In reference to my blog post from April 10, I think that I acquired some sort of allergy for warm weather. For the past two days, it’s been chillier than it was three days ago, and my cold symptoms didn’t worsen. Then suddenly, it got warm again today, and now I’m really tired and my cold symptoms are worsening.

In other news, I don’t think I mentioned this in my blog before, but my workplace has been having some issues with thefts lately, starting from this academic semester. One of the staff members actually used our office as his apartment/home last semester so very few people had the opportunity to be alone in the office and steal anything, but the resident staff member graduated at the end of the previous semester. Since then, things have been randomly disappearing.

One of the things that disappeared was a microphone. This particular microphone has been driving me crazy, because every time I go to use it, it disappears. Then, after a while, it randomly reappears, or someone says that they took it (without notifying me) and returns it.

As of yesterday, this microphone was missing, but it randomly appeared on my desk today.

So if you happen to be the person who had it and returned it, and you read my blog, then thanks for returning the microphone. If you happen to be the person who stole it and decided to return it, and you read my blog, then you made the right choice. If you’re a ghost that took the microphone and decided to return it, and you read my blog, please don’t take it again. I really need it.

So Far in 2011…

Number of Taco Bell tacos eaten: 24

Number of times I did my own laundry: 3

THIS IS A TRAGEDY.

I enroll for Fall 2011 courses at my university tomorrow at 9:30 PM. The only problem is, the most important courses that I wanted to enroll in are full.

To make up for the fullness, I selected other courses, which happen to inevitably be morning courses. After frustratingly organizing my classes until my brain almost exploded, I ended up having morning classes on every day.

My previous schedule had me starting no earlier than 11 AM on each day of the week. Now, I start at 8:00 AM on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and at 8:50 AM on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Most of you are probably calling me a wimp for not being able to wake up decently early and calling this a tragedy, but the problem is that I work during the night. I generally arrive at the office of my workplace at 10 PM and stay there until about 2 AM. By the time I go to sleep, it could be as late as 3 AM. If I wake up at 7 AM the following morning to make it to class, I would only be able to sleep four hours during the night.

Sure, I can do this for a few days, but I can’t survive like this for an entire semester. People have already suggested that I sleep in during the weekends or take naps during the day, but that can only be done so much, and doing that on such irregular intervals will end up being detrimental to my health. Also, not getting enough consecutive sleep will ultimately make the sleep that you take less effective, because you never enter the deeper stages of your sleep cycle.

My solution? It sounds lame, but I think the best way to solve this problem is for me to change my working hours from the night to the extremely early morning. For those of you who don’t know, I work at a newspaper company, and my in-office job is to make sure all the articles get published on the website.

If I sleep at 9 PM and wake up at 5 AM, I can get eight hours of continuous sleep and be able to catch the 5:43 AM bus to go to the office and finish my work before most other people wake up.

If I end up doing that, I’ll feel like an elementary schooler by going to sleep at 9 PM. -___-

So Far in 2011…

Number of Taco Bell tacos eaten: 24

Number of times I did my own laundry: 3

I made $200 in 6 hours today by participating in a psychology experiment. If you don’t want to do the calculation by yourself, that’s $33.33 an hour. I wish I could participate in psychology experiments as a full-time job for eight hours a day and five days a week – if all the experiments were like the one that I did today, I would be making about $70,000 a year before taxes.

The beginning of the day involved sitting in a dark room in front of a computer screen with images flashing in front of me. I placed three fingers of my right hand on the 1, 2, and 3 keys on the keyboard and rated the images as negative, neutral, or positive.

That seemed easy and innocent until they started showing me pictures of mutilated faces with crusted blood, a woman who appeared to have the world’s worst case of breast cancer, a police officer standing over a shot body, and slaughtered horses on a field.

After that, I moved on to a separate room where I played a handful of games involving probability and gambling. During one of the games, I realized that instead of putting effort into trying to guess the correct answer, I would end up getting just as many points from the game by randomly guessing.

I think the game was rigged, because out of the eight or so trials that I randomly guessed on, I got them all wrong.

After that, I had some lunch while filling out some questionnaires, then played a few more games involving economics and sight. Finally, the hardest part came up.

The experimenters put a net over my head that was supposed to measure brain wave activity. The problem was that the net had about a hundred or so nodes, and it had to be put into salt water so they would stick properly to my scalp and pick up all the activity. Putting the actual thing on my head took an extremely long time, then I had to do eight trials of an activity that takes seven to eleven minutes for each trial.

I think the reason I got paid so much is because of how frustratingly uncomfortable that last part was.

So Far in 2011…

Number of Taco Bell tacos eaten: 24

Number of times I did my own laundry: 2