House Hunting

Because almost all of my rotations are located in Providence, I am pressed with the necessity of relocating. I'll be honest, I've never really had to search for a place myself before. I've been spoiled with living on campus and having friends ask me to live with them before. With my ex-roommates moving to other places, I am now on my own to find a place to live. After some research and asking around, I found out that craigslist is a common search tool for college students/graduate students/young professionals looking for a place to live. My situation is complicated since I'm looking for a lease that starts in September, but won't last a year. Most places look for possible future tenants that will be signing a year lease. Not only that, I will not be in the area or in the country during July, which is when most places that have leases starting in September begin to show up. To make matters worse, I won't be back in the area to take a tour of these places when I get back to the states in August. This leaves me with the only option of searching for a September lease right now. Combine this with my current rotations schedule (8-4 Mon-Fri), my summer class schedule (6pm-9:45pm Mon-Thurs), and my work schedule (9-2 Sunday), and you have a very very tight space to find a place to live in for the coming academic year. Regardless of this tight schedule, I'm trying my best to make do with what time I have. So far I've actually been able to find a few places that seem like livable places to me. As with most people, I'm pretty picky with choosing where I live. This includes price, cleanliness of the interior, and location among other factors. I've only been able to see the inside of one place so far, but I do have appointments in the next few days to see other places. Hopefully I'll find a place that just blows my mind away. Hopefully I'll find someone who will be willing to accept me as soon as I make it known that I'd like to sign the lease. I don't want to be left with a bunch of places visited, but none actually accepting me as a new leaser. All I can say is, wish me luck.

Game of Thrones

What the heck has just happened? This week's episode of Game of Thrones has left me (and practically half the world and all of Facebook) shocked. Before last night, I was 2 episodes behind due to my busy schedule. However, I set aside some time to catch up, mainly because there was such an uproar on Facebook and among my peers. I knew something was up, so of course I HAD to watch it. While I expected something big to happen, I didn't expect something THAT BIG to happen. If you're a fan of Game of Thrones and you haven't seen this week's episode, you are truly missing out. I would say that this episode changes everything. What baffles me even more is that this episode wasn't even the season finale. Next week's episode is the season finale. The producers and writers of the show can only do last week's episode justice by introducing an even more surprising event in the season finale. There is no way something big won't happen in the season finale. Five more days. Five more days until all hell is let loose.

Work De-Tox

To whomever it may concern,

Recently I've started my clinical rotations for my last year of pharmacy school. This means I am basically working as an unpaid intern for credit at different places 6 weeks at a time. Each place is supposed to be geared specifically to a place where pharmacists have a role (i.e. hospital, retail pharmacy, ambulatory care, etc). Before rotations, I worked around 18.5 hours per week and thus had a pretty steady inflow of reasonable income (for a student at least). With rotations taking up 8 hours per day (8am - 4pm) and night classes taking up around 4 hours more Monday through Thursday (6pm - 9:45pm), the number of hours I work has dropped drastically. It doesn't help that the pharmacy I work at closes at 7pm on weekdays and 6pm and 2pm on Saturday and Sunday respectively. This leaves Saturday (9am - 6pm) and Sunday (9-2pm) as the only two days I have available to work. I personally chose to work Sunday since I wanted Saturday to relax from a long week. I can't work both Saturday and Sunday since other people need hours at my pharmacy as well (I can't hog all the hours). This leaves me with a total of 5 hours of paid work per week. You can also say that it is around a 75% decrease in income per week.This immediate change in income inflow is leaving me with money withdrawal. It's ironic that I happen to be spending a lot more money now compared to when I was actually getting more money. It's pretty depressing to think about how long it would take me to make back what I spent now compared to how long it would take to make it back back when I was working more. In another perspective, something that would have taken me one week to make back, now takes me 4 weeks to make back. Anyway, enough of my rant. This income/work de-tox is really leaving me some quite serious withdrawal symptoms. I either get used to this now and learn to understand that I won't be able to spend as much money as frequently (since rotations will be going on until May 2014) or I just continue on with my life as usual and find myself broke very soon. I'd say I should go with the former, but for some reason I feel like the latter is most likely to happen. Wish me luck.

Sincerely,
A Soon-to-be-broke College Student

Inferno by Dan Brown - a Book Review

Known for his works The Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons, Digital Fortress, and many more, Dan Brown has come out with a new Robert Langdon mystery/puzzle novel that took years of research and writing. With such anticipation for another thrilling book, most people will go into reading the book with high expectations. Just as well, fans of Dan Brown will probably enjoy the book regardless, not looking to criticize but just to read for pleasure. I fall into the latter category of readers, but still, I will dive into a review.

To start, I read that Dan Brown spent a couple of years travelling to all the places mentioned in the book and did extensive research about all statues, art pieces, and buildings in the book. As per usual, there is plenty of historically known pieces of art and architecture that play important roles, sometimes central roles, in the plot. Brown doesn't disappoint here as I enjoy being introduced to multiple pieces of history. All historical pieces were smoothly integrated into the whole storyline.

The whole book is based mainly on Italian poet Dante Alighieri's Inferno, part of his Divine Comedy epic poem. The book is based in Florence, Italy and Brown basically takes you on a tour of famous historical buildings in the area. All the buildings, paintings, statues, and stanzas from Inferno intertwine into one big puzzle that, once again, Harvard symbology professor Robert Langdon has to solve in order to survive. You actually gain a pretty good history lesson about Dante's works and his personal life, but not in a boring way like sitting in a high-school history class. Comparing to The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons, Inferno contains less symbology puzzles and more word puzzles. At first I was a little disappointed at this, but I got used to it eventually. Despite the lack of symbol puzzles, there were plenty of other types of puzzles to peak your curiosity and stimulate your thinking.

Moving onto prose, the story flowed smoothly just like all of Brown's other books. Each chapter is a few pages long at most, keeping the pace of the story fast and interesting. Again, you get the story from different point of views following the timeline of the plot. Brown also throws in a few twists and turns throughout the whole book, the most coming at the end. This leads to perhaps my only concern about this book. While the whole plot might have, and probably was, thoroughly planned and thought out prior to Brown actually sitting down and writing the book, there seemed to be way too many twists appearing the last 100 pages of the book. This almost makes the whole story seem a little unrealistic. However, in the end, it did not detract from the overall impression I got from the book. I was still well engaged in the book, often not being able to put the book down even though I definitely had to go to sleep. This is a good read for Dan Brown fans and anyone looking for a good summer read.

Rating: 8/10
While this book was engaging and interesting like all his other books, I still feel that The Da Vinci Code was a better read. The overboard number of twists near the end of the book and slight lack of symbols caused me to rate the book less than a perfect 10. 

People

Sometimes I don't understand certain things. Sometimes I don't understand certain people. People can be so confusing. I guess that's what makes this world so interesting to live in, but this interesting is not a "good" interesting. If only people in this world can learn to not believe all the gossip and just form their own opinion about people themselves. It's good to be warned about people, but we shouldn't take things people say about other people as the creed. Instead it is good to take it with a grain of salt, and then see for yourself. Too many times have I seen someone skewed in such a way, only to be exactly the opposite of what was said of them. I have become a victim of gossip plenty of times, and I can say that it is so upsetting and annoying what people can say about you sometimes. Friends who seem so close sometimes believe what other people say, when they should know you better and believe you to be who you are, not what other people say you are or what you've done. End rant.

E.X.H.A.U.S.T.E.D.

I feel so exhausted. I always forget how much energy you expend when you drive. You wouldn't think that sitting in a car moving your arms a little every now and then would cause such exhaustion, but oh does it do it well. I drove from Kingston, RI today to Agawam, MA to pick up some friends from Six Flags New England. From there I drove us directly to Minado Sushi Buffet in Natick, MA, which is another 1 hour away. Keep in mind that I haven't gotten out of my car yet at this point. Finally after eating a ton of sushi and looking like a 9-month pregnant lady, I drove us all back to Kingston, RI which took around 1.5 hours. After all that, I was finally able to drive to my house, which is like 20 minutes away from where my friends live. If you add that all up together, it totals to around 5 hours of driving and around 250 miles... all of this starting at 4pm. Yes, I am exhausted.

Good news is that I am very happily full.

Staying Busy is a Good Thing

I can't believe that it's been 2 full months since I've last had a chance to post something. It baffles me that throughout my 12 straight semesters of college, my very last "academic" semester (meaning involving lectures and exams) is by far the hardest and busiest. I don't think I've ever experienced so much work stuffed into such little time. Add this with the most hours/week I've ever worked, and you got an overwhelmed college student (at least most of the time). However, the good news is that I'm pulling through just fine. People say that things always happen for a reason, I believe that this is exactly the case. I've learned so much about time management skills and my capabilities as a student and as a professional.

I think it's always important to remember that you yourself are capable of so much when you really put your mind to it. Sometimes we have to be forced into a situation in order to realize how much we can actually do. For those of you choosing to take it easy by taking the minimum amount of classes (and the easiest), I challenge you to challenge yourself. In the end, I realize that I would be bored with all that free time, had I chosen not to double major and work as many hours. I'd probably end up procrastinating to the max, while my brain rots on things that don't help me advance personally and in life. This doesn't mean that you should force yourself to be busy all the time, leaving no time to relax, but it is good to be busy most of the time. You will most definitely find yourself getting more things done than you've ever thought you could get done in the allotted time.