – 3:30 Study in computer cluster, but these really annoying kids are talking too loudly about chem, so I study in the freezing hallway, and now I have a cold.
4: check the alarm to make sure its set for 7:40, and then SLEEP!!!

Well, it’s 1:45 now, and just in case you’re wondering, I’m going to sleep now, and I’ve set my alarm for 5:45. Well, I’ll probably watch some Monk first, because of the stress induced insomnia.

Please everyone who is in finals right now, take better care of yourself than I am!

Written by guest poster Alberto

Recently as some of you may know, Crystal began a vegetarian diet. You can read about her reasons for trying out the diet in that post so I won’t reiterate them here. Now I’ve always had a hard-line stance on vegetarianism and what I’ll take as an excuse for staying on such a diet.

There are those people who are vegetarians due to their religious beliefs. Since I’m no bigot, I’m not going to tell people that this is a stupid reason to be a vegetarian, so these people get a free pass. Although to be honest, cow is delicious and you’re missing out big time. I’m glad my religion doesn’t stop me from eating foods that taste good.

There are those like Crystal who do it for the potential benefits of being a vegetarian. This includes losing weight, staying healthy, improving skin tone, etc. I see nothing wrong with this either. If not eating fatty meats helps you reach your health goals, why not? It takes quite a bit of discipline to stay vegetarian especially if you’ve just converted. Because let’s face it, bacon is fantastic.

Then there’s the animal rights people. I hate this bogus excuse, a lot. Is it animal cruelty? Not always. A lot of the animals die painlessly, or they are supposed to anyway. In any case the proper way to handle animal cruelty is not to avoid the topic by simply not eating animals, the proper way is to punish those who don’t uphold certain moral guidelines. Man has eaten animals since the beginning of their time. I don’t think its inhumane to eat lesser organisms to survive. But couldn’t we just eat plants you say? What’s the difference between killing one life form versus another if both feel no pain when dying? Besides, I love animals. That’s why I eat them.

If you’re a vegetarian, why do you choose to eat that way? If you’re not, have you ever considered trying?

By guest poster Alberto

I met my first girlfriend in freshman biology class. I believe the first thing she had ever asked me was if she could have some of my sandwich. Looking back, that’s the kind of question I expect of her.

Months later she would always ask me for help, at first with biology stuff, but then later with computer science questions. I was obliged to help of course, and to this day it is difficult for me to refuse to help someone out. In any event, we would talk more and more over AIM to the point where I would stupidly stay up all night talking. We would at one point start talking on the phone more and more often, and that’s pretty much how the feelings started developing.

I wasn’t sure why I liked her, and I was pretty naïve at the time and didn’t realize that she liked me. Eventually a friend asked me why I didn’t ask her out already, and that it was pretty clear that we both liked each other. Seeing as I had never had a girlfriend before, I was plenty nervous about doing so. Besides, I didn’t even know at the time how to do so. Do you simply ask a girl if she wants to be your girlfriend? Yes, but only in middle school or younger.

After we started going out… nothing happened. Nothing. If anything things got more and more awkward. The whole ordeal lasted two weeks, exactly. No date, nothing physical, nothing at all. I was plenty oblivious to the fact that everything was wrong and not going the way they should when two people go out. So, when she told me that it wasn’t working out, I freaked. This was followed by stupid dialog on my part, followed by stupid non-dialog for at least a year, probably more.

Looking back, I learned valuable lessons about what to do and what not to do. Could it have been less awkward? I’m not sure. I never suggested a date nor anything romantic, which was due to my extreme lack of being able to express myself at the time. Should I have stopped talking for a year and avoiding her? Definitely not. That was merely an immature reaction to the situation and fairly uncalled for.

Now we are good friends. This past experience is but a mere joke at this point, and I’m glad it at least turned out that way.

If you have no idea who my first girlfriend was because you can’t figure it out, then you need to… probably punch yourself.

My Happy Breakfast

Two maxims you’re probably tired of hearing:

Days are just so much better when you start them with breakfast.

Days are also so much better when you start them with a smile.

Well then, days are better squared when you start them with both! Introducing Happy Breakfast, the most pleasant way to get those facial muscles working. One of my goals for this quarter has been to eat more breakfast, particularly before my morning classes from 9 to 11. I was pretty good about it for the first few weeks, I would drink a hot cup of high caffeine tea (sometimes when the juice machine wasn’t gross and completely watered down, I would have OJ), and make myself a toasted sesame bagel with scrambled eggs and tomato. Our dining hall provides free New York Times, so if I was feeling anti-social I would grab a copy and let myself feel educated. Sometimes if I was bad, I would be doing my reading for Chinese lit class. No matter what, eating breakfast nice and slowly instantly increased my alertness and mood, which transferred the smile from those disgusting red dining hall plates and onto my face for the rest of the day.

However, for the past few weeks my sleep deprivation has usually resulted in me skipping my 9 am class and then falling asleep in my 10am class. Either that, or my growling stomach keeps my eyes fixated on the clock and completely prevents me from learning anything. At this rate, I might as well not have gone to class at all.

Although it is 3am right now, I promise myself that I will wake up in time to eat breakfast and make it to my 9 am class. And if I don’t keep my promise, then I promise an embarassing story to share next time.

Mood: 3 have been in a very bad mood recently, easily incited and quick to snap at others. I advise to stay out of my path,

Physical tiredness: 3 even though slept 11 hours last night and took a short nap today, oversleeping makes me feel groggy

Spiritual tiredness: 3 again, PT overspilling into ST so much so that I can’t distinguish the two

My bike is not a trashcan

I woke up this morning to find that some kind person had wished me good morning by discarding their half-full cup of coffee into my bike basket. Less than ten feet away was a trashcan.

I took my laundry to the basement and reached for my bottle of detergent that I had left there a week ago to find it surprisingly empty. It had been half full when I last used it.

It’s amazing the kind of things people will do when no one is observing. Hey, I’m guilty too. I used to shoplift all kinds of things as a kid. I would wear a huge coat into the toystore and slip small figurines into my pocket. Sometimes I will throw my trash away into the bathroom trashcan if the bathroom is empty, even though we’re supposed to walk outside to the large dumpster.

To combat the declining socio-ethical fabric I’ve been observing in myself and around me, my friend and I began a Karma competition. Each day we have to fulfill a challenge. Two days ago we had to catch up with an old friend. Actually I ended up catching up with lots of old friends who have graduated and from high school about careers, post-graduate plans, girlfriends, Bolivia… Yesterday we had to compliment a stranger – I told someone I really liked the colorful buttons on her coat – she had replaced the boring grey ones that fell off with funky patterns. Today I have to do something nice for someone without them knowing it. I am quite stuck on this…

mood: 4 fell asleep during the critical moment in physics class when they take attendance with the clickers, slept through most of my classes, didn’t do well on physics exam

physical tiredness: stupidly stayed up until 4am during work unproductively with a classmate because I thought he was cute. Then woke up at 8 to go to class. Now I’m on my way to the library to reread everything that I read last night.

Spiritual tiredness: 3

I realize that most blogs in the blogosphere are already yups who can’t get a real job so they post their opinions about current events and feel cosmpolitan thinking that others actually care about their opinion.  I call it: ego-masturbation.

I want to preface this with: I fully realize that what I am about to engage in myself is ego-masturbation (albeit quite frankly, this entire blog is ego-masturbation).

I recently developed the habit of switching my default bored website from facebook to CNN (read this blog to see why). Recently, the headlines have been pretty much the same: corporate greed, poverty and joblessness, and occasional portraits of how select families are making it through. Today I finally found the silver lining in this economic downturn: to save costs, some states are considering abolishing the death penalty (read article here). The argument is that Justice comes with a cost, 1.9 million more per capital punishment, to be exact.

Justin Thurber raped and killed 19 year old Jodi Sanderholm in 2007. On March 1, a jury will decide whether to uphold Thurber’s death penalty sentance.

“If Kansas Senate Bill 208 passes, it won’t take effect until July 1, so it won’t affect Thurber’s sentence. But future savings could be substantial.”

Consider this hypothetical experiment of Justice: A and B commit the same crime. Hold everything about the crime constant: motive, place, date, etc. Vary only the amount of time for legal proceedings so that A’s trial is on June 30 and B’s is on July 1; perhaps the judge for B  had a cold and had to reschedule. The outcome: A is sentenced to death and B gets a life sentence. The fine line between life and death is a germ.

The moral of the story is that Justice is not absolute. It is not a necessity. It is a luxury that can be appropriated and contorted to transient social needs. Yet, the bright torch of Justice is waved in the air – inextinguishable and unfaltering – the bright light in this dark world of sin. Just as one person is using that torch to shed light into the unknown, another is using it to burn.  This notion of Justice we all carry in our hearts is just as sick as how we preceive those we exact Justice upon. It begs the question, who really is morally superior, and who is morally polluted?

I can’t supress a slight [mental] chuckle. After decades of vicious debate and moral name-calling, it all comes down to the money.

This weekend I have been very mean. I told someone I barely met that he seems self-absorbed, stuck-up, and artificial.

People tell me to not judge until I really know a person. Everyone makes judgments. Who is to say that after I hang out with someone a few times I can claim to know him or her anyway. At some point, we need to make a judgment about each person that we interact with, and that judgment determines the degree and nature of future interactions. What they really mean is to not voice your judgments, and even then, it only applies if it is a negative judgment. Five minutes after I meet someone, I am allowed say she is very nice; but if I say she seems like a bitch, immediately I will be attacked with snide remarks about not judging others.

Can we ever say that we can really know anything absolutely? Everything we perceive can be reduced to nerve signals in our brain, and our interpretation of those signals. Every interpretation is a judgment, for example, when I judge a collection of thin rectangular signals to be a rectangular prism. Look at it from a different angle, I process more signals and realize it is a cylinder. Watch it over time, and you realize its a melting cylindrical ice cube.

In social relationships, every experience is a signal, and our judgments are formed from a series of experiences, which can change from two dimensional to three and four.

Why do we all keep silent about our criticisms and negative judgments? Why is it better for us to verbally repress ourselves while preserving mental judgments? Verbally expressing those judgments is the only entry point for one to change his or her thoughts; it gives people opportunities to either corroborate or dispute your claims. Thus, without saying negative things about people, we would continue to harbor these negative thoughts in our minds while pretending to be a cheerful nonjudgmental person. Expressing negative thoughts is the only way for any progress to ever be made. Repressing them and only reiterating the positive results in stagnation and solidification of the status quo.

The caveat is that after voicing your opinion, you must be open to changing your opinion if presented with counter-evidence. Expect your assumptions to be challenged, since that is the entire basis for the merit of voicing them. Don’t let the first, second, third, or infinith impression be engraved in stone; rather, know that your impressions of people are only transient incomplete portraits filled in by a collection of experiences. People are like physical systems: they are impossible to study because in studying your subject, you perturb the system. People are constantly changing; as soon as your portrait is finished, she has already grown into different person.

Someone told me today to “be the bigger person”. I say: Wipe off your moral superiority and realize that we are all on the same playing field.

Mood: 4 obviously in a mood to rant + lonely after my friend left + possibly PMS

Physical Tiredness: 3 AM and have class at 9

Spiritual Tiredness: 4 Physical tiredness leaking over into spiritual + nervous about future + talked about MCAT