My mother-in-law, who has been visiting with us for the last two months, cut and dyed my hair yesterday and I love it.  She must’ve cut off over four inches, a testament to the sacrificial mommy lifestyle, and probably the first I’ve had it cut at all in over a year.    Otherwise yesterday was a complete write-off.

I was disappointed in the grade I received on my quarter two assessment in Human Biology.  That’s not to say I received a bad grade, I got a 2:1 and still maintain a 2:1 in the course thus far, which is what I’m ultimately aiming to do (in the UK, a 2:1 is below a first, which is the highest).  But after talking to my friend Jen about it, she sent me a link to a post on dooce.com which really hit home about the blogger’s daughter and her perfectionism:

When you attempt something, you don’t want to be good at it. You want to be the best. This personality trait bares its fangs most noticeably when you practice piano. And here’s the thing: your skill level has far surpassed everything I know about reading music, so your father has to help you practice. Your father is very good at everything he tries, but he’s not a crazed fanatical overachiever like I am. Like you seem to be. So I’ve had to walk him through what goes on in your brain when you hit a wrong note or can’t hear a rhythm.

“Jon, that wrong note makes her think she’s going to end up homeless.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense,” he’ll say.

“True,” I concede. “But if you raise your voice while she’s in that spiral, not only will she end up homeless, she’ll end up homeless and then someone will steal her cardboard box.”

As hard as it is to explain, that’s where I go emotionally when I fall short of what I personally think I’m capable of: I’m going to end up homeless and someone will steal my cardboard box.  It isn’t logical, but any feedback that goes against my internal idea of me is a hard thing to swallow, and I feel as though I’m capable of better than even a 2:1.   I’m driven to do well at this, to be a great female role model to my daughter, to not end up jockeying a phone for a living the rest of my life.  I feel as though my goals are realistic (I read once only about 10% of majors in the hard sciences come out with firsts… so I feel 2:1 is more than reasonable) but I also feel the pressure of succeeding to the utmost degree so I can get into grad school when this ungrad is all said and done with.     I’ve never been challenged in this way academically before: my first excursion into university, despite the attempt at a double major, was fairly easy (she says, having been nineteen years old without a care in the world) and I was always on the Dean’s honor list.  This go around is… well… about a million times harder.

It’s been a hard couple of days overall, mostly due to the lack of sleep I’m getting as a result of Moo, who is eighteen months old mind you, waking multiple times in the night and we’re not sure why.  Couple that with getting up at five for work on Sunday,  working a full day, and consuming enough Redbull to bring down an elephant (I really must stop with the Redbull).  I was exhausted when I got home.

Then our boiler broke during the coldest weather we’ve had this year.  Fan-fucking-tastic.

I hate writing about my “problems” on my blog because it sounds incredibly shallow and, even in the throes of emotion, I am still a logical enough person to recognize I’m so very lucky my problems are first world, middle class problems.  I don’t have to worry about feeding my kid or barely scraping by, and we even have enough money in reserve to fix the damn boiler.  Yet it was an amalgamation of everything and, in the course of just a day, I felt like I lost my controlling hold on everything.  I felt spread thin in a way I’ve not yet felt: as though EVERYTHING I am doing can never amount to my best because I’m trying to do too much.  I went from feeling like I was sailing calm waters in a boat I built myself to feeling like I am barely keeping my head above water in just a twenty-four hour period.   And I was angry: angry that Mark had neglected a “blue job” (as opposed to “pink job”) of getting the boiler serviced before winter hit, and also angry at myself for becoming THAT woman I said I’d never be: the one who cannot, for example, even locate the electricity meter because “it’s something her husband deals with.”  Ugh.

I guess what it comes down to is I need a more realistic idea of me.    I’m not superhuman, nor am I perfect, nor will I achieve savant-level accomplishments academically, nor will I wake up one morning with the ability to fix my own boiler.  What I can do, what I am capable of, is trying my best at whatever it is I do: school, work, motherhood, life.    Sometimes, I wish this thought were enough.  Sometimes it’s not, but ultimately it has to be.

Got my course materials for Biological Psychology yesterday.  I won’t lie, I’m excited!

Register for a spring course – DONE!

January 1st and I get to cross one of my resolutions off: I’m registered for Biological Psychology, which starts next month.  The course will run to October, and I will have two courses until Human Biology finishes in June.  As I mentioned before I’m nervous about what that could mean in terms of workload, but come October I will have a third of my bachelors completed, hopefully keeping me on track to have this completed by the time I’m thirty.

 I was a psychology / sociology double major my first go round with university (which I didn’t complete) so I am quite keen to see this material from a biological perspective.  I’ve spent the last month in Human Biology on the brain; neurons to neurotransmitters, hormones and the endocrine system and I am finding the material interesting and enjoyable and I could see myself going down the route of neurobiology.  It’s something I change my mind on frequently as I discover more and more areas of biology that interest me (as of now that’s pretty much everything).

Workload worries aside I’m very excited to begin, not only this course but this year as a whole and all of the challenges lined up this year.  Day 1, book 1, pound 1, course 1, photo 1… it’s going to be an amazing year.

After reflection on the goals I had set myself for 2011 I knew I needed to make the goals this year quantifiable in order to really be able to say “yes, I did it!” With that in mind all of the goals below are either succeed or fail, and I plan on making a post one year from now boasting a full list of accomplishments for 2012! Last year was the first year I attempted having real New Years resolutions and they really worked for me, gave me something to try to “beat” and, in the process, I improved myself through improving my photography, my fitness, etc. When competition with others fail, competition with myself seems like a good alternative ^_^. I’ve not included anything that would really involve others such as Moo or Mark, because resolutions should be about striving to better one’s self, and for me that’s what these goals are about: finishing 2012 smarter, fitter, happier, and more well-rounded.

1. Photography:

• 15,000 photos taken - upping the goal from last year. I feel this is both reasonably attainable and will provide a good challenge.
• Project 365 - I’ve always wanted to do this but have failed / grown bored with it on previous occasions. I want to try and do as many of the photos as possible with my camera, but iPhone photos are okay in a pinch. Will be posted weekly to the blog.

This is one of those “I’ve been too busy to blog” blog posts.  November brought with it a new schedule for our family:  Mark moved Monday to Friday 9am-5pm, a move we’ve been eagerly anticipating for ages it seems. More sociable hours means dinners as a family and evenings together just as the dark winter begins to settle in.  But  as much as this change was wanted we are still in the adjustment period, fitting together our obligations and desires to spend time together as a family in new ways, trying to find the perfect combination to make it all work once more.  My work schedule was moved, as a result of mark’s change, to Saturday- Sunday, which many would object to but I find I am enjoying.  It’s quiet in the office at the weekends, peaceful, and I can actually hear myself think.

After spending several hours a night all week this week on my quarter one assessment, I finally turned it in last night after finally finishing up the last bit: an essay on protein absorption and reassembly.  I submitted the assessment and had a mini panic attack it wasn’t going to be good enough, that somehow I didn’t work hard enough or that my best wasn’t going to cut it.  Jitters that, in all likelihood, are unnecessary now looking back with the level head the next day provides.  I’m sure I did great, but I am anxious for it to be marked and returned to me.

What little free time I’ve had lately I’ve not been spending it on “teh internetz,”  opting instead for snuggling under a blanket on the couch and reading (I’ve just begun my 27th book of the year!) or playing The Elder Scrolls V:  Skyrim.   Skyrim, by the way, is everything I’d hoped it would be and more: the world is graphically superior to anything I’ve ever seen, and the storyline is far more engaging than that of it’s predecessor, Oblivion. No matter how busy things get, or how stressful, I always save Moo’s naptime for ME time.  She’ll nap for a solid hour and a half in the early afternoon, and I’ll sit back with a wonderful cup of coffee and a moment of quiet solitude, and enjoy a little bit of time to myself to read or, lately, play a game like Skyrim.  I get to unwind mid-afternoon, decompress, and recharge so that I’m ready to tackle the rest of the day.

I find it so hard to grasp how fast the time is going, that Moo is nearly 16 months old and changing more each day.  She was such a good baby at her first wedding this past week as we celebrated Sarah and Daniel’s special day.   She’s been good as gold being carted all around town this week as we finish our Christmas shopping and prepare for our Americans in the UK Thanksgiving dinner.  And later in the week she will have her first experience in helping us trim the Christmas tree, which I am so looking forward to.

I’m starting to realize I cannot do EVERYTHING. I cleaned the bathroom the other night at almost 10pm because I knew if I didn’t it would haunt my dreams.   I cannot fill Moo’s every waking moment with enriching games or activities.  I CAN maintain a two week lead on my course work, but I CANNOT expect to be months ahead.  I will never have a spotless house that lasts for more than a few minutes.  What I CAN do is my best.  And I am starting to realize that that is good enough.

Yay!  My course materials arrived!  I cannot wait for term to start!

Do you remember the very first thing you wanted to be when you “grew up?”  What was it? Did you achieve it or was it some silly notion that seems to never come to fruition beyond adolescence?  Did you want to be an astronaut? A farmer?  President of the United States?   One of the very first things I can remember wanting to be was a paleontologist, or “dinosaur scientist” as we knew it as children, and it was a notion that stayed with me all the way up through high school.  It’s also one I’ve returned to now at 26 years old.

When I was little my parents subscribed me to these wonderful TimeLife  books that came in the mail once a month, each on a different subject within science:  space, insects, animals, Earth, etc.  Then came one on dinosaurs, and I was hooked.  I was convinced that, around the tender age of five or six, that this is what I wanted to do with my life.  I KNEW this is what I was going to do: I was going to visit dig sites and work in a museum and research prehistoric life.  Other ideas on what to do when I “grew up” came and went, among them odd and fleeting ideas such as FBI agent, but my interest in science, particularly Biology, never diminished.

In high school I took my first psychology course and, for the first time, found something that rivaled my interest in the harder sciences.  After the second psychology course, I decided to major in that instead.  So that’s what I did: I went to university (McNeese State in Lake Charles, LA. A far piece from my home in Cincinnati, Ohio) and started majoring in psychology with a sociology minor.  Yet university was also my first true “real life” experience, and it ultimately put me off of the subject.  I can distinctly remember the exact moment in time that it dawned on me I didn’t want to be a psychologist:  I was working in a grocery store at the time and, whilst stocking shelves, a customer came up to me and started flying off the handle because we had both long and short grain rice, but no medium grain rice.  As I stood there staring at him, watching his double and triple chins quiver in his rice-induced rage, it occurred to me that the types of people able to afford privatized therapy sessions are the types of people with “first world problems,” such as the grocery store running out of sodding medium grain rice, and I didn’t want to spend my professional career listening to that… or interacting with people at all really.  What to do?

Luckily for me I was given all the time in the world to decide, as Hurricane Katrina’s lesser known sister, Rita, slammed into the Texas / Louisiana boarder just a month after Katrina… causing the university to shut down for a semester and destroying the apartment I lived in with my ex at the time. Long story short, I moved home to Ohio and took an educational break in favor of some soul searching.

Last year I completed a full year course circuit of all the hard sciences: Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Geology, Astronomy, etc.  This past week I took the next step and registered for my next year at Uni:  Human Biology.  And I find myself excited for freshly sharpened pencils and crisp, clean notebooks all over again.  I have a renewed sense that this is what is right for me: the major, the path, the eventual end.  A bachelors in Biology could very well one day lead to a doctorate in Paleontology, and the more I think on it the more it seems my inner child was right all those years ago.

When was the last time you let YOUR inner child call the shots?

I think I may have fallen victim to confirmation bias, but it seems everything I’ve watched and read recently has been discussing the possibility of life in the universe.  Just today I read an article on MSNBC about the Royal Society holding a meeting to discuss what protocol, both social and scientific, we should follow should we make contact.  SETI (the organisation for the search of extraterrestrial intelligence) is bound by obligation to consult with the UN should we receive a signal or a response from the vast, silent cosmos.  Although, logically, it makes sense to have such protocol in place, I guess I was taken by surprise upon reading about it as it’s not something you read about every day. It’s all a bit intense to think about.  After all, what are we, the masses, to think when a great mind like Stephen Hawking issues a warning that our attempts to signal other intelligent beings could mean ruin for our civilization as we know it?

But would it be doom for our blue rock?  I would assume not.  Recently I watched an episode of Bad Universe which postulates that, when considering other intelligent civilizations out in the universe, they are far more likely to be thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of years more advanced than us as opposed to being on a level playing field with our technology.  In Carl Sagan’s book, Contact, it is stated that a far more advanced civilization, traveling through the universe just to destroy us, would be like us going out of our way to destroy a few ants on an ant hill in Africa.

Of course, I’d be more likely to agree with Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, where we might become pets.  Perhaps more like ants in a toy ant farm.

But what literally blew my mind was this, a quote from the aforementioned article:

Steven Dick, formerly NASA’s chief historian, speculated that we might be living in a post-biological universe, dominated by artificial intelligence, on the basis that intelligences would be driven to improve and perpetuate.

Meaning that the other intelligent cultures out there in space are SO advanced that they may not even exist in a living sense, but rather have their culture carried on by artificial lifeforms. Would we be able to even communicate with such beings?  Would this idea entail we were among the last carbon based lifeforms in the universe?  And how many of them are out there?

It all depends on if you use optimistic or pessimistic numbers in the Drake Equation. N can be anything from one (meaning only Earth in the entirety of the Milky Way Galaxy) to one million.  When Drake himself postulated a number for N in 1961 he came to ten.  Ten other planets in our galaxy, capable of supporting life, capable of nurturing an intelligent life form, whose civilization is advanced enough to transmit communication in space.  Ten other possibilities of neighbors in the Milky Way who may have, by the idea of a post-biological universe, long since organically perished and yet live on in the artificial intelligence they have created.

Amazing.

Share on Facebook ]]> http://www.awesomeville.co.uk/index.php/archives/little-green-men/feed 1 http://www.awesomeville.co.uk/index.php/archives/life-updates http://www.awesomeville.co.uk/index.php/archives/life-updates#comments Tue, 10 Aug 2010 22:08:23 +0000 Nicky http://www.awesomeville.co.uk/?p=765 As one would expect, a certain beautiful little girl has taken up my every waking hour for two and a half weeks now. In fact, even as I type this Maddie lies sleeping against my chest.  However, a few other things worthy of note have happened as of late as well:

-I received notification from the OU that I passed my first year uni course.  I have been waiting for this letter to come through the post for two months!  Last September I embarked on a general science course that would last me an entire year and take me through a range of subjects: Biology, Chemistry, Historical Geology, Quantum Physics and the universe itself.  I battled through chemical equations at the same time that I battled with morning sickness (better known as all day sickness really).  I reached the end of the course and spent over 50 hours perfecting my 23 page end of course assignment.  No matter how well you did in the course itsself, if you failed the end of year assignment you failed the year, and everything would be for nothing.

Luckily, this was not the case for me.  Whilst they don’t provide any specific feedback, I know two things:  1. I passed the assignment and the course and 2. the end of year was divided into 5 sections, 3 of which I scored in the 80-100% range, and the other two in the 60-79% range, which is fantastic.

-We may have another property.   I say may because, due to the previous two times the process has fallen through for us, I’ve learned that nothing is certain until the keys are in hand.  But the offer was accepted, and everything is proceeding with the property sale quite quickly.  I am trying not to get too excited until everything is locked into place by exchange of contracts, but I must say we LOVE this place.  I chose to have the positive outlook after the last one fell through that it was for the best and we would find something better (after a brief tear shed over it, of course) and it was exactly the case.  We found something we love so much more.  It ticks all the boxes, and is in a fantastic school district for Maddie.

We viewed the property the morning before my induction, picking a property and birthing a baby in the same 48 hour period? I think so.

- Mom went home last Friday after being here for three weeks.  It was so hard for her to go, and we miss her so much.  I am so grateful for all the help and support she gave us whilst here, and glad she got to be here for the birth.  I don’t know what I would’ve done in the first two weeks of Maddie’s life, never having raised a baby or even held one for an extended period of time, had it not been for her guidance.

And because the blog entry wouldn’t be complete without a picture of the cutie, I give you the level 1 noob:

In the wee hours of the morning, at 2am, I printed off my end of year assignment, put it in a display folder, and set it aside with a sigh of relief… finished and ready to be posted.  I had spent well over 40 hours on this 22 page behemoth, which contained the full spectrum of my course: biology, physics, chemistry, geosciences etc.  I worked on it for several hours a week over the last month, and it felt almost anticlimactic to have it finished and in hand.

Later that afternoon I walked unceremoniously into the post office, placed what felt like, literally, a second child into an envelope, and handed it off for posting.  Out of my hands and into those of fate.  It felt as though a burden was lifted and, when I got home, I finished the last little bit remaining this year for school: a 25 question test.  I passed the test, as I was informed immediately after submitting the answers online, and now all I needed to do was wait for the last assignment grade… the grade that could make or break me. For if I fail the final assignment, the rest of the year’s work is moot… I will have failed the course.  But I am confident this will not be the case: I worked too hard and too long on this to fail.

I’ve also begun my maternity leave… off of work for the next 10 months.  I don’t think it’s hit quite yet, but probably will tomorrow when I don’t have to be at work and I won’t have school work to finish…. what on Earth will I do with myself?!