i am so smart...S-M-R-T

d'oh!
oh homer simpson, i'm glad you're more stupid than me. i think being out of college...well, school in general, makes me less intelligent. my brain cells are dying faster than if i were drinking every night. i noticed the "degeneration" when i started studying for the GRE's. I registered with this free online test prep website since I am cheap and won't shell out money for learning stuff i already know. (I know that information is lodged in my brain somewhere. i just need enough motivation to dig it out.) When I took one of their practice tests....well, let's just say the results are not up to par. so sad. it was like seeing a grown man ride a bike after a long time of not doing so only to end up wobbling and crashing into his garbage bin at the end of the driveway.
i'm definitely out of practice. i forgot about half the words i learned for the SATs. i mean, seriously who uses inundate and specious in daily conversation? (go on...it's ok...you can go to wiktionary and look it up. i actually did a few days back.) i also forgot the quadratic formula except the part that has plus/minus and a square root. (alright you can laugh like you just saw someone fall off a bike. it's ok. no one's looking.)
if you ask me to take the GRE's today, i would fail. right now, i might only be smart enough to bubble in the letters of my name and to get my address correctly written. check with me in october maybe i'll make it past the block.

a simpsons like segue

i remember having this conversation with duey and ana a few weeks before graduation. we were discussing what our plans were after graduation. ana and i came up with the usual "pssssh....i don't know what i'm gonna do. probably be a bum for a while." duey one-upped us by saying, "i'm definitely going to be homeless in california." (or something to that effect) riiight....that's what uva grads end up being. as if this wasn't odd enough, count on ana to take it to the next level. she posed the question, "if you're going to be a bum, which city/state would you like to stay in?" of course we all wanted to stay warm so we picked florida. apparently if you're a bum and you get buried in snow and the snow plow gets you (ie. kill you), it's no one's fault and is not considered murder. scary. other questions such as "how long does it take before you to start looking like a bum?" came up in that obviously odd and random conversation.
homelessness is not a joking matter, neither is poverty. i have just turned in my entry for a design competition dealing with this very issue. the idea is to design a cart that can provide storage and shelter since many homeless people use a cart to carry collected items that they can eventually turn in for a bit of cash. i entered the competition mostly because of the message behind it, and partly because i felt the need to get into the design process once again. so i guess it's true you can't kick the habit as easily as you thought.

temporary insomnia

so what do you do when you realize that it's already 3:30 in the morning and you're still wide awake? you write a totally random email complete with pictures. i was contemplating on either cleaning my room or continuing to my second load of laundry. but i decided not to, so as not to wake the rest of the household. i could also continue reading The Confessions of Max Tivoli but i don't think i'd understand anything printed on those pages. emailing does not require much brain power and people don't care as much about grammar and spelling. as you can see i don't bother capitalizing my I's, and i excessively use the period even if a conjunction would suffice.

(although i really hate it when people send me text-message-like emails. i don't get it. all the letters are right there at your disposal. you don't need to press a certain key two or three times to get the letter you want. however, i sometimes i let it slide especially if it's only a few words in the whole email. i try hard not to use text shorthand mainly because i don't know how to properly abbreviate words....if there's even a standard abbreviation for those words. speaking of pet peeves: i also hate it when people use capital and lower case letters in random order. For example, "oH mY GoSh! hE IS suPer HoT!!!" what the hell!? that takes more time than necessary. i can tolerate people capitalizing random words for emphasis. but why do you need to capitalize a letter that's in the f'n' middle of the word?)

got carried away there. so where was i? right...the email. it took me an hour to write two emails. they're not very long either. i think around 6:30am i started to lose my ability to formulate complete sentences or even phrases that make sense. being sleep-deprived is much worse than being drunk although they have almost the same effects on you. you musn't operate heavy machinery. your conversations start making no sense except to someone else who is as drunk as you. your eyes glaze over. you tend to use the same two or three words over and over.

hopefully this doesn't become a nightly habit. i really don't think i can get away with being unproductive at work.