Saturday, January 13, 2007

The change in school/life balance

Hehe this term feels soooo weird so far. I am really putting much less priority on school - I am of course still going to put in everything I need to do and do a good job on everything, of course - but I feel like "just my homework" is not the #1 priority this term. It's SO weird, because every other term at school has been rush rush rush rush work 150% every single day hardcore insanity, and since now it's my last term and it's a bit lighter than usual I feel WAY less pressure from school to be running at 150% capacity all the time.

Hehe funny I say that though ("running at 150% capacity") because usually my workload around here requires an insane super focused fierce pace. I am using this energy instead to focus on my health and exercise and nutrition... pretty awesome. So after several years of this "Frosh-15" (or more like "Frosh-25") lbs. of weight that I gained in 1st year and haven't been able to get rid of, I'm working out like CRAZY and focusing very carefully on my food intake/portion size to finally do something about this. As crazy as it is to say this, I feel like I haven't had the time to make this a priority until now. That's terrible and really not a good situation if my health/fitness/nutrition gets cast aside because I am so exhausted mentally all the time that I cannot bring myself to do any physical activity and I just grab the easiest possible food, which is never good. Easy implies fast which implies eating too quickly which implies eating too much. Also easy implies pre-prepared which implies tasty which implies full of fat and plenty of empty calories which implies not the correct nutrition which brings us back to being mentally exhausted (also due to lack of correct nutrition) :) Hehe this puts the picture from Austin Powers in my head, hehe, "it's a vicious cycle!!!" haha.

Anyway I think I am putting the fierce energy and focus that I usually put completely and entirely into my schoolwork into my exercise, my health and my nutrition. This is great, but also very strange since it is a much different attitude than I have taken in previous terms at school. I think now that I am almost done, I'm starting to see the whole picture and realizing that, since I have a lighter term, I need to spend a lot of mental and physical time doing stuff for myself. Pretty cool. Also, I've already taken the most awesome, amazing, legendary and important Computer Science course already, and that was Computer Graphics last summer term. Therefore I've already done the class that will be the most important to me, so the rest of the stuff this term is really just to gain some more interesting knowledge and to finish my degree requirements.

I am thus far finding it kindof hard to get into the work this term, I am doing a fair bit of it, and I guess I'm working hard enough so far, but it's always hard to know. I feel like I am working out and socializing all the time and seeing friends and so on, but I don't feel like I've done a ton of work yet. Well I guess it's only a week and a half into term so there hasn't been an exorbitant amount of work yet, but also there probably won't be since it's not really all that hard of a term, and I only actually have 1 Programming class this term (and it's not insane like some of the other 4th year programming classes I've done.)

Anyhow here's another thing I am doing (blogging) rather than going to do my laundry and doing some homework. Hehe so I better get to it. For a change I am not thinking about work and what I need to do for school 20 hours a day. :) Pretty nice change. This is good and I hope to keep this attitude going, but I also would love to be able to still graduate with distinction. I am very close. At the moment I am about 1% above the cutoff on my cumulative average to graduate with distinction which would be sweeeeeeeet!! Of course this is not like the most important thing in the world, but it sure would be a nice bonus after working my butt off for 5 years. Good times.

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