h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Sorry peeps, I feel like I've been so negative here lately.
I hope you don't take it personally that I use my online journal mostly as a rant; an outlet for the stress I've been under.
But it's not enough. The stress is more than I've been able to deal with and I can't handle it any more. I'm too stressed, and I'm not strong enough.
As of the night before last (11pm sunday night my time), I no longer consider myself a uni student. I quit. I'm a dropout.
After spending the last three weeks having minimal social life; no money; no time; and no help from the university, my RL friends (not their fault I haven't seen them though), or my family; the two assignments which were due in on monday remained then, and remain now, unfinished.
After having three panic attacks, two nervous breakdowns, and a blackout lasting about four hours, I've decided I can't do this to myself any more.
Unfortunately on monday I wasn't able to cope with anything either, so I stayed at home instead of doing what I would have liked to do but couldn't: go to work, come to uni, hand in the work I'd done, go to my councelling appointment, go to the pharmacist to renew my prescription, and talk to the admin staff to see if the papers I've already done can be transferred to another (easier) degree, because I might actually get something out of it then.

But I didn't, because I'm too weak to cope.

I've come in today to say goodbye for now. I'm going to go back to working again, so I don't know how often I'll have access to the 'net from now on. I'm not leaving hootoo for good, though, 'coz I like you and I like it here.
After I sign off I'm going to go rebook the councelling appointment I missed yesterday, go to the pharmacy, and go to the admin centre. If I'd thought to go to rebook the councelling before I came to the lab to write this, I could tell you when I'll next be back. If it's important I'll probably text Arisztid and she can post the date here.

Hugs to you all. This isn't the end, I'm not horribly depressed about it (well not as much as I could be), I'm not going to do anything stupid; I just need time to accept my decision and learn to live with the fact that I've been working so hard, and put up with so much, for the last five years and have nothing tangible to show for it apart from a fifty-thousand dollar debt.

alright jerms. you know we'll all miss you here.

and i certianly support you in your decision. i'll miss you, but taking care of you is a good thing.

i hope it wont be too long before we see you here again

lots of love

I am wishing you the best of luck
I hope you will be more at ease.

Nothing wrong with ranting.
I always say; better out than in.
You did not go around pointing your rants at others either!

Try not to be too hard on yourself Jerms.
Drop in when you can

And burn down the university!

If you want my advice, put all your rants into a book and expose the real life stress of student life!

Or put them on A4 sheets and drop them from buildings so everyone knows.

Or....

I dunno best of luck anyway. I'll miss you even if I never did read any of your massive posts.

Even if you never get this.

Even if... Oh I don't know I'm rambling.

I'm sure you have my address somewhere, drop us a note if you get time.

If you want my advice, put all your rants into a book and expose the real life stress of student life!
Now if you are going to print some thing along those lines you have to have it on to soft toilet paper ,that way it can not only be green(before it goes down the pan brown) but extremly sail able at the same time

we will miss you

Echoes Abbi, don't be too hard on yourself. A person can only do what a person can do.

Traveller in Time on top
"See you around again

ever.

"

Glad the depression isn't too bad,good on you for realising when it's all becoming overwhelming.Sounds like that plane ticket could soon be in reach.In the meantime ,take care.

Do you think he's going to read any of this?

I can talk about him in third person now he's gone.

Hey, that's right. Cool, isn't it? I think I'll miss him though.

Me too. It's sad that he's not in university any more, I wanted to see him get his degree and everything.

Do you think he'll jump out from behind a frat house now and shout SURPRISE!

I certainly don't.

Surely he will take a peek at some time.

Even if it is a long time posting cannot hurt any surely.
Others have been away for years and returned!
Some say goodbye, come back in a week or month because this place gets in your blood or something and you don't know untill it's gone

Jerms-
Happy Trails to you !
Until we meet again...

I was one of those people. The biggest problem is I can't remember how to put pictures on my PS and I dont have time at the moment to find out.

OR FREE LEFT RIGHT ECT

Say what???

The code for putting pictures on your space
depending on where you want it the ceter bit can be altered

the no after b for what the picture is

Can someone else do it for me....?

You know how you use the smiley tag? Same idea, except instead of using TYPE="vampire" or whatever, you use BLOB="(blobname)".
You can also say whether it goes to the left of the page, the right of the page, the centre of the page, or whatever, by using EMBED="LEFT" or RIGHT or CENTRE or FREE etc.
So it'll look something like the line LTP wrote above:

Just play around with it dude. It's not difficult.

And no, I won't do it for you. Because I can't. Only you can change your personal space.


Thanks for your support everyone. I really appreciate it.

Who was assuming I wouldn't ever come back again? Grr. I said I would! As often as possible. I just don't know how often is possible...

As for writing a book, yeah I could do that. There would be some doozy stories. I'd rather make robots though. Besides, the people in this society who would be likely to read that book are the ones who already know how much it sucks to be a student, and the ones who should find out, probably wouldn't read it.

I'm still trying to figure out how much I can recover from all of this. I feel like my last four solid years of study have all been wasted, and I don't want to have gained nothing tangible for it. I know I've leaned a heck of a lot, but it would be a lot easier to convince someone else that if I had a piece of paper to go with it.
I know I can't handle doing another assignment like that last one again, and unfortunately by spending so much time on it I failed to complete the /other/ assignment, for the other paper, due in on the same day. So now I'm failing that paper too. I'd thought I'd managed to do just enough for a just-a-pass, but aparrantly not.
Also since I haven't been to any lectures for a week, (the topic for the easier paper is something I've already done, so I figured I could recover if I didn't go to the lectures,) I didn't know that there was a test yesterday. Bugger.

So yeah. Trying to figure out how much I can recover from this semester's work, and how much I can recover from my degree in general. From what I can tell, I'm two papers off a Bachelor of Science in Computing, majoring in Software Development, assuming all the papers I've done can be transferred to it. And those two papers are ones I've already tried and failed (in one case because the lecturor was incomprehensible, and in the other because it was so horribly abstract and boring I stopped going to the lectures), and I would have had to do them again for my BCMS anyway. But those papers are ones I was hoping to reattempt overseas (probably in Canada) and have transferred back to my degree here. Which might still be possible.
I'm gonna talk with someone this afternoon who should be able to confirm all that, and point me in the right direction to figure out what I need to do.

No matter what degree I end up doing, and no matter what it takes to do it, I'm going to go back to working again. Well it's either that or studying full time, which isn't going to happen; or sit on the benifit twiddling my thumbs, which sucks in its own way. So I'll find a job, maybe 20-25 hours a week, so that it's not too stressful and I'll have time to work on other projects, and enough money to be able to buy resources for them when I need to.
I need to keep being creative, otherwise I'll go spare. Again.
And I'm thinking the job would be something like nightfill at some warehouse or supermarket or something; something where I don't have to deal with people too much, I don't have to get up early in the morning, I don't have to wear a stupid uniform, and at the end of the day I can go home and not have to think about it any more. Maybe I'm just being idealist here, but that's what I'm hoping for at the moment anyway.
Before I can look for anything, though, I have to figure out if I'm actually going to do any more papers, and if so how much time I'll be free to work. This semester I dropped down to two papers, thinking that that wouldn't be enough that I'd be horribly stressed and busy, and I'd still have time for my current part-time job at the ministry (which remains - it's like a permanent fixture now.) Oh how wrong I was.
I should NOT have felt obliged to spend every single day from 8am until 11pm, seven days a week, for three continuous weeks, working on an assignment for /one/ paper. I'm quite angry about that.
You would have thought that after I had the third panic attack - the one in front of the lecturor - he would have realised just how much pressure he's putting us under. It seems he hasn't. Bleh.

Er, anyway, yeah. Positive and future and stuff.
So yeah I'm certain I can't study full time again, especially since then I'd have no income and would be destitute within about a week. And I can't cope with working just-enough-to-pay-the-bills and doing a couple of papers to fill in the rest of the week, because as we've discovered that ends up taking more hours in a week than there are hours in a week.
So I'm thinking I might be able to do one paper each semester, as long as it's a low-level paper, and work enough to pay the bills and have a little spending money for once, and still give me enough time to work on projects occasionally. I think that should be possible, although I don't like the fact that that means I won't have a degree for another year at the absolute earliest.
Damn I wish I hadn't thought of that. I want it all to be over already.


Aside from uni, I've been trying to look after myself. My mental health has gradually improved from "not feeling able to leave the house" to "feeling guilty for not having gone to work and not having told my boss either".
Occasionally I've felt sociable enough to visit people or go into town for a couple of hours, but not much. I've had a couple of visits from some of the nicer friends, which has been good I think, and one of them particularly great, being my best friend randomly turning up without warning after flying over from Melbourne for the weekend.

So that was great. And I'm feeling a lot better. I'm not even as annoyed as I should be that my computer suddenly doesn't recognise the drive with all of the MP3s and music videos on it, and I can't seem to get it back again. Probably because I've recently set up the other computer as an MP3 server, so I've got almost a dozen of my favourite albums playing still. And of course there's still the CDs.
So meh. Bleh, but meh.

Okay I'm done. Take care people! See you again soon I hope.

~*~Besides, the people in this society who would be likely to read that book are the ones who already know how much it sucks to be a student, and the ones who should find out, probably wouldn't read it.~*~

But at least you'd still make money off it.