Right now I'm planning on going to bed without finishing all of my work. Normally this would cause me no end of stress. However, right now I really don't care that much. In fact, since I did Pi-Throw I've had great trouble forcing myself to do any work at all. To a certain degree I know that it's due to anxiety about the amount of work I have to do, but it feels different somehow.

Is this what my world changing feels like? A couple weeks ago I did something I'd never done before. I didn't hand in any assignments. For the first time in my life I've failed something (actually, a lot of somethings). I'm still here. The world isn't crashing down around me. Pi-Throw made $4 826.30 and people keep complementing me about how well I ran the event. On Sunday I received notice that I won two scholarships (well, technically one of them is just a book prize). I'm really not sure if I'm becoming depressed or if I'm actually healthier than I was before.

Can't Talk

I just had one of those conversations where you’re in public and there’s mixed company and you can’t actually say anything, so people are left just guessing what you actually meant. Then, of course, someone who is talking about something completely different thinks they’re speaking about the same thing as you and by the time the conversation is done you realize that nothing that was said made any sense, you agreed with someone when you shouldn’t have, and you haven’t the faintest idea what the other people you were talking to think of what you said. Also, you really don’t what they said. In short, communication was utterly futile. I’m wishing that I lived by myself right now.

I really hate Fridays.

You're Sudan!

Every time you get a headache, you reach for some aspirin, only to
realize that someone destroyed it. That's just how things are going for you right
now... it's hard to eat, hard to sleep, hard to not have a headache. You try to
relax, but people always jump on you about something that doesn't make sense. If
you were a goat, you'd be a Nubian.

Take the Country Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid

The headache thing and the sleep thing are remarkable accurate.

I Rock. . .

The total for Pi-Throw is approximately $5300 with about $900 in expenses. However, we should have recuperated $180 of that by year-end (it’s just the way the SESS’s deal with GW and the Pat works). It’s been interesting to see the reactions of different people when I tell them how much we raised. Some are uttered shocked by the amount (in a good way) while others are not at all impressed. I presume that it’s just a question of your frame of reference. Seeing as how most people reading this will have no frame of reference for Pi-Throw, I’ll provide you with one. Last year Pi-Throw netted $6400 and grossed approximately $7000. In words, expenses were lower and revenues were much higher. Despite this fact, I remain happy with the total considering I started working on this event about six weeks before it happened.

Right now I’m trying to recover from something I’ve never done before. Namely, completely ignoring my imposed responsibilities (i.e. school) to work on Pi-Throw. So far the road appears long and fraught with great burdens. I now give you some of the highlights and lowlights of Pi-Throw, its inception, execution, and aftermath.

Lowlights:

• Strained relations with faculty and the Dean’s Office, most notably, receiving an email from an instructor who is a reference on my resume stating that Pi-Throw is an “ethically flawed” fundraiser
  

• Being brought closer to letting out a string of curses than I have in a long time by a graphic designer more concerned with the DPI on an image than getting it to print on time
  

• Missing three days of school (including some classes where I don’t know anyone to get notes from), while waking up at 6:30am every day and getting to sleep sometime around 11:30pm to 2:30pm
  

• Missing over a week of homework, including not handing in one assignment in every class I’m taking (and not handing in two in quantum mechanics)
  

• Writing a thermal and statistical physics midterm worth 25% on 45 minutes of study time (thank goodness for open-book tests)
  

Highlights:

• Knowing that my uncle, my boss over the summer, and my quantum mechanics instructor all got pies
  

• Me having the courage to step away from school to do something I actually care about
  

• All of my amazing volunteers being amazing. Special kudos goes out to J. for feeding me and not charging me anything
  

• C. and E. (and C.’s friend L.) for giving me supper on Friday night at 8:30pm when I was so hungry I thought I’d die but I was afraid to leave the office. The meal consisted of a baguette, a piece of brie, GW lager, and, of course, a coconut.
  

• C. and B. for giving me tea with honey, a sofa to sit on, and people to talk to when I really needed it

Recipe for Opening a Coconut:

1. Attempt to crack coconut on the corner of the table.
2. Realize the coconut is winning and switch to paper cutter.
3. Realize the coconut is still wining and take it outside the building, hurl it two stories into the air, and let it drop on the asphalt.
4. Eat coconut, removing stubborn pieces of shell with blunt-nosed pliers, as necessary.

Pi-Throw

Seeing as how it's eating through all of my time I might as well blog about it. So I present to you one of the reasons I'm running away to Calgary this weekend:

Pi-Throw is an annual charity event held by the Saskatoon Engineering Students'’ Society (S.E.S.S.). Pi -Throw will take place from November 16^th through 18^th (Wednesday through Friday).

Our Charities:

• Tamara's House: A local non-profit organization dedicated to providing services to support the complete healing of adult survivors of child sexual abuse.
• Website: www.tamarashouse.sk.ca

• Engineers Without Borders: An international development organization dedicated to promoting human development through access to appropriate technology.
• Websites: www.saskatchewan.ewb.ca (local chapter), www.ewb.ca (national)

How Pi-Throw Works:

• Individuals pay to have a friend, family member, or colleague pied in the face with a custard pie at a given time and place. Sending a pie costs $10.
• Anyone who receives a pie has four options:

1. Take the pie in the face for free (a garbage bag and paper towels are provided)
2. Re-direct the pie to anyone in Saskatoon for $10
3. Buy the pie for $20
4. Choose not to participate

• Volunteers deliver the pie and give the person to be pied his/her options.

• If the person chooses to take the pie in the face for free, volunteers auction off the rights to pie the person to the highest bidder.

To Send a Pie:

• Call the S.E.S.S. office at 966-7700, come to the office in person, or visit the kiosk at the base of the Place Riel escalators. Pies can be sent anywhere in Saskatoon between the hours of 8:00 am and 5:00 pm.

• Cash, cheques, debit, Visa and MasterCard are accepted at the office, but the kiosk is cash only. Cheques should be made out to the S.E.S.S. and tax receipts will be provided upon request.

Greatly Agitated

I’m having one of those days (or I should say weeks) where everything seems insurmountable. I’m incredibly worried about Pi-Throw, seeing as how a great many of the people I’m working with just don’t seem interested in reading what I send them or listening to what I say, or doing what I tell them to do. Currently, I haven’t even heard from the people who do what I ask them to do recently. Ergo, I’m afraid that everything will fall apart and I’ll be left holding the bag because I didn’t do everything myself. Doing everything myself isn’t even an option right now.

I just hope that I’ll de-stressed (note: MS Word doesn’t like the word I just made up, but since when is the grammar checker right anyways?) and caught up by the time I leave for Calgary on Thursday (and I get to see my cousins, and aunts, and uncles, and wildebeest). I think I’m going to shower and try to sleep. This not showering when I’m busy thing is one of the major things separating me from my little sister. Of course, I don’t have to deal with jerky high school boys complaining about my smell (I swear if I was teaching a high school and I heard the boys do half the complaining they do about girls . . .).

I’m done for now.

Watch Smallville.