Angry College Student Vents About First World Problems

It's certainly been a while since my last true update on my life. It's Christmas Eve, I'm back home in Redwood City after finishing my first semester in college, and frankly, I'm quite bored.

Finals week was probably the most fun I've had all semester. No real classes to worry about, long breaks in between exams, only one actual exam aside from a few papers and performances. I got to do whatever I wanted, really, there was significantly less stress than I experienced in high school (three exams in one day? Who thought that was a good idea?)

Writing this article is a bit aggravating because I have one of the 2017 MacBook Pros, and since Apple is dead set on making everything as slim as possible, it features one of those newfangled butterfly switch keyboards. For those of you who don't know, a butterfly switch is a new device underneath each key on a keyboard designed to significantly reduce the amount of space in between the key and its corresponding sensor (a millimeter, about). This design allows for the keyboard to be even slimmer than before, and I suppose was meant to reduce the chance of dust getting under the keys. What Apple failed to consider is that if dust DID manage to get under the keys, it would be impossible to get out, and they would be rendered practically useless. Every time I used the letter h in this paragraph? A minimum of 3 tries to type it, each. There is no practical solution for this except blasting your laptop with compressed air (which failed). Another fun fact about these fun new keyboards: you can't remove the keys easily without breaking the switch. I'm getting it checked out later this week, but I'm expecting they'll have to replace the entire lower half of the laptop. $700 minimum if I'm out of warranty.

Tourette's and My Life Without Regrets

Here's a little fun fact about me:

When I was just a newborn baby, my dad would swaddle me in a blanket so tightly that the only thing I could move was my head. We thought this was what led to the head shaking that would persist in my life until the fifth grade. Looking back on it now, we believe that this may have been my first tic. 

A tic, for those of you who don’t know, is a sudden movement or habit exhibited when under stress. Most people are familiar with nervous tics, which many people demonstrate on occasion (clicking a pen back and forth, tapping your foot, etc.) For those of us with Tourette Syndrome, that occasion can last years.