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itsjayyyy · 5 years

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March 20, 2019 8:30 am

Alright I’m in a much better state of mind now. It’s been an astronomically long time since I’ve given an actual update on my life, not just venting. wow, just checked back at my last few updates and i really haven’t written almost anything about this semester, but So Much has happened.

okay so first of all: i switched majors. again. so I’ve done a lot of reflecting, about my whole plan for life. social work seemed like a good field for me because I want to help people, right? but in cps, you’re not always working with people to help them, a lot of the time is spent working /against/ your client to help their kids, who are often too young to understand what’s going on. You’re basically always fighting; a lot of posts on the social work subreddit are all about how to deal with clients who are uncooperative, or yell at you, etc. I want to state that mom is wrong when she says I’m “terrible with people,” I’m actually quite easy to get along with as long as you don’t purposefully seek to offend. But I am terrible with people who try to kick up shit all the time. I mean, I can barely handle dealing with an annoyed guest at starbucks, how am I supposed to spend the rest of my career dealing with that times, like, 100? And yeah, I know I always say that I can totally live on a small income, but man I sure do love the security of having a nice savings account. And donating to online charities is practically a hobby of mine, so having a big income would make it a lot easier for me to live the life of that rich person who pays off 100 gofundme’s for medical costs every month.

And I’ve come to realize that the atmosphere of a class matters more than anything in terms of how well I’ll do. Not to sound arrogant, but I’m smart enough that I can pass any class that I try, I just need to put in effort. And effort comes a lot easier with a good atmosphere. The reason why I failed comp sci the first time was because the class had no interaction whatsoever. I mean, it was online and over the summer, and the professor gave us weekly emails telling us what assignments were due that week but he stopped doing that halfway through the semester so I just forgot about the class tbh. I felt so disconnected. And frankly, I’ve felt that way about stem since high school when I was the only girl and was always singled out because of it. That just made me go into college with a negative mindset. Even retaking comp sci was only originally for some stupid grade forgiveness so I could keep my scholarship. But this semester is just...different. My professor is just so lively, in a way that I’ve never had a stem class be. He starts off every class with “good evening everyone, it’s another day in paradise here at ucf in orlando, florida” (and sometimes he adds on “and some day you all will realize that” which tbh sounds kind of like an ominous threat to me) and throughout the class he’s always joking around, we can ask questions in class through his own website, we have a discord group to talk about the assignments that the TA is also in (and he shared pics of his dog once), all that stuff. Our professor also tells us about all the other resources we have, like supplementary instruction, tutoring (somehow those are two separate things), “the cave” (which is a room i think in HEC that is just generally inhabited by random comp sci students who hang out and can help with assignments), office hours not only for him but also his 2 TA’s. I’ve never been to any of those physical places but it’s nice knowing that I have a support system.

I know it’s the atmosphere and not just me trying to work harder, too, because I really walked into that class at the start of the semester already hating it. I gave it the last section of my 5-subject notebook specifically for how little I cared about it. (To me, calc was my priority. And yet I’m coasting by in comp sci with a 99 and a 100 on the first two exams (class averages being 72 and 68 respectively), while the same stale, disconnected atmosphere of calc has earned me a 52.) Last semester I ended with a 47% (written in as a D though, not sure if that’s because my professor wanted to give me mercy or if it’s because he wanted the pay raise associated with having your students pass). Comp sci just became a fun subject again. Coding really is my favorite thing.

The final push was a post I saw on the social work subreddit. It was about a case manager (what I wanted to go into) who had done a home visit and was unable to hide her disgust of having roaches crawling near her. I absolutely cannot. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back, I realized I needed a sanitized office to work in. Before I made the official change, I talked to my coworker shayna about it, because she’s 26 and currently in her last semester of her AA, and next semester she’s hoping to transfer to ucf to get her bachelor’s. She said it is kinda stressful to take so long to get a degree, but as long as you get it, it’s okay. I know that now that I’ve wasted 2 years, I’m probably gonna graduate a semester late, but it’s okay because iris did too. And rose has been at valencia for 4 years and she’s still working on her 2 year degree so...

Wow that took a lot of words to say. Back to how my classes are going: I did the math, and I would need to get an 80 on all 3 of my remaining calc exams to get a C overall. Yeah I’m kinda pissed at myself for figuring out I like comp sci in the middle of the semester, when i already got an F on the first 2 exams. Before, my mentality was “I’m just taking this class for grade forgiveness, I can literally get a D and raise my gpa, and then I’m never going back to stem,” but now that I’m back in stem I need to get a C or better. I mean, I could get a D and then retake the class, but the college of engineering only allows for 3 tries on a class so I would really be on my last attempt before I’m completely kicked out and have to find a new major, wasting even more of my time. I know I would absolutely kill it on the third attempt, but man I sure am gonna hate myself for letting it get to that. It’s not an issue of “the material is too hard for me,” but rather “i didn’t care when I really should have.” I never studied for the first 2 exams and got over half of it right on both, imagine what I could do if i did study. Anyways, 80 sounds manageable, right? I mean, it’s the low end of a B. But this class is cumulative, to in order to do well on the next exam which is literally next week, I have to study literally the entire course instead of just these last few units. AND I need to go even farther back and study trig, since I never took a formal class on it and that’s why I failed calc the first time. It’s been 4 years since I looked at the unit circle.

I’m trying to cut back on how much time I spend on my phone. I really think that’s the biggest detriment to me, that I always feel the need to look at it. Definitely using the forest app more often. All the time I spend cycling between the 3 social media apps I use, where I just look at the same posts over and over again every day, could be better spent studying or doing something else productive.

In comp 2, we’re doing a semester-long individual research project about anything rhetoric-based. It has to be multimodal, eg not just “what’s the symbolism in this classic novel” but rather about society and media. A lot of people chose stuff like “how do women’s magazines push certain beauty standards” or “how is greek life (sororities, not the country) portrayed in american media and is it really accurate,” but because the professor stated that we should be “creating new knowledge and building upon an academic conversation,” I tried to come up with something that nobody had done yet: I chose “what are the motivations of the incel community?” And yeah, it’s so unique that when we had to do a literature review of what other scholars have already said about the subject, there were literally no academic journals on it. My literature review is just about the layout of a subreddit’s community and how the members interact (which has been discussed before), and from there I’m going to apply that to the incel community. I’ve done “research” by reading through their posts. Wow I just tried to ctrl+f this blog for “incel” and only one instance came up, from like november last year. It’s crazy, this has been kind of a big deal for me this semester. You know all those self-hating posts about my appearance recently? Well, I walked into this project thinking “man incels are stupid they just need to stop being entitled and care about their appearance a little and maybe then they could get a girl” but as I read through the posts I realized I was wrong. A lot of these men have issues that can’t be easily fixed, like being short, balding too young, just general bad face structure, and because of that people would instantly judge them. One guy even talked about how he had cerebral palsy and needs to walk with a cane, and his super handsome brother’s girlfriend was super patronizing to him. Frankly, a lot of their posts spoke to me. I mean, before I had braces I had a really recessed chin and while everyone said “oh I didn’t even notice,” you could tell that it made me less attractive and hence why nobody has ever asked me out. Not saying it’s the only cause, but you’d be lying if you said looks didn’t matter. Especially the posts about being considered uglier than their siblings, that really hit home for me. it’s like, I see their pain and I know how badly it hurts, but at the same time as a woman I’m obviously going to disagree with their response. When women were given harsh beauty standards, we took two routes: either try to improve artificially (makeup and plastic surgery), or work to dismantle it (body positivity movement). Men, who have always been a little entitled, just blame others. I feel like if incels started an actual body positivity movement for men, we could really go somewhere.

Damn, its been so long since my last genuine update that frankly I’m not sure where to go from here. Like so much has happened and I can’t really pick out anything that seems particularly noteworthy after 3 months. I think I’m gonna end this update here, then, and just promise to give more frequent updates from now on so I can go into more detail. Today I’m going to write an email for the future (like i try to a few times a year) to rehash the whole major change (since my last letter was all about how i just switched to social work), then do the comp homework, then study for calc I guess.

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