what looks like it's done, and talks like it's done, but isn't done?
"i have no clue what next year will be like." "different than all the others..."
sometime before the semester started, i thought oh, i'm only going to have one class, so i'll have plenty of time to focus on other sources of fulfillment - cooking, running, improving social confidence, optimising for happiness in general. it turns out this is itself a heavy load when taken on top of a grad-level class, TAing, and a small research project. (example: one of the things i promised myself i would do was sit on the couch in the afternoon and read, just to prove i had the spare time to do it - and it took me until exam week to make good on that.)
anyway, i'll start with the traditional summary of my classes.
i sort of overwhelmed myself socially this semester. i said at the beginning that i'd try to hang out always in smaller groups, no more than three or four people if i could help it; i've had enough of group interaction and need more intimate personal contact. on some levels, i succeeded, and perhaps a bit too much: at one point i counted how many people i was having an active close friendship with; there turned out to be nine, perhaps plus a few more. somebody told me a while ago that four or five was the right number - i don't know, but it was difficult to juggle all of them. on the obvious hand, i'm upset to see so many people i spent the best four years of my life with leave for california, but i suppose it also means that simpler times are ahead.
still, frustratingly, i was never quite content with whatever socialising i had for more than a few minutes or hours at a time. overall, my "default state" was to be having alone time, and i just couldn't sustain myself when i had to go out of my way every time to break that (i.e. to find company). i don't know if it was a problem of the mind or a problem of how i had arranged for my world to be, but i do know that it was also causing me to stop appreciating any alone time when i genuinely did need it. (it's the same problem as feeling guilty about wasting time on the internet when there's work to do: it looks like taking a break, but isn't effective at all.) i may try to solve it by taking next week in "solitary retreat" style - not to say i won't still be happy to talk, just to try to accept being alone for its own good for some time and then to fix it differently afterwards.
as you've probably seen already, i used this semester to take myself apart - to find parts of me that i like and to make them stronger, and to find holes that had previously been shoddily patched over and to open them up, explore them, and rearrange the mental landscape around them to make them disappear. i've accrued a lot of material in doing so - how to let my feelings guide me, how to live in the moment, how to be a good friend, how to seek out what is most gratifying - but i haven't been able to incorporate much of them into the being that i actually, automatically am. there's still a struggle every so often, and i don't know how to describe it, but it means i'm not done yet.
i'm looking forward to the summer. i aim to have a lot less on my plate, and do a better job with all of it.
before i was enlightened, i chopped wood and carried water. after i became enlightened i chopped wood and carried water.
sometime before the semester started, i thought oh, i'm only going to have one class, so i'll have plenty of time to focus on other sources of fulfillment - cooking, running, improving social confidence, optimising for happiness in general. it turns out this is itself a heavy load when taken on top of a grad-level class, TAing, and a small research project. (example: one of the things i promised myself i would do was sit on the couch in the afternoon and read, just to prove i had the spare time to do it - and it took me until exam week to make good on that.)
anyway, i'll start with the traditional summary of my classes.
- optmz cmpls mod arch (15-745): not so much a sequel to undergrad compilers as a different take on the subject. several topics, especially in the first few lectures, were old hat material ("come on, teach us SSA already, and these basic optimisations become trivial"), but other ones were new and interesting (instruction scheduling).
the assignments were each to implement some sort of optimisation pass in LLVM, which was very reminiscent of 610, i.e. 5% thought and 95% infrastructure wrangling; i did not enjoy them, but thankfully i got away with only spending two evenings on each, and also they ended halfway through the semester. also ceasing before semester's end were the lectures, which was confusing; the final exam was some time in april, and i felt maybe there could have been more lectures on other interesting things in the time that remained.
the final project was really where the grad-level expectations shone through - pick a topic and do it, with minimal guidance. as usual, my abhorrence of cutting corners gave me pause (gave me paws?) when it came to, well, everything involved. ntan and i picked interprocedural register allocation, and eventually produced what felt like a very satisfactory product - by no means complete, given only six weeks to do it, but presentable. it was actually a pretty interesting problem, and quite fun at times to pull my hair thinking about it. i had infrastructure paralysis for the first two or three weeks, but picked up when we ditched LLVM in favour of our undergrad compiler; i put in less work than ntan, but what i did contribute was honest and solid, and i ended up with an A finally, giving me my second ever and consecutive semesterly 4.0.
i sort of overwhelmed myself socially this semester. i said at the beginning that i'd try to hang out always in smaller groups, no more than three or four people if i could help it; i've had enough of group interaction and need more intimate personal contact. on some levels, i succeeded, and perhaps a bit too much: at one point i counted how many people i was having an active close friendship with; there turned out to be nine, perhaps plus a few more. somebody told me a while ago that four or five was the right number - i don't know, but it was difficult to juggle all of them. on the obvious hand, i'm upset to see so many people i spent the best four years of my life with leave for california, but i suppose it also means that simpler times are ahead.
still, frustratingly, i was never quite content with whatever socialising i had for more than a few minutes or hours at a time. overall, my "default state" was to be having alone time, and i just couldn't sustain myself when i had to go out of my way every time to break that (i.e. to find company). i don't know if it was a problem of the mind or a problem of how i had arranged for my world to be, but i do know that it was also causing me to stop appreciating any alone time when i genuinely did need it. (it's the same problem as feeling guilty about wasting time on the internet when there's work to do: it looks like taking a break, but isn't effective at all.) i may try to solve it by taking next week in "solitary retreat" style - not to say i won't still be happy to talk, just to try to accept being alone for its own good for some time and then to fix it differently afterwards.
as you've probably seen already, i used this semester to take myself apart - to find parts of me that i like and to make them stronger, and to find holes that had previously been shoddily patched over and to open them up, explore them, and rearrange the mental landscape around them to make them disappear. i've accrued a lot of material in doing so - how to let my feelings guide me, how to live in the moment, how to be a good friend, how to seek out what is most gratifying - but i haven't been able to incorporate much of them into the being that i actually, automatically am. there's still a struggle every so often, and i don't know how to describe it, but it means i'm not done yet.
i'm looking forward to the summer. i aim to have a lot less on my plate, and do a better job with all of it.
before i was enlightened, i chopped wood and carried water. after i became enlightened i chopped wood and carried water.