Monthly Archives: November 2013

At least I’m gonna try…

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Watch this:

In some ways, I think we kind of do live forever. I mean, for all that I will ever know, I’m alive. What went before and what comes after me exist outside of my personal eternity. I’m woven into the tapestry, my part of the fabric adding a touch of colour and texture into the greater way of things.

But, you guys, you guys; we must LIVE while we can. It is our one job to live. Burn brightly, hold tightly to what you love. I know it’s a cliché, but I mean it.

Sometimes, I’m utterly overcome with the desire to run and fall head over heels in love with my life. Because it is too far precious a gift to take lightly. And too beautiful to take seriously: After all, none of will get out of life alive. So LIVE it while you can. While you are conscious of the miracle of chances and choices that resulted in your being. Here. Now. Don’t waste a moment. Imagine the end of your life. Imagine what, as an afterthought, you might have done with all those moments you took for granted. I’m not sure who said this, but it’s a gooder: “You are a perishable item: Live accordingly.”

I don’t do this all the time. But I’m more and more aware of it. And I will tell you this:

At least I’m gonna try.

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Picture this (and then pin it).

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First, just picture it.

No seriously you guys, you’re really gonna need to actually use your imagination, because I haven’t figured out yet how to add tabs on my blog. I mean, yeah, I have a couple of pages, but I haven’t sorted out the logistics, so anything I post is just added onto the existing post, thus creating The Longest Post in History. But you don’t care about all these details, do you? Nope. You don’t. I don’t blame you. I almost don’t, or at least I don’t care quite enough to do anything about it.

Yet. Just wait. No really, you’re probably gonna have to wait.

See, what I want to do is have this be all awesome and my website. I want a page dedicated to clothes and style and, of course, shoes. I very much enjoy these things (especially shoes) and would like to pull together some style notes. I have many Instagram photos of my lower outfits. It’s hard to take a full-body selfie that captures my outfit, so generally, it’s a photo from my middle down. Hey, you do what you can, right?

On another note, do you know how much I love Pinterest? I do. Hint: It’s a lot. 7,198 pins a lot. Oh, wait—7,199. See? See what happens? What a great site. I love that I can be a hoarder of beautiful things without actually hoarding them. This site has literally changed my life. Or at least my style. I will happily admit that between Pinterest and my trip to France last year, my style has evolved into something that is definitely Bay (and whoever else has pinned my gazillion same pins).

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I sort of feel like anyone who has gotten engaged, gotten married, decorated a home or ever done pretty much anything ever, prior to the dawn of Pinterest, should get a redo. Not because I would change my wedding—it was perfect!—but I would do other extra crafty things and it would be amazing. I would paint chevrons on my office walls and add glitter to my bathroom paint. I would bake cake pops and decorate them like miniature pumpkins and I would finally know what to do with my hair.

I love it. Though, one thing I don’t love is the misguided, but probably well-intentioned weight-loss motivation. “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,” is lame. Come on. There are lots of good ones, but I wish my Pinterest peeps would just can it with the weight-loss pins and all the “amazing” before and afters.

Now I’m going to go look at my Creatures board. You might want to, too. If you like The Cutest Animals in the World. Or not. Your choice (what’s wrong with you? Look at the cute animals I have pinned!).

 

Aaaand we’re back.

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Where’d you go? It’s been all silence for at least a month!

Just kidding. It’s not you, it’s me: I was busy doing busy things [read: procrastinating on studying]. So really I have no excuse for not blogging. You’d think I’d have been posting twice a day. You know, in all the time I should’ve been studying, but was clearly just examining air molecules. Did you miss me?

In other news, I just received word yesterday that I passed my written final, so that’s good news. I was on the fence about how I’d done. I wasn’t too worried, being that I’ve only ever failed one other test in my life, and it was finance and so I don’t care, because I passed the course. So there, Finance.

And now you have get to read about that exam. Finance was my nemesis during my MBA days. It didn’t make sense, it involved math and therefore was The Worst. Accounting also involved numbers, but at least it made sense: Debits and credits, people. Cash in, cash out. Just for the record, accounting totally made me cry, too (okay, I made me cry about accounting), but it made waaaaaay more sense than finance.

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On the last day of class before the finance final, we did what one does in every penultimate class and reviewed the concepts we’d covered over the previous months. Oh, wait—nope, no she didn’t. My finance prof did NOT review anything, but instead taught one last concept: Weighted Average Cost of Capital, or WACC (and yes, I did call it “whack” in my head, feeling like I was winning by name calling).

She thought this was okay. I did not. “But Rachelle,” she said condescendingly, or what others would’ve described as encouragingly, “it’s the same as what you’ve already learned. We’re just putting it together.”

No, I thought, it is most definitely NOT the same.

“You need to understand,” she snipered (or said kindly. Whatever).

No, I do not. I do not need to understand. I need to pass. Scrape by (“scraping by” in the MBA program meant anything above a B, which was some ridiculously high percentage, like 90%. Anything less was a fail.).

I wanted to complete finance and never use it again.

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I go home and study effectively freak out because I can’t. Get. This. Thing. It makes no sense. It’s not going to be on the formula sheet, because it’s supposed to be so frigging “understandable”.

This is when Adam reminded me that I knew how to study and it didn’t include hurling myself on the sword of the thing I understood the least, but rather reviewing my strongest areas. Excel where you can and take the hit on the things you don’t get, instead of trying to ace the stuff you don’t know and then missing the stuff you would’ve known if you hadn’t wasted all your study time on the financial equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle.

This guy. He is smart. So that’s what I did. It was common sense. After all, how much could a few questions on one topic be worth? We had a whole course to be test on our knowledge.

This was good thinking. Until I got to the exam and turned over my paper. The exam was out of 35. This is never a good sign. There are a lot of points on each question. You mess up a few answers and those heavily weighted percents really start to add up. Or down, I suppose, more accurately describes what happens.

Like any good student, I flipped through so as to see the beast I was facing. And this is when I saw the one question on WACC. Yup. Just one measly little question, which is good news, right?

Wrong.

That one question was worth 14 marks. HOLY CRAP IF I DON’T GET THIS THEN I PRETTY MUCH HAVE TO ACE THE REST OF THE ENTIRE EXAM. PANIC. PANIC.

I wrote the rest of the exam. I was pretty sure I did okay, but I knew I hadn’t aced 21 questions. Then I stared at the WACC question. I stared at the wall. I had more than 1.5 hours left of the exam and nothing to do but cry (which I did), pray (looking upward for divine intervention/inspiration) and worry. Oh, and write a passive aggressive note about why I couldn’t answer the stupid question.

Then I went out into the hallway and burst into [more] tears. I’d failed. If I failed finance, I didn’t get to rewrite: It was one of the few classes in which a fail meant a mandatory retaking of the whole bloody course. Extra time, extra tuition and, let me be honest, I could take the course about 30 times and still not get the bloody concepts.

It was the end of the world. Seriously, I think purgatory for me would involve a never-ending finance class. It’d be a special kind of hell.

Anyway, long story made short: I failed the exam. But, let the record show that I got 17/35. Yup. One-half a percent more and I’d have ridden the pass line. So, I was pretty impressed with myself.

Oh, and I’d busted my rear on all the course work all term, so when all was said and done, my class work grade carried my failed exam score and I passed the course.

Hallelujah.