Tue, Sep 04, 2001 10:35AM -0600

Song playing in my head:

• Kurupt featuring Natina Reed - It's Over [lyrics]

I feel much better now. About fifteen minutes ago, I was all hunched over and my latissimi dorsi were all knotted up, and the back pain was so bad that I thought I was having kidney problems. On the way back to my apartment, I was talking to myself, saying, "Bleh. Bleh. Fuck," like it was some kind of a mantra. My mouth is still all dry and I'm still a little shaky, but that's passing. I think I'm going to take a break until 1pm.

The way I feel right now, you'd think that I'd had to single-handedly save a patient massively hemorrhaging from a dissecting aortic aneurysm with nothing but a spork from KFC and some duct tape.

Seriously though, it's pretty ridiculous how much these midterms are taxing my adrenal glands. I've only had one so far. I'm not entirely sure I can keep this up until Friday. I haven't even begun to pour on the caffeine.

But I think I figured out another of my idiosyncrasies. I may have managed to condition myself to use thinking about depressing/no-win situations as a way to stimulate my adrenal glands. What does this mean?

Well, while I was taking my exam, I started thinking about the things in my life which I'm not entirely satisfied with, and which I feel like I have no control over. For the longest time, I thought this was the oddest thing, until I realized today that it certainly gets the blood pumping. Taken to the extreme, I suppose that when you've got nothing going in your life, you have no choice but to excel in whatever you're doing at the moment. It's kind of like running amok, going berserk. Setting off the Doomsday Device 'cause the nuclear missiles are coming anyway.

Not that I think I've got nothing going in my life--it's all just a ploy, a dirty mind trick. The problem, though, is that after the exam is over, now I have to face the thoughts that drifted through my head during the exam.

Well. Now that the adrenaline rush is over, I have no desire to talk about whatever upsetting things I was thinking of. So everything is transient. You just have to endure. But maybe I'll write about it later.