I hate today. Hate it. Hate it.

GIVE BACK MY SIXTY MINUTES.

I hate you, whoever came up with the loony idea of robbing people of their time!
You suck.

Why does every corner shop and big retailer want me to "like" them on facebook?? It's so annoying especially when they link offers and discounts to this asinine practice.

I want those offers, dammit. But I don't want facebook. I won't get those offers and discounts if I don't submit to the lameness and sheep-herding on facebook.

Hmm...

I guess my resistance against facebook trumps my attraction to those offers.

I am glad it took so little time to get this quandary sorted.

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PS: Where did the drawing gadget on (e:strip) go?

I hate it when I have just booked a ticket and find that I could have got it for $20-$50 less on a competing airline. In this case, the lesson learned is that Delta has cheaper fares coming back from NYC compared with JetBlue. I have seen this so many times. JetBlue is not exactly the cheapest as everyone believes.

I don't like flying and vastly prefer taking Amtrak. But whenever I am headed back home, anxiety trumps dislike and I usually fly. Going to the city, I always take the train.

I just hate all these price differences and deals in a way. They manipulate your thoughts so efficiently without you even realizing it.

Whiny whine.

The cold, fever and chills got out of hand so I had to go out in the rain to Walgreens at around 1:00 AM yesterday night. It was like one of those descriptions in the Wuthering Heights of wild rainy miserable nights but without any of the fun.

The Walgreens on North has undergone some kind of ludicrous rearrangement of shelves. It took me a whole 5 minutes to realize that everything had been shuffled around. The cold and flu medications are not with the other medications on the far wall anymore. I finally found them in the next aisle. It made no logical sense. I am convinced the whole point of the rearrangement was to make sick people suffer even more in their misery.

And that was not all. The walgreens brand was nowhere to be seen. The shop is aggressively promoting some new hippie form of the Nyquil concoction called Nature Fusion I looked at the ingredient list:

Acetaminophen
Dextromethorphan
Doxylamine Succinate
Citric Acid
Flavor
Glycerin
High fructose corn syrup
Honey
Polyethylene Glycol
Propylene Glycol
Purified Water
Sodium Citrate

Basically what I had been eating along with "flavor" (surely a taunting joke on people with colds), two different glycols, high fructose corn syrup AND Honey. I got it anyway.

And Walgreens was out of Biscoff Speculoos. How unbelievably unkind is that??

When I came home I couldn't open the stupid Nyquil bottle. I tried so hard for nearly 1/2 hour. It was the hardest bottle to open. You need to press down the lid while twisting it anti-clockwise. You can tell it's not going to open because it makes this annoying rachet-like noise. At that point I was almost livid with rage. I took a knife and ran it all round underneath the rim of the hideous cap and tore it off. It probably won't close well again, but who cares at this point?

I think I must have gone past 104 degree F with all that anger. When I was brushing my teeth later, my eyes looked completely bloodshot. They are still kind of murky now. I can only guess that I must have split many minor vessels in my conjunctiva. When I finally got at the syrup, it was extremely sweet. Sweeter than any other cough syrup I have ever had my entire life. This is what happens when people think that honey is not enough and go ahead and lay on the high fructose corn syrup.

So the point of this post is that NyQuil's new bottles are so hard to open that you need a knife. At 3:00 AM, anger got the better of me and I composed a nasty letter to Vicks, but in my hurry, I didn't save it and it got deleted. I have no idea now what I wrote in it. All I can remember that it was a page long before the Nyquil knocked me out. Now it seems silly and trivial but I was so unbelievably wretched and murderous last night. Illness does strange things to people, especially to me.

Update: 26th February, 2012

I received this message from a guest:

21372 02/26/2012 @ 21:08 guest @ 75.142.240.232 says:
Nature Fusion Drama
I loved the previous NyQuil drama. Walmart must have pulled all of the regular stuff off the shelves so you were guided to purchase the new (green) version of cough syrup. Got it home to my ailing husband and heard him cussing and grunting and whining about getting the damn thing open. Thinking he was inept and just felt to crappy to get it open. I asked to try.....needless to say I wore my hand out and tried using the can opener notches on my kitchen shears and only managed to strip all of the outer lid threads. So I went to the web to see if anyone else was so inclined to cut the top off. Oh boy! There is a ton of folks that would like watch the makers of Vick's products open their own designs. After reading NyQuil Drama and other similar complaints, my husband used a knife to break the child protection and was able to finally take the dosage.

So it's not just me!!!!! Vicks should be ashamed of its design team. Making sick people suffer even more in their misery! I am glad I was able to spread the hatred around. ;-)

I have a temperature of 103 Degree F and a pulserate of 97/minute . I am shaking with chills even though I am wearing a sweater and woollen stockings AND drinking a hot cup of tea. My nose and throat are burning as if someone has put in hot embers into them. To add to the irritation my nose is also dripping like a broken faucet. It's not pretty at all. I tried to lie down to sleep but my head hurts with dull pains in a supine position. I am also very dizzy when I get up from a sitting position even though I am fairly certain I am well-hydrated. I can feel that my chest is congested with some really thick mucus. Not much is coming out, which is worrying me. Whatever little comes out once every 2 hours or so is a greyish yellow in colour and very thick.

So here I am typing my detailed symptoms into the new wide (e:strip) text area that I like very much!

Seriously, this is the worst cold at the worst possible time. My work is suffering because I am making a ton of mistakes and I can't go to see my brother.

My flat is littered with lozenge drop wrappers and soup bowls. I can't wait for this cold to go away but it seems like it never will. I am on

• ibuprofen 400 mg X 4-6 hourly for the pain,
• Co-trimoxazole BD (12 hourly) for the secondary infection and
• Paracetamol (Acetaminophen) for the fever.
• Guaiphenesin (oral) 1 tbsp X 2 hourly - expectorant
• Dextromethorphan 1 tbsp X 2 hourly - anti-tussive

AND none of it is working in expected ways!!!!

WHHHHHHYYYYYY do I have to be sick now?? I have so much to do and can't do anything effectively. I hate being sick.

I woke up today with the most excruciatingly severe throat pain. I had a couple bowls of that squash soup and 400 mg of ibuprofen.

Now the ground is spinning as I type this and my peripheral vision has an extraordinary sense of movement.

I hope to goodness this won't be a repeat of the benedryl drama. I know I am not the biggest of people but common doses of medicine have the weirdest effect on me. The kid dose of 9-10mg/kg comes to around 42 X 10 = 420 mg. I am 20 mg under the kid dose.

And I have dizziness. It is so ludicrous that on the very rare occasions I HAVE to take medicines, ALL the frustrating side effects come on to haunt me in full force. I mean who gets dizzy with ibuprofen, one of the most common NSAIDs?? ME. Arrrgh.

I hate rainy cloudy days like today. I hate them so much. They increase my panic over trivial things. I have my windows open and some MORON is smoking on top of all this. It makes me livid. I detest the smell of cigarette smoke and it makes me angry when I have no control over people who just force me to smell and breathe it against my will. I wish I could just go out, break their cancer-stick into pieces and strangle them right there. I have NO goodwill for smokers who continue to smoke in a CLEARLY marked NON-SMOKING building!

It's grossly unfair to the non smokers who pay with their health. We don't share your poor habits and your lack of motivation to quit so please don't poison us with your toxins.

I hate you smoker whoever you are. I wish you all the very nasty of gloom today and a complete lack of any good luck whatsoever. You deserve to be despised and I completely loathe your habit.

I am considering getting this sunshine simulator: I am not sure I have full blown seasonal affective disorder but I definitely don't like gloomy days and would like a sunlight simulator instead of or in addition to the regular CFL bulbs I have on all my lamps.

While I am hating on non-specific things, let me rant about about my hair as well.


That is not even an exaggeration. At this point my hair is bigger than my head and that is a really bad place to be in. Not only is it completey out of control and curling all over the place, it is also making my head feel heavy. I really should chop it all off.

Only, I thought I could let it grow for a bit but that is backfiring. The ugly phase is taking its toll.

I am really losing my patience with people who just can't seem to see the obvious or who have trouble thinking straight.

It's a sign that either I am reaching a point where I am not able to think straight myself or a point where I have no time for anything else other than my dissertation.

If it's the second, I hope I finish soon.

If I don't, I will end up as the most anti-social impatient jerk on this planet who views every second person with contempt. Seriously, the "quality-me" has been taking a nose-dive in the past week or so because everything other than finishing my dissertation seems irrelevant and every person who whines that things are more complex than what they want to make an effort to learn seems like a lazy no-gooder. I am also increasingly hating on former influences in my life who made me feel like crap at any point in the time I spent with them. I don't think I am an unreasonable person in general and I make a ton of effort to get along with people all the time. So their behaviour to me seems inexcusable now. I think I have come to a decision to put them on perennial ignore, going forwards. I cannot deal with such pettiness in my life anymore.

I know this non-humble intolerant ridiculously stupid phase has to end. I am seeing myself going from a person I am always comfortable being to a person I detest and totally not proud of. It is times such as these I wonder if 95% of intolerance in the world comes from people just being too busy with their own problems and not having any time or inclination to see anyone else's point of views. Or is it that they have finally come to a conclusion that their short lives on this planet is not worth wasting agonizing over things that seem like they are not quite right.

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Disclaimer: This is just me ranting over non-specific things mainly because I need my dissertation work to go faster and have no mindspace anymore to think patiently about things in general. You can safely ignore this post altogether because it's definitely not about you. The things and people who are annoying me definitely don't know about this blog or the fact that I whine non-specifically on it. Some of them don't even know I exist. LOL

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PS: I think the main reason behind all this intolerance is that I need to finish my dissertation. Every day that passes grates on my nerves and makes me lose one more pound to sleepless anxiety, adds one more extra dimension to my nightmares. It's not pretty.

Grad school can sometimes be painful.

I like discussing papers at journal club. I read most of them and try to contribute something to the discussion. I may not have the wisest thing to contribute but I try to take away something from every paper we discuss because I feel that 1 hour is my chance to get an insight into how people think when they read papers and how they might view things differently than I do (which is often the case). I really like the process of learning in that hour of journal club.

Students are required to be at the journal club even though they might have a million other things to do. Sometimes it feels like a bother, but in the end I think everyone learns something and also contributes something to the discussion if they spoke up even ONCE during the club. It is almost the nature of science. You cannot be in the thick of it and stop yourself from being involved. Every discussion at journal club is valuable because it is the collective sharing of thoughts that you might not get to hear when you are reading alone.

Faculty, perhaps, play an even more significant role in such journal clubs. They bring to our table their significant experience and expertise in the field. Their comments are almost ALWAYS worth hearing and their input is deeply appreciated. It's that rare hour where students can get an insight into how professionals in their field view any paper and research process.

However, all faculty are not mandated to be at journal clubs if they don't have the time. Since many of them are extraordinarily pressed for time, and have several competing interests, they don't come. Which is fine because if they feel like they have the time to make it, they do contribute to the discussion and that is always beneficial to all the students.

So, it hurts like hell when faculty you admire do turn up to the journal club (supposedly because they could make time for the club in their busy schedule), don't pay any attention to the discussion at the club because they were working right through it and then abruptly get up and leave midway without a word of explanation.

It hurts too much.

I guess it's part of growing up in grad school with faculty and other students subbing for your missing family. The lesson perhaps, is that your interests will never match up with everyone else's at the table and you cannot expect everyone you academically admire to make a trial at mentoring at the club, however brief that hour or even part of that hour might be. What I am really struggling with is do I prefer brutal honesty where the faculty tells you that the paper you picked is an utter waste of time or a completely silent cold approach where they do come but they just leave midway perhaps because they don't think it's worth their time to even say anything.

I think I pick honesty. Silence hurts more than I can express.