Today was the first full day of Summer Break for me, and it has been… an adjustment. I know that I have no papers looming over my head, but I keep freaking out thinking that something is going to come due within the next few days. Bloody school has broken my brain, heh. But I’ll have myself a nice week or two off (besides work), before I have to start searching for a place to do my field practicum. I’m hoping to get some of those hours put away over the summer, so I don’t have to cram it all into three months next semester.

UPCOMING
Seeing as I have more time to sit down and experiment and write, we should see some more activity in this blog soon. First up will be the Yes to Carrots makeup remover I bought on clearance a while back… so for those of you who asked, I haven’t forgotten!  I’ll also be weighing in on the C.O. Bigelow Power Berry Mask, Madd Style Cosmetics, and the Sugarpill ‘Sweetheart’ palette. Joy!

STEALS & DEALS
A few things for Bath and Body Works fans; the Spring VIP bag is now in stores! Inside is a standard ritual of Country Chic, a preview of the newest Summer Coconut lotion, a wallflower and bulb, body sponge, pocketbac and clip, and a bottle of their amazing lavender foaming soap. I’m a bit of a lavender snob, and this soap really impressed me.  It’s definitely worth the $20 (with $40 purchase – can be combined with coupons)!  Also, the Signature Vanillas collection was 50% off today, along with Mother’s Day pocketbacs, Country Chic lip glosses, Royal Wedding lip glosses, Signature Vanillas lip glosses, and three of the Bigelow Lemon lip balms (Black Cherry Lemon, Raspberry Lemon, and Blueberry Lemon).  It took everything I had not to pick up the Blueberry Lemon lip balm, because I am a HUGE balm junkie, but I’m doing so well with my detox that I’d hate to break it now!

Finally, if you’re down with NYX, Cherry Culture (dot com) is having a rather slammin’ sale on select items, 50% off.  Discount taken at checkout, with coupon code NMS50. This sale lasts until May 8th.  Why do I have to be on a no-buy now? Why?

1) We had a fair bit of rain two weeks ago, which lead to flooding in some areas. My hometown was very lightly bit by this, and seeing as my father is the local director of Emergency Management, he was coordinating all the hoo-doo with shelters and alerts and all that natural-disaster jazz. Which meant that Mom didn’t have a way to get to (or rather, back from) her appointment to have her back stabbed with medical goodness. So she opted to drive up here and stay the night while the anesthesia wore off. I had a grand old time making making her watch cute kitten videos on Youtube while she was jacked up on drugs.

2) The day after that was my birthday, so Mom and I went out for lunch and shopping before she went back home. She scored some new scrubs for work, and a couple of e.l.f. brushes. I scored some more brushes, and a shiny birthday gift in the way of her paying for my car tags this year (thanks, Mom!). And of course, Kev got me some nice swag for the birthday… a battery backup for my computer. Seems like a lame birthday present for a chick, but I was actually quite chuffed, as storm season is upon us. There’s nothing more frustrating than having your computer blink off for a split-second power outage. So now both of us are covered in the event of power outage. Huzzah!

3) I’ve actually been clocking some good hours at work over the last few. This is what I love about the people I work with… if you need help to cover hours in an emergency, they’ll find the help somewhere. If you want more hours, they’ll find them somewhere. I feel so blessed to work with such an amazing team… doubly blessed that they kept me on board after the Christmas shopping season was over.

4) The end of the semester is coming! I have one week of class left, then finals. I’ve already finished work on two of my classes, but I am behind an all of my others (oh snap!). So this week is going to be a hard push to get all of my work completed. I have two papers, one take home essay final, and three “reflection journal” entries to write up, then studying up for my lone in-seat final next week. On top of that, I need to start pulling together the loose ends for the Psych Club community service project, and start writing up certificates of participation for all the on-campus and online students.

Yes. Things are just a tad bit busy over here.

On the plus side, I’ve registered for classes next semester… my LAST one before finally nabbing my Bachelor’s! I’ll have my field practicum, my research project, and some filler electives. One of which is… wait for it… choir. AH! AH! It’s been twelve years since I’ve been in choir! This is both exciting and terrifying.

I’ve had a few good hauls, and some products I’ve been playing around with to review. Once things slow down a bit, I’ll be able to post those. In the meantime, however, I’ve committed myself to a beauty detox for a month. I’ve not bought anything beauty related since the 15th. Not even a hair tie. Once that month is up, I’m still going to be on a tightened-belt budget. It’s a good thing none of the upcoming MAC collections have been catching my eye, eh? Except the Summer Shower lipstick from the Fashion Flower collection (April 28th). I don’t know why, but that one is so tempting!

So, what’s been going on in my world lately? I rocked another 4.0 last semester, and this semester is shaping up to be pretty awesome as well. I’ve been shaping up some ideas for my senior research project, and getting rather involved in the Psych department. So much so that I was freshly elected president of the Psych Club… which I think is a somewhat odd thing to happen in the middle of the academic year. It’ll look nice on grad school applications, innit?

In the work sphere, I landed a seasonal job at one of my most favourite stores on the planet, fully expecting to get drop-kicked when the holiday shopping season was over. But somehow, I managed to stay on. The hours are extremely slim now, and I’ll probably have to pick up a second job over the summer, but I’m just happy to be there.

Things in the family sphere got pretty hectic back in August, and that has partially settled down in the past month… but I still worry about my mom’s health. She has been pushing herself way too hard, trying to keep everyone and everything together – to the point of her going to the ER because her back is playing tricks again. It gets on my nerves that I’m not close enough to really help her and Dad out more… all I really do is offer phone-support. And phone support isn’t much of a help if she slips and falls on her ass when nobody else is home. Yeah. I get to sit here being worried, while nobody else seems to notice or care just how seriously bad her physiological state really is.

Bah.

So hell, let’s not dwell on that unhappiness. With the new semester came a new chunk of financial aid… and I splurged a wee bit and went makeup crazy. I have an Urban Decay and Sugarpill palette coming in, some MAC lipglasses, a blusher from TheBalm, and a 15-slot MAC palette for which to insert depots. Yep, I’m depotting my MAC eyeshadows. Never thought I’d see the day when that’d happen… but it just makes sense to conserve space. What’s even better is that everything was either deeply discounted or ‘free’ (rather, swapped out on MUA). The only thing I really dropped coin on was that Sugarpill palette, which came out to $39 shipped. So I’m really chuffed to have landed so many sweet bargains. I’m sure there will be some epic picture posts of my haul to follow.

In my morning class, we were talking about the Existentialist therapy model. I’m a big fan of Frankl, since his views seem to really jive with mine… and because the last therapist I saw back when I was starting college seemed to use this therapy model on me, and it worked incredibly well at readjusting my brain to enjoy the little wonders of the present, and feel excited for the opportunities I may have in the future rather than fear it for no concrete reason (wherever you are, Melissa, thank you). I geek about this way of thinking pretty heavily, so I was all up in that discussion.

We came upon the Nietzsche quote, ‘He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how‘. When asked how this applies to therapy, I almost immediately thought of my adolescence. How many times I simply wanted to die, and how strong that desire was. At least two or three times a week, I would think of how wonderful the relief would be, just to get it all over and done with. To no longer have to wake up and know that today was another day of loneliness and suffering. I thought about the hows and whens, wrote little notes of what needed to be done before and after the fact, this that and the other. But every single time I felt that I was at my wit’s end… I’d think of Mom. And as soon as I thought of her, I realized: no matter how much life hurts, the thought of never getting to see her again hurt worse. So, taking Nietzsche into consideration, my mom was my ‘why’. She is what made me survive the ‘how’.

On the drive home from campus today, I realized that was exactly why we had so much trouble when I was a teen. She was my reason for living. She kept me in this suffering. And I hated her for it. Even though I loved her, and knew that I was incredibly lucky to have her (and Dad) as parent(s), I still hated her for keeping me here. It was all her stupid goddamned fault for giving me something to live for. If it weren’t for her, I could have been free from the dark sea of pain in which I was constantly being churned. And I didn’t let her forget it. While I don’t believe I was ever aware enough of my feelings to tell her in direct words that it was her fault (nor do I think she would’ve understood even if I did tell her, because I don’t think she was ever aware of the fact that she was my last lingering shred of a purpose for living), I didn’t hold back on letting her know just how much I hated suffering life for her.

Cue the epic epiphany music. No, seriously. I was listening to Symphonika when I realized this, so the backing track was pretty epic. I had a chuckle about that. You should, too. It was the perfect moment.

Now, of course, I don’t feel this way. Now, having survived it all for long enough to see the other side, I realize how amazing it was to have her as an anchor. Every time I think of how she helped me through those horrible years, I feel more than blessed. And even though it took us years to repair the damage that was wrought, we’re tighter than ever. I’m extremely proud to call her my Mom and my best friend. After all, ‘That which does not kill us makes us stronger‘ (ILU Nietzsche, for reals). We survived it, in entirely different ways, but still together.

This realization made me wonder… how many other parents are in this exact situation with their children? How much of a teenager’s rage against their parents is rooted in the fact that they actually love them? How many times is a mother or father blamed for daring to give us a reason to live? Is “I wish I’d never been born!” just popular subconscious teenspeak for “why do you love me so much that you make me want to stay with you?” And how can we let our parents know this? How can we let them know that the reason we hate them is because honestly, underneath all the sneering and back-talking and scare-tactics, we actually love them? That we still want them nearby? How can we let them know the truth of things, when our actions seem to say the exact opposite? I know I was extremely fortunate that I didn’t push Mom away. There comes a point where enough is too much, and some people have a much lower bullshit threshold than she did. What happens to those kids who find a reason to live in their parents, but wind up pushing that reason away because of this epic hitch in logic? What’s left for them, then?

The thought is rather saddening. Here’s this situation that really does make perfect sense when you sit back and think about it, but when you’re caught in the midst of it, it makes no sense at all. And because it’s so incredibly hard to recognize the why’s and how’s of this new love/hate relationship, some people will never know how to deal with it. Or know how to heal from it. These relationships can be lost forever, when the only reason it was ever volatile to begin with was because of how strong the child-parent relationship was to that teenager.  It’s extremely tragic.

As it is so incredibly hard to understand it when you’re in it, I would like to say this to all the parents who have teenagers in the same hateful mess that I was in:

We love you. We love you so much that we do willingly suffer for you. We suffer to keep you in our lives, because you give us reason. You give us meaning. And if you can bear this – if you can stand by and support us through these hellish years we’ve found ourselves in, long enough so we can push through it all and see our own reason in ourselves – we will forgive you. We will be grateful to you for the giving us that reason to live. And we all hope that someday, you’ll forgive us, too.

So, I’m going to speak with the head of the Psych department on Tuesday, with print-outs of the assignments themselves, my syllabus, and my reasoning, to see if I’m wrong in thinking this is total bullshit. In the meantime, I’m going to take to writing my paper as if I’m explaining these rather simple concepts to a retarded fifth grader. Seriously, if she wants me to purposefully insult her intelligence in order to get a good grade, I’ll be more than happy to oblige in the worst ways possible.

This is what I get for trying to be “nice” to my profs, and respect their “authority”. Well, fuck their so-called authority. Now that I know this method doesn’t yield results, I’m sticking with my previous methods of being the bitch-student from hell. You might think that piece of paper means you get instant admiration, lady, but when push comes to shove, I can still wipe my ass with that little grad-school souvenir of yours.

It’s rather interesting, though, attending a ladies’ college. And by interesting, I mean, you really get to see how much more open and relaxed women can be when there aren’t male competitors flitting about. And hell, even I feel a little more liberated in this setting. Not only is the social environment different, but the educational environment is different. Take for instance, my Psychology of Gender class. Of course, we’ve touched the “this is what feminism is” subject, but that was all. There was no “AND HERE IS WHY IT’S RIGHT!!1!” and “PATRIARCHY, RAAAARRRRR!!” Christ, who knew that you had to hang out in a sea of estrogen to escape the feminist agenda that stinks up most major universities?

I dropped out of the University of Kentucky, because I had had it up to my eyeballs with their bullshit. I was rather tired of feeling like my money was more important to them than my education (how many times had I been told by my professors that “the grades don’t matter?”), and it made me vomit a little whenever I realized that the education gimmick was really just an excuse to have SPORTS!!1 After being dicked around by multiple agencies for which I needed to volunteer in order to fulfill my the requirements of Social Work classes, and being screwed over the TA in my German Cinema class, I came home one day in tears, crawled in bed and cried for an hour or two, while repeating “I’m not going back. This place just isn’t worth it.” This was sometime back in March, if I do recall correctly.

Soon after, I scheduled an appointment to tour my mom’s alma mater… a nice, tiny, private college in the middle of bumfucked-Egypt. I invite her ride along, as I figured it’d be nice for her to have the chance to “go back home”, as it were. And dudes? It was fantastic. So I immediately applied, sent in my transcripts and scores, and waited to hear back with what kind of scholarship package I’d be getting. I mean, this place isn’t cheap… we’re talking, twice the cost of UK. Even though I knew I qualified for a legacy scholarship, having three generations in my family walk in and out of their doors, I didn’t know if they had exhausted their scholarship awards for the year. So I was sweating bullets until my letter arrived. And I didn’t get the Legacy scholarship (boo!)… I got a better one (YAY!).

The usual routine occurs, where you register for classes, some get canceled, things get fucked up, things get fixed, blah blah etc. Which brings us to today, my last day of freedom before class starts tomorrow.

Other updates? Well, let’s see. I got a little job, which earns me even smaller paychecks. Saw VNV in NKY back in March. Started reading the Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind. Flew cross-country to visit some friends a few weeks ago. Some hellacious family drama occurred at roughly the same time as that travel adventure, and is still unfolding on a continuing basis. And… ehm. I think that’s about it, really. Exciting, right? Obviously, we haven’t missed much in my non-updating mood. But maybe I’ll update more now that I’m not so filled with hate and rage about the school situation.

This semester, however, has been a horrific experience. I have seen so many unsettling things, and I honestly loathe the fact that I have three more school-terms to survive (four, if you count the summer session… and I don’t, just to keep my blood-pressure within normal range).

TL;DR version: If you’re thinking about going to the University of Kentucky, don’t. Do yourself a favor and mark it off your list immediately. If you’re at all interested in reading the reasoning, though… click through.

First, the professors. Out of five professors, I’ve had serious complaints about three. First, the Religion professor. Most of my complaints about this professor are down to personality quirks, therefore, have no real relevance to the University itself. However, I was greatly disturbed when I learned that he was attending a conference in Denver, where he was to present a study of churches in Lexington, KY. What was disturbing about this was the fact that in his presentation, he called Lexington a “Midwestern City”. I was just dumbfounded by this, as Lexington is neither culturally nor geographically Midwestern. Here is a doctorate-holding professional, attending a conference for other professionals, presenting a study which was completely invalidated by this one incredibly obvious mistake. That a professional could misinform fellow colleagues is bad enough — that this person is allowed to teach young adults is just terrifying.

Second, the Gender professor. This one could have been fair enough, even if too much time was wasted with assuming we were all freshers who had never read or written for college before (which, to my knowledge, none of us were). It would have been okay, until she screwed up the scoring on our first exam. Rather than restructure the grading rubric to make up for the mistake, she decided to throw those points she misplaced onto other exams. Where each exam was supposed to be worth 45 points, they were now split 30, 52, and 53. I scored perfectly on the first, and rather terribly on the second… which wasn’t a problem, until you really did the math. My perfect score was worth less than the bad-score I made on the second exam. In expressing my concern, she insulted my intelligence by saying my math and logic were flawed. When I presented her with the math — which proved that her mistake cost me 1% of my final grade — she insulted my intelligence again by suggesting that the numbers didn’t matter. Clearly, if you’re at all interested in getting into grad school, the numbers [i]do[/i] matter. The fact that I was one point’s distance from falling from an A to a B does absolutely matter. The difference between making dean’s list, and not making dean’s list, does absolutely matter. And though I presented a very clear case with valid evidence, she refused to admit to her mistake.

Next, my own dear major, Social Work. I don’t even know where to begin with the class I had this semester. The instructor was a PhD student, so not yet a professional in that regard. However, this should never reflect on a person’s ability to be an effective teacher — I have had a great many student teachers as instructors, and they have been wonderful (my German instructors are a prime example). I assumed that this instructor had no previous experience, and was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt as I struggled to understand how she could make such a convoluted mess out of relatively simple concepts. That is, until the results of our midterm exams came back. I received rather good marks on that exam (45 out of 50), but the rest of the class did not fare so well. People were pissed. People were crying. People were giving up. People marched right up to the COSW and lodged their complaints — which were at best ignored, or at worst, twisted around to reflect badly on on the students, rather than the instructor. After drafting a long letter of complaints, and gathering signatures, the instructor changed her tune. Class improved. Our grades recovered, thanks to a rather drastic extra-credit scheme. We were feeling much better, and became much more firm with the instructor when we were not clear on how to decipher her horrible syntax. Then, with finals drawing near, she did it again. Though it says on the syllabus that the final exam would be open book, she told us that only two pages of notes would be permitted. Next, she told us it would be open book only, no notes. Then she said the first half would be closed, and the last would be open book, open note. Then she went back and changed it again, saying the entire exam would be open book only, no notes. Just as soon as we thought we had a handle on what was going on, she changed it, and made it clear that we were being unreasonable when we expressed our frustration with being jerked around. It is clearly our problem, not hers.
Thankfully, this instructor has been taken out of core-curriculum teaching. Unfortunately, though, she is still teaching next semester. I am terrified for her future students.

Finally, as I am meeting more people who have graduated from this university, I am more and more disheartened by their total lack of knowledge in their respective fields, their inability to accept any new ideas, and their lack of respect for current students who challenge the status quo. I’m currently engaged in a rather heated argument with an old Marketing major, trying to explain to him how social media marketing works, and how his expectations in a certain marketing ploy are entirely inefficient. It’s just… frustrating to see how badly this University has failed its students. Frustrating to see that this tradition of failure has been part of the university for 30+ years. Every time something like this happens, I am made more ashamed of my choice to place geographical accessibility so high on my priority list.

I wish, from the bottom of my heart, that I had listened to all the people who told me that I needed to go somewhere else. I wish I had made my education the real priority. I wish I had made the bold choice to find a place where I was not in a constant state of culture shock and toxic disappointment. But here I am, three terms left (we’re still not counting summer, for the sake of my sanity), stuck. Stuck wondering and worrying if anyone can take a degree from this place seriously. God knows I wouldn’t. I really, really wouldn’t.

You bet your sweet ass this is going on the fridge.

Anyway. I’ve had since April to officially apply to the College of Social Work at UK, and I finally did my entrance essay just this morning… less than a week before I have to have it turned in. Luckily I can deliver it by hand, so I know it’ll hit their desk(s) before the first.

Finally, it takes a special kind of girl to fuck up Tuna Helper. And I am a very special sort of lady. What should’ve been cheesy noodles with tuna has been transformed into yellow mushslop with tuna flakes and burnt bits. I am not happy about this. But at least the salad part of dinner was okay. It’s just impossible to jack up lettuce.