Someone Think of a Title.

I officially have what many people would probably consider to be a boring life. I'm blogging early on a Saturday because (1) I fell into an alcoh... happiness-induced sleep very early last night, thus causing me to wake up this morning earlier than I normally would, and (2) I'm waiting for B n' T to open so that I may get my Cajun food fix for the day.

This is a picture of one of the beautiful buildings on Oglethorpe University's campus. When I lived in Atlanta, my mom would often take me there during the day to explore the campus. My brothers were also little mascots or something for the baseball team there. Perhaps I'll end up at a campus this nice sometime soon! I miss Atlanta's weather so much. I can't stand this "northern" weather in Kentucky. I've already decided that I'm making a flamethrower if we have another ice storm this year. Rock salt is for weaklings!

This week was moderately better than last week. I'm still struggling a little bit with the anxiety issue; I met with a doctor on Tuesday morning. She was extremely nice and seemed to be genuinely concerned, but ultimately she was not too helpful. She prescribed Zoloft, and there is no way in hell that I'm taking that stuff. Firstly, Zoloft is prescribed mainly for depression rather than for anxiety, although it's been approved to treat both. Secondly, those types of medications take weeks before they really start to work, and immediacy is a huge issue for me right now. I can't wait weeks for an anti-depressant to kick in, particularly when I have no idea how I will react to it in the first place. I took a similar medication over the summer for a few weeks and it did nothing to help me; if anything, it made me feel worse. I know that I'm not depressed. I just have a ton of anxiety, and I would like to be able to take something on an as-needed basis. The physician whom I saw was working in the student health clinic, and I'm rather certain that there is huge reluctance on the part of campus doctors to prescribe medications like Xanax to students. I understand this hesitation to an extent, but I also sort of loathe the obvious assumption that every student who takes something like Xanax will inevitably abuse it and become an addict. Ugh. These aren't OxyContins or "Laurie-Tabs", and this isn't Eastern Kentucky. Goodness. I may try to find a private physician and see what other options there are for me. Zoloft is dumb.

I received some very good news this week! My retroactive withdrawal was approved by the committee at UK, so I have a very good GPA again. This means that I can finally begin work on graduate school applications. I'll go to a few particular professors next week to get the recommendation process in motion. I've had recommendations written on my behalf before, and I know that different professors require different information before they'll write letters. Some even require transcripts! Scary! I'm sure they'll all want to know exactly which schools I'm applying to, which brings up an interesting issue: I don't exactly know every place that I'm applying to at this point. I have a really solid idea, but I need to do some more research and make some final decisions first. That's what I'll be spending part of the afternoon doing, I suppose.

I don't know why the thought of graduate school scares me so much. It's probably because I worry all the time anyway. It may also have something to do with the fact that I'm supposedly choosing a career path here. I keep reminding myself that I can always choose something else if I end up hating whatever graduate school route that I end up taking next year. Still, I'd like to get it right the first time around. My biggest issue with law school at the moment is the fact that I don't know if I would truly enjoy it in the long run. My main hesitation with the Master's/Ph.D. route is that I don't know if I'm ready for it. I've discovered that there is a huge difference between intelligence and knowledge, and while I'm confident in my intelligence, I think I'm lacking a little bit in the knowledge realm. My friends who have already gotten their graduate degrees tell me that I can compensate for this because I have a good work ethic. I value their opinion, but I don't want to have to absolutely kill myself just to be on par with everyone else in a program. At any rate, I could just be freaking out too much. I probably need to calm down. There will be plenty of time for stress later, right?

I'm starting to seriously cut down on my Facebook usage. It was cool about two or three years ago. Now it's sort of lame. Every time that I look at my friends list, which has been reduced by about 150 people in the last time year, I wonder why there are still so many [Pikeville] people on there whom I never really speak to anymore. By means of my multiple Facebook purges, I intended to make Facebook less annoying; I succeeded, but I still find myself wondering why I even have an account. Most importantly--and I think this should apply to everyone--I truly think that, after one reaches a certain age, having a Facebook account doesn't look very professional and is sort of pointless. I stress enough as it is about keeping this blog public. Not that there's really anything incriminating on here, but I also don't know who the hell is reading it. A potential employer, perhaps? A graduate school admissions person? Highly unlikely, I know, but scary nonetheless. The older I become, the more I value my privacy and the more I hate idiots and stalkers, and so I don't see my Facebook account lasting longer than a few more months.

Speaking of becoming older, my 24th birthday is on December 3rd! I'm really excited about my birthday this year. I plan on having some sort of par-tay on Thursday (the 3rd) or on Friday. The fact that I'm almost 24 is just kind of funny. I certainly don't look it, so I guess it's not an issue. Also, I'll be able to file independently for FAFSA. Once I get some financial issues straightened out, hopefully I will be able to move back to Lexington into my very own apartment. That would be an awesome way to spend my last few months in Lexington.

Somnus? Quid?

It's 2:30 on Sunday night/Monday morning and I'm wide awake. This is what happens to me when I overcompensate for my lack of sleep during the weekdays by sleeping an inordinate amount on Friday and Saturday nights. I must stop this. Overall, though, I've been very good about going to bed at a reasonable hour this semester. This novel getting-enough-sleep thing has been a significant factor in my being able to keep my sanity and also in helping to maintain my grades. If only I had discovered this five years ago as a constantly sleep-deprived, over-achieving freshman who frequently resorted to No-Doz caffeine pills in place of a good night's sleep, maybe my academic life would have been much easier; I also would have had no caffeine-induced stomach aches from hell. Ugh. Anyway, I will surely be paying for this in four hours when I'll be reluctantly forcing myself out of bed.

Before I type the customary bullets about all the general things in my life that are random and ridiculous, here's a fun fact for everyone: while driving on I75 today, I almost died due to another driver's negligence. Okay, so that actually happens to me about once a week on I75, but today was special. There is a roughly 3-mile or so span of road on 75 North that has been continually "coned" (I'm making my own road construction verb here) in some way or another for about four months (I'm surprised that I haven't started seeing orange road cones in my dreams). This is apparently how long it takes to re-paint two or three bridges on that stretch of road in some sickeningly bright blue color in preparation for the Equestrian Games, which I really couldn't care less about. Today, the farthest left lane was closed off, annoyingly protected by a legion of godawful-orange cones arranged in a line that looked as if it had been formed by an intoxicated blind man. I was driving in the far right lane, so there was one lane in between my car and the uneven "line" of cones. I was almost out of the construction zone when I saw some kind of state vehicle driving in the far left lane. All of a sudden, the idiot driving this same truck swerved to the right, hitting three cones. Where did the cones go? They went all over the damn place, and I had to do some really quick maneuvering to avoiding hitting them. I drive a two-door Saturn, not a F-850 behemoth truck; I really don't think my car would have handled hitting those things very well. Anyway, I ended up having to pull over completely while the cones rolled all over the road like pinballs. The funniest/most ignorant thing about this incident was the fact that it wasn't the expected shitty Lexington or Ohioan driver who did the damage, but one of the very people who was in charge of all this construction/"beautification" nonsense in the first place. Oh my.

Aside from being run off the road by vengeful escapee cones, here's an update:

• You may not care for this, but I think it's pretty cool: I discovered that I remember verbatim a poem I memorized more than 9 years ago while in 8th grade! Ha! It's not a huge poem--Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken". Everyone had to memorize it, stand up in front of the class and recite it. I also remember a little more than half of the complete list of English prepositions that I had to memorize in alphabetical order in 5th grade (12+ years ago). Aboard, about, above, across, after, against, along, alongside, among, around, as, at, before, behind, below, beneath, beside, besides, between, beyond, but, by, despite, down, during, except, for, from... etc. I think I have an exceptional long-term memory, although my short-term memory is pathetic. I'm the person who will not be able to find my keys, purse, backpack and other essential things when attempting to walk out the door because I can almost never remember where I put them. But if I can remember things that I memorized ten years ago, does the fact that I lose my car keys on a daily basis really matter all that much? Hmmmm....
  
  
• I had scary panic attack episodes last week. I'm not entirely sure why; I'm fairly certain that the added stress of the dreaded graduate school decision has been weighing down on me lately. It's bad when you have to leave class because the teacher calls on you and you can barely breathe. Crap. It's worse when said teacher proceeds to ask you after class if your love life is the stress culprit. Ha! I still have to take the GRE; I'll do that either in December or January. I'm not too worried about it--I figure that if I can tackle the LSAT twice, I'll survive the GRE. I'm also considering an alternate option for graduate school, which I won't disclose over the internet for fear of angry telephone calls from friends and family members. I think it's best to mostly stay mum about my graduate school matters until I really know for sure what direction I'm taking. I wish that I could say my mind was made up, but it's still not. I'm ambivalent about both of my potential graduate school directions.

This was supposed to be longer, but I absolutely have to sleep now, lest I won't get a chance to dream about road cones.