Research Aggro!!! With many a list included.
4 Comments Published by Oh Wayward One on 19 November 2009 at 11/19/2009 03:16:00 pm.
AAGHHHH!!!
My stupid Research Methods tutor hates my project proposal and has given me about 0.0009% constructive criticism on it in my project feedback form which now I have to use to make it right, BEFORE the 8th of December.
ASSHAT!
I am just really, really annoyed. What annoys me the most is that out of all the 2 years worth of classes that I have taken in this degree programme, I have never had any problems with tutors, and never had any issues with getting bad feedback on a draft assignment. Never. I always
a) write my draft on time
b) submit it for review (you get 1 chance for review per semester/per course)
c) receive (in a timely manner) the tutor's comments
d) incorporate them and make changes
e) submit final draft by deadline
f) get a pretty damn good result for the effort.
Now, in the ONE class that I have serious issues with understanding and designing a project for, I end up with
a) tutor who hates my idea
b) gives me my feedback nearly 2 whole weeks late
c) loses one of my assignment drafts altogether
d) gives me mumbo-jumbo nonsense back as "feedback" that I can't even understand!!!!
I am really stressed now, and I'm going to have to
a) choose an entirely different topic and re-write my entire proposal (which I won't be allowed to submit for feedback since we only get one go per semester/per project, and just hope it turns out better than this one, or
b) stick to my guns and just keep shooting them blindly in the dark at nothing, but with gusto, and hope for the best when I turn it in in December??!?!?!
CRAP! BOLLOCKS! CRAPOLLOCKS!!!
I need to talk to a professional researcher fast. I would consider talking to my tutor but of course as I mentioned before, SOMEHOW for this ONE CLASS I managed to get La Maestra Idiota as my tutor and I am almost afraid to even phone her as she might squeal like a pig at me and shoot flaming daggers of wild boar fangs into my ear over the phone line. AAGGGHHHHHHH!!!!
Right now I am just channelling Elliot on Scrubs, every 2 minutes: FRICK! FRICK FRICK FRICK FRICK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
In happier news though, we are the proud new owners of an awesome 2002 Harley Davidson Night Train model Sportster which I can not WAIT to ride except it needs a few new parts first and some fixing up which we'll probably have to have done over the border. But exciting nonetheless.
AND in the "LIFESTYLE" department, I have finally found 2 places that are non-malaria and IN the country, where we can go spend a few days and blow a few grand on lazing in decadance and tranquility. The only problem is that I have to get this damn semester over with, which means effectively after the 11th of December, this city is going to be eating my dust. Hot diggity!
My stupid Research Methods tutor hates my project proposal and has given me about 0.0009% constructive criticism on it in my project feedback form which now I have to use to make it right, BEFORE the 8th of December.
ASSHAT!
I am just really, really annoyed. What annoys me the most is that out of all the 2 years worth of classes that I have taken in this degree programme, I have never had any problems with tutors, and never had any issues with getting bad feedback on a draft assignment. Never. I always
a) write my draft on time
b) submit it for review (you get 1 chance for review per semester/per course)
c) receive (in a timely manner) the tutor's comments
d) incorporate them and make changes
e) submit final draft by deadline
f) get a pretty damn good result for the effort.
Now, in the ONE class that I have serious issues with understanding and designing a project for, I end up with
a) tutor who hates my idea
b) gives me my feedback nearly 2 whole weeks late
c) loses one of my assignment drafts altogether
d) gives me mumbo-jumbo nonsense back as "feedback" that I can't even understand!!!!
I am really stressed now, and I'm going to have to
a) choose an entirely different topic and re-write my entire proposal (which I won't be allowed to submit for feedback since we only get one go per semester/per project, and just hope it turns out better than this one, or
b) stick to my guns and just keep shooting them blindly in the dark at nothing, but with gusto, and hope for the best when I turn it in in December??!?!?!
CRAP! BOLLOCKS! CRAPOLLOCKS!!!
I need to talk to a professional researcher fast. I would consider talking to my tutor but of course as I mentioned before, SOMEHOW for this ONE CLASS I managed to get La Maestra Idiota as my tutor and I am almost afraid to even phone her as she might squeal like a pig at me and shoot flaming daggers of wild boar fangs into my ear over the phone line. AAGGGHHHHHHH!!!!
Right now I am just channelling Elliot on Scrubs, every 2 minutes: FRICK! FRICK FRICK FRICK FRICK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
In happier news though, we are the proud new owners of an awesome 2002 Harley Davidson Night Train model Sportster which I can not WAIT to ride except it needs a few new parts first and some fixing up which we'll probably have to have done over the border. But exciting nonetheless.
AND in the "LIFESTYLE" department, I have finally found 2 places that are non-malaria and IN the country, where we can go spend a few days and blow a few grand on lazing in decadance and tranquility. The only problem is that I have to get this damn semester over with, which means effectively after the 11th of December, this city is going to be eating my dust. Hot diggity!
Dang, that's a lot of flies!
2 Comments Published by Oh Wayward One on 17 November 2009 at 11/17/2009 10:25:00 am.
You know summer is in full swing when the flies come out and drive you to drink.
This here is what we call the Red Top Fly Trap and it is pretty amazing. That layer of black at the bottom is all fly carcasses.
It works on the old bait & switch principle - the decaying bodies of their friends baits the live ones away from your house, and then they fly in, where the bait is switched with death! Awesome!
Anyway, like flies, there's a whole bunch of annoyances I'm dealing with right now, INCLUDING blogger's new stupid photo-upload malarkey, where you can't even type while waiting the 10 hours for your photo to upload b/c they freeze your screen up and show you a little twirly circle while the photo is loading. Can I just say that is a bunch of time-wasting crap!? And what happened to spell check, can I ask??
And I finally gave up Twitter. What another bunch of crap. I just dont think my ego is big enough to think that cyberspace really gives a rats ass what I'm thinking about every 40 characters of my life. And I don't have time to be preached to, like half the people I follow have to use it as a preaching platform and I didn't have the time to go and delete each preacher user by user. So I just ditched it. AND I don't like the idea of having even more shyte bearing my name splashed all over the internet. I've got enough of that going on already. Even after you change your account to "private", there's still leftovers hanging about, lurking in cyberspace. So it got house-cleaned.
I slept in today - as in I woke up at 7 instead of the hella-early hour I've been using in order to accomplish all my school-related crap since the semester began. I just couldn't do it anymore. I need some damn sleep! So I got one extra hour of it today. It sucks because I can't even blame anything other than simply mental stress and my own life choices - people are always like "oh I see the baby has given you the ol' tired bags under the eyes!" But she's been sleeping through the night since she was 3.5 months!!! It's not even her!! Hell we let her sleep in a couple weekends back (when we DIDNT have to be somewhere at 8am) and she slept til 9:30! It's all me! I know it! I just need a freakin break FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!
And honestly half of that aggro also stems from The Mr. these days - he's also suffering the inevitable that comes from trying too hard to do too much. Now it's too much work + mental anguish for him. He got sunk like a battleship last weekend by a tribal chief at a public meeting that humiliated him and cut him deep, and now he can't think of anything else and has a big bad case of the hangups. That plus we're about ready to feed one of our employees to the shredder AND the office vehicle got broken into and stereo stolen, AND we just realized that we're going to have to go way up into the north (into malaria-area) around Xmas to do another big public meeting (and probably leave the youngling behind because they say not to take babies into malaria area) uggghhhhhh.... for the first time ever I heard him say the other day "I'm starting to think about leaving" (the country! not me!) and I realized: uh-oh.... somebody REALLY needs a break.
I made him a cranberry-orange coffee cake on saturday to ease his troubled mind after returning from the disaster meeting mentioned above. That worked pretty well for about a half a day. But I can't go around making coffee cake twice a day! It was pretty freakin good I must say though.
We are still really enjoying the HHH (running club). Now we meet on Monday evenings throughout summer because of the temperature, instead of Sunday afternoons. It's still fun. We still love everybody there, and have made lots of really good friends there. It's almost coming up upon the xmas party though, where I have to be Mrs Claus again. DOH! We're still alternating every other week one of us walks with the walkers (and carries The Joo in the baby bjorn) while the other one runs with the runners - it's working out pretty well but i just want to run all the time, and so does he, so that's a compromise. One of the pups always comes with us too and so they love it.
Had a Dutch friend over this & last weekend, which was fun. The first weekend we had a braai at our place and drank a bunch of beer and hung out, and then this weekend we met him at the Bull for dinner, and the baby got to have her first experience at a dive bar with bad disco music and even worse prostitutes leeching onto old white men. eeww. I now remember why we dont go there on friday nights. bleh.
Right so we're not going anywhere for xmas this year. boooooooooo! Add to that that the inlaws are coming in shortly thereafter (in Jan) followed by my parents (in March) and karma has got some SERIOUS making up to do with me round about mid-2010. Maybe I'm about to come into some serious $$$ or perhaps free round-the-world airline tickets or something. Waiting....
This here is what we call the Red Top Fly Trap and it is pretty amazing. That layer of black at the bottom is all fly carcasses.
Anyway, like flies, there's a whole bunch of annoyances I'm dealing with right now, INCLUDING blogger's new stupid photo-upload malarkey, where you can't even type while waiting the 10 hours for your photo to upload b/c they freeze your screen up and show you a little twirly circle while the photo is loading. Can I just say that is a bunch of time-wasting crap!? And what happened to spell check, can I ask??
And I finally gave up Twitter. What another bunch of crap. I just dont think my ego is big enough to think that cyberspace really gives a rats ass what I'm thinking about every 40 characters of my life. And I don't have time to be preached to, like half the people I follow have to use it as a preaching platform and I didn't have the time to go and delete each preacher user by user. So I just ditched it. AND I don't like the idea of having even more shyte bearing my name splashed all over the internet. I've got enough of that going on already. Even after you change your account to "private", there's still leftovers hanging about, lurking in cyberspace. So it got house-cleaned.
I slept in today - as in I woke up at 7 instead of the hella-early hour I've been using in order to accomplish all my school-related crap since the semester began. I just couldn't do it anymore. I need some damn sleep! So I got one extra hour of it today. It sucks because I can't even blame anything other than simply mental stress and my own life choices - people are always like "oh I see the baby has given you the ol' tired bags under the eyes!" But she's been sleeping through the night since she was 3.5 months!!! It's not even her!! Hell we let her sleep in a couple weekends back (when we DIDNT have to be somewhere at 8am) and she slept til 9:30! It's all me! I know it! I just need a freakin break FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!
And honestly half of that aggro also stems from The Mr. these days - he's also suffering the inevitable that comes from trying too hard to do too much. Now it's too much work + mental anguish for him. He got sunk like a battleship last weekend by a tribal chief at a public meeting that humiliated him and cut him deep, and now he can't think of anything else and has a big bad case of the hangups. That plus we're about ready to feed one of our employees to the shredder AND the office vehicle got broken into and stereo stolen, AND we just realized that we're going to have to go way up into the north (into malaria-area) around Xmas to do another big public meeting (and probably leave the youngling behind because they say not to take babies into malaria area) uggghhhhhh.... for the first time ever I heard him say the other day "I'm starting to think about leaving" (the country! not me!) and I realized: uh-oh.... somebody REALLY needs a break.
I made him a cranberry-orange coffee cake on saturday to ease his troubled mind after returning from the disaster meeting mentioned above. That worked pretty well for about a half a day. But I can't go around making coffee cake twice a day! It was pretty freakin good I must say though.
We are still really enjoying the HHH (running club). Now we meet on Monday evenings throughout summer because of the temperature, instead of Sunday afternoons. It's still fun. We still love everybody there, and have made lots of really good friends there. It's almost coming up upon the xmas party though, where I have to be Mrs Claus again. DOH! We're still alternating every other week one of us walks with the walkers (and carries The Joo in the baby bjorn) while the other one runs with the runners - it's working out pretty well but i just want to run all the time, and so does he, so that's a compromise. One of the pups always comes with us too and so they love it.
Had a Dutch friend over this & last weekend, which was fun. The first weekend we had a braai at our place and drank a bunch of beer and hung out, and then this weekend we met him at the Bull for dinner, and the baby got to have her first experience at a dive bar with bad disco music and even worse prostitutes leeching onto old white men. eeww. I now remember why we dont go there on friday nights. bleh.
Right so we're not going anywhere for xmas this year. boooooooooo! Add to that that the inlaws are coming in shortly thereafter (in Jan) followed by my parents (in March) and karma has got some SERIOUS making up to do with me round about mid-2010. Maybe I'm about to come into some serious $$$ or perhaps free round-the-world airline tickets or something. Waiting....
Checking Out (Mindfully)
0 Comments Published by Oh Wayward One on 04 November 2009 at 11/04/2009 03:05:00 pm.
Good grief I have gotten a lot of work done in the last 3 weeks. It hasn't been fun but I made progress. And THANK GOD I've been doing this mindfulness class all the while, or I really would've lost my mind! I don't even know how to explain it, not that it matters as I know it's only interesting to me, but somehow I managed to do it all, and it's a real chicken-and-egg thing because focussing my mind has helped get things done, and getting things done helps focussing the mind. I'm just happy to be alive, after what I've managed to get through!
Wow. I kinda checked out of life there in order to TCB, but I highly recommend mindfulness, extra coffee, dropping out, and generally wandering through life in a self-hypnosis cloud for 3 weeks. I just realized the other day, I *AM* Peter Gibbons in "Office Space" right now. That scene where he comes to - in the hypnotist's office after the fat Dr. has keeled over from a heart attack, and looks blankly at his own hands, smiles, and Hawaiian music starts playing in the background....? That is totally me! There's no other way to explain it! It's amazing! The answering machine is blowing up and I don't notice... the girlfriend is screaming profanities and I don't hear.... I'm strolling into meetings late and in shorts... "I don't really like my job, and I don't think I'm gonna go anymore!" That's me!
Luckily I had the Mr. to pick up some slack when I needed, but it's amazing, I somehow feel like I didn't actually leave behind that much slack! Nuts. This is something I've been trying to master for the last however many years, and I feel like I finally got it. At first I started out feeling lonely because I haven't had any fun with anyone else, while writing papers and swimming through research up to my eyeballs, but that's what I mean about "checking out". Drop off the key at the front desk and get sucked out the revolving door into a vaccuum. I mean why not? No one gives a rat's ass about whether I'm "in" really, anyway, when it comes right down to it. So, I limited myself to (per week): 1 hash + 1 gym workout + 1 mindfulness class (just to not forget what humans look like) + 1 big liberating "F you!"email blocker on all Animal Peeps issues + 0 hours practicing musical instruments + minimal music listening and about 1 tv show. That, in turn, yeilded: 1 developed thesis proposal + 1 critical essay for Research Methods + 1 draft assignment on diabetics in the emergency services + 1 clean conscience at work + 0 social-related drama + a very low phone bill. Not a bad outcome.
I'll admit at first I was sad about missing things like the Farmers' Market and the animal peeps' Bowls Day, but you get numb to it after awhile.
If I can just make it through til 8 December, when my exams are over and my 3 final assignments are turned in, I'm gonna have one hell of a party, and enjoy it mindfully, but still get really, really, freakin smashed.
Wow. I kinda checked out of life there in order to TCB, but I highly recommend mindfulness, extra coffee, dropping out, and generally wandering through life in a self-hypnosis cloud for 3 weeks. I just realized the other day, I *AM* Peter Gibbons in "Office Space" right now. That scene where he comes to - in the hypnotist's office after the fat Dr. has keeled over from a heart attack, and looks blankly at his own hands, smiles, and Hawaiian music starts playing in the background....? That is totally me! There's no other way to explain it! It's amazing! The answering machine is blowing up and I don't notice... the girlfriend is screaming profanities and I don't hear.... I'm strolling into meetings late and in shorts... "I don't really like my job, and I don't think I'm gonna go anymore!" That's me!
Luckily I had the Mr. to pick up some slack when I needed, but it's amazing, I somehow feel like I didn't actually leave behind that much slack! Nuts. This is something I've been trying to master for the last however many years, and I feel like I finally got it. At first I started out feeling lonely because I haven't had any fun with anyone else, while writing papers and swimming through research up to my eyeballs, but that's what I mean about "checking out". Drop off the key at the front desk and get sucked out the revolving door into a vaccuum. I mean why not? No one gives a rat's ass about whether I'm "in" really, anyway, when it comes right down to it. So, I limited myself to (per week): 1 hash + 1 gym workout + 1 mindfulness class (just to not forget what humans look like) + 1 big liberating "F you!"email blocker on all Animal Peeps issues + 0 hours practicing musical instruments + minimal music listening and about 1 tv show. That, in turn, yeilded: 1 developed thesis proposal + 1 critical essay for Research Methods + 1 draft assignment on diabetics in the emergency services + 1 clean conscience at work + 0 social-related drama + a very low phone bill. Not a bad outcome.
I'll admit at first I was sad about missing things like the Farmers' Market and the animal peeps' Bowls Day, but you get numb to it after awhile.
If I can just make it through til 8 December, when my exams are over and my 3 final assignments are turned in, I'm gonna have one hell of a party, and enjoy it mindfully, but still get really, really, freakin smashed.
