the workload here has been so crazy. i wish someone had warned me how insane the pace here can get. i keep forgetting that i’m not back home anymore, where getting A’s was actually easy and all i needed to master was the art of mugging and regurgitating. le sigh.

i know i really have to step up my game if i want to do well here, but i just feel like there’s so much to see and do here besides freakin’ homework. yet at the same time, i feel so crappy when i see all my classmates handing in their assignments and essays and staying in to study when i’m just out there goofing off and taking random train rides to nowhere. people here.. are not human. they seem to get so much work done in such little amounts of time, and there’s loads of the typical thing where they go ‘oh i havent studied’ but they end up getting A plusses on all the tests and quizzes :( i mean.. really.. i thought i was spending a lot of time studying here, and for a while i was getting really angry at myself for wasting so much time doing homework when i could be out there exploring the city and going to museums and art galleries, but in comparison to some of my peers, i’m not doing nearly enough work. so many of them stay up till the wee hours of the morning studying, every day.

midterms week was especially sucky. i spent about two weeks barely sleeping and fueling myself with red bull, lots of energy drinks and as much coffee as i could get my hands on O_O i was just so tired and stressed out all the time, coupled with the fact that i couldnt really stay awake anymore because coffee was starting to lose its effect on me and red bull, while effectively lending me the energy that i needed, would give me those horrible hangovers in the morning. but i was so desperate to stay awake that i just kept chugging the stuff anyway.

but guess what :) over the weekend before my last midterm paper, i got something really cool in the mail :) i got..

Puppy was telling me how he drinks green tea to keep awake, and because i’m so used to drinking chamomile tea to go to sleep, i’d never really thought of tea as something that could be used to keep people awake, even though i knew at the back of my mind that tea contains caffeine. so i recently started buying mugs of english breakfast tea from the university cafes, and found that tea actually does work really well on me. while it doesnt give me that electric buzz that coffee does, it does keep me awake enough, but without dehydrating me or giving me headaches the way coffee does for me these days.

so it was really nice to get a box of tea sent to me all the way from Malaysia :) it’s a special kind of tea called Hirameki, which means to ‘get inspired’, and says the box: if you need to feel relaxed but alert, you can ‘get Hirameki’. that’s exactly what i need for midterms week – something that will keep me awake but wont cause me to be jittery. it seems the active ’special’ ingredient that defines Hirameki is this thing called ‘theanine’. i’ve never heard of theanine, so i looked it up online and found that it’s an amino acid commonly found in tea that reduces mental and physical stress (!), produces feelings of relaxation (!!), and improves cognition and mood when paired with caffeine (!!!). zomgs.

thank you to the secret ice cream-loving person who sent me this box of tea all the way from Malaysia! you really shouldnt have :) … haha but then i’m totally not complaining!! tea, like everything else, is so expensive here in NY. and now i have a 100 free teabags of stressless and awakening tea!!! take that, super-expensive Blue Java cafe with the mean cashiers. patronize you i shall no longer.

anyway, ya man, a 100 teabags. my brain wasnt working as i was opening the box, and because i expected to see something like only ten teabags in there, i kinda ripped the box open a bit too quickly.. and sent teabags flying all over my room. wtf.

i’m having my second calculus midterm in about 16 hours’ time. it’s going to be my first coffee-less exam. Lipton, if you help me through this exam, i will love you forever and ever. i will even play your online game for hours on end. just please! give me an A for calculus!!!

wish me luck guys :( i didnt do too well for my first calc midterm and i really need to compensate for that with tomorrow’s exam. aaaaaaaaaaaa >___<

P/S: lo and behold, the Hirameki Way of brewing tea: