Studying and Cooking

If I was a cooking vessel, I'd be a porcelain pot. Not just any porcelain pot, a clay pot with the approximate thickness of Hobbes' Leviathan. If you are unsure of just how thick the Leviathan is, well, it's very thick. It's insane how much time is required for me to spend before I become productive. The porcelain pot is notorious for taking an extremely lengthy amount of time for it to become thoroughly hot, and sustain enough heat to produce edible food. Me, I take hours, or even days before I finally gather enough momentum to complete my assignments.

Three days is more than a reasonable amount of time to compose a 1500 word essay. In fact, with two days, you could research your essay, re-read your text, write an outline, book mark quotations, compose, and proofread your essay and still have enough time to review your french notes, watch The Bicycle Thieves, fight undead orcs in the dungeon, and maybe even catch Yojimbo down at the Pacific Cinématheque. But of course, like the stupidly dense pot that I am, I manage to spend the first two and three quarters of my three days not writing my essay. Where did those two and 3/4 days go? Well, I spent a generous amount of that time on "attempting to work". If I was still taking math classes I could write an equation for my productivity...
But to take a crack at it, it'd probably look something like this:

productivity = (attempted study time)/20

So if I had two hours to work on an assignment, I'd probably be looking at less than twenty minutes of actual work done. How this pertains to the equation, I don't know. But I do know that most of that time would've been spent on repetitively re-reading paragraphs, playing minesweeper obsessively, reading Slashdot and drawing hybrid animals in the margins of my pages.

So on the particular weekend of my epic essay writing endeavors, having spent grueling hours(two days) of pre-working, and attempting to work, the tiny gear lodged in the corner of my brain which controls my academic motivation finally begins to turn three hours before midnight, signaling the last day before my due date. And boy did the gear turn, although it's rusty from infrequent use, my motivation finally rose to a healthy level and my essay began to take shape.

I proceeded to spend the next ten consecutive hours or so writing and phrasing while taking frequent short breaks to minesweep, and to pace my room whining and moaning about how terrible a writer I am. Now I could have finished after about seven hours, but by then I had already passed my "point-of-no-return" (if you're curious, it's about 5am in the morning) where I ultimately decide to forgo sleep for the night because I'll almost certainly oversleep my remaining two hours before the morning. Having decided to abandon the sweet thought of sleep, I was left with an additional three hours before 7:30am to fine-tune my essay, and for the first time since being in Arts One; proof read. It was torture, the night. Not to mention I spent all of the next day suffering the repercussions of skipping sleep.

Although given an approrpiate amount of time to warm up(a large amount of the heat coming from sheer pressure), I can be pressed to produce essays of a delectable quality. But despite that, and despite my efficacy with working under pressure, being a clay pot ultimately sucks.

100 Movies, 100 Quotes, 100 Numbers

How many movies can you recognize? Even if you're not much of a cinephile, I'd guarantee you'd recognize at least two.

A Movie A Day

I was having a conversation with a friend once, and he said, "hey, since you've joined the Film Society, you much be watching a lot of movies all the time eh?" It sounds like a more than reasonable assumption, and really, it is. But sadly enough, at the time that I was posed with that question almost two months ago, I couldn't say yes.

I've been trying to keep a very detailed list of every movie title that I have ever seen in my life on my computer for a couple of years now (Fun Fact# 134), most of it is alphabetized, but the bottom portion of the list is entirely chronological. When I reviewed all of the accumulated movies since the end of the summer, the number is anything but pleasing. I really haven't watched many movies throughout the three months since becoming a club member at the dawn of the school year. This realization saddened me greatly, and I decided to take action. I needed to watch more movies, and I needed to set a plan. This couldn't be one of those vague and ambiguous goals that people often give themselves such as "be more organized", or "exercise more" only to forget about them once their passion and determination fizzles out, I had to give myself a measurable resolution.

So it was about the time of my previous post, the day before my exam, whilst in the midst of procrastination, I decided to watch a movie, Trainspotting it was. I enjoyed it quite a bit, and I thought gee, spending the time to watch a movie didn't take up as much of my study time as I thought it would, I wouldn't have to study anymore after this exam, I could easily watch a movie everyday if I wanted to, and what better time to give yourself a hefty, ambitious film related project than during the chilly and festive, and -most importantly- school-less month of December? So it was decided, an inverted New Year's Resolution. I was to watch a movie a day, until the start of the new semester (January 7th).

I'll have to admit, there were times when I feared that I would not be able to accomplish my twenty-two movies in twenty two days endeavor. But I was dilligent, and prevailed. If I had missed a movie somehow, I would make up for the deficit by viewing two movies the next day, and I kept it up for three full weeks. It was a very lifting experience for me, I was able to finally cross off some longtime tenants on my Wanted: movie list.

For those who are interested: (not many of you, I'd imagine)
As well as for personal accomplishment/boasting purposes, I have attached the list of the movies below:



If you're thinking the same thing that I am (man that was a shitty post, and Sandie is a terrible writer), I apologize in advance. Once my brain defrosts from the lull of the holidays I will post more silly anecdotes from Sandie's life.