UBC Fail

I am so tired of sub-standard teaching assistants. I am also very very tired of UBC Professors not reciprocating the effort that students put into their homework. It is unfair for me to spend >10 hours per assignment to have you spend 1 minute telling me that because my FINAL answer of my FINAL question is wrong, I only deserve 50% on the assignment. What the fuck is this shit?! When you have this kind of a marking scheme, don't try to give me that bullshit about TA's hours being distributed evenly. WHY the FUCK would it take them 2 hours to mark the assignments of 80 students when all they're doing is putting a tick next to the final NUMERICAL answer? Why should I bother writing a 150 word summary of my methodology if you're not even going to look at it? Isn't the point of the methodology so that you don't have to look at my code? Isn't that already enough as far as a simplification of the marking process?! You bloody lazy fuckers!

And YOU, PROFESSOR. I come to you with my dilemma. Every student in 2nd year that gets a copy of the one student's homework, the one student who finished the only problem you're going to mark, they all get 100%. Don't fucking give me the excuse that you can't curb cheating. You know what you CAN do? MARK FAIRLY. Seriously, why are your TAs putting such shit effort in, and wtf are you doing in the meantime? Also, if I come to you about this, I EXPECT YOU TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. Don't tell me that you can't curb cheating and there's nothing you can do about my grade. FIX THE PROBLEM, DAMN YOU! Every other prof would, what's wrong with you?!

I've never been in a class where I pump 10+ hours into the assignment and get a 50%. This is probably the SHITTIEST and laziest marking scheme I have ever come across in my whole academic career. And the fact that you arbitrarily take 50% off my final grade for the assignment because you were too lazy to read through my answer really pisses me off.

Piece of shit. Don't make me argue with you over my grade again. Next time, I'll go for the beard and pull it right off your smug little face. You don't deserve to be a TA if you can't be bothered to work.

I'm in a very bad slump.

Fuck me. There's nobody around to witness my descent into madness, nobody I can cling onto for sanity. Where's everybody? Why is it so lonely in my world?

Crisis in Retrospect

I'm currently experiencing a high level of anxiety related to the fact that I just, without thinking too much about it, sent my resignation in to my employer. I don't know what she's going to think when she sees it or what she's going to say to me on tuesday, but there's been so much pressure on me to do it that wasn't going to go away without me actually going through with it. So as much as people say I had a choice, I didn't either. I can't live with this kind of anxiety and pressure on me, so it's better for me to choose the temporary anxiety of having to face her with this bomb of a problem than for me to go through the next 3 months with my family on my back. I agree with everything they said, it's just really hard for me to throw curveballs at people I feel obligated to, particularly when I can see the reasons why I would be making their lives difficult and the possible consequences. Still, it had to be done.

Anyway, so I realised I went on a shopping spree today to make myself feel better. I got 2 lipsticks from Mac and some hand creams from Crabtree and Evelyn - and a hand scrub for Ivan for our anniversary present. They threw in $28 worth of free stuff for our purchase, so I don't feel so bad. And I didn't buy anything useless, so I don't think I have anything to feel bad about.

At present, we've got 36 gigantic cookies sitting in our house from my cityflavr deal. 36 cookies. I think I'm going to have to freeze some of them or they'll just go stale. I'm cutting down on my sugars and upping my calcium intake, so it's unlikely that I'll be eating too many of those cookies, although there is calcium in milk chocolate. Anyway, it's a good addition to yoghurt, which is healthy, so I guess I can just take the good with the bad right? And dinner's on the stove, and I've got work waiting in my computer for me.

Ugh, need to make my hands stop shaking and my stomach stop churning.

Feeling rather proud of myself.

I actually churned through a bunch of Matlab code while at school today, and got it to work too. I'm a little stuck on the Engineering Application problem, but if I really can't figure it out by Wednesday I'll just hit up the TA's office hours and it'll all be good. But I am really feeling significantly proud of the fact that I am getting up when my alarm goes off and going to school. A lot of it really has to do with IW and how wonderful he is about sending me to the bus stop on school mornings and work mornings. And I know he would rather be at work earlier, so I really appreciate all the time he takes with me. I should really just tell him this to his face, but sometimes I don't know if he gets how sincere I'm being because he'll just change the topic to something else completely unrelated and it'll be as though he just glazed over what I said. So sometimes I feel like saying nothing at all is an easier way to be sincere.

Anyway, I'm feeling a little more confident about MATLAB this year, although I have to say that I really am not feeling the same way about Process Control. I've been really mulling over the "what if" I fail that class again. For the last time. I will be really pissed off, but I think that no matter what, I couldn't just drop out. It'd be one more class, I'd have the opportunity to focus on that one class and one class only, and I'd just work like hell the rest of the time to make up my rent money and all that. So that mum wouldn't have to worry about a thing. I feel so guilty when I think about how stretched out my education has been and what it's doing to her retirement fund. If I really do fail this class again, I'm going to just cut myself off from my family completely till its done. Sometimes, I need to be away from them, not because they're not encouraging, but because I need to be alone. I feel like they're always breathing down my neck, even when they're not. I feel the burden on my shoulders that is the expectation of me to graduate, and it makes me want to balk, even before the game has started. It's a pain in the ass.

Yeah, I really need more chocolate in this household. And milk. Apparently (and mum will kill me for this), I've got osteopenia. Gaaahhh!!