Week in review
Notes from this week (Written Thursday night or this morning...):
- Tuesday I played Diplomacy again and played a successful game as Austria-Hungary for the first time in basically ever. Asses were kicked. Names were taken.
- It looks like I really am going to be a Cog Sci major--I got an email yesterday telling me that I can slip out from under the couple requirements I was dodging. Already, I feel the costs of identity setting it: I'm feeling more distance from my CS major friends, feel less philosophical and more scientific. What bullshit! I chose a fucking major! I'm not a blank-person! Balls in a fucking sack!
- Meanwhile, research is chugging along. The main project is in it's fourth or fifth stage of major rehashing since we keep running into mathematical brick walls. But we're optimistic, now, again. More importantly to me, I'm making relatively steady progress on my pet-project paper, whose topic and organization agree with all my instincts about what makes a paper interesting and good. I'm getting some hang-ups on the math--things I had intuitively taken as given turning out to be tricky to step up and prove--but I think I'll get to squeak it out by the end of the summer.
- This summer with Howard Prospect and the Aristides Connection and another I've been watching downloaded episodes of Arrested Development, which is a hilarious show. Really. Amazing.
I bring it up though just because the last episode had a sort of coming-of-age plot twist for a couple seconds, and once again I felt completely flattened by the realization that I don't have a coming-of-age story--never had a real coming of age, or appropriate rite of passage, ever--and never will. It's too late.
This revelation-again came on the heels of a nice conversation with somebody with whom I had common youth-dorkiness. She confessed that she played the same sort of dorky high-fantasy pretend games as I did back in the day, and playing ancient computer game classics like King's Quest and Operation Neptune. For just a little while I thought I might have something that could make me a part of my generation.
And then I realized again, upon being confronted with my coming of agelessness, that I'm not, or at least that I feel like I'm not. I feel like an anomaly; an unstable compound that can only be created in the specialized lab conditions that constituted my childhood and adolescence. I had the feeling tonight that forces internal to me were going to cause me to explode or dissolve or disintegrate, that my body was not equalized with the air pressure, that I was so ionized that particles of me would soon cease bonding with each other and instead start associating within the fluid which I breathe.
Which is odd, because sometimes I feel exactly the opposite--equally anomalous, but more like a densely forged bullet with an isolated mind at its center, tearing through the soft world imperviously.
- Howard Prospect has invited me to come to his lake house with his friends from home (unknown), a small group of mutual friends and acquaintances from Brown (not particular close ones), and himself. For some reason I feel reluctant--they only social situations that I feel genuinely comfortable in are those with only close friends or ones that I have created. Funny how I despise some people for this (the latter) weakness (I insist that they handle it in a much worse way, though, by making others bear what should be their own burden). I'll probably end up going anyway though, for the sake of a change of environment. I don't want to take the gamble this weekend on boredom vs. creative isolation, especially since I recently revived a kickass computer game from the mid-90's that I've been pouring a lot of my down time into recently.
- Tuesday I played Diplomacy again and played a successful game as Austria-Hungary for the first time in basically ever. Asses were kicked. Names were taken.
- It looks like I really am going to be a Cog Sci major--I got an email yesterday telling me that I can slip out from under the couple requirements I was dodging. Already, I feel the costs of identity setting it: I'm feeling more distance from my CS major friends, feel less philosophical and more scientific. What bullshit! I chose a fucking major! I'm not a blank-person! Balls in a fucking sack!
- Meanwhile, research is chugging along. The main project is in it's fourth or fifth stage of major rehashing since we keep running into mathematical brick walls. But we're optimistic, now, again. More importantly to me, I'm making relatively steady progress on my pet-project paper, whose topic and organization agree with all my instincts about what makes a paper interesting and good. I'm getting some hang-ups on the math--things I had intuitively taken as given turning out to be tricky to step up and prove--but I think I'll get to squeak it out by the end of the summer.
- This summer with Howard Prospect and the Aristides Connection and another I've been watching downloaded episodes of Arrested Development, which is a hilarious show. Really. Amazing.
I bring it up though just because the last episode had a sort of coming-of-age plot twist for a couple seconds, and once again I felt completely flattened by the realization that I don't have a coming-of-age story--never had a real coming of age, or appropriate rite of passage, ever--and never will. It's too late.
This revelation-again came on the heels of a nice conversation with somebody with whom I had common youth-dorkiness. She confessed that she played the same sort of dorky high-fantasy pretend games as I did back in the day, and playing ancient computer game classics like King's Quest and Operation Neptune. For just a little while I thought I might have something that could make me a part of my generation.
And then I realized again, upon being confronted with my coming of agelessness, that I'm not, or at least that I feel like I'm not. I feel like an anomaly; an unstable compound that can only be created in the specialized lab conditions that constituted my childhood and adolescence. I had the feeling tonight that forces internal to me were going to cause me to explode or dissolve or disintegrate, that my body was not equalized with the air pressure, that I was so ionized that particles of me would soon cease bonding with each other and instead start associating within the fluid which I breathe.
Which is odd, because sometimes I feel exactly the opposite--equally anomalous, but more like a densely forged bullet with an isolated mind at its center, tearing through the soft world imperviously.
- Howard Prospect has invited me to come to his lake house with his friends from home (unknown), a small group of mutual friends and acquaintances from Brown (not particular close ones), and himself. For some reason I feel reluctant--they only social situations that I feel genuinely comfortable in are those with only close friends or ones that I have created. Funny how I despise some people for this (the latter) weakness (I insist that they handle it in a much worse way, though, by making others bear what should be their own burden). I'll probably end up going anyway though, for the sake of a change of environment. I don't want to take the gamble this weekend on boredom vs. creative isolation, especially since I recently revived a kickass computer game from the mid-90's that I've been pouring a lot of my down time into recently.