bad start

yesterday was the first 'real' exam day - 3 subjects. n it turned out.... bad.

to cut a long story short (n i hv to do that cuz there r 2 papers coming up tml, one of which i ve hardly studied for), at some point my mind decided it cudnt take anymore n stopped absorbing information well before i finished clearing my subjects. its like hitting a wall suddenly - your mind juz wanders no matter how hard u try to concentrate. so i was forcing myself to go on for the last 1 or 2 days n yesterday, well, i guess i burnt out.

the papers were not THAT hard, but i juz couldnt think clearly enuf to work my way thru all but the most elementary ones. like the one in bioorganic chem about Ru5P carbon fixation, i didnt memorize the exact mechanism but shud hv been able 2 work it out wif all the hints given in the paper, but sumhow i juz went round in circles n cudnt focus properly to do it. n i kicked myself afterwards to find that one wrong step messed up my whole answer. n there was another reaction mechanism problem which i cudnt work out by trial-n-error cuz i forgot wat the substrate's structure was like.

u noe that shitty feeling u hv when u KNOW a complicated question is actually very easy, but u juz cant focus well enuf to sort thru all the elements? like calculation questions involving many variables... there was one in biophysics that involved a long tedious calculation but if i had the presence of mind to cancel out certain variables i wudnt hv wasted so much time on the relatively straightforward calculation. anyway, i had that several times yesterday n felt like killing ppl when i went thru those questions again this morning n saw juz how easy they were (n juz how wrong my answers were yesterday cuz i wasnt thinking right).

n there was that stupid open book exam for elementary electrical engineering. the teacher's teaching was shit, but i KNEW i worked thru one of the questions b4 by myself, n there was one on operation-amplifiers that sumhow looked familiar (i think we did sumting similar in high sch). n anyway it was an open book exam so i shud hv been able to refer n work out the problems myself but guess what? i didnt bring the textbook. i was gonna depend on the sensei's shitty notes but found that my fogged state of mind didnt allow me to sort thru all the garbage to understand his diagrams.

at lunchtime i spilt miso soup on my jacket n jeans cuz i wasnt concentrating on drinking from the bowl. ok, i duno y exactly i managed to spill half a bowl of soup on myself when i wasnt on a moving vehicle, standing, talking to ppl or anything. its juz one of those days, u noe?

lately (since sunday or so) ive been having difficulty speaking coherently. my sentences tend to break up abruptly while i grope for words, n my articulation has become worse somehow. unlike previous bouts of 'incommunicabilty', this wasnt caused by extended lack of interaction wif ppl, cuz ive been hanging out wif other engineering ppl at the library (which has become our 2nd home). probably another side effect of mental overload.

after this exam im gonna check if theres a medical cause for this poor memory n bad mental stamina of mine. i dont see my frens turning into incoherent, absent-minded, brain-fogged idiots after extended periods of studying. a cursory search online has turned up magnesium deficiency as one of the possible culprits (some other symptoms fit, too). in any case, time to return to the swotting.............