Filled Days

It seems that due to a strange turn in events, my dates for blogging are completely not correlated (sorry for this vocabulary it is salient for the explanation). As you have noticed, I have been posting things long after they have actually transpired. But alas, today I shall catch up, not in list format again.

Wednesday opened up with me oversleeping in a sort of way. Because I didn’t get to bed until 6 o’clock that morning, I decided to stay in bed and miss my 9:00 Religion in Contemporary America class. Now you might say something about missing class, but I had it covered. The instructor had already given us the notes for the day (for the entire year), so we could virtually miss all the classes and still do well on the tests. I woke up at about noon time and quickly washed up and got up. I went straight to the Shafer Dining Court to eat. I decided to have a health conscious day, so my lunch consisted of no meat at all. (Well I would probably have gotten meat if the Beef soup wasn’t so red and the lines for the other entrées weren’t miles long). I got a huge bowl of salad and loads of juicy pineapples (which are second to my favorite only to Kiwi Fruit!).

I left Shafer and went to the Commons for a meeting with a counselor. We talked about our wonderful Thanksgiving and a few other minor things that I won’t mention here for the sake of time. The Cancer Awareness Team meeting commenced immediately after that. At the onset of the meeting I went to try out this Rice Bowl from the eatery in the same building. If it hadn’t been for my need to spend 80 meal swipes that remain on my meal plan (which is equivalent to $7.03x80) then I wouldn’t have gotten it. I did and had a ball. The bowl that I got was a very spicy chicken bowl. I nearly cried when I first began because it was super spicy (not the chicken but the rice and the sauce). Because it seemed like everyone was staring at me, I ate it slyly.

My Introduction to Life Science Class commenced after this. This was perhaps the most phenomenal moment of the week, I guess we could say. Class period consisted of a marvelous lecture by an Instructor about the joys and case studies of Clinical Laboratory Sciences. I found it to be very interesting. We examined cases of Transfusion Medicine and Hematology (a person experienced liver problems and it was believe that they had perhaps contracted Hepatitis B from the received blood, however we found out that it was a result of Acetaminophen). There were a few other cases examined that would be too detailed to list, but each one continued to grab my interest. I think that it was this day that I found out that which I wanted to do with my life after graduating. I would be in a medical/non-medical profession and be able to change people’s lives through discovery and prevention of disease. I continued to listen in closely and began to wonder if I should change my current major to Clinical Laboratory Science or to add it as a double major so I left it at that.

That night was another one of my classes, Ethics and Applications. Because we hadn’t had class before the Thanksgiving Break (the instructor was sick) and then we had Thanksgiving Break, we hadn’t met in nearly three weeks. That night was our final lecture period and we covered two topics. The first topic involved “The obligation of Children to their Parents” and the second topic was basically “The Absurdity of Life” from Nagel [Absurdity of life argument was kind of interesting because it stated that life is absurd because we can see ourselves through both an external and internal eye, the further we go out externally the more and more we see that what we do doesn’t change the world, thus giving us a nihilistic view of the world (for those that don’t know nihilistic view is quite believable in that it sorta states that nothing that we do will matter and on a moral view there is neither right and wrong in a sort of way), if we were to abandon this external view than it wouldn’t be absurd, however the only way to do that is to have a lobotomy surgery. However it did state that even though life is absurd that that isn’t a bad thing for if seeing ourselves externally does make us re-evaluate events in our lives]. Class lasted for about 3 hours and then we were released to go.

Thursday opened up with similar results as Tuesday. I managed to follow my plan of waking up (though at 9 rather than 6:45). I went to the Welcome Center to give another Tour of the Campus. This time I made another dumb and embarrassing move (on Tuesday it was completely blanking out). This time immediately after I had explained the busiest street in Richmond, I ran right into a Fire Hydrant, hurt my leg, and nearly fell over right as everyone was laughing. Luckily, I thought it was funny and managed to keep myself from falling. Boy did I feel so bad after that!

After the tour I managed to check my email for important updates. The most important one that I would love to share is the fact that my adviser told me that I could add Clinical Laboratory Science to my program, but it would be a sort of Double Major. I was ecstatic. The previous night I had reaffirmed to myself that I would go ahead and get it added on to my program schedule. Many of the classes that I am taking and will take can be tailored to both programs as they both involve virtually the same things. This is quite amazing!

That day I met with an instructor from VCU with a friend and discussed some sort of research plans. There is currently a program called BioBike that needs a bit of help done on it. It is a program that is tailored to high school students and professions. If one were to understand the program (both definitions of program are used here, program as in pure computer program and program as in it does something), then it could virtually be used for all sorts of Gene Research. Where the problem lies is that many people do not know any sort of programming language nor do they know how to actually get the program to give them what they want. It is logic lead and is on its way to becoming less of a pure code codec and more of a user friendly extremely visual program. What me and my friend's goal is, is to perhaps help the researches (who are mainly foreign and non native English speakers) make this easier for the high school students and non biology students to understand so that they can put it into practice. We will receive some monetary reward for this task as well as a trip to some place in the United States.

That night was another meeting with the Aletheia organization. I got there a bit late and was feeling a bit tired but I managed to hold and pull through. The discussion was really interesting this time. We discussed a bible verse that I had previously read and could still remember (the story of the workers who all begin at different times and get the same wage, it is the story “of the last shall be first and the first shall be last”). It was a great discussion and it left us with a thought on our hearts.

After doing a Calculator based lab in the PreCalculus class that I take [my instructor wont be here next semester, oh no!] me and a friend went over to the Shafer Court Dining Center for their Fine Dining Program. There was massive imbroglio (confusion) and a lengthy line. We were nearly the last few in line and sat there for nearly 2 hours waiting to order. Now if we had something to do we wouldn’t have waited but I think because we were the last few that it would have been a bit pointless to leave. There were about 39 people in line in front of us and a few going in to sit down. They stopped allowing people in to sit down and couldn’t take any more people in the to go line because they weren’t expecting so many people to turn up [lets try to figure this out, there are approximately 30,000 students and Faculty at VCU, of those quite a large portion have some sort of meal plan or meal swipes, and of those few about 10,000 (which is quite large) live on campus. So at this point in time, we can safely assume that if it were some major event then they should expect to serve 10,000 (which is unheard of by the way). Furthermore, of those 10,000 that could live on campus many would opt for other dining options than something so expensive and could go out to eat buffet upstairs, or at the other places on campus, so we will be generous here and perhaps eliminate 9000 people leaving us with about 1000 or so people to eat, and of course with people factor incorporated I would even take it as low as 600 people max that could come)] So knowing this why would they be not prepared to have this number, it just seems so strange that they would have been this massively unprepared! People sat and waited, sat and waited, sat and waited, and virtually at 11 that night (hours after our arrival at 8 (don’t forget there were 30+ in front of us who were waiting even longer), we get our food out of order. (People in front of us were still there when we left!). Next time I am going to make a reservation for eating in.

The final thing I would like to point out of my day was that when I got back to my dorm I nearly went supernova. From about 12 until 3:30 in the morning, there people in the hallway being ridiculously loud. At night you are supposed to at least be quiet to let people sleep, but no, the same people (this has been going on for quite some time at many hours of the day) continue to use their outside voices (to sound elementary for a bit). They shout and they are all in the same room, they purposely laugh too loud, and even more they shout, yell, and make all sorts of loud noises during even the middle of the day. It is entirely pointless and not even needed for me on the complete opposite end of the hall to hear these people! I would personally rather hear loud music than constant bouts of this talking! Can I just have one night of silence, please?