amarie24

Okay, first: yes, I know. I know. I know I’m supposed to be in bed by now. See, my class doesn’t start until 11:30 (and my Tuesday lab isn’t until the afternoon), but that still means I gotta get up at 9:45 because I gotta wash my hair. But my circadian rhythm is currently lopsided again. I’ll be alright, though; I’ll be sure to take a nice, good nap once I get home.

I got my textbooks cheap online. My Anatomy & Physiology class requires a big ass package and my school’s bookstore has it for about $350…which we can’t afford at the moment and even if we could, fuck American college/universities’ criminally overpriced bookstores. Truly, it’s a travesty amongst all the other travesties in this country’s broken and unethical higher education system. Ugh.

So if anyone needs it or is just wondering, I use the website Big Words to buy my textbook package for only about $122. This site is a gift; I’ve used it quite a few times before and it has saved my mother a ton of money and it has yet to steer us wrong. The site works as a kind of textbook search engine. You just type into the search box what book you need, give it a minute, and it’ll pull up all kinds of websites that sell and/or rent your required book for the lowest possible prices. It’ll find you just about every kind of textbook that’s ever been required under the sun.

You gotta click around, price gauge and compare, decide if you want to rent or buy (I need to buy my Anatomy & physiology package, since I’ll need them for next semester’s part two and I want to keep them for future reference throughout nursing school). But it’s more than worth it because it’ll save you a hella lotta stress and heartache.

So my books are on the way! Yay!

I got everything else ready so far! My bookbag is full of:

• My Pride & Prejudice-decorated binder (told ya’ll I’m a romance sap-nerd combo), where I scribble my sloppy, messy class notes

• My large spiral-bound notebook, where I carefully write my at-home/homework notes that’s a meticulous combo of notes from class and from my textbook. This is what I study from so that I have all of my information in one, concise place and I no longer need the textbook. It’s especially convenient when the final exam comes at the end of the semester and I can just flip open that notebook and all that I need is in one place. It’s a note-taking/study system that’s never let me down yet. ;)

• My pretty brown-and-rainbow-speckled pencil case. It holds all of my highlighters for vocabulary words and drawing charts; pretty, brand new gel pens Mommy proudly bought me for school and I use them to keep my home notes fun and colorful; my little rainbow tabs to keep my place in my textbook; and colorfully-designed mechanical pencils that I use for scantron tests.

• Two books for my personal reading pleasure.

And Mommy and I are going to the grocery store on Tuesday (my lab day!) to buy me snacks and drinks to put in my bookbag, too. Yep, yep!

Okay, time for nerding and geeking out to know more things! Amarie admits that she got quite a bit burnt out, and so I didn’t completely finish the pre-Anatomy & Physiology homework as far as the reading. But! I got as far as the tissue section’s epithelial tissue part and so here we go!

• Our bodies have more than 200+ different cell types. So don’t ever let anybody tell you that you don’t have an entire city, an entire galaxy inside of you. Teehee!

• What’s so important about tissues? Like, what’s the basic point of tissues? Well, the basic importance lies in the fact that, though we have so, so, so many cells, our cells don’t just hang around anywhere, anyplace, y’know? They have to hang around together, be grouped together in one place by their function(s)...and that one place is tissues. Our cells build up to create those tissues that the tissues are their own, individual cities where they hang out and work together.

• Our four main tissue types are: epithelial (our body surfaces-like our skin!); connective (keeps our cells, organs, muscles, & bones nice and cozy together so we don’t fall apart); muscle (flex and kiss your biceps, dears); and nervous (our brain and spinal cord!).

• Our tissues start forming and building as soon as we go from a zygote to an embryo in utero (in our mama’s uterus). Our very first embryonic cells that can grow and become any kind of cell and organ (this is called “differentiation”)? These embryonic cells are called “totipotent cells”.

• Be sure to thank your synovial membrane tonight! Our synovial membranes are part of the family of connective tissue membranes and they line our freely movable joints, such as our shoulder, elbow and knee joints. They line these joints to keep them nice and moist and lubricated so that they don’t painfully and dangerously grind against each other when they move them. So take some time, if you can, to move our shoulders, elbows, and knees and thank your synovial membrane for it being relatively easy! Yay!

• Ever wanna say the fancy-dancy medical name for our biggest organ, our skin? Well, here ya go: our skin is medically called a “cutaneous membrane” and it’s made of “stratified squamous epithelial membrane” atop a connective tissue that keeps our skin attached to us and not, uhh…falling off. Love the cutaneous membrane you’re in!

• Ya’ll, we got a lot of different epithelial tissues. We got fuckin simple squamous, simple columnar, stratified columnar, transitional, etc…all over our bodies. Dear god. That’s part of what burnt me out. @___@

That’s all for now, until I really get into school and can share my homework notes with ya’ll! Hope you all enjoyed this one and wish me luck in school tomorrow morning! :D