20 mg of Abilify later....

I feel much more at ease with society. I took my medicine last night (having accidentally skipped it for the previous two nights), slept until far too late, and woke up feeling refreshed and at peace.

I got a decent grade in my toughest class. I got a B+, which is not an A, but it's close enough to where I can feel proud about it. I got an A in an undergrad class, a prerequisite for my major, and I am still waiting on grades for the other three classes.

My medicine makes me sooooo groggy, but I guess the pay off is that I remain stable and functional. 

On the Border Between Graduate and Not

I am going into a graduate program in the fall, most likely. My student report states that I have met every requirement. Then, smack in the middle, there is this little statement that sent me into conniptions. “9 units of residence GE needed: 29 units of residence GE earned. Needs: 2 units.” WHAT? I saw an academic adviser who told me it was a misprint. He then sent me to the evaluations office. I went to the evaluations office where I was told that I would find out in July if I graduated or not. WHAT? I cannot wait that long! If I need another summer class, I need to know ASAP!

On the plus side, I have a lot of time to do nothing. Having been a full-time student taking over 12 units every semester (including during the summer time), this is the first time I have had the luxury of doing nothing. I have been listening to music I usually do not listen to, such as Nicki Minaj. I like her song, Beautiful Sinner. Some people on youtube say mean things about her and her music, but I like that she has variation to her voice. Sometimes it is soft and quavering, sometimes it is deep and punching. I have also been watching movies, painting, and spending quality time with my 91 year old grandmother. I am still a bundle of raw nerves, but at least I am able to sleep around 11 pm like I like to, rather than having to stay up until 3 am typing out home-work assignments or memorizing vocab in a foreign language. 

Thank you for reading. I plan on writing a couple of blog entries about my thoughts on mental health memoirs soon. So stay tuned! Thanks!

Grad School: to go or not to go

I have been approved to graduate from my University despite being 2 upper-division classes shy of the requirements. The academic counselor suggested I walk in May for my Bachelor's degree ceremony and then take two 100-series classes this summer to earn my diploma before Fall 2012.

By June 15th, I will have earned my BA in linguistics (barring a sudden, unexpected catastrophe) and I will then be faced with the obscure future of post-graduate existence. While I still have 2 and a half months to go, I must decide whether to apply for graduate school right away. I am planning on requesting a letter of recommendation from my professor and I need to give him time to procrastinate on writing it for me, as the deadline is in April.

I am reading a book called "The Graduate Grind" by Hinchey and Kimmel. This book looks critically at the culture and customs of the graduate education system. Essentially, the book points out the flaws of the institution, citing the University's habits of forcing conformist attitudes into their students. Add to this the stigmatization of students who are considered "others" (i.e. minorities, females, gays/lesbians, working class students). The System is a giant mouth with shark teeth that chews up Others. I am an Other. Mentally disabled, female, minority, bisexual, and working class. If I am indeed accepted into this program, I am already expecting a backlash against me. While I am passionate about the subject I am no idiot when it comes to subtle forms of discrimination or sabotage, and I have already been mistreated by faculty as an undergraduate (falsely accused of cheating by one professor and given a 0 grade on an assignment I turned in a total of 3 times by another professor, requiring me to inundate him with emails during his sabbatical with email evidence that he had received my work, thus forcing him to change my grade by an entire letter grade).
While I was a pothead, the worst case scenario was that I could get stabbed or shot or arrested during my attempts to acquire marijuana. Now that I am sober and a dutiful student, I find that Academia is another type of jungle; one where I could be failed, expelled, sabotaged, or psychologically attacked by people who believe themselves to be my intellectual superiors. I honestly can't tell you which lifestyle was worse.

I have every intention of groveling at the feet of my professor for the sacred letter of recommendation. Not because I want to partake in this culture of back-stabbing, superiority-complex driven, conformist crap, but because suffering this will lead me to my goal of teaching language or developing new strategies for language acquisition. I want to create, and apparently this requires a little certificate stating I threw my chips in and gambled with my time and money, but so it goes (as Kurt Vonnegut Jr. wrote).

Besides, as a mentally ill person living in society that abhors a schizophrenic, I am quite used to faking civility, friendliness, and conformity to others around me. This will be just another 2 years of lying, deception, and method acting. The only difference is, I won't be alone, as I hear the faculty is equally versed in subterfuge.

My love/hate affair with Academia

I spent 4 months cultivating my grades to an A- average. I am carrying 16 units, over full-time, of upper-division courses. I tended to my homework and to my academics like a gardener tends to her roses and sunflowers. Everyday, homework, studies.

In one to two weeks my months of hard work has been undone. My grandfather was the closest thing I had to a father my whole life. He died right before Thanksgiving and since that time I have had a hard time concentrating and doing well in my classes. I bombed a quiz. I bombed the first draft of a paper. One would assume that since my grades were in the 90th percentile, I'd be alright. But no, weighted grades means that my top grades plummeted to a low B in one class, a C in 2 others. That academia is built this way; allowing a student who maintained an A for four months, only to take it away in a heartbeat, is a damn shame.

Then there's all the other issues. Students disregard my work because they think I'm getting it "easy" because I'm a minority. Just the other day, a student complained about his 78% score on his homework by saying that a fellow who happens to be Indonesian got an 86% on his homework that was "identical" and that the professor must be a reverse racist.
 That's funny, considering the professor is a White guy who made a racist remark himself about how Mexicans are "dishwashers." Being a Mexican myself (or Chicana, since I was born here in California), this stung. You're hated either way; either you're a lowly dishwasher or you're getting it easy because of your race.

Recently a professor falsely accused me of cheating, allegedly because she though a scribble on my answer sheet was a cheat sheet (it was just the exam question written on my paper so I wouldn't have to keep glancing up at the whiteboard). My thought, however, is that her action was far more nefarious. It was as if she were searching for a reason to destroy my academic potential---the only brown skinned girl in the class, of course, I had to have been cheating, right? Or maybe it was my tattoos that made her peg me as a deviant type. Whatever her motivation, I gritted my teeth and explained myself. I was polite even though I had been totally humiliated in front of my peers! She later sent out a mass email to our class apologizing for her behavior, but it was far, far too late.

These examples are just the tip of the ice burg when it comes to the ugly side of academia. Professors yell about how all their students are cheating, all of their students are being allowed in due to affirmative action, blah blah blah. Well, this is my side of the coin: my grades are better than the others, that's why I'm in college, not because of a long-since banned affirmative action program. My grades are better than quite a few students even now that they've dropped due to my grieving state, even though I feel like crying every day because I miss the only man in my life who was reliably good to me. I deserve to be in academia. I'm not leaving. Ridiculously weighted grades, insulting students, false accusations, plummeting grades and all----I'm willing to take this all because I told my grandfather on his deathbed that I would complete college and get a job, that he wouldn't have to worry about me because I would be doing alright.