Oncoming tidal waves

I have a barrage of midterms coming up in the following two weeks before Spring break. I think I'll have something in all my tests, which will be good in the sense that I get them out of the way. Damn, this keyboard has a very loud spacebar. I think I'm doing okay in most of them so far, but some we haven't even had a test yet so it's hard to judge.

At the Physics building yesterday I was sitting at the tables when I saw someone pencil-chisel Mitch inside of a little heart. And then underneath it it says -JR. Then some idiot tried to cover the M with a blue B. Why are some people so immature? Aren't we supposed to be civilized college students? So yeah, I just thought that it was really cute that someone would do that. Granted, it's probably for somebody else named Mitch, but I can hope.

Other than that things are pretty calm. But the storm, she is a-brewing. I got Bubble Bobble for the Wii downloads, and that was a lot of fun. There was even a stuffed Bub at this kiosk on the mall this week, and I almost got it, but I know I have way too many knickknacks as it is. It's probably not good that I still sleep with the plush otter I got when I visited the aquarium in Cali. What can I say, maybe I'm the immature one.

I sure hope I get my GRE scores in the mail soon. The waiting is starting to really ruff my feathers. Oh well, off to class.

A not so GREat day

2: 00, Friday, I find myself reveling over getting two tests with 100% on each of them on the same day. That's never happened before. Maybe. I head home, trying to figure out how the hell I'm gonna memorize all the words in my newly acquired GRE verbal companion book in the next 24 hours before my big test. I estimate there are some 2, maybe 3000 words in the glossary. Gulp. This isn't gonna be hard. I read through some of the typical instructions, run through a couple practice sections, and do modestly well on those.

4:00, Friday, I'm watching the final match of the Jeopardy teen tournament, trying to decide my plan of action. A girl nicknamed Steve comes in second. A sophomore named Rachel comes in first. I find a section labeled 200 must know GRE words. I will have these things memorized by morning, I tell myself. This will be a cake of cake.

7:00, Friday, I got distracted a lot, and only made it to the E's. I head off to go to my friend Kelsey's 21st birthday party. Seeing that I had given up liquor for lent, I was bound to be one of few sober people. I get there, and only know people by connection. It's mostly her sorority sisters, and her boyfriend's friends. I drink some Mountain Dew and play a little Halo (badly), and give Kelsey her present- 21 bucks in lottery tickets. Had they gone to a bar closeby, I might've gone with them, but going to the Eastside would have taken up too much of my time. And I even put on cologne! I never do that.

11:30, Friday, in a state half filled with anxiety for testing and my stupidity for getting all gussied up and then not going anywhere, I arrive home and fastly fall asleep.

8:00, Saturday, I crack open the book and keep reading through breakfast. I read the words out loud to my mom and my aunt, and they make up funny stories with them as they try to guess what they mean. We finished the list around 10:30 or so, enough time for me to get ready to leave.

1:00, Saturday, I'm at the Student Union eating Panda with my friend Noah who lives at the dorms. We discuss the implications of what the GRE does and whether or not he should take it, as well. He's a good guy, but is technically three semesters behind so he's technically a first semester sophomore. But that's semantics. He says he'll probably transfer once all of his friends, the class of '09, graduate.

2:00, Saturday, it begins. Obviously I'm not inclined to talk about the questions I got. Let's just say that the vocab book helped me little if any. Most of the words I had never seen before, let alone knew how to pronounce. I find myself paying close attention to the clock, and revel in the fact that I remembered a word from 11th grade English class. The math was pretty easy, but oddly calculation heavy at times. The essays I think I did well on, but we'll have to see on those.

5:00, Saturday, it ends. I finish and get immediate scores. Drumroll please:

Quantitative: 800 (Yay!)
Verbal: 510 (Ugh...)
Writings: TBA (outlook: yay?)

6:00, Saturday, so I was looking at the statistics they included with the practice disk and saw that my score was about average, 50th percentile or so, for people who regularly get a graduate degree in Engineering or Math. (Odd fact: Physics people tend to score higher on the verbal and quantitative sections among all science majors, even math grad students!) So from a statistical standpoint, I'm okay scorewise, just okay, but would be much happier with a higher score. So I might retest, I don't know. I'd shoot for a 600 in verbal, but even that might be farfetched. Gah. I was hoping I wouldn't have to worry about this. Oh well.

By the numbers

i got 100 on my first Physics exam! Now all I need is an 80% or so on the next one to guarantee myself a D! It wasn't too hard, just a couple of sneaky math-related tricks that you couldn't do on a scientific calculator (we couldn't use our TI-83's, 89's or the like). I wish the rest of my classes were like this. AME 300 is pretty easy, but aggravating, especially with these labs that nobody really wants to do. And I think I did well on the AME 455 exam, but I'm still waiting on that one back.

AME 324B is a different story, though. It's supposed to be a pretty easy class, but I'm having a hard time keeping up with the homework. Sure, it's only one or two problems a week, which I think is far from sufficient, but the other problem I think is that almost everyone but me has the solutions manual in their back pocket. It seems uncanny to me that 90% of the class gets 100% on an assignment that I only got a 30% on. Hopefully that will be the one that I get dropped, unless I screw up horrendously again. But these graders don't believe in partial credit. I suppose in a work sense it's either the part works or it doesn't, but seriously, come on! And secondly, I don't want the solutions manual. I'm tired of being in a major where everyone thinks it's ok to "use resources" on the homeworks. I don't know, maybe I'm the stupid one, trying to believe in something called integrity, but I find it very dismal to be in a class where even the teacher (he's not a professor- he's a guy that works at Raytheon) says to just look everything up because somebody else has done the problem before. What about individual contribution? Does that have no merit in this field? I signed up for Engineering because I wanted to learn about ways to build things better, learn how they work, how and what the signs of failure are, but the more and more I delve into Engineering, I don't like what I see. Most companies force the parts to fail after a certain time (that way, they can stay in business!) and there's a part of me that just finds that disgusting. I don't want to builds bombs, either. It seems like Engineering is turning into everything I despise, which I sure hope isn't the case, but it's downright depressing. I don't know, I'm already this far into the major, it'd be pretty stupid to bail out now. But that was why I signed up for Mechanical in the first place. To be an Engineer, go to grad school, get my Master's, and work at an awesome company that gets to make something awesome that lasts for a long time, and when that floods the market, we make something entirely different, unique, but equally helpful and appreciated. I love the idea of Engineering, but it's real-world applications have been a serious letdown.

Night.

V

I should be sleeping right now. I have a test come 11Am, and a hw set due in the afternoon, but this semester has been anything but routine.

As hinted on my Facebook on Wednesday, what I did was put an ad in the newspaper for Valentine's Day. It's pretty evident, the one that starts off "Nerdy, husky, single Hispanic male..." I don't front. I know the ads were meant for people to write little love notes and such, but I figured if anybody would be reading a part of the paper they'd be reading that part.

I had a bad dream concerning the whole ordeal this morning. I dreamt I saw my ad in the paper, and they had altered some of the words to the extent of "Horny, nerdy SHM in search of chick(s) to bang" and that freaked me out even more. What responses would I get from people? I dreaded going to class and see if anyone noticed.

But, lo and behold, no catches in real life. In a way I'm kinda glad I did it. I was so freakin' nervous even when I went to the newspaper office to place it. In a way I feel really rejected. Sure, it's not like I was waving a huge poster saying "DATE ME!" but still, I am rarely one to do something daring, I'm about as plain as they come, and for it to result in a pile of nothing and minus five bucks left me pretty blue.

So I was pretty emo for the rest of the day. Really Emo. Like ridiculously emo. If emo had a song named after it I would be its opening riff. I spent a good two hours lulling around campus, touching the cold, barren concrete walls, feeling the harsh winter air on my face, etc, all while trying to study for my Physics exam tomorrow. Not the best combination. Then after class I see little point in going to, I head over to the garage to drive home, and my car is the only one left on the roof. I try and fight it, but once in my car I just let out this big yell. It was good, yet painful. I still scream like a girl, though, so that didn't help the situation any. After some Chinese food and discovering a new game to play online (Yahoo Graffiti- it's pictionary online!) I feel a little better. I don't know, I really wish that this were something that would magically fall into place, but alas, not so.

The long way home

Even with a massive week ahead, I decided that it would be beneficial if I went with my folks down to Douglas. We haven't been down in a long while, I don't think since my nana died. Man, things have changed. And yet some things looks exactly the same. The most notable thing is that almost all of the shopping has scooted itself down to the border to be all buddy buddy with all the people coming over from Mexico. We didn't do much down there, just stopped by to visit my uncle and to clean up the graves at the cemeteries. Again, we hadn't been down there for a while, and some of the other graves were as badly kept as our familes'. One even had a tumbleweed sitting on top of it, poor person. I bothered to pick it up and make sure it doesn't get in anybody else's way. We visited 7 people easily. I'm pretty sure my mom would like to bury my nana next to my grandpa James whom I'm partially named after, but who knows how much that would cost. Sure, going to the graveyard is never something people wish to do, but it is something that needs to be done. It is respect for those who have parted before us, something I think we're losing ground of as generations pass.

We also stopped by our old house to see what it looked like. They took out most of the trees, replaced it with some stupid palms, and have been working on the interior. There were even people working on it as we passed by. Douglas does feel a bit like a ghost town. I miss how small it was, though. From one side of town to another literally took five minutes. They painted a 4-square field at my old elementary school. They put in a Subway in the mini mart a couple blocks from the old house. And most of the gas stations have changed their names.

I don't know, I could probably go and talk to a psychologist about these inner turmoil feelings I have about growing up, and my dad, and living in that small town, and how in many ways I miss that town, but Tucson is a better place for me to thrive. They say that 50% of people in the US live within 100 miles of where they were born, or maybe that's worldwide, I don't know, but it does show in a sense that we aren't all that mobile. There's a good reason why my grandparents decided to move to Douglas, be it work, or money, or family, but I don't as of yet see a good reason to stay here in Tucson. My aunt's place up here on the northwest side is nice, but it doesn't feel like a home. We're all running on different schedules. It's usually me and my aunt up first, and then my mom and my cousin come home from work at 8,9 in the evening.

Other grad schools I'm looking at:
Purdue
Rice
Stanford?

I have two shitloads of stuff to do tomorrow, and I'm not prepared for either. Sigh. Oh well.

Under different circumstances

So things are about to get hairy school-wise. Got two tests this week, and something due every day of the week. So no rest for Mitchy for a while.

I got a permit acquired this week. Granted, by now it's probably not that much of a bargain, but at least it's the mild security of not having to worry about a parking space everyday, or leaving it out under the elements. And, yes, my car's name is Charlie. So Charlie will be at the Highland Garage while I'm at school.

I downloaded the real SMB2 (Known here as the Lost levels) and it's a pain. The learning curve is pretty big, but it's starting to fall into place. I have to win the game 8 times in order to unlock the extra worlds. So far I'm at 5, and the last run took all of 20 minutes. So that's a mini-long term project. I still have 500 wii points that I need to spend. Maybe Bubble Bobble?

Valentines day is this week. Wow. I totally just spelled it valentimes. Lame.

Been practicing the GRE a little bit with my mom. She's no expert test taker, but I think she knows that this is a pretty big thing to not take lightly. I'm scoring mediocre on the verbal, but I might be able to do well on the writing. we'll see.

I finally put up all the stuff in my room. My old pictures, the three random paintings I've made, and my new Pink Floyd poster that is totally kickass. Trying to go for a Southwestern theme, with random math trophies and pictures from Berkeley. we'll see.

Looks like I might get to do summer research here, but what all is entailed is not totally clear. we'll see how that goes. It looks like I'd get paid for it, so that's always a plus.

Life is happening, so why does it feel like I'm stuck in one place, or, more importantly, why there's nobody stuck here with me...