/txt/ - The Textboard

The alarm clock goes off this morning at 7am, as it does every morning. It's playing one of the two NPR stations I get reception for. I listen to the headline, and then hit snooze for 10 minutes. I roll over and go mull over last night's nightmare. It falls into the same pattern of "bad guy, try to hurt him, can't, get knife, knife can't hurt him, he smile at me, alarm clock."

The drive to school is slow. We have lab this morning, but it's not with the cadavers, so that's nice; I don't have to bring scrubs. It's all cardiovascular stuff, which is great. I don't want to be a cardiologist, but heart problems kill more people than anything else these days. Management is key. Statins for everyone (professor doesn't disclose the "donations" and free lunches they get from pharm companies), a beta blocker (unless they have asthma) or an ACE inhibitor (unless they have a cough) or an ARB (all end in -artan).

The school internet is the worst. The network isn't encrypted, just a nac server for logging in. Anyone caught file sharing gets kicked off the network via your mac address; just change it and you can log back on. It's slow anyway.

Lunch here is oversalted. I never buy it at school. Also, I usually have a big apatite after lab. They say that the smell of formaldehyde makes you hungry, but that's probably an excuse. After you stop seeing the cadavers as human, you start seeing them as meat. That is what makes you hungry.

Go on?

>>1048

yes please

>>1051

seconding this

I'm an idiot student whose troubles aren't all that bad, but in the current light they're awful and the end of the world.

Drinking it away.

>>1048

pls continue

>>1051

>>1053

>>1058

Heh, sure.

After lunch can either be the best time of the day, or the worst. On Mondays, it's the worst. 4 hours of lecture, and they usually hit you with the densest ones. The heavy duty pharm lectures, histology, or the godawful pathology lectures.

"Staring at endless slides of dead things" is pathology in a nutshell. The professor is a severely myopic brown guy with an Indian accent. He's a PhD, not an MD, and clearly loves his craft more than us; probably more than people in general. He doesn't have a wedding ring. His lectures are completely incomprehensible, but he puts his powerpoints up for download. The images on the test will be the same as the ones in his powerpoint. Memorize the pictures, and you're set for the test. Useless for real life, but then again, it was never going to be useful.

We really don't study life here; we study death and poison. Actually, that's not entirely true, we did have a nutrition lecture. It lasted 2 hours. It actually talked about how we need to not look at fat people as being "weak willed." Is it a conflict of interest if a fat guy gives us the lecture? I guess it's ok to let our patients kill themselves as long as we don't offend them or get sued. The change of pace makes me wish for the lectures on death again.

I board in a house with 3 other people. They're all allergic to different animals, so we can't have a house pet. I'm also allergic to just about ever plant you can imagine, so aside from the occasional fly, nothing lives in the house. My housemates bicker endlessly about useless nonsense, but I figured that would be the case when I found out I'd be living with girls. One of them, a PA, bakes on weekends. I think she likes me, but who can tell? I feel like it would be a bad idea to try anything. I'm right next to the bathroom and I can tell when she's the one taking a shower because she sings.

Continued later. Anyone else contriboot?

>>1056

I understand man. I know logically that people have much larger issues but that doesn't help day to day. I lost like 10 pounds over a girl and for like a month I woke up anxious every day, feeling like complete crap after having really intense dreams about it. No friends really on campus, this is my first year at college and I don't know anybody. Met some people now and got things figured out with the girl, so happy I had the nerve to talk to her and I feel a lot better now, even though she said no. Some lingering tension but whole levels of magnitude less intense. I'm a little stressed over classes and assignments but it's honestly a million times better. The last month was real intense for me and I had nobody to talk to except starting rambling threads on 8chan and writing.

I want to meet someone else now, and I feel like I'm creating an ideal that will never exist but when I let go of that it feels like I'm losing something of immense importance. I just want a shy artsy pale gf. Met one at a bookstore who I really liked but she lives 30 minutes away and I didn't get her number. Oh well. I guess I'm worried I won't find anybody, and I really hope I find someone, but I just can't really seem to find who I'm looking for.

>>1065

Sorry to hear about that anon. Yeah, the thing that got to me most about college wasn't the work, it was all the social stuff. The work was expected, I just sort of hoped that with everyone around me getting laid I would sooner or later. It ended up working out, but it certainly wasn't freshman year. I felt like I should be "meeting my future wife" because so many of my friend's parents met in college. That was the real pressure, not the work.

>>1069

I've been dying to find someone since college started. That's why "losing" the girl, or maybe even just the hope of her, sucked so much. The school work is a factor but not the big one right now.

>>1079

As long as you don't complain about being friendzone'd, there's still hope for you as a person.

But take this advice: don't worry about it. Just don't. Friend's father didn't date or lay anyone in college, still ended up getting married to a girl 6 years his junior who is pretty good looking.

If the stress is really killing you, lower your standards. Bang a fat chick. Harpoon a whale. Lots of us have done it, it works. Personally, it didn't boost my confidence as much as it could have. What really helped was jelqing, but that's another story.

It's 1997. I get my crayons and tape a piece of white paper to the wall. I don't want to draw on the actual wall. I'm not even sure this is actually going to be enjoyable, so why mess up the wall? I start coloring. I'm channeling Tommy Pickles and all the other little kids I have seen on TV, who stereotypically draw on the walls any chance they get. They seem to do it automatically, like the desire just arises naturally in them and they are driven to continue doing it even when their moms and babysitters get mad. It's alright. It's kind of boring. I look at my crayon drawing; nothing special. Actually the texture of the wall beneath the paper is kind of ruining the aesthetic. I'm in this phase where I can't stand too much sporadic white patches in my drawings. If I am coloring something in, I'm straining my fingers hard, pressing the crayons and pencils down till the ends snap off. If I try to do that here I'm just going to rip the paper and get color on the wall. So I give up. I leave the paper taped up for a while. Maybe I can show Mom and explain to her about how I was trying to draw on the wall like little kids on TV do. She'll probably think it's funny how self-aware I am, although I've noticed that she only catches on to that some of the time. I make jokes she doesn't get all of the time, generally jokes that play off of the fact that I'm a little kid and therefore not supposed to know stuff. She ends up not realizing I am joking, then over-explains things, which I find funny but it's also a little frustrating when I want her to laugh too but I don't want to spoil my own joke. Anyway, I'm done drawing. I don't remember what I'm doing next. Who knows why certain memories stick around and some don't.

So tonight, near the end of my shift, I headed outside to throw away some more cardboard. We always flatten and put a sticker on it so council garbage men know they have to pick it up.

I go through the back door and see their van there.

They didn't pick any cardboard but they tell me to throw the one I am carrying in the van.

I do so, asking why they wouldn't pick any of the cardboard on the ground.

Their van is making a lot of noise, so I can't hear their answer.

I inspect the cardboard and check for anything suspicious.

No matter how hard I look, I can't find anything strange about it.

The manager comes and starts asking the garbage collectors to remove the cardboard, but they would still firmly refuse for some reason. I still don't understand why they won't get it, so I inspect it one more time, determined to understand the situation.

So that was I saw it. I mean him.

A homeless guy built a little shelter out of the cardboard to spend the night.

At this point, my manager and the dustmen were in the middle of a fierce debate to decide who had the wake the guy up.

They argued that the manager is the manager, so HE should be the one.

He argued that THEY are the ones who do that job, so they should wake the guy up.

I wanted to argue that the manager didn't want to get the homeless guy to go away because he is some kind of asshole, he just didn't want any trouble with the borough council, but I didn't say anything because, sincerely, I was just hoping they would shut the hell up so they wouldn't wake the poor guy up.