Life and Times of AlieMalie

… and don’t want to be working on my Introduction. I always find something much more important to do other than work on what could determine what determines the path my life will take in the next few years which in turn will determine the whole path. Oh well. There’s always tonight and tomorrow, eh? All nighters ROCK!

I am a little blue and a lot tired.

I want a ticket to Europe.

I wish I was finished with school.

I hate flying.

I love my friends.

I miss being a kid in the country.

I fear not being good at what I do.

I hear the hum of silence in the house.

I wonder where and what grad school will be like.

I regret nothing.

I am not as friendly as I seem.

I dance in my living room alone when I get super good news and am really happy.

I sing in the car.

I cry at the drop of a hat.

I am not always very smart – in fact, I can be really fucking stupid sometimes.

I write all the time, and not always here.

I confuse myself.

I need a vacation with friends.

I should take a nap.

I start books and have to finish them – even if I hate them.

I finish other people’s sentences way too much.

My old neighbourhood hosts a party during Fiesta every year on the second Saturday. Today was that party. Some of my very good friends have a double lot so we all find our way to their house, bring a dish, some lawn chairs, some beer and good conversation and sit out on the lawn to people watch and talk. Sometimes we’ll venture into the fair to go shopping, get some funnel cakes – yum! – or hear some live music, but mostly we all just sit around. Oh, and watch the parade. Lots and lots of fun. This is the one event that will bring me back here every year. Anyhoo, there was a traitor in the midst – I gave a cascarone to one of the munchkins and they turned around and nailed me. Good thing they’re all still at the age where I can scoop them up like a sack of potatoes and haul them off to return the favour. Like I said, LOTS of fun.

In a funky mood tonight.
I am so not tired – my internal body clock is completely messed up – so I decided to go thumbing through all the photos I have on my computer. fun fun fun. Anyhoo, here is a shameless photo post.

Attempting to look coy? Riiiiight.

Well, I had my last test aside from my final in my Experimental Psychology Lecture this morning. Even though I studied last night and pretty much fully understand the material – how to appropriately read psychology articles, experiments, correlational studies and how to write and conduct the same – I feel like I’m doing miserably in the class. I went to talk with the professor and we both agree that my performance in this class is puzzling. The questions I ask during lecture as well as the discussions I prompt and partake in show my understanding of the material yet my grades on the tests are lackluster at best. C’s, I tell you. I am not used to getting C’s – especially in an area that I obviously excel in: Psychology, hence the major.

To be completely honest, I’m really pissed off with myself. I’ve realised that the way the class is presented – 15 to 20 slides per lecture that we’re supposed to take notes on as well as an accompanying lecture while we’re taking notes on the slides – is not conducive to the way I learn. Any of you who know me in person, hell all of you actually if you’ve been reading my blog for a bit, know I like to talk. Heh, why the hell do I have a blog? ‘Cause I can talk or type any one of your ears or eyes off. That sounded so wrong, but anyway. I do not do well in classes where I cannot process the information immediately and then talk about it. In this class I am too busy writing down notes that are presented on the slides that I cannot hear what the professor is saying or answer the questions she’s posing. In the past three weeks it’s gotten to the point that my frustration is starting to show in class where I’ll – ahem – forcefully put my pen down and ask in a not so nice manner for her to repeat the question. It’s not frustration with her or me trying to attract attention, it’s frustration with not being able to cover all of the presented material. This is really screwing up my grade. If I could orally present the knowledge I’ve gained in this class, I’d blow just about everyone out of the water.

Not only that, but I cannot see myself using the information I’ve gained in this class for anything other than grad school. Don’t worry, I understand the gravity of the previous sentence. Grad school is a huge thing for me – for anyone who undertakes it for that matter – because it means that I’ll be able to get a degree and a license to be able to practise counseling and be an influence on other people’s lives. People will come to me and place trust in me before then even know who I am simply because I will have a piece of paper on my wall that says I met all the criteria set out in grad school which to me means I will have conducted multiple experiments, correlational studies and been able to interpret other studies to further my research and back it up. I know I’ll need this class for that, trust me, I know. Grr. But what I really want to do is help other people, again, hence the degree in psychology. I guess I just need to reevaluate how I’m looking at these things: ends to a means. But I don’t want to look at it that way. This class is more geared for people who want to spend the rest of their lives in little white coats collecting data and running the statistics to show there’s a significant effect here, a significant correlation there. I have no use for that.

I have no use for that to the extent that the proposal for the study that I’m writing right now is the one that I will run in grad school and it’s directly related to exactly what I want to do when I start my practise. It’s a study on the decreasing attention spans children are experiencing. I’ll go into it more in a couple of years here I guess – patience people! hehe – or if you really want an idea, email me; I just won’t publish it on the web with no guarantee that someone else won’t get to it before I do. It’s a really interesting topic, the way I’ve produced the study, and for some reason it’s never been done before which I find extremely interesting seeing as though it’s a fairly simple experiment that will have huge results from very little manipulation as well as being very related to real-world implications. My theory on that is that so many people are having a decrease in their attention spans that they don’t have the patience to conduct a study for as long as this one will take. But that’s more of a joke than anything – kind of.

Anyway, I’m so frustrated at the moment. I know that no matter my grades in this class or any of the others that aren’t directly related to what I want to do, I will be able to impress people with my grad school application as well as my proposal and interview. What sucks is that it will be a bit more difficult for me to prove my worth to some of the professors I’ll be interviewing with beacuse of my less than super GPA. Oh well, time to pull out the charm, wit and ability to discuss anything and everything intelligently.

Fuck, this is why I want to be a psychologist – I want to talk and listen, NOT run a bunch of damn numbers.

Grr.

Bring on the damn Fiesta. Thank god it’s Friday.

On a completely different topic: I’m sitting here in the computer lab jamming out to my iPod and the songs that I used to listen to constantly in Romania have just shuffled into the playlist. I love that. When I travel, I listen to a ton of music. Well, not a ton, but a select few CDs so that when I come home, I will be able to pop those CDs in and be reminded of whatever it was that I was doing when I was listening to those songs wherever I was. Like I listened to the Beatles 1 when I was on the trains in the UK so whenever I hear Ticket to Ride (which is actually the American version, the British version is Ticket to Rye but they figured Americans wouldn’t get the Rye reference and since it sounded like Ride, why the hell not?), I think of taking the train from London to Leeds. When I hear some Celine Dion song (yes I realise I just lost a ton of respect from some of you), I remember being on the train in Belgium. And so on and so forth. Cool, eh? I’m only allowed to do that with each CD for one trip so that I don’t get overwrite with the songs. I wouldn’t want to erase the memories of Europe with memories of NYC – plus, there’s always new music for new trips. So here I am sitting here listening to ELO – bonus points to any of you out there who know who they are, and no cheating! – and thinking about romping through the Transylvanian Alps. At least I’m in a better mood now.