First of all, hooray for Pittsburgh for having a “gallery crawl” tonight- there were some cool things downtown. I wish I had been with a couple friends instead of with an RA and other Margaret Morrison folks on a trip to the symphony; a trip that I attended because it was really cheap and a way to get some culture! The galleries were cool, though, like the Wood Street Gallery featuring some Indian dance and Future Tenant with some modern art, including various Iranian heads of state on a conveyor belt being poked by little pokers. And then we saw the symphony, which I’ll give the classic review of “I can’t really appreciate it, but it was neat.”

But man. Sunday through Tuesday, all my free time was on Networks. Wednesday, grading; Thursday and today, Neural Nets. I might drop Neural Nets.
Reasons for dropping it:
- I’m not learning a lot, I don’t think. It’s all either going over my head (math blatz! 3-d calc?!) or is just a high-level overview. The homeworks are giving me fits- they’re theoretically easy, but there’s a bunch of dicking around with MATLAB. Lame.
- Maybe I’m overworked this semester?
- Doesn’t really help me graduate. See, it’s a CS elective (I need 1), and it’s a cog sci elective (I need 4). I just want to make things as easy for myself next year as possible.
Reasons for keeping it:
- If I drop it, I’ll have 3 classes + 2 StuCo’s. That’s a little bit silly.
- It sort of helps me graduate. (pulls up spreadsheet) If I drop it, and I don’t accomplish anything next semester while I’m studying abroad, I’ll need 10 classes to get both of my majors (CS and CS). If I do keep it, that number goes down to 8 (double counting). And it’s really 7, because another class will double count. And I’m hoping I can take some classes in Europe that will count. So … well, whatever. I don’t know why I’m telling you all about my class schedule. I’ll graduate, and it’ll be fine.

But this week was a killer. And there’s no break; it’s right back into the mix with more Networks this weekend. The thing that’s so tough about all this work popped into my mind while I was talking to my mom the other day. It’s not because I hate the work- doing Networks is all right, except for the time pressure. (It’s almost fun, because you can really make progress, and you can really get into it.) The problem is this: I keep compromising more and more who I want to be and what I want to do. For example: I haven’t started this cooking club that I’m all about starting. I’ve been completely sedentary all week. Friends have been over here and I’ve been sitting in this dim basement doing homework. When people ask “how’s it going?” all I can say is “well, I’ve been working on Networks…” geek geek geek geek Geek Geek GEEK GEEK GEEK!

But then, I had all summer to do what I want to do, and what did I do? Well, I had some fun, but I don’t feel like I made the most of it. Mostly because my job was so boring, I felt listless all the time.

Solution: stop talking about doing stuff, and go do stuff! Well, it’s Saturday night at 1 am, what can I do? (obvious answer: sleep, so I can do stuff tomorrow!) What I really need to do, though, is lose myself. Have you noticed the number of “I"s in this post? There are a lot! I feel like the more you think about yourself, talk about yourself, etc, the less happy you become. I need to lose myself at a party, in a game, in cooking maybe, meditation, some project that I like… and most of all, in other people!