Stress fractures

Life does not look bright at the moment... Finals are approaching, next year's classes are already causing me stress, and this semester's are far from done with their stress hold on my life. Just off the top of my head I have a paper and 3 tests coming up, as well as a choir audition, a choir concert, a sign language concert and 3 potential TA positions for next year to worry about.

This isn't even the half of it though, because that's only the school aspect of my life. My personal life is all sorts of conflicts, indecision, and over thinking. It's to the point where I found myself using game theory to try and help me to decide... and it actually helped a little bit. Whether this use of what I've been studying here in college is a good thing or not I don't know, but one thing is certain. I'm a huge nerd.

Getting back to classes... O-chem is the cause of the majority of my stress lately. I love and hate that class at the same time. I love how much that class makes me think and teaches me. I hate the fact that I can't get a decent grade to save my life in that class. The teacher is great and gets the information into my head, but on tests I have a tendency to not remember anything and basically spend the first 30 minutes of every test or quiz getting my mental gears turning in the right direction. By the end of the allotted time I am flying through mechanisms I know and trudging through the ones that I'm not so confident in. Which would be fine, except I'm still only half way done with the test and the time is up.

Another cause of my abhorrent grade in O-chem is the fact that no one is there to stop me if I start to go down the wrong path. In class assignments are easy for me, I throw out mechanisms and possible synthesises and people around me can stop me if I go down the wrong road. On tests I don't have this nifty little safety net. So instead of finishing easily I find myself with a brick wall between me and the desired product. I think that's enough O-chem rant for now...

Next semester I won't be able to be in u-choir because of my schedule. I kind of knew it would happen eventually, but it still sucks. Given this lack of u-choir I've determined that I am going to try out for the concert choir. This audition is making me very worried. For one, the audition itself is not something I will enjoy. I hate preforming in front of people. This is the reason I've never and probably will never do a solo. The thought of me singing just by myself in front of people... it just doesn't agree with me. I could sing in front of my choir without a problem, but when there are people who don't hear me sing on a daily basis present I suddenly have issues.

The other thing about the audition that scares me is the concert choir's inherent stuck-up-ness. Whether I am worried more by the possible rejection of these would be peers, or the possibility that I would become one of them, I don't know. And of course none of this even matters if I don't get into the choir in the first place.

As mentioned earlier, I am thinking of being a TA next year. Where I do the TAing is one question, and the other is if I will get paid or not. I am choosing between ASL, biology and economics. I basically know that if I do ASL I won't get paid for it, since that program is having a hard enough time paying the professor much less the optional TAs. In biology I could probably get paid since the sciences are huge here in Morris. Economics is pretty much a toss-up. I was asked to TA this semester, but said no when I found out I wouldn't be paid. So if I get a job as an economics TA it would mean that I wouldn't necessarily be paid.

Well, I think that's it for this post. I'm stressed out in case you can't tell, and sleep sounds like a really good idea. Also I may be coming down with a cold, so sleep would help that too. To sum up: O-chem blows, girls confuse me, and jobs that don't pay kind of suck.