This has been a particularly challenging week. I started a new volunteer gig, the second one I have going at the moment, and I had two tough exams ("second midterms" which is a bizarre nomenclature but it seems to be the way it's done here).
I've been surviving this week on pretty minimal rations--you might call it a form of comfort food. I won't starve, but it's not very pretty. Basically, I cut up a chicken thigh or two (I can get a package of 10 or 12 for just a few dollars at the local store), boil that with some pasta, toss in some fresh veg like broccoli or snow peas, and when it's done, mix it with a can of stewed tomatoes. Of course I add things like salt and pepper and perhaps a dash of olive oil, but that's the basic idea. I can make this dish in less than 20 minutes, eat it in less than 5 minutes, wash up and get right back to studying. The second variant of my quick comfort food is to make a bit of rice or pasta, usually steaming some spinach or other greens with the rice, and add that to a package of "salmon". It comes in a foil pouch and looks like tuna. We aren't talking salmon steak, of course, but the taste is decent. I douse that mess with homemade garlic-dill-ginger-balsamic vinaigrette. Same process: make it all in 20 minutes, scarf it down in five. I either eat standing over the sink or I sit at the table and study. Either way, I'm under the watchful eye of CircusK9 because no matter how plain or hurried, food is food is potential treats falling on their heads.
I've distilled my exam prep into a fixed process. I recap the lecture slides, notes taken during lecture, and the text info (one of my classes has no textbook) into handwritten summaries made on plain white paper in pencil. These take quite a bit of time to prepare--for my genetics exam on Thursday, I had to process a huge amount of material and ended up with fifteen pages of handwritten notes. I then read these notes over several times, at least half a dozen times before an exam, over a period of at least a day, and I often repeat them orally while pacing around the house, to the great distress of the dogs--they don't like the pacing or the orating.
This might seem to be an odd way to study but it takes advantage of two aspects of my personal learning modes. First, the very process of summarizing all those sources forces me to think more deeply about the important points and themes. I write the major ideas out using my own words and notations, making them more "comfortable." And second, this process creates succinct fodder for my eidetic memory. I don't have a perfect photographic memory, but it's pretty darned close. I've had this ability since I was quite young but didn't learn how to explicitly use it until I was in grad school. I can recall images of things but my recall tends to be more reliable with text, or rather, an image of text. (If I don't explicitly manage the eidetic capture, it tends to be a bit random, which leads to clutter.) My mental "photograph" of each page combined with the effort I spent in writing everything out helps fix all of the important bits into my brain.
I'm sitting here now full of organic carrots from the Department of Crop and Soil Science worker bees, part of a meal which for once involved no boiling of carbs. The students from that department grow all sorts of vegetables and put them out every Friday morning in a self-serve "market" in one of the buildings on campus. I shared the leftovers with the dogs, who all love carrots.
I've got a lot of homework to finish over the weekend, as well as starting the prep for my big biochem exam next Friday, the house is a mess, and I have a metric ton of leaves that need to be raked up. Tonight's my best opportunity to
basically do nothing. I'd better get back to it.
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