Brought to you by the letter P

Ahem.

It SEEMS TO ME

that having an exam within the next 3 days is the best way to get me to write a blog post. I am so not in love with Neuro night now. Pathways, pathways, pathways. Starts here, goes to there, inhibits there, which inhibits there, so inhibiting the inhibition leads to activation there, and then it travels here, crosses over there, then crosses back over, over there...stupid brain. Too smart for its own good. LITERALLY.  Anyway.

P is for procrastination.
This is seriously the worst bout of studying I've ever done in my life. I don't feel ANY stress to study. Worse than last time. But we have fewer lectures, so I'm less behind  starting out than I was before, so maybe that's why.

I'm seriously beginning to wonder if my brain somehow knows exactly how long it needs to study given the time I have and the information it needs to cram in...and then is exactly as productive as it needs to be to achieve that?

Because I ALWAYS hit a wall the night before a test. This is just earlier than usual. But it's sort of like the night before a test since tomorrow is mothers' day and I'll be spending the day NOT studying, with my mother and grandmothers. Who knows.


P is for Press handstand.
"What on earth is a press handstand?", you might ask. An excellent question. I will show you a video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEy5-dQVUk0

There you go.
It's REALLY DIFFICULT to do a press handstand. Like...REALLY. But I have AAAAAALWAYS wanted to be able to do one. Since...forever. And so I decided I am going to. I've been on this kick a few times before but it's never lasted for more than a couple of days. So I am going to set GOALS this time so maybe I'll actually stick to it. There's a bunch of different drills you can do to strengthen the various muscle groups needed at different points in the handstand so I'm gonna do those a million times a day until I can get myself up into that crazy handstand. So I know my goal is really unrealistic, but I don't really operate well unless I'm under some pressure, so I'm aiming for being able to do it by June 18 when my roommate goes back to California, so I can show her before she goes. As like, a going away present or something. :-P That's about a month, and as long as that sounds....the press handstand is really hard. especially when you start from sitting. So we shall see. ;-)

Oh yes and my HPSP (Air Force) application is IN and I should be hearing back within a couple of weeks. Can't WAIT!!

Still studying...

I decided to break a (non-Africa) record and post 2 days in a row.

Studying is going much better today...that's because my stress level has increased (how weird is it that that's exciting to me? What kind of warped reality am I living in??) and also because today's topics of study are much more interesting. I'm much more inclined to enjoy memorizing the anatomy of all the different minutia of the spinal cord than learn about sensory receptors. It's the anatomy thing.

Pathways are fun too. I'm going to memorize how information gets from your fingers to your brain. Not as simple as one would think it should be. But fun to know.

We had a lecture on the visual pathways yesterday and wednesday....this stuff is SO INCREDIBLY complicated they can't even teach us a fraction of what they know, which is only a fraction of what there is to know. How people think I'm stupid for believing that God designed this is beyond me. How can you think this incredible level of organization and complication and things crossing over and combining and separating and coming back together to give you all the different things we can see (the presence of an object, it's color, it's size, it's distance from your face, it's contrast, it's movement, it's direction of movement, it's orientation in space, whether a sound is coming from it or somewhere else...) happened by accident? If the most intelligent thing on earth - the human brain - cannot even comprehend how the visual pathways work, what makes you think that something that cannot reason (Chance) came up with it?

oh well. their loss.

anyway.

Here's an interesting tidbit: If you cut the spinal cord just a little bit, you will lose your sensation of pain and temperature on the opposite side of the body from where you cut. (for everything below the cut) But you will lose your sense of fine touch and awareness of where your limbs are in space, on the same side of the body as the cut.

IT IS SO GORGEOUS OUTSIDE i just want to go sit and nap in the sun like a cat, but I need to study and I can' t see my laptop if i sit outside plus there's no desk so it's really annoying because the SMELL of the breeze is coming in my window and making me crazy.

Ok back to the grind.