February 1, 2012

  • Two Standard Deviations of Adventure

    I first noticed something was amiss shortly after midnight, when I started typing, and only nasty things came out. Haskell doesn't make any sense. Wraiths are stupid. Meditation sucks. The word "let" is ungainly. I hate Haskell. why won't they make any Now Panic and Freak Out posters with the crown upside-down???

    On and on it went, and eventually I noticed something was out-of-the-ordinary, and I sat down for a reset.

    Resetting is a strange sort of ritual for me. I build a playlist of about a half-hour (for that's about how long I have before I start falling asleep), and then I turn the lights out, close my eyes, sit very still, and listen to it. It's loosely meditative. I try not to think about anything. I think the idea is that some register in my brain somewhere has gotten a bad value stuck in it, and so I dump in all this sound and flood out my RAM. In the end, hopefully the bad feelings are all purged, and I can try again.

    There are some sounds that are worth a thousand words to me, or even a thousand frames of a recompiled memory. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. I once walked into Professor's office and saw a large painting on his counter. I asked what thousand words it was trying to say, and whether it had been painted by a computer? He answered that no, it was simply painted by a human. He didn't think it was trying to say anything. He thought I was looking too hard. He went on to say that he didn't know if it was upside-down. Perhaps the artist had signed it, and by a signature, perhaps he might determine if it really was upside-down. He found the signature; the painting was indeed upside-down. That was an interesting little episode.

    But a few seconds of song are enough to build a full emotion, hopeful or enthused or poignant recollection. I hadn't realized that Collide would remind me so strongly of summer 2005, which was when I first started listening to it. Three weeks out of a summer that I'd all but forgotten, and I certainly couldn't tell what songs I listened to while I was there! But the songs can still tell me. I could see the layout of the computer lab, the bright room with black computers and an aisle down the middle, and the particular flavor of the companionship of those particular people. I hadn't realized I still remembered what being around those people felt like.

    Half an hour later, I returned to the Internets, all ready to continue on with the Haskell assignment, when suddenly. . . .

    It's hard to tell when one gets gradually crankier over many hours, but it was so immediately clear right then. I looked at the chapter, and I immediately felt angry. It was very strange. I like programming, and although it is often tedious and frustrating, it doesn't usually make me angry. I didn't understand where the feeling was coming from. I noticed I was confused. I was particularly grateful to've had my half-hour of music, so that I could at least try to feel more reasonably about it. But all the rest of that night, I had to try hard not to be cross with Haskell. It occurred to me that I might hate that class.

    Red Bull is especially effective after a while of not having any, and a 20-ounce can especially so. All those times I tried to implement rollover, and what it actually took was a can of Red Bull and a problem set! Around noon today, I submitted that problem set, and shortly after had a short phone conversation with Mr. Two Sigma. Not a phone interview, just a short conversation where he explained to me how the code test will work, and then told me about Two Sigma. It sounded like a happy place. Mr. Two Sigma was very friendly. I was a veritable monster. I asked whatever I felt like, rather than reasonable things. "Does Two Sigma contribute to the country's GDP? Does it create wealth, or simply reshuffle it?" Mr. Two Sigma responded that people there sympathized with the Wall Street Occupants.

    I spent the rest of the day stumbling around being non-punctual about things. Late to class, left early from class, late to carillon anyways, left early from ACM practice, late to handbell lesson. . . .

    Handbells are gorgeous little critters! The larger ones are about the size of a person's head and heavy enough that they are hard to shake. When I gave one a hefty swig, it echoed: DOOONNNNNNGGGGGG! I tried to quiet it, and I could feel the thing vibrating, big solid resonant frequencies rolling around within it. The smaller ones looked like little Terraria fairies. Ms. Ellen gave us a lesson. Each of us had three or so bells, and whenever those notes came up, we were to ring those bells. I was A, B-flat, and B. Most of the pieces we played were in F-major, so the B bell didn't come up very much. Each time it did, it caught me completely by surprise. I felt like naming them, but then I'dn't be able to remember them all.

    Now I'm here again. The night after rollover, all I want to do is sleep, but it's another problem set night, and I have until noon to learn enough about my senior project topic to write a proposal about it. And also figure out what a proposal is, that might be important too.

    The list of things to be done is still vastly longer than it should be, and I do want to mail out more postcards and knit some more, but that problem set was a big one. Having that done feels like I'm not completely off track.