God is Great, Coffee's Good, and People are Crazy.

It's my 2nd week back from a spring break filled with travel, snow, family, friends, and cats in two different states, and already I feel like I'm ready for another one. One cruel trick of Oberlin (and other schools, I guess), is that you schedule for the following semester about 2/3 of the way into the current semester. By this time, you're getting a little tired of your current classes, but still have what feels like an eternity left in them. And this is usually the point in the semester when I burn out, and decide that it's more important for me to clean my apartment or go on a 2 hour grocery shopping adventure than do the next day's homework. At the same time, I have a lot of academic energy from planning the next semester. So that's where I am now.

This phenomena didn't make it easier to study for my cognitive psychology exam today. I stayed up the latest I've ever stayed up studying for an exam (2 am, come on, a girl's gotta get some sleep). And boy am I glad I did. While I felt like I was just staring at my notes over and over again, when I got to the test this morning, I felt like I knew about 85% of the material, which is really really good for me on a psych test (the one exception was the test when I complained to my friend about people who get 97s and ruin the grading curve after finding out that the curve was only 3 points, only to later pick up my exam and discover that I was the one with the 97). And while I'm pretty sure that this won't match my legendary curve ruining exam results (I mean, I talked about "homework wine" in one of the answers. My professor is either going to love it or refer me to the counseling center), I stepped out of the test feeling okay about my work.

But I didn't start blogging to tell you about my exam. I want to write about over caffienation and important academic decisions.

I guess my coffee habit started freshman year. I was indifferent to the stuff, but after finals week, I learned to use the substance sparingly in order to maximize productivity. My habit really kicked into gear when I got a summer job at a dispensary, I mean, coffee shop. By the end of sophomore year, I was up to 2-3 high test cups a day. I've cut down a bit in my old age, but during the peak of my coffee consumption, I accidentally declared my major while strung out on a particularly strong to-go cup of Black River brew. Declaring my major wasn't an accident, but I'm pretty sure the enthusiastic conversation I had with my department chair about psychology and West Virginia and Oberlin was a result of caffeine, since I haven't shown that much enthusiasm for psychology since.

So over a year later, on the day before my infamous homework-wine cognitive psych exam answer, when I was rushing around like a maniac trying to go to class and take care of business and study and oh did I mention meet with a professor in the sociology department about an honor's project (I don't want to talk about this now because I'm scared I will jinx it and there's a lot of background work involved, but I am so excited), I accidentally/on purpose consumed two travel mugs of CDS and Oberlin Market coffee.

Two travel mugs is not that much coffee, but part of my current coffee habit involves cutting my daily morning French press with decafe coffee so I don't turn into a crazy lady. And with no time that morning for my trusty French press, I had to resort to stress drinking other people's coffee.

I could go on all day about the best coffee in Oberlin and how too much bad coffee made me tear up because someone said "kittens dying" and write long ranting e-mails and shake and misinterpret almost every social interaction (wait, was he hitting on me? Am I supposed to walk away now? Does that girl want to start a fight?). But to make a long story short, I met with the professor, she really liked my idea, she offered to help me pull academic strings, and I figured out what I need to do before I can start this project.

I'm searching for a good way to tie in homework wine, spring break, academia, scheduling and over-caffeination so I can finish tonight's homework and get more than 4 hours of sleep tonight. I would say something about coffee being an academic lubricant for me, but I'm pretty sure that's not actually true, as it makes me kind of tense and crazy when used in excessive amounts. I'm not sure there's a moral to this story except for perhaps, study hard, get enough sleep, and make your own coffee you lazy girl. And academic enthusiasm is a good thing!