The FE Exam. If you've talked to me at all in the past month or two, you should know that the big thing on my mind these days is my upcoming FE/EIT (Fundamentals of Engineering/ Engineer-In-Training) exam this Saturday (10/27). It's seriously got me stressed out. Between that, the work stress, the sleep deprivation, and other things going on, I feel like I'm near the breaking point psychologically. (Hopefully after this month ends, I can breathe a bit easier.)

But yea, so a bit of explanation is in order, I suppose. The FE is an eight-hour test held twice a year all across North America(?) that covers basically EVERYTHING you learned in your 4 years in college. It's kinda like a "chuunin exam" to become an engineer, haha- in the US, to become a licensed Professional Engineer (PE), you have to take a first exam (the FE exam), then work a few years, then take a second exam (the PE exam)- after which they give you an official rubber stamp, you can put "PE" as a title behind your name, and you have to pay a renewal fee every few years, hah.

Being a licensed PE is really important in some fields of engineering and absolutely irrelevant in others, so not everyone chooses to take the exams. (In fact, MOST don't, it seems.) My tentative observation is that, the more likely you are to kill a bunch of ppl if your design fails, the more important it is to be licensed- so like it's uber-important for say, civil engineers. And as luck would have it, my company (or rather, its parent company) is essentially a construction company, so it places pretty big emphasis on getting your PE. They're the ones that suggested I take the FE in the first place, and listed it as one of my career goals for the year. >_<

But yea, I remember back at UT, they sent out an email suggesting we take the FE as we're graduating before we forget everything, but most people I know didn't take it very seriously cuz it was "optional." I've since found out that at many colleges (like UNLV), the engineering students are required to take it to graduate. Woulda been a good idea though, cuz even after only one year out of school, it's shocking how much I've forgotten. =/ Questions that used to be absolutely cake for me (sliding block on an inclined ramp) and woulda taken about 30 seconds before, took me like 30 minutes to figure out how to do again. -_-

So I've been studying on and off for about the last 2 months now. Getting progressively more and more hardcore as the deadline nears (feeling the noose around my neck helps me get my butt in gear). But yea, the test is this weekend, and my schedule the past two weeks has basically been: wake up around 6:30, get to work at 8, work till 6, study till 11, go home and eat dinner, cry myself to sleep around 1, repeat, hah. And I've got a major deadline at work wrapping up at the end of this month too, and with everything, uggghhhh... I just feel totally stressed to the bone. Averaging 5 or 6 hours of sleep a night doesn't help things either. I dunno, this whole sleep deprivation thing used to be so much easier in college. =/

I dunno, I mean, there IS always the option of retaking it, I suppose. But I feel like I really committed to this one. I'm missing my grandfather's 80th birthday banquet in Taiwan to take this stupid test. (I'll be the only one on my mom's entire side of the family not there, so I've turned myself into the bad grandson (AGAIN!) for this. =( Ugghh, I feel like time and time again, I'm being forced to choose between family and career... and I think I'm making the wrong choices. =/ ... I should stop there, before this tangent turns into a rant-fest.) And I had to email professors I hadn't talked to in years, to ask if they'd be willing to fill out recommendations for me; had to ask two of my bosses as well. I'd die of the embarrassment of having to ask them all again if I put off taking (or had to retake) this test.

But yea, I keep hearing different things about how hard the test is. "Yea, any retard could pass that test- it was a joke!" "Dude, it's not as easy as you think," "You better know that reference manual like the back of your hand," ...I don't know who to believe, but if my performance on the practice books are any indication, this could be bad... =X

These two black widows have made their homes on my patio. (The arachnid variety, if I even need to specify, AHAHAHA.) Now, I'm no entomologist (or arachnologist, technically, since spiders aren't true "insects"), but I know the scarlet hourglass of death when I see it, hah. From my somewhat limited knowledge of spiders, I know that the black widow is regarded as one of the most dangerous, and is one of maybe four types of spiders with venom toxic enough to potentially kill a human (albeit, probably only a weak, sickly one).

But yea, I was pretty shocked, and I told my coworkers about it, and they were like, "yea, that's nothing special. They're pretty common around here. Just don't mess with them, and they won't mess with you." I dunno, I guess I'd just never seen one before I moved out to Vegas. I remember black widows were the kinda thing we joked about back in the schoolyards of Plano, like, "yea, you better watch out, or a black widow'll come for you in your sleep!" So yea, now I've seen both black widows and scorpions at my apartment complex. =O If I see poisonous snakes too, I'm out of here! >:O

Whispers of the Heart (The Dangers of Lotus Gates). I had some of the best rage I've tasted in a long time at the gym tonight, allowing me to work out until I nearly puked before calling it quits. It was like unleashing a limit break (to use the Final Fantasy terminology). And it felt really good at the time, but afterwards I was reflecting on the risks of tapping into your body's reserves like that. I touched on the topic of lotus gates in a post a couple weeks back, and I thought I should have some follow-up discussion.

Given the fact that Naruto is just a cartoon/manga, a bit of embellishment and exaggeration is expected, but I think there IS quite a bit of truth to the concept of lotus gates. The idea is that your body has these natural caps on how much it typically lets you exert. And you can exceed these limits, but in doing so, there's a price to paid. (Sometimes you willfully open the gates, and sometimes it's your body's own natural reaction to the situation. For example, whenever you get nervous/excited and you get a decent amount of adrenaline flowing through your body, when the adrenaline wears off, you find yourself unreasonably exhausted. It's like a chemically induced fatigue (from adrenaline withdrawal?) that follows the high.)

But the deeper you delve into your reserves, the steeper the price. And it's a thin line- push it too far too fast, and you get muscle tears, strains, dislocations. Those are some of the immediate consequences, but usually it's a lot more gradual. From personal experience, I'd say the consequences of physical exertion in roughly escalating degree of severity, go something like: fatigue, muscle soreness, cramps, spasms, nausea, complete muscle unresponsiveness, tunnel vision/blacking out, loss of consciousness. (Vomiting goes somewhere in the list too, hard to say exactly where.)

And to all that, you might say, "Oh, those are no big deal. With a couple days' rest, you're as good as new." And for occasional lotus gate usage, that might be the case. But repeated/continual use apparently DOES have more deleterious consequences. Earlier this year, I went to the doctor, and found out that I have a heart murmur. They did several tests and found that like one of the chambers of my heart is abnormally large. The doctor said that they typically see this problem with powerlifters and other ppl who do a lot more anaerobic exercise than aerobic (having high blood pressure plays a part too). All the sudden bursts of output required in going from 0 to 60 puts excess strain on one particular ventricle of your heart, and in response, the cardiac muscles start getting swoll. Swoll to the point that they hinder the valves from closing all the way (kinda like how buff guys can't touch their elbows together?), and you get abnormal flow and arrhythmia. (And come to think of it, I've been experiencing occasional arrhythmia for a long time, so I guess this problem has gone undiagnosed for quite awhile.)

And yea, I've been tossing more aerobic exercise into my workout, and been trying to warm up better. But I've just been thinking about how I guess using the lotus gates apparently DOES shorten your lifespan, and I can't help but think about all the damage I've done to my body already. I feel like it's kinda like making a deal with the devil for power or something. (Though I'm not sure if it's even POSSIBLE to push to the point that you die afterwards (i.e. opening the final (death) gate)... or maybe I just don't have enough willpower.) I dunno, I feel like I can't keep relying on the rage- it HAS been taking a toll on my body. (It's probably not psychologically healthy either.) *sigh* I need to develop some internal strength of my own without having to rely on the lotus gates. =/ I'm still too weak. Weak of body, weak of mind.

Still not yet who I want to be...

Sometimes you feel like you've got a decently strong hand until the flop comes out, and you're just like Ok, well THAT didn't go quite as expected. And you just gotta accept the fact that it's not in the cards for you this time. Sometimes you've got no choice but to fold 'em, and that's alright. And all you can do is root for your friends at the table who are chasing after the same pot.