Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty I'm Free at last!" (with apologies to the Reverend dr. Martin Luther King)

The fat lady done belted out "Merce Dilette Amiche" andleft the stage. This quarter is kaput.

I survived my finals. At the risk of sounding boastful, I passed them with rainbow array of dancing and flying colors. Everyone in both of my study groups -- I consider Matthew's study group mine as well since they study at my condo often when I'm present, and i usually join them -- also did relatively well. I was especially proud of my brother, who scored at the very least in the top third in each of his classes. Rankings don't count here, but they really do count if you read between the lines. Someone is keeping track.

It isn't officially announced to the rest of the group when someone fails to make the cut, but my best guess is that bimbo with a big mouth who thinks my boobs are too small didn't make it. I'm making this prognostication based on her reaction after each final. The again, maybe her grandmother died or something of that sort happened to her. Time will tell, but it's really not my problem.

I caught Type B influenza, but didn't stzrt with the symptoms until during my very last final. I was going to say my final final, but to have done s would have seemed a bit redundant. I got on Tami-flu right away, which seems to have shortened the duration.

Because I was feeling quite yucky, Jared took the train here to drive me home in my car. I could have ridden with my brother except that would have left me without  car for the duration of my vacation. Rafael showed up to say good-bye as Jared arrived to pick me up. That wasn't awkward[irony font]. 

I smoothed things over pretty well, explaining how Jared had my name tatooed on his arm to avoid serving a mission. Rafael has cousins who are LDS, so he could totally relate, and said he would have done the same thinf if he'd been in Jared's position.

It's almost too bad they don't live closer to one another, because I believe I just set up a bromance between the only two guys on the face of the Earth who will go out with me. Perhaps we should arrange a triple date of some sort. Jaci if you're reading this, don't  tell me that it's called a menage a trois; I"m not that srt of girl. 

(For the record, I've never yet agreed to an exclusive relationship with anyone. Also for the record, I'm reaonsably certain they're both straight, whihch matters only on th sense that I'm dating them and do't want to be sonme guy's beard.)

Anyway, Tamiflu seems very definitely to shorten symptoms. I was down for the count fr four days, but now I'm just a little weak, and I have the luxury of restingas long as I want in my cozy bed.

In addition to being sick, another reason i didn't go home last weekend was that my parents were hosting their friends, the Ratzlaffs. Weird though they mat be it's not that I could't have possibly tolerated their presence, but Baby Boy Ratzlaff would have been stivk sleeping on a sofa had I been there. He had to sleep in a girly-girl room,  but the bed was far more confortable than a sofa would have been.

I woulsn't have minded hanging out with BabyBoy (whose actual name is Michael, but he didn't receive that name or any other  until kindergarten registration time, because school officilas refused to register him as "Baby  Boy"), but Matthew was home, and Matthew took him places to make the weekend more bearble forthe poor kid. Here's the link to the blog devoted to the Ratzlaff family.
http://alexisar.blogspot.com/2010/08/my-parents-good-friends-ratzlaffs.html
This explains more clearly than I could ever say again just why it was that I spent the weekend up north evn though i've been paroled from school for a few weeks.

Peace out, whatever the hell that means.

This video might almost be amusing if chances were not that the food supply for the entire family -- or perhaps a fate even worse -- would likely happen to any one of these children who made the slightest error. I did find the head bobbing quite a trip, though.  It's too bad Lawrence welk s no longer around. He could've made stars of these North Korean children. They would either have fit in well with the Semonski Sisters, or perhaps they could have replaced them.

Here are the lovely Semonski sistters at their loveliest. Seriously, Lawrence could have walked into any Mormon ward across the U.S.  and found a group of  sisters of the same number or larger who could have sung better than these seamonster did.

it's all good

        This is the current incarnation of my bed. I change the comforters and accessories avery couple of weeks.

I'm awake at this ridiculous hour because when I came home a little after 3:00 after my last class, I totally crashed. Several consecutive days of barely sleeping left me barely finctional. It was all I could do to make it upstairs to my room. I'm still even in the clothing I wore to school yesterday. I'm on top of my comfortoer with just a throw blanket for covers. It worked, though.

My parents are asleep in their own room. Dad is home, which made sleeping soundly a bit easier for me, although, to be perfectly honest, I'd sleep well with any strong body in the house. Some NFL offensive lineman, or  Omar Epps, or even Venus Williams,  would work just as well.  I just don't want to have to fight off an intruder with my mom as my only backup. She's not much stronger than I am.  I do have my dog here with me, which is also nice.

I'm going to shower and put on PJs and watch tV until I fall back asleep. If I don't go back to sleep, no big deal.

Finals are the week after next, which will be nice. I'll do a decent amount of studying to prep for them, but I'm already reasonalbly prepared. I have to go for a bit of overkilll when it comes to studying for exams.

I hope everyone has a nice weekend. I'm going to the beach with a few friends tomorrow, including the firend who has my name tattooed on his bicep.  I don't read anymore into the tattoo than the obvious intent, which was to gethim out of going ona Mormon mission, which it did. someday it may mean more, but not yet.

Schizophrenia, Insane Finals, and Twisted Sister

My last final starts at 9:30 tomorrow morning. I probably know the material as well as I could ever know it. Still, I can't just walk away from it, go to bed, and leave it alone for the night.  It has penetrated my brain and has invaded every aspect of my consciousness. I'm sure if I tried to sleep and were successful, I would dream of inverse Gaussian distributions, compound Poisson processes, cumulative distributive function, probability distribute function, leptokurtosis, platykurtosis, and their ever-important adjective forms, leptokurtic (a distribution's kurtosis that is greater than three), and platykurtic (a distribution's kurtosis that is less than three). This doesn't even begin to address the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test,which primarily establishes either whether in empirical distribution differs from an ideal distribution, or whther two empirical distributions ar significsantly different.

I sense a big yawn and a "Who gives a shit?' from the other end of this cyber-connection. I sympathize, as it isn't of prime importance to me at this time, either, although my grade in the course is.  To me, it seems as though the content of this particular course is of the sort that I'd like to remain in my brain for just long enough to get through tomorrow's final. Then I'd probably wish for it to go away as though the course, or at least my enrollment in it, never happened. Such might not be wise, however.

Let's be hypothetical, here. Not everything in the practice of medicine is neat and clean or conducted under controlled and ideal circumstances. Anyone involved in medicine, be that person a paramedic to a certified nursing assistant to a surgeon  will, if he or she remains in the field for long enough, witness one or more truly horrific sights. I've seen a little of it myself from the other side -- I saw my own tibia and fibula protruding through my skin, exposing flesh and connective tissue, with blood spurting everywhere it could reach.  Furthermore, medical school, medical internship and residency, and medical practice will expose a participant in any or all of the aforementioned to at least a limited element of trauma.  I think  I'm equipped to deal with the trauma. Sometimes the medical personnel are going to win, and sometimes they're going to lose. I've been around enough doctors to know that any physician, surgeon, or whoever, is going to have some great successes and highly rewarding moments, but is also going to have a few dismal failures -- to lose a patient or two (or three, for four, for five, or . . . .) on the ER gurney, O.R.  table, or elsewhere.

In some cases,  time will be the crucial factor in a patient's death.  Sometimes nothing under the sun will have changed the outcome. Sometimes it will be medical error that results in  a patient's death. Doctors are only human, and even insurers recognize that once in a great while, a doctor is going to make a mistake that will cost a life. It had better not happen often as far as the hospital mortality review board and the malpractice insurance carriers are concerned, but it WILL happen. I think I'm equipped to deal wih this when it does happen. I don't expect for it to be easy, but I think  I'm enough of a realist to know that it will be gut-wrenching and will cause some temporary depression, but that I will eventually move on. It's also one of the reasons for maintaining a professional distance between oneself and one's patients. Grieving for the loss of a patient in a professional sense is difficult enough without adding the grief that accompanies the loss of  someone who has become a close person friend.  Occasionally boundaries will be crossed and this will happen, but it cannot be habitual if a person is to succeed in the medical field.

In any event, I think I'm up to all of this, especially as the worst of it will happen in medical school and residency, as I intend to go into pathology.  My dealings with patients in that branch of medicine will be minimal. Still, four years of med school, two of which will include heavy dealings with patients, and probably four year of residency are a lot of years to spend dealing with patients. What if I think I'm up to the rigors of it all  but am not?

My original plan was to enroll in law school as soon as I did my initial year of residency -- my internship. After that, I would be a licensed physician in whatever state with which I cleared matters with the state medical board.  I would work roughly three twelve three-hour shifts (ERs are pleading for MDs even without specializations; for want of doctors, they're utilizing physician's assistants and nurse practitions working as doctors; employment would not be difficult to find)) while attending law school for three years. Following that, I would complete my residency. My hope is that it all works out well, that the law degree is just something that comes in handy if I ever choose to go into hospital administration, or in helping me and my colleagues in dealing with sticky situations. I might also shift courses and defend doctors against malpractice suits.

One other option though, and one that would pay extremely well, if I ever decide that money is extremely important to me, is that I could go to work for a major insurer writing malpractice insurance policies. I wouldn't technically be an actuary, but with this course I'm taking, and with combined law and medical degrees, few insurance coverers would care that my degree had not been in actuarial science. My qualifications would actually exceed those of most actuarial science graduates. If such becomes the case, I would hope to remember every single thing I ever memorized about skewness (or, as some prefer, skewedness), leptokurtosis, and the Kolmogorov-Smiirnov test. It would behoove me not to forget a single thing I learned in this class.

My study partner and I seem to have a better grasp of the course content than does anyone in the class. Study groups are a new experience for me. As a minor, being heavilyinvolved with study partners or groups was not practical. As a  minor, I dealt with the curfew here for minors, which, though not tightly enforced, was a factor for me.  A seventeen-year-old who looked twelve  sent out red flags to campus police and to sheriff's deputies patrolling the off-campus community.  Furthermore, other students didn't really want a minor studying with them who could only study until maybe 10:00 p.m.  Turning eighteen has been for me like discovering that the glass slipper fits and that I'm the real Cinderella, and everything doesn't turned bag]ck into ragged clothing, pumpkins, rats, etc, just because the clock strikes twelve.

Though I still look like a child, I generally have my pick of study partners or groups. In the larger classes, we tend to form ourselves into informal groups and find convenient times to study. In Risk Theory, there's one other guy who "gets it." We've paired up. He's a twenty-four year old MBA candidate. He's  married, which makes things a bit awkward, but we work it out. We usually study at his apartment  when his wife is home.  Once we studied at my house because his wife was at work, but my mom called his wife and told her that she would not leave the house with the two of us there, and that, no offense intended toward the lady's husband, but that she would never leave her daughter alone in a house with a man who wasn't an extremely close relative,  regardless of how much she trusted the man. We've studied about ninety minutes a week, and it's been time well-spent. I expect both of us to ace this course, and, as for the rest of the class, they'll be lucky to pass unless I've really mis-assessed the situation.

A good study partner or group is worth a great deal. I've found the old adage about not judging a book by its cover to be true when it comes to study partners and group members. In my "Hunters and Gatherers" course, we even had a frat rat in our group. He wasn't a bad guy and actually had a brain; he pulled his share of the load, and he did a little to convince me that just because a person is affiliated with the Greek system is not necessarily proof positive that the person is a reprobate.

I've found that I'm not competitive where my study partners'  or groups' grades are concerned. (Perhaps I would be less generous  if they were all getting A's and I was barely pulling B's, but as it stands, if they don't do well, I consider it at least in part my own failure.

In the meantime, do I just stay up and watch TV, or do I try to sleep and risk dreaming about  Poisson processes, among other matters equally counterproductive to quality rest? I would avise anyone to think long and hard before enrolling in  Risk Theory.


Be cruel to your school.
'Cause you may never get another.
Be cruel to your school.
In the name of rock and roll.
Be cruel to your school.
Just like a sister or a brother.
Be cruel to your school.
In the name of rock and roll.

       -- Twisted Sister

[edit]

Uggghhhh!!! But it's almost over!

Finals area upon us, or they're upon me, anway. I've taken two exams already. I don't have  exams for either my gymnastics ro tumbling courses. My Music Theory IV instructor has kindly decided that giving me a final exam would be cutting down a tree for no good reason and has agred to give me the A and the number ine finish in class standing  without the final exam. It's not an exam over which  I would have bitten my naisl to the quick, but then, it's two hours I can use to do something else, and it's even more than that when considering the time needed to travel to campus, park, walk to class, walk back to the car, etc. It was an act of kindness on the part of the professor, which is something that seems to be rare around here.   If I have a chance to do this professor a favor in return, I will. She also teaches violin, and in the future she may have a student who is not a trust fund baby whose funds are low and who is in need of an extremely cheap or free acompanist for a senior recital. I'll come through for her and for her student if such is the case.


I took my final yesterday for regional literature. As much as it pained me to do so, I temporarily "forgot" that not every great piece of literature was written in the South. Actually, some good works did come from the south. I focused on To Kill A Mockingbird,  Cold Sassy Tree, and A Confederacy of Dunces. To Kill a Mockingbird was the only really major work to which I devoted major space, and even in doing that, I was taking a chance. The readers, especially if the prof does her own grading, get very weary of reading the same things, or even about the same things  repeatedly.  I included a few references to the works of Janet Holt Giles (they're quite funny in their own way). I gave token mention to  Gone with the Wind  (again at the risk of boring the grader) and the collective works of Mark Twain (I love Mark Twain, incidentally, but I was concerned that whoever grades our tests will get tired of reading about Mark Twain, so I trouched lightly upon his works). If anything wil distinguish my exam from the others, it will be the emphasis on A Confederacy of Dunces, It was a Pulitzer Prize winner. The professor alluded to it in several lectures without mentioning it by name, probably curious to see if anyone would follow up on her subtle hints and check it out. I'll know soon enough if reading it paid off in terms of this exam, but it was a good read, regardless.

I took my final for Theory of Knowledge today. It was fairly comprehensive, but gave a broad base of topics on which to write mni-essays, and allowed students to choose seven of the fifteen on which to write.  I was too lazy even to think. I just wrote essays on the first seven topics. I don't even know what the final eight were. My mother said that is the stupidest thing she's ever heard of. When the final grade comes out, we'll see if it was really that stupid or not. I'll know in about a week.

Tomorrow is my anthropology final (Hunters and Gatherers). It will be interesting to see in what direction the professor goes with this. I suspect it's going to be a single essay on a fairly narrow topic, but I could be wrong. If I had to make a guess, I suspect it may have some connection to the relationship between formal land ownership as an ultimate end to the lifestyle of hunting and gathering, and that obesity and/or overweight may tie in to the topic. The professor is weight-phobic and works in the topic of obesity in the USA into almost every lecture whether or not it is pertinent.  I'd be concerned for those in the class who are overweight (no one in the class is technically obese in my opinion)  and that his bias could potentially impact their grades except that I don't think he has a ghost of a clue as to whom any one of us is, and probably couldn't pick any of us out of a police line-up if five-hundred-thousand dollars were on the line.

On Friday is, for me, the biggie:  Risk Theory. I would expect several questions pertaning to Stochaistic processes, a whole lot of skewdness issues, and hopefully at least something about kurtosis since I did a paper on the topic.  It will probably be roughly half short essay and half problem-solving related to specific cases.   I've studied the subject matter all along, so there's no real reason to panic now. Still, I'll probably take half a klonopin -- enough to calm my jitters but not enough to make me drowsy -- if I can talk my dad into it.

Immediately following my last final on Friday, I'm heading to Utah. My friend Jared will join me there, as he grew up there and has many connections to the place. He's killing time waiting for his mission call to arrive, so he can decide whether to accept the call and strengthen his quadriceps by riding a bike for the next two years, or to instead tell the Committee and the Church as a whole to take a flying cannonball into the polluted Great Salt lake.  I'm going to do a few recordings for an LDS-genre children's cartoon that the father of the children for whom I babysat is the muic producer. I'll only be there until Tuesday and will have the rest of the week off. Utah's a lovely place and all, with all those seagulls and Mormons and Mormon relatives, but I live a quarter of a mile from a beach. Most of the  student population will be deserting the place to go to dirtier and more debaucherous beaches than the ones we have, so it's as though my friends and I will have the place to ourselves. There will be some tourists here, but they don't know the good spots, and I'm certainly not announcing them here. (If you're a regular reader and know where I'm talking about and really want to know something about the place, shoot me an email at aleximerc@aol.com and I'll gladly share any secrets I have about the place.)

I'll end with a bizarre verse from a bizarre Paul Simon song ("Duncan") just because I thought it was a rather inventive rhyme scheme near the end. Neither the song itself nor the selected verse  has absolutely anything to do with this post or with my life or with just about anything.  Sometimes random inclusions are fitting.

A young girl in a parking lot
Was preaching to a crowd
Singing sacred songs and reading
From the Bible
Well, I told her I was lost
And she told me all about the Pentecost
And I seen that girl as the road
To my survival
      -- Paul Simon

#    -- the non-arrtist still known as Alexis

Same Song, Different Verse *

* a whole lot louder and a little bit worse 

It had been several months since I last relived past real-life horrors through my dream state, so I suppose I was overdue. This one did not disappoint. It was pretty much like the real thing except that it combined elements of two separate incidents. In my dream,  I was in the girls' restroom (or women's restroom; come to think of it, I'm not sure what the sign on the door says, which is just about the only memory of the whole sordid affair that is not precise and vivid)   in the administration building of my former high school . . . with the attacker thugs present and attacking me . . . but there was also smoke, which  allowed me to simultaneously relive the two prior nightmares of my real  life.

Now that I'm awake and cognizant that my dream was just a dream, my preference would be to deal with it myself,  probably by turning on my bedroom TV and channel-surfing for the rest of the night. When I have such a dream, however, I typically  wake up everyone else in the house, and sometimes everyone in one or both of the houses on either side as well. This time I only woke up the inhabitants of my own home and one of the two adjacent houses. It could have been worse; I might have been sleeping in the dorm tonight, and I might have awakened three floors of sleeping residents on the night before most of the students began taking final exams. I suppose I should thank God for sparing all of them the interruption in sleep and for sparing me the humiliation of being the cause of that interruption.

Because my pulse is still at 120 beats per minute fifteen minutes after I've been awakened with those precious memories, my dad is insisting that I take one-half my normal dosage of Klonopin. He's not insisting on the full dosage because I absolutely must be dressed and ready to head out the door in  four hours and twenty minutes. I'd still rather not take even a half-dosage of a benzo in such close proximity to a final exam. My mom, however,  is saying that she'll drive me to school and drop me off at the  drop-off point closest to each classroom. She will then park, come into the room of each of the day's final exam, give a copy of my 504 plan  with the pertinent section highlighted,  to the professor or teaching assistant, then sit across the classroom from me, watching so that she can wake me up in the unlikely but conceivable event that I doze off in the middle of the final exam.

I'm most fortunate that my mom has [temporarily, anyway]  retired from her "real"career as a clinical psychologist, school psychologist, and school administrator, and can follow me all over campus in my endeavor to remain conscious throughout the three final exams I must take today. My 504 plan specifies that this service is to be provided for me on an as-needed basis, but it would be much more embarrassing, not to mention much more time-consuming, inconvenient, and sleep-depriving,  if I had to make my way to the Support and Enablement Office at the crack of dawn to make arrangements to have someone else provide my in-class wake-up service. If my mom comes to class with me,  I don't need to explain anything to anyone. She will will sit right next to the exam proctor to make it clear that she isn't there to aid and abet me in cheating on the exam, although my professors surely must know by now that I have no need to cheat, but she'll otherwise maintain as low a profile as humanly possible. Suspicions of cheating, embarrassment of having Mommy accompany me to class, and other indignities notwithstanding, I'm most appreciative of my mother's willingness to drop whatever she had planned for the day to help me over one more hurdle. Not everyone is lucky enough to have a mother so willing to sacrifice her time as my mom.

Tonight's incident was slightly unusual in that this was the very first time since the impetus and onset of my nightmares  that it was technically my own decision as to whether or not to  be medicated, as I am now a legal adult. I could have "just said no" to drugs, and I was tempted.  The fact that I am  I am eighteen, though, does little to change the reality that sometimes Daddy actually does know best.  I took the benzo.

Sweet dreams, everybody.