Well that’s it. My final final assignment is handed in, I took my Psych 1200 exam, and all that is left between me and freedom is my Psych 1100 exam on Friday.

After that, my Xmas season can truly begin, and I can fully relax and enjoy it knowing that I truly accomplished something : I finished five courses of education, and with good marks in all of them.

Although in one case, that good mark is only good relative to the class average.

speaking of that class, I had a very interesting thing happen to me right before the exam. The guy I sat next to for all of Psych 1200 ^[1], who was also in my Ideology and Politics class, asked me how well I did in I & P, and that happened to open up a whole discussion about how much the prof of that sucks.

So I’m not the only one who dislikes her.

Interestingly, he said that he took another course from the same prof last year, and she was fine. Didn’t stick out from the other profs at all. But this time, she was totally different.

He agreed with me that she didn’t know what it is like to be just starting in the subject, and that she never taught us to do the things she tested us on. He said that he had never had a course where he had to do a paper every two weeks. I dodged that bullet by… umm…. completely spacing on half of them.

I’d be fine with argumentative papers if I didn’t have to back up my opinion with facts. Make of that what you will. I just really don’t want to fit what I say into existing knowledge.

Fuck that. That’s for scholars, not thinkers. I think it and write it. Someone else can figure out where it goes in the existing body of knowledge.

I really don’t care.

And I don’t like dealing with unprocessed knowledge. Like I have said before, My mind automatically integrates information into a heavily optimized body of my OWN knowledge, but that takes time. And, due to my own sluggishness and procrastination, I kept ended up having to do these research type reports in a hurry, and that meant no time to absorb, digest, filter, and integrate the information I was dealing with.

What I should have done was start the project immediately so I can find the studies, read them slowly and carefully so I can absorb the dense information stream (rereading as necessary), then given myself time to process it all until my mind reduces it to a simple, easily operable set of facts.

Do that for all the research involved, and writing the damned thing would be a breeze. I’d be writing about things I already know. It would be not that different than writing without the research.

Something to keep in mind next semester. I mean, philosophy and creative writing are unlikely to require any research projects, but history and linguistics might.

I hope not, though.

Oh, and something magical happened while I was doing the exam. I got that amazingly good feeling I had once before during a Psych 1100 class. I felt relaxed, happy, and totally confident. And I was able to ride that wave all the way through the exam.

And speaking of that exam…. I finished first! I apologize for the following :

*dances around like a lunatic chanting ‘I finished first’ in a schoolyard singsong*

Ahem. Sorry, had to be done.

And of course, what I really want to know is how do I get that good feeling back? Now that I have two instances to compare, I can make more progress figuring that out.

In both cases, I was in a classroom at Kwantlen, fully engaged in what was going on, and hydrating regularly from my big 2L water bottle.

It can’t be the hydration alone, because I hydrate a lot at home too, and I never feel that good. And it can’t just be that the hydration was spaced evenly. I do that at home too.

So it must be the hydration plus another factor. The full engagement comes to mind. Somehow the hydration facilitated me moving into “The Zone” and being in “The Zone” is one of the happiest places a human being can be : fully activated and using all their energies in a relaxed but focused way.

So perhaps the key is for me to hydrate while doing something which fully engages me. Those things are hard to find, and I suspect there may be another factor, like recent exercise, at work.

Maybe that’s the formula. A little exercise to get my body into a moderately adrenal mode, then hydration and engagement, and voila, I feel amazingly good.

It would totally be worth it to feel like that again. The only other time I have felt that good was when I was coming off being on liquid Valium for an endoscopic procedure.

Maybe muscle relaxation is the key. I don’t know.

But I would love to feel that way all the time. It was amazing. I might become somewhat insufferable at first, as I felt totally confident and relaxed and it is honestly only crippling neurosis that holds back my potential for being a smug, cocky bastard in check most of the time.

But after I came back down to Earth, it would be great. All my creative potential, cleverness, and intellect without the burdens. I could do amazing things in this world if that were the case.

And I swear, I will get there some day. Lose the burdens, keep the good stuff, and ROCK THIS WORLD OUT.

I might not be there yet, but I know deep in my soul that I can be an amazing person who is both sweet and kind while also being gregarious, charming, and very impressive.

Some day, beloved readers. SOME DAY.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.