Dear Professor,

Hi, my name is Student. I sat at the front of your class for Calculus this quarter, attended every single class, took notes attentively, and did not slack off at all during the quarter. Our final is coming up very soon and I am writing to ask that you please refrain from making the final too hard.

I know you enjoy making difficult questions. You have a PhD degree and I know that you probably don't use it much daily. In fact, this class is probably your only outlet for utilizing what seems to be a relatively useless skill. Maybe you spent years and years being terrorized by other great mathematical intellectuals during your graduate school years only to wonder "why am I here? what am I supposed to do with this degree?" Maybe you suffered a lot of criticism for your research work or maybe you realized that you've reached your intellectual limit when you were about to graduate and your colleagues had no respect for your work at all.

Well, I just want you to know that I understand. I have two degrees in English and as much as I love reading books and writing, I don't particularly enjoy teaching. I especially don't enjoy teaching literature or writing to students who have no appreciation for the respective author's literary ingenuity or genius. I'm the type of person who can almost cry after reading a great poem or a great book, but it is painful to see that other people cannot appreciate the subject matter as well. I don't think you will cry after seeing a Fibonacci sequence on your broccoli as you eat dinner, but please, try to understand that as a student, I'm not taking this class to spite you and your life's passion or work.

You see, I want to go some place in this life. I left someone I loved in another country so that I could make something of myself at home. Taking this class is a step towards that goal and it would be horrible if my grade and my dreams were ruined because you can validate your own existence by making obscure and theoretically difficult questions on the test. If that is your life's goal and dream, I suppose I cannot stop you from doing that, but I know you must understand that people have dreams and goals to get somewhere. Maybe you can find an outlet for your mathematical genius elsewhere - like making Youtube videos, or starting a math blog, or...well, maybe doing any of those things can help you find other people who are excited about your work and can talk with you about it. Maybe you can get people excited about your work by explaining it in an accessible or entertaining manner like Vhart!

Sincerely,

Disgruntled Student

I just found out that one of my good friends broke up with her boyfriend. I don't know why, but this worries me. She's 6 years younger than me, so sometimes, even though I don't really feel the age gap, I feel like she is a younger version of me. We have a lot similarities...I just worry about her because in a way I feel almost responsible for her. I think we're both very spontaneous and we don't really know what we want. I feel like I want to prevent her from making the same mistakes I made.

Tests are coming up and I'm very stressed. It's so stressful, that I can't even make myself begin to work. I'm breaking out and my eyeballs are bloodshot and slightly jaundiced from a combination of studying, staring at the computer, and drinking to make the stress go away (I have a problem with self-medicating when I get too stressed out). The stupid thing is, all of this stress is intensifying because I can't get myself to start working. I can't start working because I am too stressed out. Does this make any sense?

It's the same thing with being overweight. When I'm depressed, I tend to get hungrier, so I eat more. When I eat more, I gain more weight, which causes me to be more depressed because now, not only am I depressed, but I am depressed and fat. I get more depressed, so I continue to eat beyond what is a normal amount for me. It's a cycle that can't really be ended because I was always depressed to start with.

The only solution for me is to drink a moderate amount of alcohol because it regulates my stress and abnormal hunger pangs. Do you ever experience cyclical problems?

The last time I got over someone I really loved, it took me 1-2 years. Why does it always take so long for me to stop hurting over the past? My mom always said I was stubborn, and I guess she is right. I am stubborn about letting people go, letting emotions go, or accepting fate. I force things to be the way I want them to be, even if it's inconvenient.

But you make me so angry. I can never forgive you. Not until the day I die will I ever be able to forgive you.

When I read that Xanga was shutting down, I immediately started thinking about all of my old entries on Xanga and what I should do with them. I've been on Xanga since high school - that's more than ten years ago. This was before college, before my first pseudo boyfriend, before my first kiss, my mom died, etc...it seems like this blog started way before my life really began.

I originally thought I would download my archive and keep them somewhere like an external hard drive. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it would be better if I just let it all get deleted. I don't need memories of a painful past. My life up to this point has just been a series of painful major events. One major sad event takes many years of faintly happy events to wash it out. Your saddest events never go away in the end either- all that happens is that you feel less and less as you age. As you get older and older - things affect you less and less. Soon we can barely remember what true love feels like, or what it feels like to talk to your mom about something that's been bothering you...things like that just fade away. Like life. We just all fade away until we're nothing but ghosts and lost memories.

I thought this would happen sooner or later. I've been on Xanga for over a decade. There were a few years in which I didn't blog at all. I've experimented with other blogging sites, but I always came back to Xanga because I felt like it was a good old friend who knew my history. Maybe not the greatest quality friend, but an old friend nonetheless and I could care less about the other sites out there that promised so many innovative techniques to blogging. Xanga did the job, plain and simple.

As a site, I felt that it struggled too hard for too many years to stay afloat. During that time, we had to deal with them putting ads on our blogs and then provoking us to pay for membership to remove the ads. I am not really excited about Xanga's proposed transfer to WordPress. I'd rather that they merge with Google and work with them to get a site that is clean, functional, and attracts more users and possibly more traffic for advertised content. We should be allowed to keep our blog sites.

In any case, we can always see this as a new beginning. What do you think?

We went to SD for Memorial weekend and ate at a mexican place called Lolita's, which had the best carne asada fries ever~ Just thinking about it now is making my tummy grumble. Their adobada tacos are also really good. Everything else was ok.

Here is their address and Yelp page in case you want to check it out yourself:
Lolita's Taco Shop
7305 Clairemont Mesa Blvd, Ste A
Kearny Mesa
San Diego, CA 92111
http://yelp.com/biz/8gtSugNXvM90hZgqjIWiw

Just making a note of some tunes I really liked while listening to my podcasts:

Armin van Buuren ft. Cindy Alma - Beautiful Life

Skip to 2:20.

Orjan Nilsen - Violetta

Skip to 3:20.

Ronski Speed with Syntrobic feat. Elisabeth Egan - One With You [Euphonic] 

Click the title for the song, but wait a few minutes for the song to start (there's no single on Youtube, so this link takes you to the whole mix. It's right after the Oceanlab song). I know it sounds really old school, but I think that's why I like it so much.

I went through my Flipboard on the iPhone today and was particularly moved by the stories about the survivors of the Oklahoma tornado. I was also stunned by the story on the riots in Sweden (http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2013/05/22/186042744/riots-in-sweden-thats-right-sweden). My bf's sister and bf believe that Europeans are incredibly racist. I think it's a thinly veiled racism that pervades throughout their society. At least while I was living in Holland (I can't say much about other EU countries because I've never lived there), I noticed that they'll say they're open to all races, but at the same time make overtly racist comments about immigrants, particularly Middle-Eastern or, even more specifically, Moroccan people.