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!

Part 1: More on New Years Resolutions

This week I've spent a lot of time thinking about what I achieved last year and what I want to achieve next year. I realised that (to me, probably not the rest of the world but w/e) I spent a lot of last year focussing on more "mental" things - amongst others, I spent time trying to tackle my anxiety (including my dislike of public speaking), time meditating/EmWave-ing and time practicing mindfulness. I still think that those things are all super important, and I definitely want to continue with them (and will) into the new year.

But...I also realised that there's a lot that I could do to improve my physical appearance, and I want to spend time this year focussing on that.

Posture

Posture has been a bit of an issue for me for a while. I've seen physios and doctors over the years, but have never really been able to stick to anything for long enough to noticeably improve my posture. I (apparently) have slight kyphosis and lordosis (excessive curvature of the spine), which doesn't help but should be fairly easily correctable.

From: http://tle.tafevc.com.au/toolbox/file/c53ab17c-6542-4c66-f587-3e2858a9d41f/1/805_009_2.zip/fit009_2_lr11/fit009_2_lr11_1a.htm

There are gazillions of studies showing how important good posture is for self-confidence, health, impression you make on other people etc etc, so I do think that this is an important thing to work on. In order to do that I'm going to do two things. Firstly, strengthening my abs should help - if my abs are stronger they'll be better able to support my spine, reducing the lordosis. Secondly, I have a rather strange contraption called "Shoulders Back". It's basically an elastic/mesh combo that you put around your back and shoulders and tighten slightly so that it holds your shoulders back therefore improving your posture. I'd like to try to wear it for 1-2 hours per day (although sometimes it starts to drive me insane because it kinda rubs under the arms).

This photo makes me look a bit deformed, but I was trying to take a picture of myself in the mirror reflected in another mirror, so it all got a bit confusing! Also, the "brace" has a bunch of velcro on it, so I don't like it wear it with tops that I really like in case it snags them!

Weight

I've talked about this a lot before, but at the moment I probably weigh about 133lbs (I'm five five). When I met my boyfriend (at the beginning of college) I was 122 lbs (but that was also because I hadn't eaten properly in about a month because I was worried about starting college). At the end of freshman year I was about 137 (eek!) and since then I've hovered around 130ish. Previously, my goal was to stay under 130, and I'd still like to achieve that (I'd like to be 124-125). That might end up changing throughout the year (I think I have a lot more muscle now, I'm not even sure if I could get down to 124, but we'll see). My main "problem area" is my stomach (which you can see in the picture). It used to be my legs, but running's sorted that out for me :D.

Clothes/Shoes

I have a lot of clothes and shoes, a lot of them randomly acquired from my mum/grandmother when they decided they didn't like them/they didn't fit them (we're all roughly the same size). I've realised that I'm not really growing out of things any more, so at some point (soon) I'm going to have to chuck some of the things I've had for 7+ years that sort of fit and have holes that are sort of not noticeable! I also have a lot of great clothes and shoes that I don't wear much because my wardrobe is so cluttered with all the other things. It's also so easy to just throw on sweatpants at college, but this year I'm going to make an effort to plan clothes and outfits better. I've got some awesome new clothes this Christmas, so I want to make the most of them!

Yay! Three new tops (brown, orange and purple), a new jacket (bright pink!!), two new pairs of trousers (orange and pink - I like bright colours!), London pjs, leopard boot liners, new orange leggings and brown bear socks! :)

[More on this to follow tomorrow...]

Studying makes me sleepy!

Unfortunately, the above is true. I used to eat to keep me awake when I was studying, which was a terrible habit. I've been trying to find other ways to stay awake, alert and focussed. I stumbled across a blog called Marc and Angel Hack Life, which is totally awesome. They have lists of various things (50 ways to get more done, 60 ways to make life simple again, 75 reminders for tough times, 52 Monday morning stress reduction mantras) which I've printed up and put all around my room!

One of my favourites is "50 Natural Ways to Boost Energy". It has a lot of good suggestions for staying focussed on work. I've been trying to use the ideas when I start to feel sleepy, and I've also come up with a lot of my own.

So, at the moment my top 10 ways of not getting sleepy when studying (in no particular order) are:

1. Stand up, stretch, walk

2. Open a window, cool my room down

3. Energizing breathing

4. Put on some music

5. Shower, wash my face

6. Chew gum

7. Put on an essential oil (I have a few from Neal's Yard that I really like, including one called Energy!)

8. Drink water or tea (I've started drinking coffee which is a bad habit that I want to break)

9. Brush my teeth

10. Make a (reasonable) schedule and try to stick with it

And, of course, sleeping enough at night helps a lot too!

The other thing that's key for me is not to aimlessly spend time on the internet at night. It's when I'm most easily distracted and least focussed, so I often end up wasting a lot of time if I start to go down that route (and that's sleeping time that's getting wasted!)

Do you get sleepy when you study/work for long periods of time at a desk? How do you combat it?

The last few days...

Have been interesting. I've done a bunch of "self-improvement" type things.

*I cut my hair and cut a lot off. It was way too long, with lots of split ends and really needed a cut. It's a lot shorter than it was before. I'm still not 100% in love with it yet, but I think it was a good decision! (There's a sort of picture of it below)

*I got a mole and cyst on my chest removed. It was very prominent and showed whenever I wore anything low cut. I've been meaning to do it for a while, but just haven't had the time etc to do it. Anyway, it's obviously still healing, but hopefully I'll get a good result.

* I got the mole and cyst removed at the same time as I went to go see the dermatologist for my skin (on my face). I'm still having issues with it, but I do think it's getting better. I'm going back to my regime that I was using before I got worried and stopped using. I'm washing it twice a day with a very gentle face wash. In the morning I'm using a benzoyl peroxide type of thing plus a moisturizer and in the evening I'm using a retin-A plus moisturizer. (Retin-A's help the skin to regenerate faster, and it will apparently help to bring things up from under the skin). I have a new brush kind of thing that's meant to help with absorbing all the creams and treatments, so that's useful. I also need to make a huge effort not to poke and prod it, because I know that really doesn't help. I'll keep you all updated with how things go!

I know this is a pretty awful picture, but this is my "start". This is the worst part of my face (my chin on my right), but I would like it to get better (I'm also paranoid about it scaring, which I think it's starting to do).

* In my psych class we talked about the way the norms of what people at my college have worm over time. It really made me think about the way I dress, and I want to start making more of an effort with my clothing choices - when I look okay I feel much better!

* I bought a couple new things that I've been planning to get for a while. For example, my backpack has been completely falling apart, so I really needed to get a new one which I've finally done! I also ordered a humidifier, which will be super helpful for the winter. (They turn the heat on so high here, and I can't control the heat in my room individually, so it gets incredibly dry here).

My old backpack (including the awful straps that I thought were going to break at any moment) and my new backpack!

* I've almost got my room fully assembled! I've been meaning to put up all my posters etc for a while, but I've had so much other stuff that I've had to do. Anyway, I've spent time over the last few days putting up posters and pictures!

My "zen wall" that's right above my mini fountain! (You can also see my short hair here!)

Some of my favourite decorations in my room - art work from when I was little! (Also the pinnacle of my artistic ability!)

Webinars

I think I mentioned earlier that I wanted to try out "attending" some webinars on personal development type topics.

I really enjoyed one run by HeartMath, which is the company that makes the coherence device that I use. It was about better communication, which is obviously something that it really important.

I've also been listening to one called "Awaken Your Soul at Work". I found out about it because one of the founders of HeartMath was speaking at it. It's a 12 part series and it's been fairly interesting. Certain parts of it have definitely appealed to me more than others, but there were aspects of it that were interesting. I still need to go back and listen to a number of them, because I missed a lot of them as they happened during the middle of the day.

In the future I'm going to try to stick to ones that are topics that I'm really interested in and that I think are really going to be useful for me.

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!

Summer Money Issues

I get paid ($450/week) for working in my lab over the summer. As you all know, I was hoping I'd be able to lead some tours as well, mostly for my own personal development. However, I've found out that I'm going to get paid for that as well, and there lies the problem... . I'm already working in my lab for forty hours, so any work I do outside that means that I'd be working overtime. The way it apparently works is that my lab and the tour guide people split the cost of the overtime. The tour guide people are happy with it, but my supervisor isn't and I feel a bit bad about it because he was there first as it were. Also, of course, my first priority this summer is to work in lab.

I'm not hugely concerned about the money/overtime, but still. My professor has offered to reduce my work-week in lab to 38 hours, but I don't really like that idea. Firstly, I think it makes it seem like I'm slacking off a bit (even though I'll actually be working for way more than 38 hours/week). Secondly, each tour is one hour and fifteen minutes, so that actually means that I'd only be able to do one tour and I'd be getting paid less overall (lab pays $11.25/hour apparently). Not a huge difference, but probably $100 or so over the summer.

I'm in touch with the tour guiding people trying to see if it's possible for me to do that on a volunteer basis or not be paid the overtime so fingers crossed for that! I'm just frustrated by this whole thing because it is my thing to sort out, but I feel like I'm hitting dead ends everywhere, I don't really care about getting paid for the tour guiding thing (obviously that would be nice, but that's not why I'm doing it and the pay isn't that incredible) and the whole getting paid aspect is appearing to add a lot of difficulty! Anyway, fingers crossed for being able to do the tour guiding thing on a volunteer basis!

Feeling a little bit better

After I posted that post yesterday I went for a run (with the boyfriend). It was a tough run - partly because I wasn't really in the mood for it, and partly because it was an outdoor run, which I don't normally do. I ran a little slower than usual (according to my gizmo). But, the good news is that I ran for 22 mins 30 seconds, which is even better than my goal for this month!

I also reflected on some of the good things that happened to me yesterday. Something I've been working on is getting less distracted when I'm studying. I have a really bad tendency to be studying and remember that I need to do something (send an email or something) and feel like it can't wait. One thing I did yesterday that seemed to work well was to put little sticky notes in my reading (randomly) that had little rewards on them (e.g. email, have a snack, facebook etc). It made it all a little more a game, which was good!


I still haven't lost any weight (130.8 lbs), which I'm a bit annoyed about. I know it takes time, but I've been feeling like I've been being really good, and usually weight comes off me pretty quickly. Anyway, I'm just trying not to get discouraged.

My skin is also getting a little dicey. Maybe its because of all the water (which is meant to clear your skin, but the skin will probably go through a bad period first, while it's clearing), the sunscreen (I'm not crazy about my current one, but I should be wearing it. And it is a resolution for this month. I think I'm going to give my skin a day off from it today...), stress, or me picking at it/touching it more. I'm going to try to be super nice to it today :)

Anyway, I should get some studying (Sociology) done!

Public Speaking

I hate public speaking. (I'm not sure if I posted about this before given that the blog is playing up.) Its really not my thing. But...it's something I really want to work on. Being able to do presentations well is a really important skill, and its going to end up being something I need to do (I'm considering pursuing a career in litigation).
Anyway...I signed up to be a summer tour guide for my university! I'm not sure yet if my application will be accepted, but I'm excited! It'll be a great way to get more comfortable with public speaking - its (obviously) not graded or anything, and after being here for three years I know a lot about this place. I don't know what my schedule will be if I'm accepted, but I've asked to do 2-3 tours (each tour is an hour) every week.
Fingers crossed for getting accepted to it!

Grades

This week and next week are finals week - I have three exams:
Sociology (May 17), Engineering (May 19) and History (May 20).
When I was in high school/senior school, work and exams didn't really
stress me out that much. I was only studying science, which I'm
relatively good at. I generally did well on exams and papers, and if
something was really important to me and I studied hard I could almost
always get a grade I was happy with.
Then I hit college...my first semester was particularly tough (not
just because of academics) and I wound up with some of my worst grades
- C+, B, B, B+. They're certainly not super awful, but I hadn't really
got C's before.... . Anyway, things got marginally better, and I was
averaging somewhere between a B/B+. Last Spring was an awful semester
for me though - I ended up with B-, B-, B-, A-, which didn't make my
GPA happy at all! I was also disappointed because I'd studied *really*
hard (like, done all the problems in the textbook kind of hard).
Last semester I decided to seek help for academics and study skills.
Grades and academic stress were also one of the things that prompted
me to go see the counsellor, as they were really getting me down/
depressed and badly affecting my self-worth (which I later learned/
realised should not be at all linked to grades). Anyway, my University
has pretty good academic support - they run workshops on various
academic skills (studying for finals, procrastination, effective
reading etc) and they also have (free) sessions where you can go talk
to a peer advisor about your study strategies. I was really lucky and
randomly was paired with someone who just seemed to understand where I
was coming from. Two of the most useful things he told me were:
1. Often there's a type of problem or concept underlying problems that
you don't understand. So, what's important is not to do all the
problems in the book and work out where you went wrong in each
individual one, but to work out the trend in where you seem to go
wrong in problems and focus on that.
2. Think of the exam as "point grabbing". Don't imagine starting from
100 and losing points for everything you get wrong. Instead, imagine
starting from 0 and gaining points for everything that you do get right.
I've also learned a lot more about smart studying - predicting exam
questions, tailoring my studying to the kind of questions asked on the
exam (I study different for a essay vs definitions now).
Last semester wound up being my best semester ever and I was really
pleased with my grades (I got my first ever A! And 3/5 of my grades
were A range (A, A-) grades).
I'm hoping that I can keep up the trend this semester. I'm pretty
nervous about my exams, but I'm trying to use all my study methods. At
the moment. I'm really just catching up on the reading I didn't get to
do during the semester though!
Does anyone have any other study tips or ways that they like to study?