Failing Out

I think one of the reasons that I don’t write here with any sort of regularity is that there is an event in my past that has influenced me. It influences where I’m living, it influences my choices in classes, it influences my job, and it influences many of the choices that I will have to make in the future.  The thing is the event that happened is very detail specific and while those details aren’t super Google-able they are identifiable. I am still thinking about how visible  I want to be on the internet. If I write many or I think even some of the details people who read this blog might be able to figure out who I am.

But there are so many times that I want to sit down and write here, yet I feel that I can’t because I haven’t told you about this previous event. So I am going to do some bullet points. If you have specific questions you can e-mail me and I will try to answer them.

• After I graduated from high school I enrolled in a state college. This college was not a basic liberal arts school, but was designed to focus on math and engineering. It targeted smarter students, which I was. I was planning to major in biology.
• At the school I developed more of a social life than I had ever had before. I had a best-friend, good friends, acquaintances, casual buddies.
• Because of my new social life and some other habits I didn’t apply myself to my studies very well. I ended up not going to some classes and not doing some homework assignments.
• I was placed on academic probation. I lost the academic scholarships I had been awarded.
• I couldn’t register for classes the following year, however I didn’t tell anybody and tried to fake my second year.
• I was found out and evicted from my dorm room.
• I ended up coming back to my home town where I was told that I needed to get a job to prove I was responsible.

That year of college was the best year of my life. It was absolutely amazing, I loved being at the school. In that year I had my first boyfriend, I had my first kiss, my first  through the shirt boob-grabbing experience. I had friends. I had nights sitting in strange dorm rooms watching How I Met Your Mother. I had a surprise Birthday party, I planned other surprise parties. I joined a volleyball team. I went to parties and attended small study sessions. I had what was essentially the college experience. 

However at the end where everything unravelled I ended up poisoning all of my new relationships and very few of them survived. I came home ashamed and a failure. I think given the opportunity I would do some things differently, but I have no idea if the end result would be different but maybe I would feel differently about myself.

Metacognitivethoughts.

 

I want

I want a spouse. Someone who loves me, accepts me, thinks highly of me. Someone who wants to be with me. Someone to lean on.

I want to know if my spouse is supposed to be a man or a woman. I spend so much time wondering who I am, what I like that I just want one definitive answer of man or woman.

I want a house. A house with a kitchen that overlooks the backyard. A house that I can turn into a home.  A house that I can change, and build and make my own.

I want kids. Chubby-cheecked babies, adventurous five-year olds, inquisitive ten-year olds, sulky teenagers.

I want a place for a garden.

I want a community. A group of people who will support me, that I can support.  All of us sharing our lives together.  A community of people of different ages, experiences, and ideas.

I want a pack for my children. Other kids to run around with. Long-term friends with secrets.

I want to be able to wake up in the morning feeling safe and secure.

I want to one day wake up and not have to ask myself if I am happy yet. But to just be happy.

Metacognitivethoughts.

ABC Meme

I saw this over at Shauna’s Pickles and Dimes and thought it might be fun. So here it goes.

Age: Twenty-two.

Bed size: I have two twin beds in my room and tend to use both regularly. I prefer the one up against the wall, but right now it has a whole bunch of junk on it.  I tend to like sleeping in smaller spaces  so I think that until I get to a place in my life where I share a bed with another person I will keep the twin bed size.

Chore that you hate: Folding Laundry. Its boring and I’m just going to wear it again. And it’s easier to find if I just leave it in the basket. And If I fold things then I think I have to iron. And … And…. I just don’t like it. So there.

Dogs: I have one basset hound. That one dog makes enough noise the neighbors probably think that I have seven basset hounds. I tend to prefer big dogs like labs,retrievers and hounds.

Essential start to your day: I have to put my glasses on before I get out of bed. If I can’t find them right when Iwant to put them on I have a slight panic attack.

Favorite color: Green

Gold or Silver: I tend to wear mostly silver.

Height: Five feet two inches.

Instruments you play: Trombone and Piano

Job title: Bookkepper

Kids: Not yet. But I do want them some day

Live: New Mexico

Mother’s name: The Lady

Nicknames: Hannahmonster, Little leprechaun, I feel like there are more but I can’t think of them now.

Overnight hospital stays: My birth. I’m not a big fan of hospitals.

Pet peeves: Unstraight tables at school, people who don’t use calendar dates for future events, people who don’t use turn signals, there is definitely more of these but I have the feeling that it wouldn’t be productive for me to list all of them.

Quote from a movie: “Ess-cop-aye that’s funny it’s spelled just like escape I wonder what it means.”–Finding Nemo

Right or left-handed: Right.

Siblings:Two sisters, the blonde-one and the curly-haired-one.

Time you wake up: Between seven and eight-thirty on school days. On the weekend it tends to be ten-thirty.

Underwear: Bright colored Haynes cotton bikini briefs

Vegetable you hate: Yams. Squash.

What makes you run late: My internet usage.

X-Rays you’ve had: Both the dentist and the orthodontist think that x-raying my teeth are important.

Yummy food that you make: Chocolate chip cookies, soft-ginger cookies, chicken noodle soup.

Zoo animal: Lions, giraffes, elephants, and snakes.

Next Year

Recently I have found myself saying to myself in those conversations that I frequently have in my head (Do you people have conversations with yourself in your head, nice communicative monologues just always present?) about next year. I find myself  saying next year when you are at such and such a business school things will be different. Next year when you have your own apartment, or next year you will be somewhere else, or next year you have an opportunity to be somebody else. I think these thoughts all the time.

I hope that in the Fall of 2012 I will have been accepted to a business school somewhere, and I will be working towards getting my degree in accounting. But just because I hope something doesn’t mean its true. I need to finish the classes I am currently taking, I need to do well in those classes before I can be accepted into business school. I need to complete English 101, oh my goodness, English flippin 101.  And then  I need to apply to business school before I can get accepted.

And yet, a large portion of my  thoughts have been devoted to the idea that next year I will be at business school. Like it is  some sort of guarantee. And it isn’t. It isn’t some guarantee that I will be able to finish my classes, or face the sixty-two million anxieties that I have about applying to a business school, or that I will be accepted.

What really worries me though, is that so many of these thoughts that I have about next year are about my future happiness. Happiness that I don’t currently have. Happiness that I want.

Next year I’ll have friends and we’ll hang out, and people will genuinely want to spend time with me.

Next year I will be able to figure out what kind of relationship I want to be in.

Next year I will be in a long-term monogamous relationship.

Next year I’ll be proud of my abilities in school.

Next year I will be the most awesome student ever.

Next year I will have my own apartment, and I won’t have to feel guilty about not wanting to spend time with my family.

Next year …..

I am so afraid that next year won’t live up to my expectations, and then I will be stuck. Stuck in this depression, stuck in my dead-end safety job. Part of me feels like I should be able to be happy now, be happy with the fact that I have a place to live, a job, the ability to go to school, that I could make friends if I wanted to, and be in a relationship if I just put forth the effort. And yet I’m not.  I’m not in friendships. I’m not in a relationship. I’m not happy.

And I don’t know what to do about it.

Metacognitivethoughts.

This is not Actually a Real Post

I know that I said that I would post on Fridays.

I know that I didn’t post on Friday September 16th.

I know that I have not posted since then.

And guess what?  This isn’t actually a post at all.
I suppose I should owe you some sort of explanation. But you see I don’t really have one, other than : busy–the things I want to post are heavy emotional things that take time–I forgot to write an english essay and am now playing catch up–I have to write a letter of recommendation for one of my teachers and its kinda freaking me out-I went to a soccer game-I spent like a million and half hours at work this past week–my spaces (car, living rooms, kitchen, bedrooms) aren’t clean and therefore makes me not think as well–I have to host book club–I have to join my mother’s book club, so essentially try out for book club–I have to read the book club book–I have assignments in other classes — excuses. Which now that I have written out seem somewhat valid.

But I can leave you with this:

A girl walked into my comparative politics class last monday and said “My mom brought home a goose and a wiener dog.”

That might possibly be one of the best things I have ever heard said that could be the set-up to some  sort of joke.

Metacognitivethoughts.

 

Presidential Smarts

I watched parts of the Republican candidates debate, and by watched parts of the debate, I mean I went to YouTube and watched some of the train wreck clips of Ron Paul look like a jerk. Which while it helped to cement my opinion of someone who I didn’t really have an opinion of before, and provided several excellent examples of logical fallacies for my english class, it didn’t really give me an overall feeling on the debate. 

 For the record I will not be voting for Ron Paul. I will not be voting for Ron Paul simply because I didn’t like the way he handled himself at the debate. I am all for playing the game, as long as the game is played well. If you don’t want to play by the rules don’t play. (This will probably be as political as I’ll be on this blog.)

 Then in Statistics class we started watching Al Gore’s “An inconvenient Truth” and one of my first thoughts while watching the movie was wow he’s smart!  I was impressed by his presentation and understanding of the data within that film. There were several comments in the movie about Al Gore’s presidential campaign, which lead me to start thinking about other presidents. I came to the conclusion that I don’t consider most of the presidents we have had to be smart, or even that smart is a word that people should use when looking at the qualities they want in a president. Which frankly had me a little worried.  Shouldn’t smart be a word that I use to describe a president? Shouldn’t I be looking at potential candidates intelligence?

But the more that I thought about it, the less worried I became. I think that there are several reasons that I don’t consider a person’s intelligence when they are running for president.

1) I assume that a lot of what is presented to me as “The Candidate” or “The President” is actually a team of people, not one single person. I figure that the White House has a staff of  at least one hundred twenty people, people to write speeches, present and manage  the press, people who cook and clean, people who worry about appearances, people who make sure that the right things are said at the right time. On top of the White House staff the President has access to virtually the smartest people he can find, which he then uses in his cabinet. I feel like because the President has the access to smart people, who have the abilities to inform him of smart decisions, that he himself doesn’t have to be super smart.

2) I think that any time a person is in a place of power, making controversial decisions other people will take the words that you say and try to make you sound as stupid as possible. I figure that a part of my impression that the President doesn’t need to be smart comes from the attempts and relative success of other people to make him seem stupid.

3) Many of the “smart people” experiences that I have had in my life revolve around people who are math and science smart. People who study mechanical engineering, or biochemistry, or who get PhD’s in physics, or who can write pages of computer code. I tend to be biased towards the people who fall on that range of the intelligence scale. Where I think that people who become the President or who want to become President are intelligent in something different. I think that they study political science, and have an amazing knowledge of  people skills, they are the ones that study law, and policies. So I think that they are smart in different ways from what I normally consider smart.

4) I think that science can be very exact with simple step by step processes that can be duplicated easily, whereas the President works in a messy unpredictable arena, that isn’t as easily measurable.

I guess that my question for you is what qualities would you use to describe the President? What qualities are you looking for in future Presidents? Is smart one of them?

Metacognitivethoughts.

 

Updates and Things.

I have absolutely no resolution to the last post that I wrote. Nobody seemed to know anything and apparently the only person that does know something is only a voicemail voice. I did find out that Macroeconomics instructor quit, and the school didn’t bother to find a replacement for most of his classes, which leaves many people trying to get any sort of business degree in something of a bind. I’m glad that I am far enough along in my program that I have managed to get both Macroeconomics and Financial Accounting out of the way and only need Microeconomics. And that I still have two semesters left so I could be somewhat flexible with the classes I am taking this semester and next semester. I just really really hope that they find a new instructor for Microeconomics in the spring.

In other helpful advice I have to share: if you have a balanced schedule in terms of math classes and test  classes and reading classes and writing paper classes, Don’t switch out one of you test centric classes for a literature reading/writing papers class. While I think that my literature class will be fun and interesting, it is also going to kill me in the amount of time I have for other things.

My classes for this semester are as follows, because everybody out there wants to know right? Right.  I am taking Intro to Architecture, Computing for business students, Intro to Literature, Comparative Politics, English 101 and Statistics. Which brings me up to eighteen credit hours. I am also working about 35 hours a week.  I don’t think that overall it’s terrible, but the this workload of both school and work doesn’t leave me much time. When this semester is done, I deserve some sort of big reward. I have a chart all set up and have a place to put my reward, I just haven’t yet figured out what it is. So some help there maybe. If you have brilliant ideas of a semester completion award/reward to help motivate me, let me know.

Classes have been going well, I’ve been back at school for two weeks now, and because we as students are awesome we obviously deserve some time off. So I don’t have to go to school on Monday. Or maybe the country has some sort of weird holiday thingy-ma-bop. Can somebody please explain to me the purpose of Labor day? Add it to the terribly long list of things that I don’t get.

I have decided that I am going to try to post every Friday. I mean I also set a random goal of posting twenty times in the month of June, which never happened but I think posting on Fridays might work out better.

Metacognitivethoughts.

 

Grrrr… I am Angry.

Today I went up to my school to buy some books, renew my parking pass, and do some general before the first day of school errand type things. In the process of running these errands I discovered that my school had done something that  made me so incredibly angry.

In the summer of 2010 I took macroeconomics. It was a summer class which made each class period was three hours long. Economics isn’t exactly the easiest thing to learn and three hours at a time is a long time to sit in a classroom and learn it. With all of that being said I loved my instructor. I liked going to my three-hour long summer economics class. I found that my instructor knew what he was teaching, and he knew how to explain it to his students. My instructor came up with examples that helped to solidify what  we were learning. My instructor knew how to get students to work together. His tests were written so that we as students were tested on concepts, and not on our ability to memorize homework examples, vocabulary or snippets of lectures.

 But I think that the most important quality of my economics teacher was that he cared. He learned all of my classmates names by the second week of class, he asked what was going on in our lives. He spent the time before class asking about other classes, our interests, what books we were reading. We were encouraged to look for examples of economic principles and our instructor worked with my fellow students and I towards understanding.

Throughout the course it was revealed to me that my economics teachers also taught Financial Accounting, Microeconomics and a couple of other accounting tech classes. After my accounting teacher found out that I had taken a simple bookkeeping class to help with my job, he suggested that I take his Financial Accounting class. Because of his teaching style in Macro, I was willing and excited to take his Financial Accounting. I signed up for the Financial Accounting class the next semester. It was in that accounting class that I realized that I was good at accounting. That being an accounting is something that I most definitely wanted to do.

Quick summary: I took Macroeconomics, found a teacher whose teaching style I loved, took Financial Accounting, figured out what career I wanted to try to pursue.

In the fall of 2010 I took the above Financial Accounting class and a basic management class. It was in my management class that I found one of the worst instructors that I have ever encountered.

Management instructor was a small business enthusiast who had worked for years in small business, running small businesses, helping other people set up small businesses, and running a consulting firm to help encourage the county government to develope small businesses. His life experiences doesn’t completely relate to management in all aspects, but does relate in some ways. This made for a very small-bussiness-for-our-specific-area centric class, which okay not great but I can somewhat see the practicality.

Management instructor made me very angry in management class for several reasons. One of the largest problems with the class was that the instructor spent the entire time “lecturing” if by lecturing you mean reading us the book. Management instructor would look over the book, outline the book with huge chunks of text directly copied and then read us the outline. It became apparent throughout the class that just because Management instructor knew how to read, didn’t mean he understood what he was teaching. This lead to several instances where Managament Instructor taught us things that were not correct. Management instructor was the type of person who had to be right always, and if he wasn’t right then he got angry. Fun Fun being taught wrong things without a way to clarify/correct wrong teachings.

Management Instructor was also both racist and sexist. Throughout the entire semester I was subjected to speeches that implied and outright stated I was less of a person because  I was female and not the same race as Management Instructor.  When I finished that class I made myself a promise that I would never take another class  from Management Instructor again. This was a fairly easy thing to promise myself as Management Instructor’s other classes were all creating your own small business classes.

Can you guess what made me so mad today? 

In April I began the process of signing up for my summer and fall classes. I signed up for microeconomics, with Macroeconomic Instructor. I was so very excited, microeconomics was supposed to be one of my fun easy classes. And then today when I printed out my schedule the instructor had been changed from Macroeconomic Instructor to Manageament Instructor.

My school changed the instructor on a class that I was really excited about to an instructor that I had promised myself that I would never take again. My school had changed instructors in the week before school starts, which doesn’t give me any time to find a different class. Every person that I talked to in the school had no idea why this change happened, if this change is going to continue in the spring, or could give me reasons why such an unqualified person is teaching such a complex subject matter. I think that economics is the type of subject matters that requires people who can manipulate the subject and provide workable examples. Management Instructor is in no way that type of person.

Grrrr…. I have no idea what I should do, but I think that I am going to end up dropping Microeconomics and hope that in the spring Macroeconomic Instructor is the one teaching it.

Metacognitivethoughts.

Thoughts on Sex

So random question: At what age can I assume that most of my friends have had sex? It always seems so shocking to me when somebody I know announces they’re pregnant. The first thought that passes through my head is always OH MY GOSH you had SEX. Which somehow I think I should rewire to be OH MY GOSH CONGRATULATIONS!!!!

I went to high school at a private small Christian high school. And basically our whole sex ed curriculum was sex is something that married and only married people do. Since none of you are married, none of you are having sex. We all talked about sex in the way that high school students do; if any appropriate “your mom joke” or “that’s what she said” came up we took the opportunity, we turned everything and anything into a sexual innuendo or double entendre. I remember once in chemistry class, me and several other students came up with a proof that sex was a form of nuclear energy. But everything that we said was just talk. Very few of my classmates had any kind of relationships and most nights we all hung out together after school in large groups. I thought.

My at home sex education was more comprehensive. By the time that I was in high school I had known about sex for several years. My parents (especially The Lady) thought that I was stubborn. And therefore if I wanted to have sex I would have sex, so I had all kinds of contraception explained to me. I knew about the pill, and condoms, and diaphragms, but along with that knowledge I was given the idea that my parents wanted me to wait. Wait until I found someone I loved, that loved me, to wait for marriage. I was taught that sex was a special, sacred act and that waiting was always, always better. And so I have. I have waited. Mostly because I haven’t found someone special, someone who I love, someone who loves me. I haven’t found anyone that I have wanted to have children with, haven’t found anyone that I want to marry. And I assumed that my classmates were taught the same, and believed the same.

When we were in ninth grade a group of girls were sitting in a circle in the locker room. And they started talking about sex. I wasn’t a part of the group but I have heard several people’s transcripts of the conversation. Somehow the question came up over who had done it. Their were several girls who admitted to having sex, and were somewhat proud of their “accomplishment” and then the rest of the girls were horrified that the first girls had admitted it. The actual act of sex was a shameful thing, if you did have sex you certainly weren’t supposed to admit it. And yet these girls had. I think that was the first time I realized that some people didn’t wait, didn’t want to wait. That was somewhat foreign to me.

After that incident one of the “good” girls in school got pregnant. She was a golden girl, everybody’s favorite, favorite student, favorite jock, favorite go to person to get things done. And yet she had to leave our junior year so that she could have a baby. Once again I was shocked that she hadn’t waited. She was one of the few students that was in a long-term relationship, so it kinda makes sense that she didn’t wait.

And now as I get older and my circles expand with people who weren’t taught in my high school, people who I can no longer assume were taught about sex the same way I was. I have to come to the realization that more and more people aren’t waiting. That sex isn’t special or sacred to them, and that they have had sex. Which is absolutely mind-blowing to me.

I guess part of the reason that I find it so shocking is the way that I find out about most people having sex is when they announce they are pregnant. It’s not something that comes up in chit-chat, or small talk. Sometimes it comes up when I can forge long-term friendships, but not all the time.

So my question is what age should I assume most people have had sex? When does being a unvirgin” instead of a virgin become the norm?”

Metacognitivethoughts

The State of Things

“Hey it’s me again”– Does anybody else watch How I Met Your Mother?  I’ve watched every single episode multiple times. That quote I’ve put there is from a song that Ted sings in the Pineapple Incident. And yes I realize, real song, but every time I think about it I think of drunk Ted singing it dancing on tables.

That is how you should picture the thoughts in my head. A drunk guy singing a song that he picked out of a juke box dancing on tables. Ridiculously practical picture for my thoughts right now.

Sooooooo……… shall we catch up?

Summer school started in June. I am taking two classes this summer Public Speaking and Psychology. Public speaking is going well, I will be giving my third speech on Thursday. Its a persuasive speech convincing people that censorship in the form of book banning is wrong. Psychology is kinda crazy.  How fitting, a class that teaches me about several types of actual crazy is in itself figureativly crazy. But maybe I’ll write one entire post about psychology.

For the month of June I was involved with a project. I was a stage manager for a children’s theater camp. This was my fourth summer being involved with this same camp and it was in equal parts amazing and frustrating and awesome and inspiring. We performed  an adaptation of a children’s book  and added musical numbers. I painted sets and found props and worked backstage and herded children and spent a large amount of time telling one particular ten year old boy to stop talking. Why are you talking. Stop Talking. No talking means your lips shouldn’t be moving. I should not hear sound coming from your lips. Stop talking. That one child was probably one o f my favorite campers, it was a good thing that he showed effort.

Work has been taking up a lot of my time lately. Which always happens around major holidays, it is in the nature of the business that I am in, but it means that most holidays aren’t enjoyable. However my boss realized that spending the evening of the fourth inside wasn’t my mostest favorite thing in the world and he took me and some of my other coworkers up to the roof to watch the fireworks. It was such an amazing view of  panoramic fireworks and the city itself.

One of my regular customers introduced me to his son. ( I have several regular customers that are concerned with my lack of boyfriend and all think that I should met their sons. Which I find strange. Is this common practice? Oh look at the poor service person that I deal with regularly, she doesn’t have a boyfriend let me introduce her  to my son.) But I gave the boy my number and he called me and we sorta kinda talked but then I had to go to work so I ended our first conversation after about five minutes. He called again later and we held an hour long conversation. In which he informed me that he grows pot, lots and lots of pot, and he wants to study botany to grow better pot. ( My second question is: Is this something that you should really tell a relative stranger? Is this a good getting to know you type statement?) He then came to visit me at work and was somewhat put off by the fact that I think work is for work, not personal relationship chats. I mean I don’t chat with my family or friends at my  work place I’m not going to chat with some boy.

And lastly I just signed up for Twitter and you can find me over there with the screen name metacogthoughts.

Metacognitivethoughts.