greenstorm | Loose end

Huh.

For the most part things turn out better than I expect them to.

That's another way of saying that I'm really pessimistic or really cautious about a lot of things.

I'm also -- you know, people said 'things will change when you get to University' when I was in high school. 'You won't be the smartest person in the room' they warned me 'you'll have to work at it'.

Well, I went to UBC and some of it was too hard and some of it was too easy and nobody gave a fuck about me or about the classes they were teaching. I never did any work there. I also didn't do very well. I also didn't do it for long.

Now I'm at BCIT. I'm doing a lot of things that basically I can take as far as I want to. I can sink a ton of work into them and really learn some interesting stuff, or I can squeeze an hour in here and another hour there between work and sleep and call the thing homework and it appears I do okay in both situations, and sometimes I do really really well. I have yet to figure out if my level of achievement is correlated with the level of work I put in. It doesn't appear to be. Instead it seems to be my interest in a subject that drives my ability in it. I would love to have time to spend on playing with these ideas and doing them more, cementing them in my head and also looking for the fun parts. I think I could make everything interesting if given enough time (or good enough teachers but hey, why ask lightning to strike three or four times?)

Want me to tell you a secret? I'm terrified at how well I'm doing. Every time I do okay to well with no prep, it makes me lazier for next time. Each time I do spectacularly well on something because I sorta-know my stuff, game the test, and have a meta-sense of the subject my expectations for my achievement are raised-- and I am very competitive with myself. That's why I'm the level of workaholic I am, I think.

So there've been a ton of things happening lately. Last week was the work crunch, this week was the school crunch. I've done a final exam in sustainable resources, a test in maps, and a midterm in math this week. Also a project worth 30% of my ecology grade is due in an hour and two english assignments are due today (one's finished and I'm halfway through the other-- seriously, this assignment included 'read several articles from forrex.org (the ecosystem management trade journal) and you know, that is a LOT of very technical reading). Eep, I've lost myself in my parentheses.

And last night I was up late working on the plant assignment, did some more today, but work ended early and I flew through as much of English as I could without heading home and grabbing my textbook. Now I'm livejournaling from our computer lab because, er, I have two hours to kill and honest to god nothing I can do.

I talked to the financial people and need to get somethign signed by someone who isn't in.

I went to the gym but didn't want to spend the time to figure out the system and gave up after scouting it out.

I can't work on my citizenship or tax stuff because I don't have the info here.

I didn't bring my laptop because it's heavy and I had aerial lift certification today, didn't wanna haul it PLUS the plant assignment (5" binder) PLUS my schoolwork.

I could run down the batteries on my devices but what's the point?

Well, better post this and I can hunt down the prof to deliver my plants assignment to. It really is a thing of beauty. 70-odd pressed and labelled plants, all alphebetized and sorted according to structure and family. Also it's a collection of the memories of plant walks taken with my favourite prof, and a collection of mental images of little micro-environments. Because I wanted to I handwrote everything instead of printing it off on the computer. I didn't want that to get in the way.

I'll show it to youif you ask me.