Sunday 22 November 2009

I like to make myself believe

Wow, it's been nearly a month since my last post. That must mean I've been lazy, I guess.

Well, it's not entirely true. I've just been so damn busy with university. This course "Cell Biology" is kind of a nightmare. You need to read in three different books all the time, do exercises non-stop, prepare for classes and experiments plus write lab reports. This course contains both cell anatomy, biophysics, biochemistry, histology, a bit of signal transduction and genetics in one single bumper version of doom. We have no holidays until Christmas and our last holiday was the summer vacations. There's also no free time before the exams, so we have absolutely no time to read besides the exercises and lab reports we have to do all the time. And did I tell you we have three exams? Yep, first a 4-hour mix-mash exam of all the aforementioned subjects minus genetics. Then a 2-hour genetics exam and finally a 20-minute practical microscopy exam, where we have to diagnose 10 different tissues just by looking at it for 2 minutes through the microscope (example: "This is an exocrine seromucuous merocrine gland with endocrine islets containing trabecular structure"). It'll be quite a mouthful. And it all starts the day after my birthday.. Meaning the day everyone is most stressed including myself, will be this day. I've heard it said by older students that 40% of all students attending this course, fail. Goddamn it.

So I've started reading every day, as much as possible. It takes about one hour to read 20 pages in one of the books, so it's seriously tough going. I'm rarely this serious with studying. I didn't use to have to really study much to do well before. I guess the difficulty is finally catching up :P.

I've also become a fan of a band called "Owl City". The first song I heard by the was this one. I also like their song "Vanilla Twilight" and "Saltwater Room" a whole lot.

What have I done other than school-related stuff lately? Not a whole lot to be honest. I've been to the theatre, an art exhibition, a board game night and a LAN night. I also went to a huge anime convention with two friends from my Japanese course. There I bought a hood with cat ears. Pictures from there can be found on Facebook for those who know me. I've been to the cinema to watch "Inglorious Basterds", been to two parties and applied for half a year of studying in Australia.

I've also had the nastiest virus ever, which had me resulting in having to reinstall Windows. And then discovering that it had managed to copy itself to my external harddrive and infect the pc once again. It was one of the worst virus types around, I discovered. The type is called Virut; it copies itself to all other programs it can find (so even stuff like your own antivirus or your task manager begin creating the virus). And it's polymorphic - changing itself all the time. Luckily I managed to stop it the second time around before all hell broke lose (again). And my pc is back to reinstalled normal. Good thing I have all the important stuff backed up. Probably all my passwords are compromised now.. Meh.

Well, I'm off to bed after this rather meek post. Tomorrow I have the final lab report of this course to write. It's about our gene manipulation experiment. Yay..

I'll find something interesting to write about once this is all over!!