bagawallashitballs

Here are some of my favourite quotes from the last month of door work:

"I'm a professional boxer." Announced by an overweight girl at 'The Association' in Ripley. She wasn't..

"You'll get used to the locals here.." Said by EVERYONE! What's the deal? I haven't reacted badly to 'the locals'.

"Hang on a minute mate, I just bought a drink.." Gentleman I asked to leave because he punched someone.

"You're posh aren't you" ... No... I'm southern, shut up.

"... so he said 'can I have a word outside?' an' I said 'that's not happening mate'. I mean I'm not 'urting no one, just a bit of coke for myself. I said 'I think you wanna talk to (insert doorman who's been there longer here) he understands'" Said obviously for my benefit to 'doorman who's been there longer'. To which I responded "I'd have had you out. He was just doing his job. If you don't want to be thrown out don't do drugs." BUT I resisted the urge to make a face..

"raghssshhbagabagawallashitballs" Woman who punched me in the face.. I added 'bagawallashitballs' to make her sound more clever.

"So what would you do if I did this" Said by our 'professional boxer' as she punched me in the stomach, to which I responded by feigning being winded and asked her to 'give me a second JESUS!'

"My boyfriend's over there" said by woman with her arm around her boyfriend.. He nodded. I'm still confused.

"'Insert owners name' said I could stick around." It was 'owners name' who told me to kick him out.

"Ha, you are WAY more ticklish tonight than you were last night!" Overheard two straight men on the front door.

"Catch it, bin it, kill it!!" One gentleman discussing a woman that he had seen and was less than impressed with the look of. He was not exactly a catch either.

Me:"What's your D.O.B?", girl: "16th of march 1986" (wrong), me: "that's wrong.. you don't get your own birthday wrong and it looks nothing like you."... time passes... Me: "You need to go home" as she tried to sneak in ... third attempt, me: "Seriously you need to jog on." she has a tantrum, the like of which I've never seen during which manages to say the utterly golden and pointless "My uncle's a doorman!" 

I love sharing.

L33t Learning

Since I missed out on my calculus mark by 5%, the school of computer science looked at my application and saw that I had very high marks for programming, so they said if I hit 40% in the resit, I'd progress to year 1 of the degree this September.

This was a mixed result for me. Having been out of education for 16 years and having never studied maths to FE level, I have struggled to get my head around Calculus and Algebra as well as square away my subjects every three weeks for this year.

So for the last three to five weeks I have been on calculus overdrive. I've pushed my brain through real life pain; through threshold after threshold in a relatively short amount of time to arrive at a point where I would actually be comfortable starting the course again. I've inflicted such guilt on myself when avoiding study, that it made me quite difficult to live with I imagine.

Each tiny step up the Calculus mountain took me hours or days of study to get my head around, and during the last week I bashed said head against every past paper I could get my hands on over and over again. I studied the papers, and the solutions trying to reverse engineer the lecturers answers. Occasionally I'd hit a wall, when I could not see how the lecturer made some magical leap in his/her working out. I shed actual tears digging through notes looking for specific axioms that I had missed in the lectures. I scoured the internet, and notably bugged one of my maths lectures with (I estimate) close to 50 emails.

I sat the paper on Tuesday, and I have to say I'm really confident. I completed all 18 questions and did not hit a single point where I felt utterly lost. I couldn't believe it when I came out. It could still all go pear shaped, but I think I've done enough.

EDIT:

I passed with 68%, so the school has accepted me. :)

Jogging algorithms

Wrote this as a comment on a g+ joke post about how geeks run.. So while I don't take credit for the idea, this was my take on the algorithm which I share now for posterity :)

for(int i = 0; i < routeSteps.length;i++){

do{

   jog()

}while(!stitch);

System.out.println("gasp!");

Panic() imLiterallyGoinToDie = new Panic();

System.out.println(disproportionateSwearWord);

}

Tea cuppa = new Tea();

System.out.println("never again");

//I spent WAY too much time on this

Menigma

Grown women everywhere, forget about what you think men want. 

That is all. 

Need some context? Ok, here goes:

Over the last couple of days I have spoken with and seen social media from single women who have given the males of our species domain over their emotions that in general, we neither understand nor do we deserve. 

Your state; be it happy, sad or whatever, should not be dependent on whether or not some bloke wants you, or whether he wanted you and now wants someone else. It shouldn't matter how he feels about whether you will sleep with him. Most of all, never compare yourself to past or present partners. 

In a relationship you build respect and the other half will, over time come to care about how you speak, how you feel and act towards them. If you're not in a relationship do not give someone that power. For all you know they don't give a shit. 

I will never figure women out and I suggest that women proceed as if the reverse is true also. 

Also, if you find that the same shit happens to you, I suggest you change the  way you meet men. Change scenery a bit. Get out of the town your in for a few days. Just do something different. You don't need dating sites or anything. Take a friend and go to the next city on for a quiet drink now and again. 

If you're in a town, and have been for a long time, things can get a bit... Claustrophobic?! Every bloke you meet has a mutual friend on fb. This is an emergency! You are about to lose five seconds in the crystal dome! Get out! 

Lastly don't go out lonely. Do anything to change your state before you meet men especially for the first time. Actually if you are changing scene and not giving men so much power you will probably start feeling better and this will come across.

Basically I'm not trying to give dating advice.  I'm trying to say have fun and find yourself mixing in different circles. Put men out of your mind and enjoy your life. I hate seeing friends unhappy. 

Studying the hard way?

A huge challenge for me during this year at uni (termed year 0, programmers will be pleased to know) is working out how best to study. Ironically the 'study skills' module has helped exactly 0% with this. 

I think that studying is a very personal thing. If, like me, you find that just reading and writing and going through exercises is very difficult and demotivating I have a few tips.

Replace the act of writing with the creation of something. Your own 'study system' if you will. For me I use a third party PDF reader (foxit) to speed read and annotate my lecture notes, copy the highlights onto a pad/whiteboard and summarise them and the formulae in aural notes that I then upload to www.meds-place.com/maths.php. The next day I listen back through, copy out all of the formulae and add as many as I can in the same fashion. After this ritual is performed I attempt example questions and then exam papers. 

This daily ritual can be split, shrunk, expanded as I need; depending on the events of the day. I also repeat this daily (if there's time) for maths revision. The priority being which exam is the closest, or which I feel weakest on. 

I can happily study 4-8+ hours straight in this fashion. Of course I take breaks at convenient intervals and make sure I get outside and get exercise. 

I also find that it helps to change my scenery sometimes. Considering all I need is my laptop, notepad and pencil case, this is really easy. 

Some other things I've discovered:

- Get Evernote and keep your notes there. You can access PDFs from smartphones in this way.

- Get a mini whiteboard to do practice questions on. You'll save a buttload of paper. The act of writing it down is way more useful than the act of reading them again. 

- Combine rote learning with understanding. If you are overwhelmed by something learn the formula/equations by rote, then read each day on it and attempt questions. This will lead you gently to the lightbulb moment.

and last but not least:

- Don't procrastinate too long on random blog posts...

You're grieving wrong

Loss is quite a thing. The brain has built in functions that will set  it aside indefinitely until you are ready to deal with it. 

Yet even while you are setting it aside, allowing yourself to perform whatever task you decided subconsciously required the delay of that loss, the brain is iterating through it one small chunk at a time. 

The greatest piece of advice I ever got about dealing with a loss was this:

"There is no wrong way..."

As in, whatever you are doing, that is the right way. That is what you need to do. It's terrible to be lost without that knowledge. To feel guilt because you don't seem sad enough, or you're functioning how you need to, to carry on.

The only people who will tell you you're doing it wrong either have no concept of loss, or no mechanism for analysing what they themselves are doing, or they have lived with a guilt for not doing it by somebody else's standard for some time. 

Screw standards. This is your future, and your recovery. Whoever you lost, they would not wish you to live with guilt as well as the pain of loss. 

The other thing that struck me today, after 19 years; you cannot underestimate the trauma that surrounds death. The loss itself is entirely separate to the trauma of witnessing it, and the pain, suffering and degradation of quality of life that leads up to it. 

Today I broke down in tears as I shaved my head. There was no trigger. I am not even sad. Perhaps my brain just finished another chunk. Go brain...

Facebook - It isn't clever

Tonight I woke up and found it difficult to get back to sleep. This has perhaps put me in a foul mood...

I trawled facebook just to keep me quietly occupied, as everyone is asleep. The more I looked the more I had to resist the urge to jump down some poor thread's throat and tear it a new arsehole. 

Thread after thread of complete drivel. Its like somebody is genuinely attempting the old 'give infinite monkeys a typewriter' experiment. 

I'm not talking about the opinions of my friends (necessarily ;)), although it is always sad to see someone taken in by baseless, wishy washy bullshit written in big words to dazzle and confuse; by a sacked off buzzfeed journo for a 'the world is magical' organisation who can't face the reality that we're probably not telepathic until proven otherwise!! OK maybe I am talking about that a little bit. 

Proven, by the way, does not mean that it is said in another book. Nor does it mean that you heard a person tell a story that someone else heard about their great Gran while she was exploring drugs. Proof is measurable and can be cited. 

As I was saying I wasn't annoyed about that. But scrolling through the waves of drivel I found myself compelled to get involved several times and I suddenly realised that I was probably about to offend someone. So I stopped. I posted, edited and finally deleted several posts that were not meant to offend in the slightest. So I thought to myself; "If I don't want to offend them, and this is not going to achieve anything else... what am I trying to do here?" 

So here I am ranting away at Blogger. At least Blogger won't care that there is zero proof that our earlobes give us a sixth sense by wobbling at the exact fucking resonant frequency of a unicorns fart! At least Blogger will not take offence at me making this face *makes face*. 

I suppose all I'm saying is, if its written on a meme or a thread on facebook, it is almost 100% likely to be utter bollocks!