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- Week 40: I signed out from the university and other stories.
Week 40: I signed out from the university and other stories.
What I've been up to, what I’ve read and no longer reading, and more intense paragraphs of my hatred for Sheldon (from TBBT).
Grace Iderima
October 04, 2025
Regular programming.
Sunday, September 28.
I'm currently in church. This is the second Sunday in a row that I've been to church, after being in church only two times this year, and maybe, 8-ish times last year. It's probably not even up to 8, but not more than 10.
The pastor just advised all of us to go watch the burial of Charlie Kirk. He's trying to give an illustration, but it just reminded me of something. I've been hearing about Charlie Kirk and his death, but I don't seem to understand why he's so important and his significance to the Christian community.
As a result of the rapture trend on TikTok and social media, generally. I somehow went into a rabbit hole to understand how it started. I saw people talking about the death of Charlie Kirk and how it's a major significance of the end times. A man died. He was assassinated. At some point, I thought he was a spiritual person or something.
Funny enough, when I got back from church, I read an article that made me understand why the American christian community liked him so much. Apparently, he's a martyr.
Friday, October 3.
It's currently 1:55 PM and I was in a good mood until I got a call from my project supervisor, about 7 minutes ago. Up until that point, all I had done was dance (a lot), listen to music, work on my project report a little bit. You know, atp, I had decided that I wasn't going to think about everything that's so wrong and just be “here right now.” UNTIL THAT PHONE CALL.
You know when you're trying to brush something off, but you're already in a bad mood, so nothing is helping anymore. That's now I felt (and still feel) after the call. Ever since we finished exams, it has just been one thing to the other with my project supervisor. Just angry about several things.
At some point, you just have to sit down and wonder if people in certain positions and qualifications realise that not everyone know as much as they do or have the experience as they do, so they actually don't understand you. Not because they're stupid or dumb, they're just not experienced and don't know what you know. It's just so annoying. I cannot wait to be done with this thing, so I can explain why exactly I'm upset today and with this entire thing. And trust, I will.
Now I understand why people were always giving me that sad, pity look when I tell them who my project supervisor is. It's well deserved.
I'm tired of this school, actually, but seeing that I'm done with my final exams, it's not too far now. I will be finally done with this school.
I wrote my final exams on the 26th of September, I wish I can say that was a very happy day for me, it wasn't. Not because I was going to miss my classmates or I was finally feeling the joy of being an undergraduate, I was just really exhausted from the entire week (and month) and the day felt anticlimactic. All I wanted to do that day was go home immediately after the exams.
When I started my exams, I had a problem with my finger. The pinky finger on my right hand which I use to write. I couldn't write properly, it was swollen and painful to move. Or just to be, generally. It was painful even when I wasn't moving it.
I thought I would be able to write my exams, I remember writing my first exams and I just kept writing and writing, until I thought I had permanently disfigured the finger because it wasn't moving from the writing position back to regular hand position.
During that weekend, I couldn't read throughout Saturday, until Sunday, when I decided that I would go to school and read for the exams there. Being out of the house made it easier for me. I wrote the exams and it passed. The finger stopped hurting by Saturday of that week.
I just remembered another upsetting exam experience, this particular one is coming to me now because it would have been totally avoided, but only God knows [redacted]. I actually didn't know how upset I was about that particular incident until now, wow. People are really weird. Plus, it's more interesting when they do a particular thing and then try to come back like nothing happened.
Anyways, I'm done with school and I'm currently working on my project. My project defense is scheduled to be in November, but I don't know if they'll bring it forward. The induction is in January, that's a ceremony I'm actually looking forward to. I will finally be free.
For some reason, I can't think of anything else to say, so I will just stop here.
💕 Something new I learned this week:
The Black Dolphin prison in Russia. I was reading a book talking about drug lords and gangs in Mexico, specifically El Chapo, so I went to look him up and I read about the prison he's in and I was curious about similar prisons, so I looked that up too.
💕 Something that brought me joy this week:
TikTok. Is this… addiction? Tiktok is actually really fun? The escapism is topnotch. Sadly, I've blocked the app again, so I can face my problems.
💕 Something I'm looking forward to:
Getting a job. I need money.
💕 What I'm most grateful for this week:
Not losing my head.
Books.
I started reading The Eminence In Shadow manga sometime last month. I didn't even know it was an anime until my brother told me. Anyways, I'm no longer reading it because, at some point, I had to ask myself, do I really want to continue reading a manga about an MC who's in so much denial and blind to everything that's happening around him? The answer was no.
Yes, obviously, the story is literally about him being a background character, but I just got tired of the way he treated the Shadow Garden. The Shadow Garden literally serves him and eats every word from his mouth, but he wouldn't think twice about betraying them just to do some weird background-but-actually-main-chatacter-acts. I stopped at chapter 41, right after the Mitsugoshi incident. And it's like 851 chapters in total?! Toh.
Everything else I'm reading is nonfiction, I'm currently reading two. The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison and Body Work by Melissa Febos. The Empathy Exams is a collection of essays exploring empathy and what it actually means. I enjoyed the first chapter, and I haven't been able to get into any other essay in the book. Body Work is a book about writing, mostly about yourself and experiences. There's been a chapter about the significance of memoirs and writing about self, a chapter about writing about sex, and I'm currently on a chapter about writing about other people.
💕 Some of my highlights from what I'm currently reading:
"Empathy comes from the Greek empatheia—em (into) and pathos (feeling)—a penetration, a kind of travel. It suggests you enter another person’s pain as you’d enter another country, through immigration and customs, border crossing by way of query: What grows where you are? What are the laws? What animals graze there?”
"Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see: an old woman’s gonorrhea is connected to her guilt is connected to her marriage is connected to her children is connected to the days when she was a child. All this is connected to her domestically stifled mother, in turn, and to her parents’ un-broken marriage; maybe everything traces its roots to her very first period, how it shamed and thrilled her.”
"You come back and find you aren’t alone. You weren’t alone when you were cramping through the night and you’re not alone now. Dave spends every night in the hospital. You want to tell him how disgusting your body feels: your unwashed skin and greasy hair. You want him to listen, for hours if necessary, and feel everything exactly as you feel it—your pair of hearts in such synchronized rhythm any monitor would show it; your pair of hearts playing two crippled bunnies doing whatever they can. There is no end to this fantasy of closeness. Who else is gonna bring you a broken arrow? You want him to break with you. You want him to hurt in a womb he doesn’t have; you want him to admit he can’t hurt that way. You want him to know how it feels in every one of your nerve endings: lying prone on the detergent sheets, lifting your shirt for one more cardiac resident, one more stranger, letting him attach his clips to the line of hooks under your breast, letting him print out your heart, once more, to see if its rhythm has calmed." (oh, fuck. )
"It wasn’t likely I would die. Dave didn’t know that then. Prayer isn’t about likelihood anyway, it’s about desire—loving someone enough to get on your knees and ask for her to be saved. When he cried in that chapel, it wasn’t empathy—it was something else. His kneeling wasn’t a way to feel my pain but to request that it end." (oh, fuck. )
"Transforming my secrets into art has transformed me. I believe that stories like these have the power to transform the world. That is the point of literature, or at least that’s what I tell my students. We are writing the history that we could not find in any other book. We are telling the stories that no one else can tell, and we are giving this proof of our survival to each other. What I mean is, tell me about your navel. Tell me about your rape. Tell me about your mad love affair, how you forgot and then remembered yourself. Tell me about your hands, the things they have done and held and hit and let go. Tell me about your drunk father and your friend who died. Don’t tell me that the experiences of a vast majority of our planet’s human population are marginal, are not relevant, are not political. Don’t tell me that you think there’s not enough room for another story about sexual abuse, motherhood, or racism. The only way to make room is to drag all our stories into that room. That’s how it gets bigger. You write it, and I will read it.”
"When does empathy actually reinforce the pain it wants to console? Does giving people a space to talk about their disease—probe it, gaze at it, share it—help them move through it, or simply deepen its hold?”
"Until the worst happens, it always might happen. When it actually does happen? Now, at least, you know.”
"Part of me has always craved a pain so visible—so irrefutable and physically inescapable—that everyone would have to notice. But my sadness about the abortion was never a convulsion. There was never a scene. No frothing at the mouth. I was almost relieved, three days after the procedure, when I started to hurt. It was worst at night, the cramping. But at least I knew what I felt. I wouldn’t have to figure out how to explain. Like Stephanie, who didn’t talk about her grief because her seizures were already pronouncing it—slantwise, in a private language, but still—granting it substance and choreography.”
"This was the double blade of how I felt about anything that hurt: I wanted someone else to feel it with me, and also I wanted it entirely for myself.”
"the hunch that I had a parched interior life activated only by the need for constant affirmation, nothing more. I wanted Dave to guess what I needed at precisely the same time I needed it. I wanted him to imagine how much small signals of his presence might mean.”
Articles, blog posts, essays, and everything else in between.
I haven't been keeping track of the articles (and everything else in between) I've been reading. Welp.
Music.
Hehe. Taylor Swift’s album just came out and I have a new album fixation. I'm actually not done listening to it, but so far, my favourites are The Fate of Ophelia, Opalite, and Elizabeth Taylor.
Also, it gets tiring hearing the ‘Taylor Swift is back with another bland album’ argument every time she releases another album. Or worse, the “all her albums sound the same”, like really? You're telling me that tloas sounds exactly like 1989 or Reputation or Midnights?
Taylor Swift really does have haters. Also, people saying that they didn't enjoy this album because she wasn't talking about being sad or she was heartbroken need to get themselves checked. Seriously. And it's not just songs, this particular thing happens every where. It's almost like people can't produce good things if they're not sad, depressed, trying to unalive themselves, or heartbroken. Let them live?
💕 Soundtrack to my current mood.
That would be party 4 u by Charli XCX, especially that “party on you” part that just keeps going. It reminds me of something just going wrong over and over again, and you being powerless against it.
Movies, Series, YouTube, and everything in between.
I'm still watching The Big Bang Theory, I'm currently in season 10. I'm actually almost done with season 10, I'm on episode 24. That's the last episode.
I hate everybody's relationship, I wish they would all break up. At the top of my list right now though, is Amy and Sheldon's relationship. Oh God. Amy literally acts like Sheldon's mother, that's her role in the relationship. Not a partner, a mother. I hate it so much. Especially since I know that the scene where he will propose to her and they'll get married is coming. Ugh. Barf.
Everybody knows this, but I genuinely hate how Sheldon treats everyone and it's constantly excused because “that’s how Sheldon is. He's smart and so, he doesn't have manners”, and now, Amy comes in. She's the partner who puts him in check. A grown man o.
It doesn't help that she's so desperate to be loved that she always takes his side and stays with him constantly, no matter what he does. I will never forget the scene where there was a fight between Howard and Sheldon, and Amy hit Bernadette with her bag, she never apologised for that.
Sheldon is so irrational and annoying, and—where do I even begin? I think about the parking spot episode and I just wake up in the middle of the night and have the urge to write an essay on why Sheldon is actually the most toxic person on that show and should be without friends. He always insults Howard and Raj. Oh, boy. I'm just going to stop here, but you get the point. He's terrible.
I just remembered that episode where they bought a new table for the dining room, so it would accommodate everyone and Sheldon refused to move from the living room table to the dinning table, because “he doesn't like change”, being inconsiderate to the other people who have to suffer because of his decisions.
Obviously, they went back to the living room because he wouldn't budge. And oh, the episode where he made Leonard wear an itchy sweater to prove a point. That was a really cruel thing to do, and it's even more funny when you think about the fact he actually calls Leonard his best friend.
The parking spot episode? GRATED MY LAST NERVE. Sheldon doesn't even have a car, doesn't drive, and doesn't intend to anytime soon, and he still fought with Howard over the parking spot. I could go on and on. I also just realised that I don't have to watch a show that's making me so upset, I can actually just stop. and I will. I'm done with the show. I'm no longer watching it. I will stick to TikTok edits now.
Moving on, I also watched season 3 of Alice in Borderland. I thought it was going to disappoint, but it didn't. I loved it, I even cried. The only thing I would say is, some of the games didn't make sense. The zombie game, especially. I think if I was in the borderland, I would die, not because I lost the game (I totally would lose btw), but because I don't understand the rules. There were so many rules in the zombie game, man.
I also didn't understand the plot, but it didn't ruin things for me. Still loved it.
Gather round.
💕 I recently published a new review on the literary blog. Go check it out.
Photo Gallery.
That’s all for this week. You can send a reply if you want.
See you on the 18th. Bye x.
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