Internet-less Adventures

I know the title to this post sounds strange but...the internet at my college stopped working from 11am - ~8pm tonight. At first I was a little freaked out...how am I meant to survive without twitter/facebook/wikipedia/email/Friends episodes??, but after a few hours I realised that it was actually wonderful!

It's so rare that I get to be "disconnected" from the world. It happens a little at home (mostly because my UK phone doesn't receive emails), but now that I have internet in my room there it's so easy to just go on my computer.

It was relaxing not constantly getting bombarded with emails and feeling like I needed to be online working on things (but actually most likely procrastinating). And, one of the best parts of it was that no-one else had internet, so the rest of the world wasn't expecting me to be emailing them back etc. I certainly wouldn't like to never have internet/email, but it was sort of nice to be free from it for a few hours today.

In other news:

My first day of classes was fine (although there was a bit of upset when I realised that I'd started my last ever Chemistry class. It sounds a bit ridiculous, but the entire focus of my academic life for the last 12ish years has been science/Chemistry and it's sad and a bit scary to be coming to the end of that). I still haven't decided what my second class is going to be (I have to take a Chemistry class and my thesis counts as two classes, so I just need one more). I went to one today on Words and Song Lyrics that seems interesting but I'm worried that it might end up being a lot of poetry/lyrical analysis, which isn't really my thing.

I emailed my thesis advisor and set up a meeting for Thursday. I also started going through my introduction and added a new section to it (which is important, it's about how and why magnetism even exists).

My thesis is due in:

71 days (giving myself 5 days for binding at the end)

=~10 weeks = 1704 hours = 102,240 minutes = 6,134,400 seconds

I drunk a lot a lot of tea today. Which is a good thing. But also possibly a bad thing. I felt exhausted after my two hours of class today so took a looong nap (not good...I think I might be anaemic. I barely eat red meat at school and my multivitamin doesn't contain iron. Anyway, I've changed (temporarily) to one that does and I'm making a conscious effort to eat iron-rich foods - eggs, chickpeas, spinach etc). When I woke up from that I had a killer headache, which the boyfriend suggested might be from an electrolyte imbalance from drinking so much tea. Anyway, I put salt on my dinner (which I rarely do) and I'm going to stay aware of that and try to increase my salt intake, which should hopefully help.

I have a clear day tomorrow, which really means a whole day to work on my thesis. My plan is to spend the morning in my room, plowing on with the introduction (I also need to read the full thesis guide and come up with an outline/list of compounds before my Thursday meeting, so if I finish the first run through with the intro I'll move onto that). I'm planning to spend the afternoon in lab doing whatever I need to do there (and if there's not much to do there I'll go back to what I was doing in the morning! Or start writing my chapter for this week...)

How would you spend a few hours if your internet temporarily stopped working?

Life Goals

So, the topic for my blog today is kind of a big idea.

Remember my boyfriend got that A- that he was so happy about? Well, he got an email today telling him that there'd been a mathematical error and he'd actually only gotten a B+. (Needless to say he was really upset yada yada, but in the end it was all resolved and they ended up changing it back to an A-, yay!). During my attempts to cheer him up we started talking about our goals for our lives over the next ten years, and we each choose three important things. Mine were...

1. To be graduate from law school successfully and get a good job in a related field.

2. To remain healthy, slim and strong.

3. To be in a happy, successful relationship (hopefully married and hopefully to my incredible boyfriend).

I also read a slightly morbid article called "How the Top Five Regrets of the Dying Can Aid the Living":

1.“I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”

2. “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.”

3. “I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.”

4. “I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.”

5. “I wish that I had let myself be happier.”

My thoughts:

1. I try to do this and one of my goals of this blog is to use it to reflect on what is important to me.

2. Haha, if only. That said, over the last year and a half I have tried to redress my work-life balance. I've tried to exercise more, I've made more time for my friends and the boyfriend and I are trying to make time for regular date-nights.

3. I try to do this. In some ways, I'm great at doing this. I'm good at telling my boyfriend and some other people how I feel. But, I do want to try to speak up a bit more about certain things (little things, like changing meeting times and locations). Often if you ask for things, you get them and generally there isn't much of a downside.

4. I'm not sure how I feel about this one. I do still stay in touch with one of my closest friends from high school (Kirst), but I'm not too close with most of the rest of them though. In part it's because I'm doing such different things from most of them (most of them are working now because their degrees were only three years. Mine's 4 and then I'm doing another 3 of law school).

5. I'm not sure I get this one? I don't try to restrict myself from being happy at all and I'm always on the lookout for more ways of making myself happy.

Well, that's all from me! Tomorrow you'll get lots of photos from my Connecticut trip!

Sleep!

For some reason I've been having sleeping issues recently. I just feel tired alllll the time. I'm (generally) getting enough sleep at night (I need about 8 hours) and I'm going to bed and waking up at pretty much the same time every day. I
'm pretty sure I'm not getting ill with anything (this has been going on too long for that).

As bad as it sounds, I'm pretty sure its psychological. I get bored, and then I want to sleep. I also think that studying in my room isn't the best, especially when it's warm and I'm bored and my bed looks super comfy!

I think I might love my bed more than is normal! It's just so pink, and covered in hearts and so me! [I won the teddy bear at a fair last year. I'm not super into teddy bears, so actually the reasons that I still have it are a) I actually won something! b) it makes a really good back rest!]

Anyway, it's been on my mind a bit recently, as I'd really like to be able to feel more alert and awake during "awake" hours! A few days ago I got an email about an "Interactive Sleep Workshop" that my college is running this Wednesday. Apparently "If you're not getting enough quality sleep, then you're probably not performing at your best. Does it take too long for you to fall asleep? Do you awaken often through the night, or hours before dawn? This interactive workshop, provided by two sleep experts from CPS [counseling and psychological services], will inform you about insomnia and offer effective strategies to help you fall asleep more quickly, and others to make your sleep more satisfying.". It sounds a bit goofy, but for the last year or so I've been on a mission to take advantage of all of these kinds of workshops offered through my college. It's something I'm interested, and in some of them (especially the one's on study skills), I've learned a tonne. Plus, if I do find this useful, I'd consider going back to see a counselor about this issue if I'm not able to resolve it soon.

Once I've gone to the talk and heard what they have to say I'm also going to try to incorporate things that I know will help - studying outside my room, keeping my room cooler etc.

Fingers crossed that the talk's useful! I'll let you know!

Sunday was not a good day for me....

I'm really close to my family, and every time someone comes to visit me and then leaves I get a little upset/depressed. I've always been this way, even when I was really little. I remember/my mum's told me that I used to get absolutely hysterical in the airport when we dropped off my grandparents. I also used to cry every day when I had to go to school and leave my mum (yeah, I have/had issues). (The counselor person that I went to go see decided that I had a traumatic childhood full of loss and that now I have attachment issues. I definitely didn't have a traumatic childhood, or one full of loss, but the attachment issues part has some merit...).

Anyway, I also get bouts of nostalgia for various things like childhood. The silly thing is that I'm sure it wasn't that great when it was happening, but it seems like it would be great to go back to it now. (On the other hand, if push came to shove, I don't think I could give up my current life). I also know that in a couple of years I'll look back on my time now and feel nostalgic for that.

My little brother (who visited over the weekend) is currently in his first year of college. It seems like he's having so much fun, and it makes me miss when everything was new and exciting. There's also a girl he likes (and I have literally spent hours in the last few weeks giving him advice on that). I absolutely adore my boy now, and wouldn't break up with him for anything in the world, but hearing all about what my brother's up to does make me miss the beginning of a relationship, when it was exciting when he said he loved your or invited you out. It's not that that stuff isn't exciting now, but I know he loves me (we've been together for over 2.5 years at this point, so I hope he does!!). Him being in the first year of college and having this girl he's pursuing made me nostalgic, and him leaving (at the end of the weekend to go back to his college) just compounded the upset.

When I feel nostalgic I just feel completely depressed and overwhelmed and don't want to do anything but sleep. I'm over it now, and am feeling a lot better (getting over it in a day is pretty good for me!), but it sucks when it's happening. I still haven't really found any successful way of stopping it happening (and I have a feeling I never will) but at least I'm finding ways of coping. The most useful thing my counselor ever said was that I know this is going to happen. It happens without fail every time someone visits and leaves. Either that means that I can't have family visit (and I don't like that idea, I love them visiting) or I need to be aware that when they leave this is going to happen and so I have to plan accordingly. That means trying to get work done in advance, so that I'm not feeling crummy with nostalgia/pseudo-depression and trying to work and also trying to arrange other fun things to do or give myself things to look forward to in the near future.

Do you get nostalgic/upset when things "end"? How do you deal with it?

I'm back...

[This is a looooong post! Feel free to skip bits]

So, as I said in my last post I've been really busy recently. I got back to the US on Monday evening and started lab work on Tuesday. My (super awesome!) best friend, who is also my roommate this summer, moved all my things into my room, but I still had to arrange/unpack everything when I got back.

The plane flight back to the US was kinda stressful - it was delayed by over an hour because of technical difficulty (not exactly a relaxing thing to hear if you already hate flying!) and pretty much every seat on it was taken, which also ups the stress of flying!

Lab
I started lab work on Tuesday, so didn't have a huge amount of time to relax. It was all going fine until my parents decided they didn't like me working on the project I was working on (and I agreed with them). I know that sounds totally ridiculous and like my parents are being way too interfering with my life, but the reason they stepped in is that my project had me working with lead oxide, which is pretty nasty stuff. Lead is a heavy metal which means that once it gets into your body it stays there and you can't (really) get it out. Excess heavy metals in the body have been linked to things like cancer and dementia, so it's sort of serious. Lead oxide is also worse for you than plain old lead, because lead oxide is a fine powder which "poofs" whenever you touch it or move it. [I was wearing a mask whenever I was using it, but of course none of that stuff is 100% effective]. I'm also especially worried because I like in an old English house, which means that the water in my house probably goes through lead pipes. As lead doesn't leave the body, it's entirely possible that I already have a higher lead concentration in my body than someone my age should have.
I talked to my supervisor about it and to say the least he wasn't overly pleased. To be honest I don't really blame him: he thinks its safe and the rest of the people in my lab all handle the stuff occasionally. I'm also the only undergraduate who has changed projects at all, and now I'm going to be changing my project twice. (He's also grading my thesis and is meant to be writing me a letter of recommendation for law school, so I don't really want to make him dislike me...).
Anyway, that whole thing was a bit tough to deal with - I felt caught between him and my parents. I am probably more health conscious than most people in my lab as well, so a lot of other people in my lab thought I was being ridiculous and paranoid. Regardless, the situation is hopefully somewhat resolved now. I'm going to be getting a new project on Monday and I'm just going to have to try really hard to impress my supervisor!

Roomates
My living arrangement for this summer is a three bedroom triple, which means that each of us has our own bedroom. I'm living with my best friend (fingers crossed that that doesn't mess up our friendship, I'm sure it won't) and another girl (Diza), who we're sort of friends with (we needed a third person to fill the triple). Anyway, this other girl is driving me nuts, and I've only lived with her for three days. She's incredibly needy and is an over protected only child. She will literally stand outside my locked bedroom door and talk at me. She insists on doing things like coming into my room and turning on my laptop so that I can hear a song she wants me to hear. She followed me into the bathroom yesterday so she could finish telling me about some inane thing. I don't want to be mean, and I do feel a little sympathetic (I think she's pretty lonely), but seriously! I need some personal space.
The other issue is that she doesn't get me. She's fairly different to me and has no sense of independence. She insists on coming to the gym with me (the gym is kinda my alone space) and she will talk and talk at me when I'm lifting proper weights (so I need to focus). She also refuses to push herself at all - she was lifting 5 lb weights, complaining that they were too light, but refusing to lift more in case she hurts herself. She also complains and complains and complains about how much she's hurting from the gym, which drives me nuts!
She's also working in a lab (not my lab, thank god! Lab is the only time she's not there chattering at me.) and everyone in her lab was sent an online quiz that was meant to determine how empathetic you are and how good you are with other people, reading other people's emotions even when they're hidden etc. She scored 16 or so, if you score below 20 that's a possible sign of autism (because you're that unaware about what other people are thinking/feeling). I scored 72ish (I'm a fairly empathetic person, even if it doesn't seem if from this rant), so clearly it's possible to do "well" on this thing.
Anyway, sorry for the rant, she's just driving me absolutely insane. I know it's not her fault, but she has zilch conception of public space and alone time.

The Boy
I miss him. A lot. It probably doesn't help my mood!

Food/Gym
My food has been okay, but not great. I need to go back to recording my food more. I have been doing okay at the whole high fiber options thing, but I still think I could push it further. Basically, my meals are good and generally very healthy but I eat too much crap and sugar between meals (marshmallows and chocolate), which is really bad (and I just measured my blood sugar - 144 - also really bad).
Tomorrow I am not going to eat chocolate, marshmallows or other candy.
In other food news its really tough to go shopping at school. There are no supermarkets near by. I'm going to try a grocery delivery service, and I've scheduled the delivery for Sunday, so fingers crossed for that!
With regards to exercise, I've been doing okay, but it's a real pain to have to go with this other girl all the time. I find it harder to exercise with her yapping in my ear. I did go swimming (alone) yesterday though, which felt fantastic. I haven't been swimming in ages (despite the fact that I'm meant to go to increase my oxygen transport ability - more on that at some other time).
My heart rate monitor also arrived! I've only used it once so far, but I got a really good workout with it. A few months ago I went to an exercise physiologist who did various tests on me and was able to determine my own max heart rate etc (and that my limitation is the rate at which I can transport oxygen/carbon dioxide from my lungs to my blood). Anyway, what he suggested (for me, this isn't universal) is to get my heart rate to 190+ for two minutes and then come down to 160ish for 2-3 minutes. I tried it on the rotex on Wednesday and it was really good!
I've also decided that I'm going to try to...swim twice a week, do gym-based cardio two or three times a week and lift weights twice a week (and have one rest day!).

Mental Health/Personal Development
I've gotten bad about doing my breathing every night, so I need to get back to doing that. HeartMath, the company I purchased it from, runs various webinars, so I've signed up for one of those on "Better Communication". I'm hoping it'll be interesting.

Resolutions
I'm doing okay with the resolutions. I've been fairly good at wearing sunscreen which is of course a good thing. I've gotten worse about doing my "old" things like taking vitamins and psyllium, so I need to get back to doing those kinds of things.

Tour Guiding
I have my first tour tomorrow! I'm not an official tour guide yet (the tour tomorrow is a practice tour to see if I'm up to scratch!). I'm a bit nervous about it, but fingers crossed! I'm going to spend part of tonight thinking about what I need/want to say! 

Ahh! This was a realllly long post! Sorry about that. Just had a lot I needed to write about!

"Hot House Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire"

Since I've been done with classes, I've been able to read fiction books! I've read two so far, the second of which is called "Hot House Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire" by Margot Berwin. It's a weird title, and a weird book, but it was also really good and I really enjoyed it. It centers around one woman's post-divorce life-revelations through plants. It's a little hippy/new agey in that some of the characters in the book believe in "plant magic" and other things like that, but the protagonist does question it, which I liked. The book had some parts which really resonated with me, and in some ways it was "preaching" acceptance of the world around us, looking for the good in the world and practicing mindfulness (which are things I'm working on).

Alison at Life in a Pink Fibro has something each week called "Rewind" where people post links to their old posts (it's awesome, you should all do it!). Anyway, through that I found this post (Finding the Mindfulness in the Meaningful) which I really enjoyed. It also talks about mindfulness. Anyway, this post pretty much doesn't make sense, but the summary is that the book and the post have encouraged me to re-start trying to achieve a greater state of mindfulness in my life (mindfulness is also part of ACT). I'll let you know how it goes!

EDIT: I've been looking for resources on the internet, and I've found two sites that I like...http://www.dailygood.org/more.php?n=4595 and http://blogs.psychcentral.com/mindfulness/2011/05/9-ways-to-a-more-mindful-workday/. In addition to these particular articles, they both have many more articles on mindfulness. I think I'm also going to get a book called Excuse Me, College Is Now: How to be a Success in School and Life, which, as the title suggests, is a book for college students about the challenges and difficulties they face. Even though I have been doing much better with college stress etc recently, I'm always interested in reading more about self-improvement type things!

Last Day of Class!

So, today was my last day of class for this year, which I have mixed feelings about. Like I said yesterday, I don't like change, and I don't like things ending, so this is tough from that point of view. I still have exams and papers for all my classes (lots of them!), so they're not totally done. I have really enjoyed my classes this semester, which is great, but it makes it harder when they (start to) end.

At the beginning of this school year (October), I saw a counselor a few times. My college provides counseling to students free of charge, so it seemed like a good time to try it. It's also easy because the health center is just a few minutes from my dorm. I'm not sure what it was about it, but I didn't really like it. I really thought it would be my kind of thing - I'm definitely the type of person who likes to talk out problems.

But...I'm not convinced that the person I was seeing was well matched to me. She specialized in chronic mental health problems, Asian/Asian American issues and eating disorders in minority populations. She was really nice and all, but it wasn't helping me work through my issues. Part of the issue is that I'm definitely someone who dwells on things. It wasn't her fault, but it meant that I'd have to go back and go over issues from the previous week. Anyway, I eventually stopped seeing her, which I think was a good decision. I did later see someone who specialized in biofeedback (which is how I got into coherence), and talked over some of my issues with him. He suggested that if something's upsetting me I give myself five minutes to think about it/dwell on it, and then try to move onto something else. Obviously it's not always that easy to just say "ok, this is really bothering me, but my five minutes are up", but it does get easier with practice!

Anyway, that was all a very long way of getting to the point, namely that if I start stressing about the end of classes again I'm going to give myself five minutes to think about it, and then try to move on to doing or thinking about something else! (If I remember) I'll let you know how it goes tomorrow!

Does anyone have any other coping mechanisms for things like this?