After an unexpectedly easy lab practical and an unbelievably horrible final test (for me, at least), Synth Lab is officially over. Now I wait until grades are turned in to find out how it all turned out. After that final it may very well be the B that everyone who knows me (family included) has been waiting and longing for. The important thing, though, is that it's over. Man that class sucked.

Though I was talking with my ChemE friend Blake about it today, and we agree that if it weren't for the evil teacher, evil TA, and horrible grading procedures, we would have actually enjoyed it. The labs could be tedious but were actually neat. You mix stuff together and get something else, and then you do tests to find out what it is! But when you have to worry about shoddy equipment, getting yelled at for things that aren't your fault, getting docked points for not doing things perfectly, it all adds up to a highly unpleasant experience.

After next Wednesday I'll be done with MSE and psychology too. We have one last MSE test and I don't have to take the final. There's a test during finals week for psychology but you can drop one test so I don't have to do at all well on it. You're not allowed to skip any tests, however, which I think is a very stupid rule. That teacher is awful. Catherine, who's in that class with me, has determined that the reason she doesn't do very well on the tests is that she gives the teacher more credit for intelligence than I do and thinks some questions are tricks. I somehow can figure out where the teacher's brain is going, and realize that while the better answer might be something else, this other answer is what she would put.

For instance, on our test Wednesday there was a question that stated "I am with a girl I really like at a movie (this alone was odd because our teacher is female and married, but she used the male first person all over our test) and a sad scene comes on. I feel myself start to cry, so I look away and think of other things. This is an example of:

illusory mental health
emotion regulation
emotion suppression
mood repression"

Catherine and I both put down that this was an example of "emotion suppression" because the guy in question is suppressing his emotions. Catherine went to argue her test grade today and found out the teacher's answer was emotion regulation! After an hour of arguing this among other questions of equal or greater stupidity, Catherine got back the point for this question by pointing out the very section in the book that names emotion suppression as a kind of emotion regulation.

Overall, our psychology class is quite bad. Our lectures aren't actually lectures so much as copying down definitions taken word for word out of the book that's she's copied onto her powerpoint slides while she repeats and elaborates on the definitions out loud. Plus she wears really slutty shirts.

Last night was a scholarship dinner I didn't want to go for, this one for a national minorities in engineering thingy that I won't name so no one can google it. It was apparently their national conference and us scholars were invited for what purpose I can't understand. These people gave me money so I should like them, and admittedly this scholarship dinner was much better than others I've been to. The conference people didn't know many other people either so they were chatty and I wasn't completely left out. But the main reason I hate these kind of dinners was all summed up in the fact that the vice president of this national minorities scholarship council introduced herself to the three black scholars I was talking to but ignored me. It's all a different kind of prejudice. Like how I can't (and don't want to be) the Hispanic kind of a national merit scholar (they're a separate branch) because you have to prove that you have at least one genetically pure Hispanic parent. I've met very few people who don't have the prejudice that to be a minority you have to be pureblooded and have dark skin. It doesn't work that way. By that criteria, people who are half-black and half-white, who in my opinion face some of the worst prejudice because they aren't necessarily accepted by either group, don't count. It's all crap. But hey, they had good food. Though I can tell you before I get there what they're serving at these scholarship things: chicken in a coating and rice pilaf. Every single time. It's good, but so predictable.

So ever since I got Sims 2 I've been trying to get someone to have twins, and someone to get abducted by aliens. So I finally get someone abducted - and then they have twin alien babies!