defibrillate

My class schedule is approved. Here is what a standard week will look like once school starts, along with two more online classes - Intro to Healthcare and Human Relations in Healthcare Settings. I'm glad this is all gonna get done.

Proposed Plan for My Life

Ongoing: Math & Physics tutoring, because I will fit those two things into my schedule no matter what, so help me.
Possibly: Chinese and Japanese tutoring. Those aren't likely but I'd like them. We'll see.

Fall Quarter: Prereqs, first 3 months of Evergreen volunteer commitment
Winter Quarter: Clinical Laboratory Science I, Phlebotomy I, Basic Pharmacology, second 3 months of Evergreen volunteer commitment
Spring Quarter: Clinical Laboratory Science II, Phlebotomy Externship, Medical Law & Ethics, and some sort of lab work for free for the sake of experience
Summer: MONEY. SAVING. GOD WILLING, A VACATION. Remember how I went on about wanting to travel? Yeah, that's happening. I have a dear friend in Georgia I've promised to visit and a standing invitation to Vietnam.

Following All That
Transfer to UW. Become something. Because, do I want to stay a lab assistant for the rest of my life? Fuck no I don't, but I need a stepping stone since I can't afford a ladder or some metaphorical shit like that, so that's what I'm doing for now. Rest assured I will also do Other Things. Better things. All the things.

In conclusion, holy shit, never before have I spent this much money at one time. $2,000.00 in tuition. I know that's fucking NOTHING as far as tuition goes, but still.

I should probably not leave proofreading marks on the paperwork I have to hand back to the hospital's Volunteer Services crew, but damn. I just can't take the dumb. Call me hypersensitive but simple, sloppy errors like that reflect poorly on my department and on me, even as a volunteer.

I don't even care if they bring this up with me. I hope they bring it up. No one needs to be shy about saying that drawing up official publications for a multimillion dollar business should require at least college-level writing. And, oh, I don't know... Professional-level would be even better.

My newfound interest in American comics has led me to actually bother learning stuff like body proportions and volumetric... skeletal... things which I'm sure have technical names. You know what? It's fairly painless. It's making me wonder why I didn't bother learning this five years ago when I was actually mourning the fact that I couldn't draw whole people, just their heads. I can be so dumb sometimes |D

Here's something else that was dumb (and bear with me because this may make some of you want to run away and never talk to me again): I was in the international district the other day with my mum because we had to drop a huge stack of documents off at the attorney's office and felt like going shopping afterwards. We went to Daiso. For anyone that doesn't know, that's the Japanese dollar store (well it's not really a dollar store but it has a dollar store business model) and it's INCREDIBLE. It's extremely dangerous because despite that everything is $1.50 I can spend massive amounts of money there. They have amazing coffee mugs. I appreciate their nice cheap sumi-e ink. Anyways, there was this little contraption I couldn't resist buying to make my sister uncomfortable - it's this thing you stick in your nose that's supposed to keep you from snoring. Yep. My sister and I are both really light sleepers and we share a room, and I snore when my allergies are bad. I'm actually sort of proud of how loud I allegedly snore. According to my sister I'm a prodigy. Anyways, I bought this thing because I knew my sister would be like 'crap dude what the hell are you thinking,' and because I am just the type of person that can't resist seeing if/how things work I decided to shove it in my nose before I even gave myself the chance to question what was going on.

Turns out I should have disinfected it first, of course, which I did think of but assumed I'd be okay. Yay, Captain Lab Technique, you fail. I have a completely uninteresting sore throat and sniffles number now, which would be no big deal, except that I have to be back at the hospital tomorrow for them to read the results of my TB test (for anyone that's interested, I definitely don't have tuberculosis) and to drop off my immunization records and I'm not allowed to bring colds into the hospital. So I have to be better by tomorrow. Come on body, we're on a schedule. Get a fever going and kill this thing.

And that's how I ended up sitting here drinking 5,000 cups of tea and drawing stuff rather than being awesome and doing things with my life. Even though, like I said, the drawing is a good thing. Especially considering I'm working on getting a comic of my own drawn. I'm sort of really hoping no one will hate the fact that even though it's an FF doujinshi, in addition to the storyline being distinctly un-Final Fantasy-ey, the art will also be REALLY FREAKING un-Final Fantasy-ey. Really figgin un-Asian in general. I'm sort of aiming for Channel Zero meets CHEW meets Gorillaz. If that sounds really weird to you, just relax, I'm sure no one will actually read it considering there are no pairings. I'm still really excited about the idea though C:

...that I might actually have to write. As part of a series. Called

FFVII: A Different Kind of Apocalypse

FFVII and Zombieland

Oh, Midgar. I wish I could tell you this was still Midgar, but I've come to realize you can't have a city without people, and there are no people here. No, my friends, Midgar is now the largest city in Zombieland. Remember Geostigma, plague of the 21st century? Well, Geostigma killed just about everyone... but it also brought them back as ravenous freaks. The late-stage virus leaves you with a swollen brain, raging fever, makes you hateful and violent and gives you a really bad case of the munchies. That guy down there is me. I'm in sector four, under what remains of the plate, and it might look like zombies destroyed it but that's actually just sector four. I've been fighting my way back into the city towards what's left of Shin Ra Tower, where I'm hoping the rest of the Turks are still alive...

FFVII and Resident Evil

My name is Reno. I worked for the Shin Ra Corporation, the largest and most powerful commercial entity in the world. I was part of security at our base of operations, a city called Midgar, which housed laboratories in which we were developing experimental bioweapons called SOLDIERs. But there was an incident. A virus started infecting their population, and under the conditions within their altered bodies, it mutated. A terrorist group breached one of our facilities with the intention of freeing the infected... And they succeeded. The virus escaped, and everybody died. Trouble was... they didn't stay dead.

FFVII and Star Wars

Opening crawl: WAR! Diplomatic approaches in Wutai have failed and Shin Ra's army as mobilized. Unrest from within the company along with an increasingly violent resistance movement has strained Administrative Research beyond its capacity and the Turks struggle to maintain order. While Shin Ra's board of directors endlessly debates their course of action, Veld, the former leader of the Turks, returns to Midgar to help his allies carry out a plan to shift power away from the board. Meanwhile, the young Rufus Shinra returns from Junon with similar intentions...

In other news,

( FFVII: Misplaced Branding Edition )

I'd like to spend $6,000 I don't have on school this year. You may have noticed that number doubled since the last time I started talking about money for school. That's because the 29-credit certificate I'm aiming to get will actually take 3 quarters due to prereqs (there are 19 introductory credits you need to take CLA1, which you need to take CLA2). So I figure, as long as I have to take the time, I might as well get a phlebotomy certificate and take extra courses like pharmacology and medical law.

Normally I'd be really, really uncomfortable with the idea of borrowing money, but $6,000 is a small loan. According to the company I'm looking at borrowing from, even if my credit score is poor (which I think it is, considering I haven't done much of anything to build credit) my minimum payments would be less than $100 per month - that is, if I wanted to take 20 months to pay back what I borrowed. I'd probably do it quicker.

The plan, then, would be to take some time off school after this year and focus on working to pay back this money. It wouldn't take that long, even if I only landed a part time job.

Yep... I think this may be a sound plan.

...I like this fandom more and more.

High school after high school is way better than high school during high school. Or, it could just be that my high school Japanese teacher's retirement party was more fun overall than high school was. I was not really expecting the party to be FUN fun especially considering it started at 8:30 am, I was pretty much expecting that I'd run in and drop off a gift then leave. I actually ended up staying for three hours and bearing witness to a 66-year old man do a geisha dance in the "#1 Grandpa" shirt we all signed for him. Just so you can grasp what this is like - Mr. Hesselgrave looks EXACTLY like Professor Oak. Yeah, imagine that. The dance was almost as good as one kid explaining why he'd bought a manual on surviving in space as a retirement gift - I guess his logic was that Mr. Hesselgrave would live long enough to need to live in space, since his entire family is really long-lived - and another kid then shouting "SENSEI FOREVER!" ...And another shouting "SENSEI ETERNAL!"

Yeah, it was beautiful. And our poor teacher almost cried, he was so touched.

Not sleeping is so cool, guys. Makes you do dumb things like import 600 Windows alert sounds into your iTunes library without even wondering why it would be a bad idea.

The good news is I figured out it was a bad idea. After I listened to them all.

Oh, also, I managed to injure myself on a a bag of horse feed last night. I was throwing it over my shoulder to carry it to the barn and it collided sonorously with my ear. Well I guess no one else heard it, but yeah, ear punch. With horse food. Woo.

orz

Why, Sig? Trying to attract a younger clientele or something? I hope their marketing intentions weren't to target this to women, because that's insulting. A good amount of a gun's value is in that it's intimidating, and this... This isn't intimidating. It looks like a toy. Or a manufacturing error.

I really do hope this was a mistake -- because if it wasn't, Sig spent time and money spent developing something which doesn't improve reliability, function, or ergonomics (if I believed this was solid marketing I wouldn't be saying that was a bad thing). Plus, this is a concealed carry gun... It just sort of seems like something intended not to draw attention shouldn't have a flashy rainbow finish. And wouldn't that distract a shooter from the sight picture?

On the other hand, if it matches your Jordans, buy it.