Term 2081 Finals

Not much to explain; it's Finals Week. What else is there to say? Anyway, here's my schedule:


Aw. They're in descending order of difficulty. How quaint. Obviously, any prayers between, oh, 14:00 and 15:50 EST on Tuesday are appreciated... because no matter how much studying I have done, and no matter how much studying I continue to do between now and then, I will not reach a point where I will be able to call myself "prepared" for the CHEM exam. Sure, I will have prepared, but to "be prepared" implies completion of the preparation, which won't even come close to fruition. Come test time, I'll just go in and write what I know; that's all I can do. And that's all I have to say about that.

The MATH exam I'm not too worried about, as I've done fairly well on the midterms and have gotten pretty good at fitting the necessary equations and transformations on my one-page "cheat sheet." I'll be making that Tuesday night at around 18:00 after I've had a couple of hours to wallow in self-pity. And I hope I'm kidding there, but the way things have been going in CHEM, you never know...

As for ChE... please. In a matter of 60 seconds, my classmates got my professor from "bring your Felder textbook (for the data tables), a calculator, and a ruler" to "bring your Felder and Wankat's books, a calculator, a ruler, and a one-page cheat sheet." I've been getting high-90s on the exams and 100s on the quizzes as it is.

Of course, I won't blow off studying... what else do I have to do all week? But if, after two or three hours of studying, my mind has gone numb because of the seemingly simple and repetitive concepts, then I won't feel bad calling it quits. My only concern is that this exam is three hours long, as it's a six-credit class... our midterms were two hours and our quizzes were one. Yikes!

I'm going to stay in Pittsburgh all day Friday to tie up loose ends, and begin my journey home shortly after the men's basketball game against Oklahoma State on Saturday 15 December. I'll be home for three full weeks before classes resume on Monday 7 January 2008.

Random tangent: I'm usually adamantly against New Year's Resolutions, because January is such a horrible time of year to start anything. I much prefer March, June, and October for resolving to do things, for reasons to long to fit in this already-long tangent. But I've got a January resolution this year already, although I'll probably start it Friday after my finals. It was more or less prompted by the most recent episode of my all-too-frequent emotional breakdown series. No need to worry; good comes out of all of my breakdowns, you see, in case I haven't made that obvious by mentioning the resolution in the first place.