the world is your acorn

I have a shitload of things due tomorrow. I’ve been really on top of things, and finished my take home exam on Friday morning. Well, today I went to email it to my professor, and I can’t find the final version. Yeah. It’s true. I’ve been working on three different computers all weekend since I have a lot of video compression to do, and apparently I threw the only final version out trying to clear space for the video import. I’m an idiot. I could have mailed the damn thing to him when I finished it, or backed it up, or any number of things that I didn’t do. Now I’m rewriting while I could be working on the other things I have for tomorrow. WTF. I haven’t been this dumb with computer stuff since freshman year in college. I’m frustrated as all get out. urgh.

It’s been weeks since my last post. I’m not sure why I haven’t been posting. I keep composing little posts in my head, then not getting online to post. I’m probably only posting right now because I have a 1pm deadline to gather and transcribe some data, and I can’t get myself started.

Things have felt crazy since Thanksgiving. We got back from The Little Red Haired Girl’s parents’ place in the evening after an 8 hour drive on Sunday evening, and regular life just started up right away. No chance to recuperate from vacation. We managed to get unpacked and laundered right away, but the house is still a shithole from our bringing home all kinds of things (mostly holiday presents) from Virginia.

Suddenly now it’s the last week of classes, and I’m facing 2 exams and a poster presentation all due or happening on Monday. I should be freaking out. Somehow I’m not. I have been compulsively creating schedules and lists for myself for a few days now, and I’m chipping away at some of the things that I have to do. For some reason none of my major end of semester tasks seem like unsurmountable hurdles this time around. Either I’m getting a little better at this, or I am seriously deluding myself and am in for some sort of hysterical breakdown soon.

Why does the bathroom by my office suddenly smell like the stairwell of a parking garage? You know that smell? What is it, anyway?
ick.

How am I supposed to get any work done with all this drilling and construction and stuff going on in the building? As if I need any more excuses to just pack up, go home, and watch tv.

Just before I came here my program at school revamped its doctoral structure, so there have been a lot of new things being implemented around me. One of those new things is first year poster sessions. At the beginning of our second year we have to present a poster on research that we did in our first year. Today is the day of the poster sessions.

My poster is done (thanks to the help of The Little Red Haired Girl who stayed up late with me cutting things out), I’m as prepared as I can be in the near future to explain what I did, and I’m praying for “generous” questions from whoever does any questioning. I’ve been pretty immersed in this thing for the past few weeks in preparation, and my advisor has given a lot of hours to help me with it. He’s been really encouraging, and even though he’s out of town for another meeting he emailed me last night to wish me luck and say some kind things about my work.

My fear is that he has too much confidence in me. Or that I’ve somehow tricked him into thinking I’m far more competent than I really am. I guess many students have this fear, and being in the education game I should accept that taking these kinds of risks and making mistakes are good ways to learn. If I were already spectacular at this sort of thing I wouldn’t be in school. Yet still I feel this rising dread of impending doom. Like walking into a straight club in New York City. I don’t belong, I’m not sure I want to belong, and people will surely be able to glance at me and know I don’t belong. And I have no idea what to wear. In reality though, I will probably have fun and no one will even notice I’m there except for my friends.

Let’s just say you are a student in a class with, oh let’s say, 6 people in it. Hypothetically speaking. This hypothetical class might take place in a small classroom, and everyone might sit around a table. I don’t care what your issue is, it is RUDE and distracting for everyone else if you decide to start a loudly whispered conversation with your neighbor. Especially if said loud whispers are actually low voices that we can all hear. If you have a question about what is going on, ask so we all get the benefit of your ignorance. There are only 7 people in the whole room, for crying out loud.
Jeeze.

• The video card which 2 summers ago was the savior of my gaming months is now the bane of my existence. Why is it so hard to cleanly remove nvidia driver installations?
• The 3 hole punch here in my office only takes about 8 pieces of paper at a time and requires me to stand up in order to get enough leverage to actually use it.
• The website here at school does not tell me what applications are installed on the computers in each lab. Does that mean I’ll have to trek all over campus to find computers that are useful to me? Some of the labs are also computer classrooms, and available for “walk-ins” only when there’s no class. In other words, I’ll have to walk my ass all the way across campus only to find out I can’t use the computer.
• The other night I dreamt about little wieners wrapped in Pillsbury crescent rolls. I have neither little wieners nor crescent roll dough in my house, but I did have some Pillsbury biscuits and hot dogs. So I tried wrapping hot dog pieces in biscuit dough. It was ok, but just not the same. I think it was mostly the proportions though, since I just shoved the hot dog pieces into the biscuit instead of remolding pieces of the dough.
• Everything Guy is tempting me to go to this conference in Mexico in November. It seems really cool, but it’s that busy time of year for school. Argh.
• Oliver has a doggie date with a miniature poodle and a schnauzer at the dog park this evening. He’s super excited.

Sometimes when I’m reading, especially if it’s academic stuff, I’ll have an outburst of reading/mumbling out loud. The Little Red Haired Girl often makes fun of me for it, particularly because I often don’t realize that I’m doing it. Usually it happens when I am feeling distracted by thoughts or something else going on in the room, but I want to concentrate on whatever it is I’m reading. It’s like, if I read it out loud, then yet another of my functions will be engaged in the content, thus outnumbering whatever parts of me are doing other things.

This morning, as I was getting into the shower, I caught myself bursting into tuneless humming. I suddenly realized that I was doing it to drown out (or distract myself from) some stupid embarassing memory from years ago. I don’t even remember what it was now. It seems that my mind tends to wander into unsanctioned territory from time to time without my permission, and my way of objecting is to voice something, anything. Kind of like yelling “blah blah blah” and covering your ears when mom is lecturing you about something.

Although, now that I think about it, there have been times when I have been reliving some particularly cringey conversation, and I’ve caught myself responding outloud what I wish I’d said, or something dismissive like, “It’s all good….” Of course it only serves to make me feel even cringier because I’ve just said something out loud for no apparent reason at all.

Somehow I managed to stay out past 2 last night. I had a great time, and got a chance to talk to almost all of the prospective students (including a few who didn’t apply to our particular program), and was able to hang with current grad buddies too. I am excited about this cohort, and am interested to see who will show up in the fall. I hope a lot of them do, and I hope that I helped the process along in some way.

I just went back and looked at my livejournal posts from this time last year, when I was a prospective student. It’s really funny the way everything turned out. I was dreading the weekend, but I knew it was important for me to do. I never thought in a million years that this is where I’d end up. In my posts I mention my current advisor, as well as Everything Guy and The Thespian. It was pretty interesting looking back at my first impressions of things. It seems so long ago, but I can still remember the feeling of getting to my hotel room and not really knowing what to do or to expect and just wanting to be back at home, but knowing that this was something that I had to go through. Well, I just hope that I can make this weekend as meaningful for some of the prospective students this year as it was for me last year.

I had a pretty good time last night at the dinner at a professor’s house, and really made an effort to talk to the recruits instead of just talking to people I already know. I’ve definitely gotten better at small talk, although I did take a few cues from Everything Guy. But in this case it’s more than small talk because I really am interested in these people – I was talking to another classmate of ours last night, and we were saying that a lot of these folks will be our classmates and our friends and eventually our colleages, so even without all the free food and booze, this weekend is really worth our investment. The free food and booze helps too, of course…