Finals Week

The week that most college students dread is finally here: Finals Week. The mere mention is enough to make people cringe in anticipation and either rush to the library to begin studying or rush to their room to lie in bed and just give up. I am no exception to this, however, this year has given me a very different finals week experience than any other of my years at college.

To begin, I’ve been working on finals since Thanksgiving break as the majority of them were actually projects and presentations rather than a standard, formal written exam taken during the week during a two hour period. And then those presentations have been spread across the last two weeks. This has resulted less of a finals week and more of a “Month of Final Exams” for me and all of the other students taking the same senior engineering classes as me. I’ve gotten little sleep over this past week and now, that the majority of my presentations and reports are finished, I can actually get the chance to breathe a bit. That’s right, I’m actually relaxing more during finals week than I was before.

Don’t misunderstand, I still have a long way to go but actually getting to sleep at night it definitely a very nice and underrated option to have. With 2 and a half finals left to go (there’s still a report due for one of the classes where I had a presentation) I still have plenty of work and studying to get done during the tail end of this semester. And, as most students are aware, that tail end is filled with barbs and spike and other such things to make our lives all the more miserable. Think Stegosaurus or Ankylosaurus.

I wish the best of luck to all of those trying to survive finals week this fall semester. I’m sure that we would all use a little bit of luck this time of year, myself included.

All Nighter

I saw the sun rise for the second day in a row. It wasn’t because I decided to get up early after a restful night of sleep to see the beauty of a sunrise and bask in the glory of the wonder that is life. No, nothing even remotely close or pleasant as that. For the second night in a row I pulled an all-nighter to get my projects finished up. I have gotten some sleep these past few days but that was mostly due to me passing out from exhaustion. At least I have sleep to look forward to once this semester is over. I plan on sleeping at least through those first few days that I get back home and can lie down on my real comfortable bed and not those rectangles of foam the university calls a mattress.

I have to say, there is something so odd about being up all night and seeing the sun rise. During the day, we watch the sun slowly sink into the horizon as it gets gradually darker over the hours before a sunset an even then the light seems to linger on for just a bit more before the night fully arrives. The mornings however seem to be the complete opposite. The night goes on and on and then suddenly, it’s bright outside and then soon after the sun is rising. It’s almost as if you blink you’ll miss it.

I’m sure that there’s a reason for that but I don’t really care right now. I’ve got enough on my mind as is. For now, I’m just going to say that the sun is a morning person and I can understand why. My only issue with the sun being a morning person is that I, most definitely, am not.

New Theme and New Idea

I started using a different theme for the blog. I think it looks a little bit nicer and it makes the widgets a lot more accessible which is what I really wanted. Also, I may attempt to try writing something more than my rambling thoughts. No promises or guarantees of success or failure but we’ll see how it all goes. Now to just find some inspiration….

Closure and Confirmation

If you’ve read any of my previous posts you might have found out that I’m rather socially awkward and that one of my biggest fears is dying alone. I don’t mean to say that I’ve reached a Unabomber level of social interaction or anything even remotely close to that. I have friends and such but what I mean is that when it comes to a love life, mine is literally non-existent and I have almost no experience in that area of human interaction. So when I say that I’m going to die alone I mean that I’m going to be alone and unloved for the rest of my life until I eventually die. Now that I’ve gotten definitions out of the way, let’s get to the actual story.

For the last few months I’ve developed feelings for one of my good friends. I’ve been friends with her for years and we’ve gone though a lot together. I spent most of this semester overthinking everything and waiting for that impossibly perfect moment to tell her how I felt. Though my nerves probably would have prevented me from doing it even if that moment did occur. As an aside I’ve become pretty good at bottling up my emotions (yes, I’m aware that it’s likely unhealthy) so it was pretty easy to hide how I felt about her. However, my feelings for her combined with my insecurities began to fester in my mind over the months. My anxious thoughts would keep me up late into the night while I tossed and turned in bed. The thoughts used her as a focal point but were more about my own fears. “Why would she even like me?” “I would have absolutely no experience with dating and relationships while she does. Surely she wouldn’t want to have to deal with that.” “I’d probably just be terrible at relationships anyways.” “What if it ruins our friendship?” These thoughts went and still go on and on and on.  Gnawing away at me day after day.

Then there came the night before my post about “Today I Learned.” I got far too drunk and ended up drunk texting her sloppily how much I liked her. It wasn’t a very pretty sight. I apologized to her later and she said to not worry about it but I still felt terrible. My thoughts were racing around even faster. Combined with the stress of all the work that I have to do in these next two weeks I felt like ripping my brain out. Then, last night happened. Last night there was a small relaxed get together. I had a few glasses of wine and then a few more. I was very conscious of my actions, however. The wine acted more as liquid courage than stupid juice. In the end, after getting back to my room, I sent her a long message about how I had meant to say all that I had in the drunk text while I was sober and that either way I just wanted closure at the very least. I got a response the next day and unsurprisingly she said that she just saw me as a friend.

I suppose that it could have been worse. Our friendship could have been ruined by me doing something especially stupid or continuing to bottle up my emotions and causing up to drift apart from me being so emotionally unavailable. Don’t get me wrong, I still felt like crap about it like I think most people would but I want to believe – need to believe – that in the end this will be good for me.

Still, a large part of me knows that this is just more confirmation of the fact that I will die alone. I know it sounds ridiculous that I would get that from getting rejected from just one girl but understand how I see it. It took me months of buildup just to tell her how I felt in an almost reasonable way. On top of that, she was the first girl that I outright told how I felt about her. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had many crushes before but I’ve never in my 21 years of life made the first move to tell a crush how I felt about her. It’s a bit embarrassing but it just supports my belief that I will never find love and will eventually die alone. I know that I wound wishy washy about this and that’s just because I am. I think that this whole experience was a good step forward for me but it was only a baby step in the long road to not dying alone and the clock ticks faster everyday.

I apologize if were expecting me to end with something more positive about what I learned from this but there’s really nothing all that positive to take from it.

Back to the Grind

Thanksgiving is over and now I’m already back at school. These last two weeks are going to be hell. I have no doubt about that. At least my professors had some mercy and nearly every midterm project that I had that was supposed to be due this Monday got pushed back at least a few days. It’s definitely a bit less stressful to have the extra time to work and get everything much more polished. I won’t be doing much these next weeks other than working but I’m sure I’ll have plenty of late night ramblings to post on here. However, how coherent they will be is up for question.

Anyways, I am glad about one thing at least. Christmas time is here! Like many other people, this is definitely my favorite time of the year. there’s just so much great nostalgia involved with the season and nearly everything going on. In fact, the first thing that I did when I got back to my room was to decorate it. it put lights around the windows and then almost all the way around the top of the ceiling. I still have more stuff to put up even though I’ll only be here for a little over two weeks before heading back home. The common room does look pretty fantastic though.

They’ll be more to write about soon I’m sure.