Hysteria.

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Let me tell you, spending three hours in optics lab every Wednesday does something to you.
Lenses, mirrors, focal lengths, img/obj distances, and magnification equations may look friendly at first, but after a few hours of working with equipment assembled in the seventies and the (non)help of a novice TA without a master key, you will indeed go insane. For those of you non-scientists out there, think of the most excruciatingly particular and involved high school science lab you have ever completed. Then multiply its duration by three, your frustration by twelve, and the lab's level of difficulty by junior-in-college status. THIS IS PHYSICS LAB.

Of course, I have had firsthand experience with physics-lab-induced hysteria on multiple occasions. Today, I started bawling and giggling simultaneously after stretching out over our table somewhere after our three-hour mark in Dante's inner circle. I leaned across the light table with complicated measuring equipment in my hands, ready to measure the image distance of a virtual object projected between two lenses aligned in parallel (ugh; don't ask), when much to my surprise, I discovered that my torso was too short to make the necessary measurements. I simply could not reach. All that work and I couldn't reach. This realization promptly sent me into a hysterical fit in which I cried my eyes out while hiccuping and laughing madly at my ENTIRELY STUPID PREDICAMENT. Of course, then the TA rushed over to ask if I'd burned myself on the heat lamp, which made me laugh/cry even harder, and after that everything went to pot. Seriously? Three hours of perfectly calculated positioning and I'm too short? Realizing something so factual and normal as that put my ridiculous context into sharp, stinging perspective: The last three hours of my life have been completely meaningless. COMPLETELY MEANINGLESS. And now I am impaired from making my final meaningless measurements due to being too short to stretch across the table. F M L.

As an angry side note,
MAYBE THIS WOULD NOT HAPPEN IF WE HAD SOME RELATIVELY MODERN EQUIPMENT, EH? LIKE, FROM AFTER THE DOMESTICATION OF THE DOG, IF YOU CAN MANAGE IT.

Experience has taught me my university's priorities:
1) Undergraduate humanities
2) Graduate business
3) Football
...
7) Cosmo maintenance
8) Undisclosed BYUSA retreat budget
...
42) Science programs

Compare the MARB (science lecture building) or the WIDB (bio lab building) to the beautiful JFSB (humanities lectures/offices) or even the SWKT (neuro/nursing/psych). And don't even get me started on the stunning HFAC.
FACT: We poor science majors are crammed into lecture rooms with hundreds of seats, bad visibility angles, zero leg room, and old equipment, AND IT SUCKS.
End side note.

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After my hysterics, I walked to the duck pond and watched the ducks for a while to calm down. I love ducks. Then I went to Mimi's Cafe and had a honey oat bran muffin (my favorite) and sat in a big squashy armchair at Barnes and Noble where I read Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games in its entirety, all four hundred or so pages. I felt immensely satisfied, as I always do when finishing a book in one sitting, so (luckily) the day wasn't a total waste. Almost, though. That was a close one.

Be happy.

 This pic will help.

 Evgeni Plushenko and Johnny Weir arm wrestling! Aww.