It's about time I got my butt in gear for O-Chem. I meant to spend ten hours a week studying for the class. I've been so busy that I've probably done about...a tenth of that so far. And somehow, January is almost over. So sad.
But in an effort to remedy that, and due to a rude awakening with the obnoxiously-easy-but-still-ever-so-hard quiz we had to take this morning, I spent about five hours in the O-Chem Lab today.
Thanks be to all my lucky stars for the patient TAs in that room. I hate sounding like an idiot, but it's impossible to intelligently fake talk your way through Molecular Orbital Theory. So I sound like an idiot, and the TAs are surprisingly okay with that. It's not really a symbiotic (like my science terminology?) relationship, but the odds are in my favor.
"Wait...so what IS this up here in the anti-bonding orbitals? Aren't they nothing? No electrons or protons? So why do they have nodes and how are they supposed to be high-energy orbitals? I don't get how something exists out of what is apparently nothing."
Very patient TA: "Well, you see...um...you're kind of on the right track. There really isn't anything there. It's all theoretical. It's what-if."
"Oh. Dang it. This just got a lot more complicated than I thought."
o dear, that sounds awful. I is not excited to go back to school at all.
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