A lot has happened this week. Unexpected tests, drinking to the point of sickness… read on.

It’s reasonable to assume that anything I write here can be used by potential employers to judge hiring eligibility or by literally anyone to perform open-source intelligence gathering about me. This makes me wonder what parts of my life I should share, especially things of a chemical nature or something that would associate me with words like “irresponsible,” “impulsive,” etc. But I hope you, dear reader, will see what I write for what it is – A form of therapy, a form of writing practice, and an open journal that has the potential to entertain, educate, and give insight into my life. We all make mistakes, but not all of us write about them. Today’s journal is about two of those mistakes.

On Monday I began my formal learning journey through statistics and calculus, answering questions like “what are Taylor Series” or “what is an artificial neuron?” On Tuesday I continued this. On Wednesday, there was a party with AIC, a mostly-chinese organization I’ve been part of. I’m on the roster of this group as a 副部长, aka a “Vice Minister.” This is likely because I’ve been the primary foreigner that’s been attending most of the meetings and get-togethers, and helped out with the interviewing process for the Fall semester’s new recruits. So even though it’s hard to remember member’s names sometimes, I get along with everyone and it’s always a fun time together.

We had a party at a villa on Wednesday night in which everyone cooked and we spent the night all together at this house. I made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and potato hash for my contribution. We drank some baijiu and whiskey and red wine, and with a few friends that I’m closer with we chatted about everything under the sun including chinese politics and relationships. There was KTV, pool, a scary movie (Cabin in the Woods), I taught them poker, all a good time. At least until I got just drunk enough to think that drinking more was a good idea. So I kept at the baijiu until I went to sleep at 4am, then woke up with a massive hangover.

In the morning I couldn’t eat or really speak effective Chinese, and the whole subway ride home my head was in my hands. I got home at noon, slept until 5pm, and started puking up anything I put in my mouth for the rest of that Thursday night until I got a McDonalds double cheeseburger down at 11pm. Worst hangover of my life. Definitely staying away from the hard alcohol for a while. Mistake 1: Getting drunk to the point I could not control alcohol intake, and inhibiting my ability to be active and competent the next day.

That’s when I checked on my HSK registration, a test that I marked in my calendar as being on January 24th. I checked on it to make sure the payment went through, since it didn’t last time. A glance at the webpage showed the test was January 12th! That’s in two days! Mistake 2: Look at important dates twice. The mistake was probably from seeing February’s test date, February 24th, and mixing the two up.

Some background – I applied for the HSK test in December but the payment was returned a week after applying, past the payment deadline. So I was unable to take the test then. Luckily I studied for a couple weeks before this and was already confident taking the test, but I needed to get back up to speed as much as I could! I’m feeling good about it, especially after seeing peers pass it with good scores, but there’s a need to jog my brain a bit before the exam.

I was in no capability to study that Thursday night. So I slept early and woke up today, studying all day with minimal breaks until dinner where I had some BBQ food-on-sticks (烧烤）with friends, then back to studying, and a small break here to write. Studying is mostly going through the HSK practice test book I have, making sure there’s no part unstudied. I’m not doing too bad on the listening and writing parts, but need to practice the grammar as much as possible.

So in short; no work on personal learning or chess since Tuesday night. Tomorrow night I’m spending time with a friend who has his last night in Nanjing, so maybe tomorrow afternoon I can get something done. Another thing coming up is sending out emails applying for jobs, which I’ll start working on in the next week or two.

Now that I got this all out of my brain – Back to work, get to sleep early, then study tomorrow morning before the test!