ladyarkham

Oh my gosh, that test made me just want to just stand up and yell at Dr. Hackett. What an evil, awful, vile exam.

I feel so stupid. This is one of those exams (that are fortunately fewer and farther between, the longer I'm in school) that makes me feel like I'm the only non-science person in a room full of real science people. That I've been faking it, that I don't belong here, because I'm so much stupider than everyone else and will never be able to understand stuff like this.

At least it's over. I think I may have gotten half the points, which would put me at a 65 for the course. So I may pass with a low C. That'd be nice.

I don't know.

I am not a happy camper. It's time to finish my book, get some sleep, and lose myself in computer games.

( just plain medchem )

I'm having trouble understanding what MAO-A and MAO-B do.

I know, intellectually, that calculating exactly what grade I need to make on the exam in order to ensure a 75% or better is not the best use of my time.

A 78%.

Ok.

Today's test, Contemporary Pharmacy Practice, was, according to the people I met out in the hall, "A waste of fifteen minutes." This and Communications definitely display the sense behind not making people who already have an A take the exam - though most of the class wouldn't be taking the exams were that the case.

For tomorrow's exam, I need to:

1. Review pKa's of different functional groups
2. Review activating/deactivating ortho-, para-, and meta-directing groups
3. Re-memorize structures of heterocycles
4. Complete the metabolite prediction practice problems
5. Figure out why I got them all wrong, redo it (I'm assuming I'll need to do this.)
6. Remember that we *want* drugs to be ionized and therefore water-soluble here, unlike in Monday's exam where we wanted them to be unionized so that they could pass through lipid bilayers. Stupid Biopharm.
7. Quickly review stereochemistry: R,S,E,Z, cis-, trans-, Fischer Projections, and alpha and beta sugars.


As a note, the course coordinator announced during the test review that he believed he wouldn't be sticking to a 90-100% range being an A, that it might be more like an 85-100 is an A. After the applause died down, he noted that he'd never been able to keep to the ten point spread with this class before.

So I'm reading Young Miles, a book that fits in somewhere near the beginning of Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga.


And it is just awesome. Seriously. I cannot heap enough praise on this book. It made me laugh out loud with just the cleverness of it, several times. It's about this guy, Miles Vorkosigan, who, due to an assasination attempt on his mother when he was in utero, is fairly deformed and physically weak - he has brittle bones, and he stands at 4'9". However, he turns out to be an accidentally brilliant leader. At one point, an enemy who's "interrogating" him breaks off the conversation to instruct his guards to throw him out the airlock - "You were beginning to convince me."

And it's not very contrived, and he's still remarkably human, unlike the Enderverse characters. Please go find this book and read it. You will be glad you did.

My hardest and most crucial final is over, and... I did well! I know I've passed the class now.

Rereading my notes, we need to have the structures and hydrolysis products of Indomethacin, Aspirin, Phensuximide, Camptothecin, Benzylpenicillin and Cytarabine memorized for tomorrow. It's kind of buried in my notes.


I feel good about the studying I've gotten done today. I still have a lot more to do tonight, but it can be done.

I've kept up my vow to avoid webcomics et. al., but I'm really ready for Thursday to come. ^_^

And, neat:

Yes, I'm skipping church. *is such a heathen*

This morning is dedicated to studying MedChem - going over the metabolic reactions catalyzed by P450 and FMO, and hopefully just in general reviewing Dr. Hackett's material and getting on with life.

This afternoon, I'll go back to Biopharm. I'm really worried by how badly I'm doing on the reviews. After consulting our classmates' study guide, and rereading my notes, I think I understand the concepts a bit better now... But I need to do really well on this test, so the rest of today will be dedicated to practice problems, just working and reworking the material, until my mind is properly trained to do the problems.

I understand this stuff so well in class, and it just floats away during exams.

So, a few weeks ago, I got cautioned by my RA that jumping jacks in the room were disruptive to the entire building. >_< So, you know, DDR is probably off limits. So I was trying to think of something small I could do in my room to get some exercise in, get my heart rate up, without making any noise or vibrations to annoy my fellow dorm-dwellers.

And so I found this hula hoop.

It is the best thing ever.

As I've mentioned before, my school uses a "meal swipe" plan for its meal plan. Unlike Grove City, which allowed each student a breakfast, lunch, and dinner entry into a cafeteria, students choose a certain number of swipes for the semester, and then one swipe will get them into the cafeteria.

Once you're inside the cafeteria, there are buffet-style offerings of various entrees, including a salad bar and dessert bar. However, there are also "Upper Cut" offerings. For an extra one, two, or even three swipes, one can purchase shrimp, crab legs, sushi, prime rib, chicken tenders, and other higher quality offerings. There's even a Hershey's Ice Cream freezer, where for an extra swipe through their reader you can get an ice cream cone of a specialty flavor.

Now, the meal plan works out to be somewhere between $5 and $6 per swipe. Knowing this, knowing that my future self is paying for this, I economize. I bought a relatively small plan and use meal swipes for meals. I only rarely purchase sushi, and when I do, I think of it as spending $12 on dinner.

The undergrads, however, don't seem to think the same way. They swarm the Upper Cut stations, especially the ice cream station, swiping their meal plans away with seemingly little thought. They aren't paying for it, so there's no reason for them to ration and economize, they might as well get everything they want. All it's costing them is to flash their student I.D.

They're completely detached from the cost of the services they're using. Kind of like health care.

To do today:

1. Classes, duh.
2. Hand in Patient Wellness Assessment.
3. Go to IPPE.
4. Deposit Dad's check.
5. Go to test review.
6. Go to D&D.
7. Complete absorbance lab thing from several weeks ago that's due Friday. (I'm so stupid.)
8. Get more sleep than I did last night.

Dr. A, our Communications prof, has given out basically perfect scores on all the (many, many) ungraded projects we've turned in throughout the semester.

On one hand, I put a lot of thought and work into some of those, and am kind of sad that they won't be properly evaluated.

On the other hand, I can skip the final exam and still get a high B in the class.

This radio show is awesome.

While this particular show isn't very notable as a whole, there is a segment a few minutes in about some artists who created their work by polling people as to what elements of art and music they like, and what they hated. They then created paintings and music combining the most popular elements - and then combined all the most unpopular elements.

Listen for the clips from The Most Unpopular Song, a 25 minute track in which an opera singer raps about cowboys, echoed by a children's choir, to the sound of bagpipes and banjos.

I dragged myself to Bible Study tonight - I almost always enjoy it, but I usually have to fight myself to go anyway - and was glad I did, yet again. :) We finished the book of 1 Peter, and apparently next week will be some kind of Christmas dvd and carol-singing time. I'm looking forward to it.

I got into a minor debate with one of the guys in our group, though, on interpretations of Job. He started talking about how the message of Job was the message of Grace. "Job was making sacrifices all the time, even when he didn't need to, for all the wrong reasons. He feared God too much, and he had too legalistic a view - he thought that by sacrificing all the time, he could guarantee that good things would come to him. God used his suffering to prove that it's not the sacrifices that are important, but that Job had a closer relationship with God and a deeper understanding of who God is. The sacrifices couldn't get Job anything - he had to learn to rely on God's infinite grace."

I argued with him a bit, and it came down to him saying "No, that's not explicitly in the text, but it's a good interpretation."

It's a negligible point - nobody's salvation depends on it, etc. etc. But I'm always pretty perplexed by people who put things in the Bible that just aren't there. Not that the message of grace isn't a good one - it is important to relate to God as a person, as someone who loves us - but that's not the point of Job, to me.

What do y'all think?

Until I finish with final exams next Thursday afternoon, I'm giving up Netflix, Hulu, webcomics, and flash games.

I think these classes have lost their shiny newness. Next semester, I'll be more motivated, just because they'll be new. But I'm ready for the semester to end.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Today, my sister arrives on the overnight train from SC, and we finish up our preparatory cooking for Thanksgiving. (My mom is doing this "turkey brine" thing she got from her Good Eats book, soaking the turkey in broth, salt, and spices like candied ginger and allspice berries, I'm really interested to see how it turns out.) I need to go to the pharmacy and let them know when Christmas break is over, so they'll know when I can work again.

This'll kind of mess up plans to go see people, like John D. and Angie, over break, I'm afraid. But we'll see what happens.


I looked at my spending from last semester, and worked out that between today and July 15th, I've spent $660 on gas. My mom kind of shrugged that number off, saying that it was probably normal to need a tank of gas a week - and isn't time for me to think about getting a new car?

I was kind of thinking I'd run the SUV into the ground - and hopefully graduate pharmacy school and have a paying job - before I thought about new cars. We'll see what happens. Maybe this summer?

It's good to be home, even though I really feel like a visitor here, now - kind of like when we'd go see my grandmother or my aunt and uncle when we were kids. Familiar and welcoming, yes, but not mine. Not anymore. And... that's OK. It's a grown-up thing to feel. ^_^

So, I just had a dream that was simultaneously awesome and horrible.

I dreamt that:

1) Pharmacy school was Hogwarts. Yes, musical Hogwarts, not book Hogwarts. Yes, there were both magic and drugs.

2) I walked into this required banquet thing the school was throwing for pharmacists from across the country... and found that we were presenting out Career Development Projects to all of these pharmacists. We were all supposed to make a powerpoint presentation. By the time I realized that I had not actually made any powerpoint slides, and did not know my paper well enough to just rattle off the numbers and facts that I needed to, I had already ticked off the teacherby making noise and screwing up the microphones, and other people had started presenting so it was too late to go get my computer and whip up some slides anyway.

"Man, those powerpoint slides were, like, half the grade for the class!" I realized, just before waking up.

Man, I hate it when that happens.

There's always a bit of time right after I meet up with my mom again where she lets me know all the ways people around here are screwed up and how bad things are, and after that we're good again. Like, my cousin's gotten a divorce, but my parents had to divine that from information she posted on Facebook rather than anyone telling any of us. Or like my mom's Bible study is getting rather political and she's feeling like an outcast. Or financial problems for the family. Etc. etc. etc. So that was lunch and this afternoon. Now we can move on.

I made some of amberdulen's awesome meat pie tonight! I did pretty well - the crust tasted excellent. The insides smelled and tasted scrumptious, though not quite as good as the one the lady herself made - I know for a fact I put too much flour in the gravy-part, and not enough pepper. (And I forgot the egg wash.) But it was really good. Next up, I steal a an Oreo truffle recipe from B's sister.

Speaking of which, B is coming up to visit this weekend! Woo!

I've become addicted to a few of the reality shows on Hulu - namely, "Bank of Mom and Dad" and "Kicked Out," both shows about twenty-somethings who are screwing up their lives. In the former, they're tens of thousands of dollars in debt, while in the latter they're just live-at-home layabouts. In each, the victim's parents enlist the show's help (or possibly the other way around) in smacking these youngsters back in line and teaching them what life is really like. I admit it, I enjoy the smug superiority I feel, watching these shows. But I also feel a bit uneasy, knowing just how easy it would be to be in their position. If my parents were not who they were, if my grasp on reality was just a bit looser, how easy it would be to become totally dependent on people around me, or to ignore my responsibilities and rack up debt.

I do enough of that last one as it is, being in pharmacy school.

To do today:

1. Pick up OTC textbook
2. Put away laundry
3. Dishes
4. Recycling/trash
5. Biopharm homework
6. Go to IPPE
7. Test review @ 4:15
8. Prepare for Law activity in tomorrow's class
9. Go to D&D

I've gotta prep my room for Thanksgiving break inspections, so's I can head down south to visit irked_indeed's family, and then head home.

***Later***

My IPPE canceled on me today, so I'll have to do more site visits after Thanksgiving. Fortunately, this frees up my time so that I can go to D&D tonight! Hooray!