Hello muchachos!

I have pretty much settled into a routine now. Not to say that I wasn’t used to university and being in a whole new environment, yadda yadda yaaa, but I now have a routine that I abide by. My whole life is basically just me, trying to nap whenever I can. That’s about it. In fact, I just got up from a toasty little siesta in Koerner, and another quick cat nap outside on a bench by the flag pole not too long ago.

Can you believe we’re in the middle of the term already? There’s only like a month (?) to go, which is cray. Why are university terms so short? The work has been piling up and I often find myself eating away my sorrows in the dead of the night. Pocky is my friend. Ramen is my friend. Liszt’s paraphrase of Mendelssohn’s Wedding March is my friend when I’m stuffing my face and (figuratively) crying at stupid o’ clock. I’ve only gained one pound so far, in spite of the insane amounts of sugar I’ve been shoveling into my body. Lucky me. Probably because of all the walking I do from Totem to Buchanan and the Anthropology/Sociology building. My exercise used to be rolling around in bed, trying to find a comfortable position…. That’s it.

The past week or so has been a blur. I feel like I’m in The Hangover, only there hasn’t been any drinking or parties involved, because I am one of the more subdued first years. COUGH. I recall cursing the world as I woke up at 6.30am to get ready for my 7am shift in the Totem kitchen, and I also finally met your favourite first year Blog Squadder Derrick, who, while intensely funny and adorable online, is more amazing in person. [This is a paid advertisement.] But what really happened, was that I got my assignments back.

In university, you are bound to be registered in a really weird course that turned out to be the opposite of what you expected. TABL100 – Basics of Table Manners? Cool, you think. You will probably be learning about how to be a proper lady/gentleman, and you will gain all sorts of valuable insights into the art of etiquette. A few weeks in, and you realize that you’ve been misled. What are you doing, learning about ballroom dancing and how to properly sit inside a limousine? If you’d wanted to learn that, wouldn’t you have taken SNOB 100 instead? What is this doing in your class?

Well, I have one class exactly like that (which I am not going to specify), and I recently got my marks back.

I don’t want to sound like a complete butt, but I was an extremely good student in Grade 12. Grade 1 to 11, not so much (I got 12 marks on a Physics test once… Good ol’ days). But I completed Grade 12 in a Canadian school, as opposed to the national curriculum, and I did incredibly well. I’m not going to specify how when why what, but I was a pretty damn good student.

But what I got back for that class, was easily 15 – 20 marks lower that I would have gotten just a few months ago. Sure, I could make excuses and say that the assignments were ridiculously ambiguous and abstract. Sure. It’s not even like I wasn’t prepared for this – I knew that a drop in grades was to be expected in university. I knew that getting anything above 90 wasn’t going to be a walk in the park anymore. But knowing and actually experiencing something are two completely different things.

So I experienced a little bit of a crisis for a while. What am I doing in university? Did UBC make a mistake accepting me? Where is my brain? Am I even smart enough for university? Am I going to fail out of first year? What is life? What is x when y=4? Are the hobbits going to Isengard? And when am I going to do my laundry?

I recovered quickly, though, with the help of copious amounts of chocolate bars and some potato chips. I wasn’t going to let something that trivial knock me down. I am strong. I am invincible. I am gaining weight. I would learn from this experience, and emerge as a wiser, worldly person. “Why do you look so different?” People would ask, gaping at me in wonder. They’d sense that I have changed, that something has somehow shifted.

“I don’t know,” I’d reply, flipping my hair. “Maybe I’m born with it. Maybe it’s Maybelline.”

Well, I guess that’s just first year for you. You make mistakes, and you learn from them. You fall, but you get back up. Or maybe you don’t, and that’s just too freaking bad.

I still have to do my laundry. Happy Thanksgiving everyone!