The Ticking Post

Time beats a steady pulse onto life. The percussions are telling me eighteen hours until the dreaded orgo exam. Will I make it through this test? Well yes...I've made it through two others. I gnawed on pencils and fingernails, even cracked my brain like an egg on the frying pain to search for answers and pull through. You see an orgo test is this hot seat of confusion and pain. It is just like an ant under the magnifying glass, except you are that ant. Fortunately, we students always make it out alive. But I was thinking if I eat my pencil during this exam, perhaps consume enough graphite to constitute lead poisoning and collapse out of the chair, then I might be excused. A little irony in the midst of this mad science called Organic Chemistry. So in the midst of typing this post, time is beating against my ear drum, tum tum, tum tum. I should abandon my procrastination and just get to it because there's nothing worse than time whipping lashes of stress over and over again. Who needs that? Not I.

The Sounds of Settling

The time is unknown, and I crawl back from the library, my eyes bloodshot from studying. A tinge of red gathers in my eye from starring at my math folder while unfinished problems lay on the desk before me. Another unsuccessful night. I have dealt with it, and I deal with it again now. I'll turn in my homework late once again, get the same C-/C+ grade, and move on to next week's challenging defeat. But, I'm spent on discussing the math department. If you have not caught the drift, the math department is difficult and tiresome at this University.

I choose to settle. Acquiesce. I'll just enlist three more classes, and burden the great cross, that grueling sum of addition, and major in the damn subject. For, some crosses are easier to bear than others, and the financial one bears down most.

In other (and more important) news, I sealed the position for Conference Manager and will be residing in Alabama Hall for the summer. Free housing, free food, free laundry, and a stipend cushion the chair that I will sit fat and happy in throughout the summer. A great job to lighten the academics, lighten activities, and just lighten the load.

On a different note, I cursed today more than I have perhaps all year. I could not begin to count the obscenities, numerous as they are. But the anger, the rising temper flares for the precious world destroyed like the sculptor's sandcastle so carefully constructed, so wedged into miniature square perfections, only to be toppled by toddlers. I have lost so much ground in faith today.

The Signs of Math

Calculus is just one of those subjects I get. I see intergrals, derivatives, limits and the like, and I'm calmed by the secrecy of numbers. They add, divide, multiply, and subtract in perfect, magical formulations for an answer. But, the math department at Emory fails to keep my interest. The faculty disposed of me once I revealed my interest in medicine. What is it with professors? Just because I want to be a doctor and not a mathematician, they feel that they have the right to ignore me?
The faculty has become less than impressive. I had one ninety something year old professor with one lung. He coughed proofs and theorems onto the board, the white chalk dust coagulating in his good lung. My current professor explains concepts using definitions rote from the book. Explaining the subject in any other logical sense would just be obtuse. The very few and very best math professors that I have been priveleged with have been visiting professors who are not even on faculty! The visiting professors are more keen on the imperfections of the math department and leave Emory quickly. If only they would stay long enough, the corroding portion of the department would whither away, and a strong breed of intellectuals and educators would arise.
But, I am too hopeful. I have to settle with the path of math. I have three courses until the completion of the major, and I would rather not think about choosing another major or finding ways to afford it. Frankly, I'll stick to statistical analysis and any other course dealing with numbers to pass onto medical school.
"Stick to what you are good at." It's the basic creed, we should remember. Like the yellow, black arrowed street sign that directs us around the dark bends of the road, it never leads us wrong.