dark clouds, no rain

I suppose that I should consider this session of uni to be somewhat more significant than usual, it's the last session that I will be experiencing as an undergraduate student. So far, things have been relatively relaxed. My thesis work is in a preliminary, easygoing stage. There have not been any assessments as of yet, and few of my subjects are in urgent need of attention at this point in time. On top of all of that, it feels as though my subjects this session could potentially be quite... fun. None of my subjects will have exams, and none of my subjects will be assessed using horrible assignments with fixed, non-subjective answers. The assessments that I will have to complete at home will involve quite a bit of writing; learning journals, an essay, my thesis... I much prefer assessments that encourage you to display some degree of independent thinking and creativity. Though this may sound totally geeky, I'm particularly looking forward to the essay that we have to write for our ethics component. It's the first essay we've had to do at uni (discounting general education classes), and it'll be on a subject that requires a significant amount of introspection.

That's not to say that I'm looking forward to all the work that I'm going to inevitably end up doing. The relative uncertainty of how this session will pan out is also less than comforting. Where my research project ends up going will be largely dependent upon the results that I get as my experiments progress, so at this point in time, I'm not exactly sure how much work I'll end up doing for my thesis.

Of course, dreading the amount of work that I'm going to have to face isn't exactly productive, and it won't help me get through the work any more easily. In this respect, I think that the basketball training that I've been subjecting myself to of late has indeed been 'character building'. During the training, we have to do things called suicides. These suicides involve sprinting up and down the court: baseline to freethrow and back, baseline to halfcourt and back, baseline to 3/4 court and back, baseline to full-court and back... after going full-tilt at 5 suicides or so, I usually feel ready to pass out. Unfortunately for our basketball team, we went out to see Coach Carter together, and this movie inspired our coach so much that he decided that subjecting us to extreme self-induced physical torture should become a common fixture of our training sessions. So, every Friday night, my team-mates and I run many suicides*. Anyway, my point is that when considering things to dread, doing suicides is definitely equivalent to doing a whole bunch of uni work. Going through these suicides and trying to cope with them does funny things to your mind. You get too tired to think rationally, and you just end up naturally doing what you can to cope. After a while, the way in which you handle the running becomes ingrained in your head. Dreading the work you have to do does not help. To keep running well you just have to accept that you're going to go through torture, and then you can push through it without any fear.

So going back to talking about uni... as I said before, I think that I could actually quite enjoy some of the subjects that I'm doing, and I feel ready to delve into the horrors of overwhelming amounts of work. If all goes well, hopefully this session ends up being as rewarding as it promises to be at this stage.

*Question to my suicide-fearing peeps: How do you reckon Trung would react if he read this and saw me writing the words "many suicides"? Here's my guess:
MAN U FELLAS NEED 2 GET SUM CONDITIONING UNDER UR BELTS..COME DOWN N SEE THE FABSTARS PRACTICE @5AM YEAH...