I just had the best workout of my life. I felt totally pumped up at the end, and in the best mood of my life. Strange, then, how the slightest thing can send me spiraling back into depression. Sometimes not giving a damn anymore is easier said than done—just like not caring what anyone else thinks.
(Lest anyone take this the wrong way, please don’t. I blame myself and myself alone.)
The nice thing about my depression is that it’s usually gone when I wake up in the morning.
I shouldn’t have gone to work out today.
I left to work out a few hours ago. When I came back, most of the people I wanted to talk to were offline, and I was too tired to do anything else. I might go to bed shortly after writing this post. I might stay up and play Knights of the Old Republic instead, although if I start I’ll feel compelled to record my actions and write a fanfic out of it, and I don’t have the energy to do that.
Two nights ago I decided to shave. I’m pretty happy with my appearance overall. When I take care of it, my hair is smooth and shiny and healthy, my body doesn’t look too bad when I have clothes on (and would probably look great if I took better care of it), and my face is alright. The only thing I don’t like is my facial hair. Sometimes I want so badly to have a thicker beard that’s worth anything instead of this patchy-ass curly shit. I got sick of it today and shaved it all off. It’s really quite frustrating to find that there’s something I don’t like about myself that I can do absolutely nothing about. It makes me feel incredibly powerless.
Something else that makes me feel incredibly powerless is when I see a young woman or girl crying. Unless I know beforehand that it’s her own damn fault, seeing a woman crying makes me feel sympathetic, tender, but completely powerless. I mean, I can’t just approach a complete stranger who’s crying and try to comfort her, can I? (Actually, I tried it once. I don’t know if it helped.)
Sometimes my friends joke that I’m too much like a woman. Maybe so. For instance, I do have mysterious mood swings for no apparent reason. Tonight I’m actually pretty depressed. I didn’t really feel like working out even though I did, and now I’m sad that I didn’t get to talk to anyone. It might strike some of you as strange that talking to people online is so important to me, but to be honest, most of the people who are worth my time and attention don’t live in Pullman, and if they do, I haven’t gotten around to meeting them. Sometimes I think that when I graduate, I’m going to leave this place, never come back, and never care about it again. Sort of like the way I feel about Port Angeles, except there’s a few people in and from Port Angeles that I do care about—more than I’ve met in Pullman, to be sure.
I should have picked a harder major. It’s hard to feel superior to others when you’re a business major, even if it’s MIS. And majoring in philosophy only helps slightly. I don’t know—as much as I hated high school and wanted to get out, it was better in some ways. I had more friends, friends who were just plain better people than the friends I have here. I had a lonely existence in high school and never really spent much, if any, spare time socializing, but it seems that even that was better than now. Inevitably, everyone who was as smart as me went to a better college than I’m going to. And the thing is, I’m too far out of money to transfer or change majors. All I can hope to do now is graduate and get ahead in the real world.
Or maybe I’ll screw that up too and live a dull, meaningless life.
Textbooks are usually a major expense, but this year I’m taking another approach to textbook purchases. Simply put, I’m not. I’m not going to buy any textbooks unless I personally want them or unless I’m convinced that they’re absolutely necessary. In lots of classes I can concentrate and take good notes and not really need to read the book, so why should I bother buying it? This is particularly true of some MIS classes. If you’re relying on physical paper for information about technology, you’re quite often a moron. Books aren’t updated when reality changes, and reality changes far too quickly and far too often in this field for it to be worth printing a book about. (It’s true that some things stay constant long enough to write a book—I’m not making broad generalizations here.) Anyway, I haven’t bought any textbooks yet, although I’m probably going to eventually.
I’ve also decided to get into better physical shape this semester. My energy level is lower than it should be even though my thyroid levels are at pretty good levels, so maybe getting into better condition will help with that. Well, that, and I want a toned muscular body for reasons of sheer vanity. (Don’t tell anyone).
So aside from classes and personal growth, what else am I doing? Well, as I may have written about before, I’m working at the AML. There’s a one-credit class, English 300, that basically covers how to use the lab and lab software, and the course is now taught by the consultants in a series of workshops. So I’ll be teaching people how to use the video editing software we have in the lab. Towards the end of last semester I worked up a workshop outline with a couple other consultants and this semester we’ll be teaching it. This should give me more hours of work and more interesting work to do, so that’s a definite positive.
I have a few other ideas and ambitions for self-improvement, but I’m a little anxious to see if I’ll have time for them, and if so, how many of them I’ll have time for. I do know that I’ll make more out of this semester than I’ve made out of past semesters. I’m mature enough now to meet the challenge of life and to make the most out of it. So be it.
Today was the first time the realization actually struck me that I’m back in school, taking classes and incurring the associated obligations of being a student. A lot has changed over the course of the past couple weeks.
I’ll start where I left off: Christmas. Many people complain about the commercialism of Christmas and how that threatens its spirituality. As I explained earlier, these people are morons, and contrary to their whinings, the Jews and trial lawyers didn’t stop me from having a rather joyous celebration of family and prosperity. I love Christmas, and I had a pretty good one at home with my parents.
Upon returning to Pullman last Thursday, on the fifth, I faced a number of daunting tasks I had to complete before classes started anew. I had to finish moving into my apartment and make the place habitable. It still requires some severe cleaning, but in the past few days I’ve accomplished the important parts; there’s now a clear walking path through my bedroom, I have internet access, and my door can be safely and reliably locked. Unfortunately, some of the items I’d foolishly left in the apartment over break were stolen by the previous tenants, so I have taken the liberty to do as I please with the items they’ve left behind and neglected to retrieve. Among these items is some sort of fish in a bowl. My roommates and I are debating what to do with it: Jeff leans toward experimentation while Greg and I are leaning toward disposal. They also left some rapidly-decomposing food products in the fridge, which we are all leaning towards disposing.
There was also a situation where one of the previous tenants had a boyfriend who had a key to the place. I managed to retrieve the key with no loss of life and limb, although there is still another key out there. I’m going to suggest to my roommates that we put in a work order to change the lock on the front door entirely just in case.
On Monday, I went to class for the first time. Since I’m living off-campus this was my first time on Pullman’s marvelous bus system, which I’ve recently discovered is quite crowded at certain peak hours. It interests me how people on buses and elevators will ordinary go out of their way to sit a distance away from everyone else given the chance, but as soon as that’s no longer feasible, they have no problem cramming in together with complete strangers. It’s even more apparent on elevators—while bus passengers seem to accept their fate, elevator passengers relish it. Invariably, when I look with uncertainty into a crowded elevator, the passengers welcome me and insist that there’s room. It’s not friendliness that fuels this—people aren’t mean around here, but they aren’t particularly friendly either, like they are in the South, for instance. I think people secretly enjoy cramming together in small spaces.
Lots of animals like to crowd together physically. Puppies will pile atop each other to sleep and penguins will huddle together for warmth in the antarctic cold, but humans don’t usually engage in mass physical contact without some excuse or pretext. Public transit allows us to fulfill this need in a socially acceptable way, as do elevators. (I suppose that, in its time, the fad of cramming as many people as possible into a telephone booth or Volkswagen, was another way to fulfill this need.)
Anyway, onto class. Here’s a summary of my classes:
MIS 271: Programming in C#. Seems interesting. Seems like real programming. Seems like fun.
MIS 322: Systems Analysis and Design. What is systems analysis, you ask? Good question. It’s what systems analysts do, and since I want to be a systems analyst, maybe I should take this class. (I don’t have choice since I’m an MIS major anyway.)
MIS 375: E-commerce or somesuch. Another MIS requirement. Seems moderately interesting, and it’s in the Boeing Wireless Classroom of the Future, which I’ll explain more about in a future blog.
UH 350: An Honors requirement, UH 350 classes are about non-Western civilizations (we study Western civilization in UH 330). My particular section is about East Asia, which is a very interesting and important region of the world.
MgtOp 340: Operations management—a wicked sweet class. If I wasn’t an MIS geek I’d definitely consider it as a major, because operations management is a pretty geeky job in and of itself. It involves using statistics and statistical analysis to figure out, for instance, the most efficient way to manufacture goods, or how to empty and refill an airplane in 12 minutes, or things like that.
Phil 490: INPC Seminar. It’s about free will and ethics and shit. I’ll explain more in a later post.
Overall I’m pretty enthusiastic about this coming semester. I’ve got more to write about but not enough time, so…if I don’t post again tonight, you all better harass me until I do.
