HOLIDAAAYS finally.

Hi readers, for the very first time since the 22nd of September. I HAVE A HOLIDAAAY!
OMG it's a much needed holiday, no waking up early, no running for the bus and catching a train. I must say I could get used to this. Going out tomorrow with some friends, man I haven't been out to do anything exciting for ages. I think the last time might've been in August.
My laptops finally come back from repair, it looks brand new. I honestly don't know whether they replaced the laptop or not. On the day I took it back to the shop I left a white stain on the top cover of it, you know, so I could identify it. But no, they've completely refurbished it. Thank you Lenovo :D

Man I love Christmas time, all the lights. Especially Birmingham city centre OMG someone give me a camera lol. But the combination of the new library, the Birmingham wheel, outdoor iceskating and the German markets is just incredible. The sales, and the non stop Christmas movies and hot chocolate is just mmmm.  I seldom have hot chocolate though because i'm lactose intolerant. What I find very weird till this day is that ice cream doesn't really give me much hassle, but having hot chocolate outside of home, is a very bad idea.

Sleep, I think in just 3 days I've paid of my sleep debt for the whole year. Last couple weeks of the semester I was going on average 5 hours of sleep a night. When I handed my assignment in however, I came home and slept from around 8pm to midday and then the same the following day.

This shouldn't be a 'real' holiday for me because I still have an exam to do in January,  but I haven't really lifted a pen since Wednesday, I hate the exam coming up, it's most likely the last chemistry exam i'll have in my life but I don't feel like it. For a while I've thought that my demotivation was because I haven't been feeling that great for a while now, I rationalised it with, increased stress levels reduce the level of immunity. I haven't been stressed and have gotten worse, the joys of getting a wisdom tooth (!) I've also acquired a swollen lymph node today which has got me thinking there's some serious shit going on. In the meantime I guess i'll just enjoy my holiday till my tooth stops irritating me. I know i'll regret it later but right now, I'm getting into the holiday spirit. And I hope you are too. Happy holiday's folks

Confused, marriage? why? how?

Confused, sleep deprived, stressed and all the rest of it.
Its come to my attention that I'm a very confused person, I don't really have a clue in what I want to do in life. This blog has nothing to do with biochemistry.

Jumping to the wrong conclusion, that's a huge mistake that I've made a couple of times, for instance, one of my very close friends got married recently. And she didn't tell, naturally i assumed that i mustn't mean a great deal to her if she hasn't told me. But then again I hadn't seen her on facebook for about a year. Internet connection maybe? I really don't understand why people, especially people you were friends with would hide something like that from you, not just her but I've firsthand heard more of the same story. Facebook's another thing, it allows people you've erased from your heart and memory to re-connect, after it's taken you so long to delete them.

Finding a spouse. Yes I've said it, in some Asian and African cultures the time for women to get married is the early 20's and I've hit it. My family has already started to give me some criteria, my mother would come up to me and say " i want a son-in-law who is good to his mother, one that will be like my son" and uncle "so there's no possibility of someone knocking on your door tomorrow" oh it gets better mothers friend " She's going to bring you someone she's met in uni" and the icing on the cake, my little sister " Hurry up, i want your room".
oh aren't i loved (!) As you all may know, having a boyfriend/girlfriend in Islam is a big no no. What really annoys me is the assumed pressure to get married soon, sometimes you can sense it in a conversation.

so how do people go about meeting their spouses? that's a good question and that really varies. some people are school sweethearts, knew each other but didn't engage in activities which are prohibited. Others dated anyway. Some meet through family, in arranged marriages where they'd meet in a room with people, usually family members. They may exchange details or they may not ( i.e if it's a long engagement they will only contact to arrange the wedding) There's many ways people go about it. And with the uprise of technology there's even Muslim dating sites.

Personally I'd like to know what the persons like before it reaches asking my father, that's why I'm a bit iffy about arranged marriages, you'll only see what the other person wants you to see, and that's gonna be them in a good light. when in fact they may only be like that 5% of the time.
Which is why I think the easiest way is to find someone in school/college. Then you'd see how they treat other people and how they deal with problems etc.
 Personally I'd rather be engaged for a long time, whilst i get my shit together ( I want to have my own life before i share it) and then get married. During that time it's culturally acceptable to talk, it sounds very restraining and it is in a way. But by not mixing freely with the opposite gender there's generally fewer heartbreak.

When i was younger i used to think, I'll meet someone in uni, who has the same lectures as me and then we'd get married when we graduate. Time has changed and most importantly there are no potentials in my course. I'm not a big fan of inter-racial marriages, not that I have anything against them. It's just not for me. I'd want a man who sings to my kids the same lullaby's my father used to sing to me. Now however the concept of marriage seems so scary to me, I find it difficult to trust people especially men. That's because I've seen so many broken households where the woman ends up raising the kids on her own. You see marriage to me isn't about the first couple of years where spouses are head over heels in love. But what about after 20 years? Especially if it's an arranged marriage you can't really know. I've spoken to one of my friends about this once and she said i should pray and put my trust in God, and she's absolutely right, when my turn comes i really should.

The part I've noticed women struggle with is finding a potential which gets me wondering if it's the same for men.

I'm not 100% cynical, like i said I'm a sarcastic person and immature (though I've been working on the immature) and if i marry someone with the same sense of humour, then a bucket load of laughter would be shared. I've just figured the obvious out, people trust who they're going to marry because they love them. So maybe it won't be such a scary experience after all!

First lot of assignments and exam

This blog is way overdue, a lot has being going on for me for the last couple of weeks. Exams and deadlines, I've found out the hard way about the joys of assignments, practical write ups and exams. Midway through my human structure and function module we had an exam, and because i'm trying for a merit based scholarship I worked my ass off. Some of the topics in the first half included the endocrine & reproductive system, tissues and evolution of homo sapiens. Our lecturer basically gives us some vague lecture notes which you then expand on, now I record lectures and replay them when I'm stuck on anything in particular because I always thought that anything that's examined will have been taught to us. That wasn't particularly the case.
When the day of the exam came I was unprepared, because unlike at college and school, you cant retake to get a better mark. The make it or break it moment came and I felt sick. The actual exam questions were hard and most of them you wouldn't have gotten right unless you did some extra reading. It was composed of 30 questions and 20 of them I was 99% sure that I had got right, another 5 were an educated guess and the last 5 a random guess.I was aiming for at least 85% but after seeing the exam questions, I was pretty content with what I achieved. This was the nice bit.

OMG assignments! One pitfall of doing A levels is that they dont prepare you for assignments. My first assignment was to compare and contrast the structures of eukaryotes and prokaryotes. Simple essay question, but you cant use what you know unless you can find a reliable source to reference from. So my college biology teacher telling me that they have different sized ribosomes wouldn't be able to go in my assignment. What really screwed me over is that I didn't have that long to complete it, I think I've had it for 2/3 weeks, but I prioritised my exam, leaving me 5 days to complete that assignment and a practical write up. To cut a long story short, I made a complete mess of both, and most of the marks lost were due to referencing. And I cant re-do them.
I believe that you should be able to retake/re-do things as many times as you need to, this is actually from my personal experience. I got a D in my core maths module, not once, not twice but 3 times until finally I got an A in it, but oh well! So now the only way for me to get a decent grade in my chemistry module is to do amazingly well in the exam.

I would've never imagined a busy schedule like this, but I guess that the constant deadlines means leaving little time to slack. But it has taught me one thing, that I love biology over chemistry, don't get me wrong I find chemistry really interesting but no, I cant risk my final grade doing another chemistry module.

Semester 1 is nearly over and it felt more like a year, it's made me hungrier and has changed me as a person. This will make more sense in the next blog.