Archive for August, 2008
Lately I’ve been listening to “Can’t Stop Now” (lyrics here) on repeat, at least two dozen times in the last 3 days, because it’s been firmly stuck in my head and I’m trying my old trick of “if you transcribe it, it will go away!” (More historically accurate: “if you arrange it for an a capella group, it will go away!” which is why sheet music for “Build Me Up Buttercup” mysteriously appeared outside Mark Penner’s door after one evening during which I could not sleep.)
This is one of the few songs that I actually know the lyrics to, and the lyrics are also stuck in my head because they very nicely capture a feeling of perpetual motion caused by exhaustion. (”…and I’m too tired to stop…”)
Some people say that if you don’t know what to do, just start moving forward in some direction and you’ll get more stimuli to figure out what direction you ought to be headed in. It’s like charging forward on a wobbly unicycle; thrilling, requires your full attention in multiple directions at one time, needs concentration - it’s basically really interesting constantly being on the brink of falling, and you just have to keep on pedaling forward because if you stop you’re going to collapse. (Speaking of which, I would like to learn how to unicycle again someday.)
Similarly, it is an interesting way to live, although not necessarily the healthiest thing to keep up for extended periods of time (I do take breaks, so no worries on that front). It’s times like this late at night when I’m writing that I become more conscious of how fast my flywheel’s churning and how not-aware I’ve been of this all day.
Occasionally people can knock me out of this and make me sit down and be with them and focus without hyperfocusing; sometimes I can’t get into the flow of things when this happens (especially if I’m dragged into it not of my own accord) and I get super-antsy; sometimes it works and gives me a good breather perspective. Still not something I can control as I would like.
It also strikes me that things I write on this blog are written - even designed - to knock myself down, in a way. To make myself more human and explain how and why I do what I am doing; there’s no magic to it, for the most part*. No mysterious thought processes, no “but I could never do that - X is special!” sauce. I read some of my friends’ blogs and go “holy cow, they think in shiny ways - they have such cool projects, great experiences, exhilarating lives.” And I can only read about the high parts, or the low parts that turn into lessons and then high parts, and the things that make good stories and good drama afterwards, because that is what they write about.
I think I write that stuff, but I also write stuff that isn’t shiny. I am confused and bored and lazy and I write about that. I get upset and irresponsible and sometimes I’m not a good person, and I write about that. I’m also sometimes happy for no apparent reason, and sometimes I think the world is wonderful and glorious, and I write about that too. It’s not intended to have drama or a story arc or make people reading it think a certain way about me. It’s just uncensored (I have mentioned this before) braindumping for the future me, to see what I was thinking in the past. I don’t want to steer anybody’s thoughts in a certain direction. I just want to understand my own.
*Okay, I read absurdly fast, but seriously, if this was your main information input method for the vast majority of your life, you’d become much speedier at it as well.
The statements on the flip side - that I am weird in some ways that I don’t understand, sometimes, and that I am conscious that I do occasionally have an audience and react to it accordingly, and a lot of other things - they’re also true.
My mental flywheel’s getting jittery (part of this is that I am re-learning how to deal with and enjoy loneliness as SOP). I’m going to drop the laptop and go do more unpacking ’till I pass out. Tomorrow I help my cousin move back into Babson’s dorms. Inertia! Inertia! Go, go, go!
Saturday, August 30th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
After driving people out to Olin last night, I was awake and so decided to assemble furniture. I kept assembling furniture until all furniture that I could assemble with the tools available was assembled and I had nothing else to do except sleep (circa 2:30am). Thrashed about a bit, became unconscious, woke up at 6:45 and was awake. As in, 6:45 is when I gave up trying to go back to sleep. So I unpacked some more…
My life has become this parade of shopping and unpacking, shopping, driving, and unpacking. Sometimes the shopping is fantastic, like carting around large pieces of wood at Home Depot (and a drill - we’re doing a bit of make-your-own stuff); sometimes it’s somewhat less fantastic, like when I grudgingly conceded that I should leave room in my closet for some clothing (as opposed to bookshelves all the way across).
I think we’ve got mostly everything by now. Thursday will be the last big day of Getting Stuff, as that is when my bed and Chris’s coffee table arrive and when I’m going to pick up my keyboard from Guitar Center and snatch the last few remnants of things we didn’t get today - eggshell foam, an extra lightbulb, maybe another floor lamp. Then… that’s it. We can retire to nurse our aching wallets with impending paychecks for another year.
I got a little too preoccupied with Getting Stuff, because somewhere around 9:30pm when I finally started to walk back to the (fully loaded) van in Natick I realized that I was feeling kind of woozy and lightheaded and that I had forgotten something that day: eating. Whoops. Fortunately, Nikki still had nearly all the sandwich stuff I’d gotten for Olin’s move-in day sitting in her fridge, so I swung by, inhaled a plum and sandwich, and then (blood sugar levels newly fortified) proceeded to hurtle down the highway much less fuzzy-headed, which was nice.*
*I’m going to post a sign on “Care And Feeding Of The Mel” above/beside my workstation at 1cc when I get table space, requesting that folks drag me outside for sunlight, food, sleep, and that kind of thing. I may not remember to get much of that stuff otherwise.
Then I walked into the apartment and there was a call of “Mel! Fondue!” and Chris and Leslie (who had earlier accompanied us to Costco so that we could get big bags of frozen food and whiteboards, bless her) had this gorgeous molten pool of cheesy habanero sitting out on the table and we stuffed ourselves silly with dipping ciabatta cubes and carrots and celery and apples into it.
It is a little odd to be writing about just living, rather than working on this or that - my current big project is Yavin IV, but that seems so… small, and mundane, and ordinary, compared to the usual, y’know, BREAK NEW GROUND! CHANGE THE WORLD! RAH RAH RAH BIG IMPORTANT THING! and it’s honestly just a little nice to have that be the case for a tiny amount of time. To work on something purely selfish and extraordinarily ordinary. I don’t think I can keep it up for very much longer; I can’t wait for work to start on the 15th.
I think I have enough to do before then, though.
Saturday, August 30th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Assembling furniture: Useful, sort of boring.
Assembling furniture while trying not to bleed on it: Less boring.
Sometimes when unpacking, things are sharp.
Leslie came out on Thursday night with more kitchen things, and we broke in a fair number of our appliances by cooking our first meal at Yavin IV (the name of our apartment; it’s near the Maverick T stop, and Maverick -> Rebel -> Rebel Alliance). Chris made curry, we ate on the roof as the sun set. Last night was spent at Sunset with more Olin people (yay!) and I… went shopping before that, and - well, you’ll see.
Interesting news, courtesy of my brother. I tend to view these things with a detached scientific curiosity, as I don’t really want (or need) to hear more than I do; it’s what I’m used to now. Besides, spending more energy on hoping for something I probably won’t get is less productive than harnessing those joules to work on… assembling furniture, or something else that I know I can get done.
I own far to many books, so I believe I will continue in my original (and formerly abandoned) plan of Read And Take Good Notes And Then Give Out As Presents. It’s either that or buy something like 5 bookcases and have a maze of bookshelves in my room instead of walls and floor.
My boxes are consuming the floor space in the kitchen and living room, so I ought to continue to unpack now. Yes.
Saturday, August 30th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Newly assembled and officially the most important piece of furniture in the house at present: bookshelf. Very large. It folds. 5 shelves. From Target. Terrifying fact: it’s nearly full, and I haven’t unpacked half the books I have in the apartment yet, and that’s nothing compared to what I have to ship here from Chicago. I will get more bookcases, and find some space to put them in my room (there is no way all my books will fit into the living room without being incredibly unfair to Chris). Also, at least 80% of these are textbooks. That I like. Yay!
As noted earlier, Chris and I now have food and I have a Rice Cooker of Ridiculousness which I am super proud of (still have “shiny new X” syndrome). It makes lugaw (rice porridge) and steams things and I can make it do stuff like “I put things in you! Have them cooked when I get back at 2am tomorrow morning!” Other vital cooking equipment obtained at Super 88: wooden bamboo paddle for wok-awesomeness and plastic Chinese-style soup spoons for… well, soup. And for microwaving things, because I hate having to hold a dripping spoon of oatmeal while I watch the timer.
I’m also really happy with our silverware; it turns out that Chris and I had eyed the same set separately (same store, same day, different independent trips) and he had been hoping that I would get them (we had agreed I’d buy the silverware) but he never told me, so when he saw them later in the car he was quite pleased. Likewise with the bookcase I got, actually. I am not as happy with the plates I got, but they are nice enough (just slightly more breakable than I’d like them).
Aside from moving in, I went up to Nashua today to see Chandra, and currently am writing from her couch as she has just gone to bed. This after having me look through fashion websites to pick out styles that I liked. Whee. To be fair, I did ask her to help me do something along these lines (something something enough people have requested wardrobe overhaul and I should probably learn how to dress sometime…) I learned, however, that I do not like anything on fashion websites at all. Poor Chandra mostly learned that I like zippered hoodies. (”You keep talking about functionality! I’m trying to get you to describe emotions!” “I, ah, feel happy when I’m functionally clothed?” “Argh!”)
My put-on-clothing checklist runs as follows: “Am I naked?” (If so, get dressed, repeat the question.) “Will I be cold?” (If so, add more clothing, repeat question.) “Are all the things I’m wearing clean?” (If not, do laundry and/or change clothes and repeat the question). If these three pass, I walk on out the door. So my current style can probably be described as Mel Does Not Know How To Care About Whether The Things At The Top Of Her Drawer Actually Color-Coordinate Oh Boy Does She Look Like A Dork But Hey She’s Happy So Whatever.
I’m feeling mildly adrift, but happy (then again, I am always happy). In one sense, I have stability - apartment, forthcoming paychecks, impending piano lessons (YAY!) I think I’m way too happy about the piano part and must temper my enthusiasm so I don’t overdo it and burn out and stop practicing completely in a month because I can’t keep up with my far-too-ambitious expectations for myself; this happens often.
On another side of things, the feeling of being the N+1th wheel is somewhat acute at the moment, where N is the number of people who have “each other” and a place they fit, with not much room for more. Really, I do have a lot of people (I am very lucky) who do care about me; many of my friends are nearby and awesomeness abounds, so I shouldn’t have much regarding this to gripe about; I’m in the city that I love with people that I love and places, projects, things to do I love, and bookstores. (Come on. Best bookstore city ever.) Plus I may soon have an Actual Bed. What’s not to like?
Oh - amusing story about the bed. I went to the discount furniture outlet and strolled to the first salesman I saw and said “I have a twin size mattress and I need something to put it on.” He looked me (5′8″) up and down and said “A twin size mattress?” I said “Yeah.” “For you?” “Yeah.” Turns out the twin size beds they had were mostly in the kids’ section, so I could get (1) a trundle bed! or (2) a princess canopy bed! or (3) a seafarin’ captain theme bed! (They, alas, did not have anything shaped like a racecar. I would be tempted otherwise.) I was a little tempted by the trundle bed until I realized it costs a lot, was heavy, big, and meant that any guests we had would have to be incredibly deep sleepers to not be roused by my “grah! I’m hyper and can’t sleep yet!” pre-nighttime thrashing.
Tonight I sleep on Chandra’s couch. The margarita-half I drank (more like 1/4 a rather large one - I had some of Chandra’s) will help with the impending unconsciousness shortly, so this should be an uncharacteristically brief night thrash-about. (We had Mexican food tonight, which explains the title of this post.) Hurrah for spicy things, and now hurrah for rest.
Wednesday, August 27th, 2008 | Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
(walking out of Super 88, our local Asian supermarket)
Me: Whoa, I have a rice cooker and a wok. I feel like a real grown-up now.
Chris: For me, it’s more like “I have my own skillet!”
Me: Yeah, I’m Chinese.
(in the grocery store, international aisle)
Me: *immediately walks over to sesame oil / soy sauce section*
Chris: *has moved to stand in front of the olive oil / balsamic vinegar rack*
(later, while unpacking all our boxes)
Chris: You know, it feels really weird to be doing this right now.
Mel: Oh yeah.
Chris: All of my friends from high school got their own apartments after, like, their freshman year of college, so they’ve all done this already, years ago.
Mel: Whoa. I was going to say that it was sort of early to not be living with my parents because I’m not married, but… yes.
Also, I’ve never complimented a company on the packaging of their toilet
plungers before, but OXO is smart; they sonic-weld their plastic case
around the plunger, but include some handy perforations so you can,
with one deft motion and no tools, extract your doodad from its case. Yay good design!
And also also, Chris is wonderful. Our apartment is a no-shoes zone; we have a shoe-rack by the door. I’m happy because I can traipse around barefoot and still have clean feet.
The unpacking continues.
Wednesday, August 27th, 2008 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Ahh. I get to sleep on a mattress now. My mattress. In my apartment. Which I have now. Shared with Chris. I’m still in somewhat stunned disbelief regarding this, but the hours of unpacking and assembling furniture are starting to sink in. Also, boy howdy trashcans are expensive. It feels incredibly good to be back in Boston.
I think I’m home, if I can find out what that means exactly now. I still have a wanderlust and probably always will, but I also think I need to have a place to run away from - and that place is home. (Someday I want to ’settle down’ and have a stable place to run away from. Big house somewhere, full of people who will also be based mostly there for many years. Hey. I can dream.)
There is a terrific backlog of posts stored up on my XO. It’s somewhere in the depths of the minivan buried underneath such things as bookshelves and a mop. I’ll post it later when I find it. But yes, we drove to Boston, made it, found a place to stay, so basically, NextPhaseOfLife.start() has executed. It has many threads and takes a long, long time and lots and lots of processing power.
Olin move-in today. And lots of shopping. Dropped Nikki off at Olin (Tank took the T to get her car), bought some plates and brooms and shelves and a dish rack and many things for me and Chris, gazed longingly at piano store (I’m going to get a digital; I’m starting lessons soon), went back to Olin, brought food (half-consumed), got mistaken for a freshman (by a sophomore who hadn’t met me yet), helped people haul in boxes, haul out bins, had some cannoli out at Greg’s, removed belongings from aunt’s basement, staggered back to Maverick, currently half-collapsed on couch listening to Chris and Leslie unpack kitchenware.
I’ve pushed back my hyperactivity a little (I pulled it up to drive so I could be awake for that) and hopefully that’ll be enough to let me just collapse a little bit tonight. I can allow myself to be tired for 12 hours, right? Right.
Good night, world.
Tuesday, August 26th, 2008 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
I believe I’ve just successfully taken most of a weekend off from work, which is a rather remarkable and uncommon occurence in my life - I’ll have to practice this more, as I think I’m more effective doing things in short intense bursts (I’m a sprinter).
Breakfast: Travesty-in-a-can (aerosol pancakes) for Andrew, who headed back home this morning. Also ridiculously overbuttered eggs, buckwheat pancakes, and mango sausage. I talk about food here because the details of such are more concrete than saying the vague (but very true) “man, I miss Andrew. It was awesome having him around.”
Lunch: At the Botanical Gardens with mom, right before listening to taiko drumming (apparently it was Japanese theme day, and there was also a special bonsai exhibit). Taiko drumming is something I’d like to do again at some point in time. Some Go players had set up a table and I quickly found that I’d forgotten much of what Mark had taught me sophomore year… eventually I managed to remember enough to hold things even with a handicap of 2, but zow. Rustiness.
Dinner: Made frozen yogurt with Chris. Blueberry. I drove to 3 different hardware stores looking for rock salt; finally settled on the 99.5% salt (0.5% Something Else) used for… water purifiers or something.
Still feel awkward on the piano. Still, for some reason, really like it. Still trying to get it back again.
Also interesting: watching wasps drop from the attic above as mom doused their nest with noxious fumes. Plip. Rain of writhing wasps on the driveway. Crushing them was an act of mercy. While I don’t like stingy insects hanging around the house, I’m also mixed about preemptively soaking them with Chemicals of Deathiness. Not that mixed, though. I helped hang the new screen up there.
As time goes by, I’m coming more and more to appreciate and love (and realize how weird it is) to be able to snap into happiness and excitedness at will. It doesn’t stop me from being tired and/or sad, but I can almost always turn on being happy and energized on top of it, and since the latter is the more visible/dominant state, it works really, really well. It’s like speedreading for me; it’s something I just did since forever, and took for granted, and am still mildly surprised that anyone would consider it not natural.
Compartmentalized lives aren’t particularly fun to live. I shall attempt to not have one inasmuch as I am able to do so.
Having a good library nearby is… indispensible. I love the feeling of melting into stacks of books - it’s one of the few places where my mind can both roam and be free from distraction enough to focus on whatever it happens to flit onto, and where having my mind flit onto Random Things is totally okay.
It’s kind of neat to come across people who’ve developed similar coping
mechanisms for the world as you have, but entirely independently. It’s also kind of neat to see the words they use to describe it, and how they’re different from the words you chose yourself.
Though I dislike having a car, driving said motor vehicle, and look forward to once again having less hair, there’s something nice that I’ll miss about being able to cruise down a late-night street with the front windows open and music playing and tangled trails of hair (my hair is straight and fine and soft) dancing about your ears and face. I won’t miss it enough to prevent me from cutting my hair and selling the van, but it’s a kind of moment that I sort of… on top of all the things I dislike about the car and the hair and the everything, the kind of moment that I actually enjoy.
Two days left for packing and finishing everything. Must force myself to rest more, and rest more regularly - hence typing here in an attempt to coax myself into that mental state. It appears to be working.
Sunday, August 17th, 2008 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Hooray! The summer’s ending! I’m free!
Finally, the summer’s ending. I’m going to collapse and sleep now.
Crud, the summer’s ending. Too much to do. Too much to do. How am I going to get it done?
Hooray! The summer’s ending! The load’s going to be gone from my shoulders soon.
Aah! How did the summer end so fast? Where did it go?
Nononononono peopleleaving staystaystaystaystaystay
Hooray! The summer’s ending! I’m going off to do more exciting things! See exciting places! Meet exciting people! Work on exciting projects!
There’ll be another summer next year.
Hey, ripe blackberries. Hello, fall.
Friday, August 15th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Since I haven’t updated in the last several days, I’ll take a sampling of freeze-frames from the week.
Right now
Leaning on an inflatable hedgehog chair, blogging and waiting for the next train (1.5 hours to go, then another hour of train and car riding… we’ll probably reach home around 1:30am.)
Several hours ago
Tangy melty goat cheese with a blue vein running through it spread on Tuscan bread and washed down with cloudy Belgian wheat ale. And raspberries. Plus raw okra, heirloom tomatoes, and sparkling pink lemonade. Full belly, sprawled back on a tacky white and blue and yellow flowered blanket in the park, and a conductor is waving frantically at the orchestra which is blasting Bizet in our direction. Tank is next to me, wearing my ILXO jacket and hugging her knees; Andrew is on his back with his arms crossed up behind his head, eyes closed. Chris leans over and cuts another slice of cheese, and something fiery trails overhead. There are stars.
Yesterday
Eyes glazing over; I’m picking off my “JUROR” badge (first time) and reading 150 pages of Alan Greenspan before throwing myself into the corner of a train and weaving in and out of consciousness the entire ride back. My eyes have been burning lasers struggling to lipread lawyers and judges talking on the opposite side of the room (turned half away from me most of the time, some with mustaches and a habit of resting their hand in front of their mouth, thank you). The sustained concentration has drained me. When I get back into the house, I crumple into the mattress until Andrew shakes me awake for dinner; I don’t want to have to try to understand English any more. Shopping for Ridiculous Picnic Food later that evening perks me right up.
Wednesday
Laser cutting trial 3: Chris shows me the snapped pieces of the Exploded XO, which didn’t cut all the way through on the Epilog. I love this new design; he’s placed rows of labeled holes on the side to hold the screws in the order you take them out when disassembling an XO, including a slot for the blasted gamepad that keeps ricocheting out when you remove the front panel. Leslie Larocca comes for dinner, and then we drive home in this amazing pouring rain that turns the streets into a soggy Impressionist painting. Dark night, blurry yellow streetlights.
Tuesday
Evanston. Mango-coconut-otherthingsIforgot bubble shake after my last day of speech therapy. Tank and Nikki are here; so are ample amounts of sunlight. The expansively happy feeling of fitting into a place in the world for just a second; it’s enough to let my guard down later on and I drive a long loop through Buffalo Grove on the way back from Barrington that night, listening to music I don’t know the words to, windows open and volume on high and trying to shake the feeling of not wanting to let go of this summer.
Monday
There’s a long list on the board of things to do. We should do them. We proceed to do so.
Friday, August 15th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
This afternoon’s nap was definitely a mini-crash. I was at the Game Jam coding on a vocab trainer and felt a little wobbly when I went to get a drink of water, so I told Tank to come find me in 15 minutes. I then passed out on the industrial-blue couches by the History department and proceeded to have trippy, trippy dreams for nearly 2 hours.
This is weird for several reasons:
- I was tired enough that I couldn’t fight it.
- I slept. Almost immediately. No thrashing around like I usually do before I sleep. Just BOOM, and I’m down for the count.
- I dreamt. (I usually don’t dream during short naps.)
- I dreamt about really strange things. Usually my dreams - and I’ve been in the habit of trying to remember them for several years - are relatively mundane. (Seriously. I dream about things like waking up and going downstairs to eat breakfast. Really exciting. When I have trippy dreams, they’re usually tied into something from the waking world. This was not.)
After that nap (and being surprised by Andrew, Nikki, and April-Hope, who were waiting to ambush me around the corner in the hopes of waking me up with an adrenaline jolt) I was able to muster up enough energy to get me functionally through the rest of the day, drooping slightly but managing it well enough not to be in danger of crashing. I got a lot of code refactoring done and split things into a GUI layer, a logic layer, and a generic flashcard library (data storage & manipulation) layer. Coded in the van on the way back, too.
It is hard to plan around flexibility.
I wonder when people will stop being surprised at the abilities of others. The one that’s been hitting us the most this summer is age. I wish I could go around without having an age, or a race or a gender, or anything like that - just be a Being who Does Stuff. Yay for preconceptions. I know exactly how I could use the typical ones attributed to me to my advantage, but I don’t want to have those as an option for things I can manipulate. First of all, I refuse to become good at a game I don’t want to play, and I’m afraid of what I’d become if I played it. Second, if you can do X “despite being [a] Y,” you perpetuate the notion that “Y’s can’t do X”. (You can, but you’re just ’special’.)
I learn the most when I push closest to breaking but don’t actually break. When you push too far and break, you have the potential learn even more but sometimes you don’t realize it, and since I consider awareness to be much of learning, I get more goodness out of not breaking. Meaning I wouldn’t break myself repeatedly if I were actually smart. Meaning I’m not actually smart most of the time. ;-) Also, learning something is more important than being right.
Wow, English… I’m not speaking it right now. I think I’m going to sleep very, very early tonight. I can’t crash and burn during these last few weeks; we can’t afford it, since everyone’s running pretty close to their limits (I’m being as insistent as I know how to be about all the ILXO folks getting tons of rest). If I crash, I impose my brokenness on others, and that’s an unfair load. Hence the self.take_care_of().
Saturday, August 9th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »