S for School, Sick, and Spam

Hello, lovely reader! I’ve missed you! It’s been over a week, so I have lots to tell you. This post is going to be kind of sporadic and random, so it might not flow very well, but it will give you an idea of what’s been going on and what’s all floating around in my head at the moment.

School
Classes are keeping me quite busy! Lifetime Fitness has definitely been interesting and eye opening. It inspired me to finally have Music Man add me to his gym membership so that we can start working out regularly. Right now, our plan is to go one day a week and once or twice on the weekends. Thanks to the class, I’ve been able to put together a good strength training routine. I plan to try to do strength training once or twice a week and cardio two or three times a week. It will help to have my wonderful husband as a gym buddy!

We went to the gym together on Sunday, and I felt so great afterwards. I’ve been leery to go. I’ve always thought health clubs were intimidating, because you have to worry about trainers following you around everywhere and people staring at the fatties (errrr, me). I was happy to find out that wasn’t the case; in fact, I felt quite comfortable there. I’m excited to go back, and I think Music Man and I will both be more successful in going regularly now that we’re going together.

Sociology has most definitely been an interesting class. I wouldn’t exactly say that I feel as though I’m learning a lot, because a lot of the stuff the instructor has lectured on so far is really common sense. We’ve mainly learned about inequality among social classes, and the concept is really quite simple: people who have the money have the power, and the people who don’t have it try to get it, which create conflict and inequality. DUH!

We have formed our groups for the group project, and I’m less than thrilled with how that’s going so far. Half of my group-members have been complaining for the past couple weeks about how they don’t know when or how they’ll find the time to do group work on top of work for other classes and various other commitments. While I understand that, because I've had similar thoughts, it's disconcerting to me. The thing I don't think instructors get, especially with adult students, is that we have complicated lives that make meeting in groups tough. For example, in my group: one woman is going to be out of town every weekend until the end of class, so she can’t meet on weekends and another girl can’t really meet on weeknights, because she has classes every night of the week. This should be interesting to say the least. The thing that’s saving my sanity at this point is that I’ll get to evaluate my group members, and those evaluations will factor into their final grade for the project. It's good to know that there's recourse in case someone doesn't share fairly in the work, which is sometimes the case in groups.

Yesterday, we had to come up with our topic. We needed to find a group of people who are discriminated against (as in treated unequally), and come up with a creative presentation for the class. I threw out a couple ideas: the deaf and hearing impaired (Music Man has tons of info and data on this, and can give firsthand experience), children from non-traditional families (Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are hard for kids like my nephew, and they struggle with classmate’s questions and judgments surrounding not having parents or having two moms or two dads), and victims of domestic violence (usually suffer in silence, many times remaining in a bad situation for far too long because of the shame they feel as a result of society’s views that violence against women is a funny joke and/or that women should “just leave.”)

My ideas were rejected. The group ultimately chose sex addicts/addiction. How sex addicts are discriminated against/treated unfairly, I’m not sure, but the group is convinced that this is a great topic. I think it definitely has the potential to be interesting, but I just don’t know that it really meets the criteria for the project. We are going to present it in a talk show format. I get to be the hostess of the show. Wooooohooooooooo! Yeah...I'm not entirely thrilled. I just want it to be over at this point.

As of Wednesday, I’ll be halfway through Sociology. I need to spend tonight and tomorrow afternoon studying for the midterm that we have on Wednesday. I have to do research for our group project, because we’re getting together next Monday before class to discuss our findings. I also have two chapters of the Lifetime Fitness textbook to read this week and a test this weekend. And, of course, I need to continue working on the Public Speaking Competency—July 14 is coming too quickly!

So, that’s that. I’m super busy, stressed, and exhausted.

Sick
I hate when people come to work sick. HATE IT! What is a “small cold” to someone else can easily turn into a major issue (i.e. bad sinus infection) for me. My cube neighbor was really sick the week before last. I almost thought I was going to go homicidal a couple times because of her constant coughing. I’m totally not exaggerating, lovely reader, the coughing was constant. I tried really hard to drown her out with my ipod, but wasn't very successful. When I overheard her tell someone that it was a viral infection that had worked its way into her lungs, I nearly lost it. Why are you coming to work if you’re that sick?!? Stay the fuck home!!!

This individual has a supervisor that is very strict—she really cracks down on her employees for every little thing—so I know that probably had something to do with this particular employee coming to work even though she was so sick. I think it is so incredibly rude and slefish not to consider that you can infect those around you with whatever happens to be plaguing you.

I was pretty irate over it, and even made a few nasty comments to my boss about how I didn’t appreciate people coming to work so sick. Not that there’s anything he can do about it since the sick employee and her supervisor are not in our department, but I considered it fair warning to my boss that I could possibly get sick.

Surprise, surprise, surprise…I was quite sick last week and ended up staying home from work the last three days of the week. I’m still not quite feeling 100%. I thought I was getting better, but the headaches and heavy head feeling have returned, which make me think I have a sinus infection. If I don’t feel better in the next couple days, I’ll have to go to the doctor. I’m pissed! No. LIVID!!! I can’t afford to be sick right now; I just have way too much to do.

Spam
My blog must be getting noticed, in some small way, by the search engines. I’ve been getting quite a few spam comments lately. I delete them one day, and the next day they’re back again! Whose idea was it to spam blogs through comments?!?! What genius came up with that idea?!?! Do the spammers really think this tactic is effective?! This can't possibly work. All it does for me is piss me off.

I am annoyed, and I feel a little bit violated. This blog is mine. It’s like my little home on the internet. It’s where I share my personal thoughts, experiences, and opinions with all of you. To me, a spam comment on my blog is the equivalent of someone coming into my home, uninvited and unannounced, and shitting all over my furniture and/or vomiting all over my clean floors. It’s foul and infuriating!

The Birthday post seems to be particularly spam-worthy for some odd reason. I’ve implemented comment moderation for posts older than 7 days, which I’m hoping will help. If not, I might have to implement stronger measures. Which do you find to be less annoying when commenting on blogs, lovely reader? (1) word verification or (2) comment moderation (i.e. not having your comment appear right after you hit post). Whichever you find to be less annoying is the one I’ll implement if the need arises.

Wayback Wednesday
Music Man pointed out that I missed Wayback Wednesday last week. Those are pretty much the only posts he reads, so he was sad that I dropped the ball last week. Since it was the very first day of me feeling really, really, wicked sick, he understood. I hope you do too. I had promised you that, at the very least, I’d try to keep up with that, and I failed. I am going to do my best to hold my commitment to Wayback Wednesday. There will be one tomorrow.


That’s all I have for you now, lovely reader. I’m hoping things will calm down soon, because I have a list of things I’d like to write about. I’m also trying to get better about using Twitter, so please follow me there too.

I hope all is well in your world, lovely reader! I’ve been reading many of your blogs, and really enjoying what I’ve read, but my brain has been too scrambled to leave coherent comments. I’m going to try to get better about that too!