Because If I Have Half a Brain I'll be Researching Tomorrow Instead

There was a fire drill just earlier. If There's a real fire, I'm taking my mac. No questions. That and a coat. The Enterprise ought to be fireproof, right?

despite the fact that I should be getting MUCH more done than I am, it seems that all my work goes to spinning my wheels and taking care of things that I have to do during normal level of work. So, even though Mum and I have gone over the plan, and it should be pretty well fool proof, I just don't seem to be doing enough. So now I'm terrified again. Yay.

I figure, I'll just have to start staying up till midnight like the rest of my compatriots. Hopefully studying. I'm not eager to do that, firstly for the obvious reasons but beyond that I'm afraid of working myself to death this week, and not having the gumption to work myself as hard as I need to for the paper due after NEXT week. Hooray!

Hopefully I can make it through this week intact enough to prevent this from happening again.

The Morning After

My God it was FREEZING in my room this morning! While this bodes well for me, I'm afraid that I'll not have enough covers later. I might have to close the window and turn off the fan.

This is to make up for not posting last night, so I might as well tell you why I didn't post last night. I've been trying to find people for a DnD group from the moment I got here. In the process I've discovered this campus is ripe with DnD groups and people who play, including one DM using 4.0, about which I've heard AMAZING things. Well, I decided to attempt the mantle of DM, not knowing what I was getting into. Yesterday was our first DnD session, and my first attempt to get things moving smoothly. That's the goal, moving smoothly, because when things move smoothly, people can focus on playing their character more than playing the game. Problem is, I'm playing 3.5, and it seems that system is set up much more for the little detail rules and picky or exact roleplay. I still don't know all the picky rules, but Alex is much more experienced than I and he's helping me out. Thankfully he's equally as stubborn as I am, so when he points out when I'm doing things wrong, he can stand up to my sheer ignorance. I'm also trying to get a good discource going between the two of us, so we're arguing less. Every time he brings up an innacuracy in my game management, he always has very good reasons. He really does play by the rules exactly. Problem is, I think I want something more like 4.0. Can't say for sure, because I hardly know 3.5 and I've never even touched 4.0. At any rate, we only got through one encounter, which is really not great, but we were somewhat pressed for time and I was really inexperienced. I think this was a better learning experience for me than it was a game for the rest. Still, it was really fun because all my friends (except COLE who was talking to Lydia) were around one table, joking and talking and goofing off. Hopefully the game gets better quickly, and nobody was put off by gaming.

Bagels are an Amazingly Good Food

At 7:20 I realized that I should get food before the dining hall closed at 7:30, but I wasn't all that hungry. At 8:20, after my shower, I decided to go down to the ridiculously convenient convenience store in the Stephenson main building to get bagels. With Bagel as my witness, I shall never go hungry again!

Every time I ignore the "Journal!" reminder from iCal, I feel a little bad inside. Sure, it was appropriate when I was bogged down by homework to ignore the reminder, but now I've just been ignoring it. That said, it does go off at 8:30, the time I've decided is my proper bed time, so maybe I ought to change it. Still, I'm ignoring it because I don't want to do it, not because it's too late. The last journal entry in there is from weeks back when I was delusional with the flu.

Speaking of the flu! Apparently, I was still contagious when I went back home, sooo yah. Everybody really ought to keep track of their symptoms. I don't want to be the one to bring Swine Flu to Aviation High. (although, I have to admit that does sound kinda cool)

Because Mum Bothered me

I have just discovered Red Dwarf: Back to Earth. With this on top of DnD, SNES, and a large and very good group of friends, why the hell am I so generally annoyed all the time?

Every time I begin to think "life's pretty OK right now," it seems that grand mother swoops in with some horrifically troubling facts about how incredibly not OK my life is. The real problem is she's right every time and she's also the only person that can really help.

So yes, my life's been pretty, irregular as of late. I'm not getting to bed when I want to, the rest of the people in my dorm have a tendency of being loud late at night, but I'm not even sure if that's loud enough to be a problem. I'm not really stressed, just angry because for the 8th year in a row the universe has consistently smacked me upside the head for feeling good. Reminds me rather disgustingly of the Vogon homeworld, but I digress. Apparently it is the people above me that have a habit of banging, so I'm going to go on a trip upstairs.

It Had to Happen Eventually

I must have been working too hard. I was in the store in the main building of Stephenson getting something to munch on as I pounded my head over the thesis for my paper on the Atlantic slave trade, and I almost asked to buy "a can of Pringles and a carton of slavery."

I missed a post. I very specifically missed a post. Specifically because I told my mother earlier that day that I would post, and I did not. My mother! How terrible is that? But it had to happen eventually. I've been piling work upon work and I'm suffering from... some well known work phenomenon where it all builds up in the week before due date (I can't recall what it's called just now). At any rate, even in a post that is little more than me saying "I'm too busy right now," I refuse to write just a single sentence on life. I refuse to treat this blog like some bastardized Twitter.

Go, Notes and Fear

So apparently the HP 11C scientific calculator is downloadable as an app for iPhones and the iPod Touch. I wonder if Joshi knows this? Anybody feeling like giving me an iTunes giftcard upwards of $9.99?

Go
I played Go with a friend of mine. He's in my GenEd 111 class, and then my PreCal class right after. He's really cool in that he's probably the biggest geek I've met here. I think his name is Eean? Ean? Not sure on the spelling either. Great friend. Anywhoo, I was taking a geek test (to find out if I was a geek) in PreCal (the teacher was droning on something I already knew. Trust me, I checked). I mentioned my outrage that the test included Chess geeks, but not Go, and he agreed! I believe he is one of the first people, if not the only person, I have ever met who knew about Go before I explained it to them. This discovery was exciting. Even more exciting, he's just as bad at it as I am. So, right after PreCal, he and I went back to my dorm to play Go (he was amazed I actually brought a Go set to college). The game was surprisingly even, until Ean made a fatal mistake. (He remembers what. I do not) I eventually won, but the game was very close for the longest time. He and I agreed that this will become a regular thing. I am exploding with happy.

Notes
Soooo. I'm a good student. I'm here to learn. I opt to stay in and do homework, instead of go out and party. I get to bed early, and wake up early to plan my day. I keep lists and sync my calender with my ipod so I'm always on time to class. So logically, I've been keeping on top of my notes, right? I totally haven't spent a week and a half accumulating something along the lines of 20-30 pages of notes on various subjects, without editing and compiling them into some sort of neat, organized notes-document. Right? Yah... sooooo. That's what I spent the hour and a holy crap it's nine already. Yah. Spent all that time working on notes, and after that I've got a grand total of two pages of math notes translated... But it's progress! Mostly I was figuring out Word's infuriating formatting, so now I've got it set up it should be much easier. We'll see how much I can get done tomorrow.

Fear
As I mentioned earlier in a letter to my good friend Lydia (whom I've told about this blog. Say hi Lydia!) I am working hard to get on top of my classes, so as I can start work on getting on top of my life. I currently have no idea how to get from here to the amazing, and far from average, career that I've built up in my head. Firstly, I've been aiming at robots, and this may or may not be what I'm actually interested in. I find I've grown more and more obsessed with blurring the line between man and machine. I like the field of human/machine interaction (or "building peripherals to the human experience," as I put it in that letter to Lydia), and that's what I really think I want to do. Problem is, I really have no idea where to look. I don't even know what it's called. It's this really wide field including User Interfaces, prosthetics and really crazy stuff like adding extra senses to people and messing with their heads. On the subject of robotics, Mum told me to watch things like the Great Robot Race (the one with all the autonomous vehicles out in that desert) and note all the schools involved, and sure, that's the way to do it, but where do I find things like that? Honestly, I really need a mentor at this time in my life (I highly regret not getting one in high school, and for whatever reason I don't work well with Mum) only I don't think this school is set up to help me get one. Right now my long term is so nebulous and confusing, and a good deal of that is the school's fault. It'd be really nice if I could find an adult who could tell me what to do...