5/17/16

1. 5/17/16
1. The past couple of days deserve more time than I have. This Saturday was the swing quarter dance--I went shopping with Alex for a fedora and badass button-up, danced for several hours, and then there was the afterparty! Felt almost like a homeschool event--potluck style, lots of people I knew, Eleanor and Brianna from physics / honors floor were there.
2. Sunday I made brunch with Trevor and Alex (we made lots of stuff!) then thermal hw and math study.
3. Today, math midterm in the morning. I thought I was really solid, but when the test started I was pretty jittery. Eventually managed to make most of my arguments work, but we’ll see :P
4. Then systems programming (what up?? A lecture that’s not syntax??) The lecture was on networks; I sat there enjoying the lecture for once in the quarter, actually listening to Perkins’ voice vs. trying to read ahead on the slides so I could think about something else.
5. Thermal physics was pretty boring--probably should have gone to the supernova core collapse modeling lunchbox instead, but there’s a midterm Wednesday. And actually, I had fun trying to recall the structure of a Carnot engine before Cobden could draw it up.
6. Then accounting. I decided to go to lecture. Was pretty meh, and here I started to feel disconnected and discombobulated. Was hardcore multitasking, working through old worksheets, reading articles from Dad, etc. because the lecture was so darn slow. But hey! A good lunch.
7. Went back to Haggett and worked on CS for a few hours. Then went to physics, thought there was a tutoring group meeting, there wasn’t but it was cool, did more CS. Ran into Amiel and Chris, SPS regulars.
8. Worked under uncertainty and struggle, just blindly filling out more code, since I couldn’t debug at any level of granularity and everything was interdependent. But debugging my write-it-all-at-once blob wasn’t as horrible as I thought--managed to pass about half the tests, and excitedly decided to end on a high note and switch to math.
9. But I hadn’t brought my math to physics, so I went back to north campus, got dinner at McMahon, ran into dude from accounting who said hi to me in class today named Tern(?). Ate dinner with him and his buddies. Seems like a bright dude trying to figure out what to do with himself in the weird business / frat world.
10. Returned to Haggett, read for math, then actually got a decent way through math hw. Crazy!
11. Went to Monday dance. Pretty fun, learned some new moves. But I think Alex is in a bit of a struggly state wrt school (and, as I know from experience, struggle tends to spread from its cause to other, seemingly isolated parts of one’s existence.) Meditated on the complexity and insanity of human life on the walk back to haggett--my brain kept turning over bad math analogies, relating analyzing the complex confusion of multi-motivated and infinite-game-level aware individuals to the behavior of complex functions around essential singularities (where the function approaches every possible value on some sequence tending to the singular point).
12. Exchanged a few pleasant messages with Brandon re the boss physics schedule we’re going to have next year (Yeah! Get excited!). Wrote this log and turned in. Night voyageurs, all you insane, essentially singular even if mostly analytic, human shmids!