rianjs.net

Well I'm back from my first ever Writing 2 class (hah!), and the prof seemed pretty cool. I have to straighten things out with my school first, and then we should be good to go. The guy knows a lot about history… I wonder if he did anything with it in college. Those were the most interesting bits of class: when he'd start on a random historical tangent that pertained to whatever the class had been reading, and I'd think to myself "Oh shit I remember that from AP US History!" The downside was that he talked for a good hour and 45 minutes before giving us a break. (It's a three-hour class). Jesus that was rough.

All-in-all I'm a lot happier than I was earlier. I get to pick up the Kim at the airport tomorrow morning (yay!) and she'll be here until Tuesday. And I've got MercyMe's "I Can Only Imagine" blasting my ears out, because the song is awesome. I don't consider myself religious, but this song gives me goosebumps, even after hearing it over 70 times. (Hooray iTunes's play counting ability.) I haven't listened to it in a while and there's no one home, so…

Here it is, about twenty minutes before I have to leave for a class I don't want to take, and by all rights, shouldn't have to take. I seem to have lost the argument with the school administration regarding Writing 2, which obviously sucks. But that's not what's annoying me at the moment.

What's under my skin is me. This situation should never have occurred. The reason I'm taking this class again is because I did the big research paper in Writing 2 at MCP, and I got a 99.75. The highest grade anyone has ever gotten on a research paper ever at this school with that professor. So what did I do? I stopped going to class because it was a waste of my time. (I could have told anyone that when I started, but whatever.) Yeah, really smart. So I got an incomplete, which basically has translated into an F. So I got fucked.

It's my own fucking fault. Just like it's my own fucking fault that I fucked off in Organic Chemistry 2 (and 1) and ended up with a C+ instead of an A. I started out with a 39 and then a 23 on the first two organic 2 exams (out of four total). One was a drop grade, and the other I had to leave on there. Shit. I fucked myself good that time, and I fucked myself good in Statistics as well. I easily could have had an A, but instead of going to class consistently, I got irritated with always being called on (though it massaged my ego) as a last resort if no one else could answer a question. And then I didn't study for that final after not going to class consistently for the final three weeks of class. Fuck. And then Physics. I had a 100 on the first two exams, and then I got a 75 on the third and who knows how well I did on the final. Why? Because I didn't go to class.

I'm rather tired of this cycle. I should be on the Dean's List, but I'm shooting myself in the foot every time I make a stupid decision. I started to not do that at the end of this last semester which is why my organic grade went up, along with a lot of help from Kim. Shit, there are so many people not as gifted as me that get much higher grades because I'm such a fuckup. It just angers me that I let myself slip into mediocrity when I could achieve so much more. I've had to put off a few dreams because of a GPA not high enough (being SGA treasurer, which Kim now is; I find the irony of this amusing and sad, though perhaps it's better that we didn't run against one another for the sake of peace in our relationship), as well as wanting to be on the Dean's list. It's like I have macroscopic ADD. If the class is brief enough, I do well, because I don't have enough time to get bored with it and stop going. This is why I got an A in Calc 2 last summer. And this is why I am taking Biochem I and II this summer: because I'm afraid that if I don't, I'll be screwed next year.

I'm not stupid; I know everyone makes mistakes, but I keep making the same one: letting my apathy get the best of me in the middle of the semester, and then scrambling to get my shit together as time winds down. I also know that I've told myself that it will never happen again many times, and yet it still does. But I'm not going to let it get the best of me this summer dammit. I have to do well in all three of my classes now. No more bullshit. I'll worry about the Fall semester gets here, but for God's sake, I want the Dean's list, and then Rho Chi. Fucking A, my Adderall is in full force right now, which usually makes me very happy, but now it's just making me vow to not be a fuckup for the rest of the summer. Odd when happiness turns inward and turns into introspection.

I'm going to get an(other) A in Writing 2.
I'm going to get an A in Biochem 1.
I'm going to get an A in Biochem 2.

Come hell or high water…

I'm writing this without Internet access because I feel like doing some last-minute blogging. Not sure why; nothing profound has happened. I figure I'll save it and just paste it in tomorrow so everyone can read about my phenomenally interesting life. The Comcast guy will be here between 8 and 12. Usually that means around 8(!). We are fortunate to have the Comcast building not two minutes from our house.

The eBay auction for my iBook ended. Funny thing, I've been using my Mac more during the last couple of days than I have in months. Probably since pledging. Curious. Not that I've been using it for a lot of really important stuff: more stupid things like surfing the Internet while watching TV or a movie. Speaking of TVs and movies, I (re)discovered today that taking medication for my ADD while doing something relatively mindless watching TV is a bad idea. I feel this compulsion to do something while watching. This can be something active or passive. Passive like reading a book, or active, like folding my laundry. And if I can't do something to divert myself in this fashion, I get antsy.

I took both my XR and immediate-release today. I got a lot done, I guess. For doing nothing, anyway. I repaired the VCR/DVD player combo because there was a tape stuck in it from my mom. I thought I was going to get annoyed because stuff like that never goes as planned, but it worked out surprisingly well. I removed some screws, and popped the cover right off. I plugged it in, hit eject, and saw where it was getting caught, and unhooked the tape. Viol?; finis. Too bad the attempted lawnmower repairs didn't go nearly so well…

I mowed a lawn for the first time yesterday. My mom bought this super-duper, self-propelled, top-of-the-line Ariens mower, and I fired it up (can you believe I had to ask how to do it? I know squat about mechanical things…). I mowed the lawn in about 45 minutes. I probably could have done it a lot quicker, but I was having fun with it, so I was taking my time. Anyway, we have this tree in the front yard (that I'd take a picture of if I wasn't so lazy and it was raining and dark and a million other really good reasons for me to avoid getting off my ass) that is right next to our second driveway. But the second driveway is about 7.5 to 8 feet lower than the hill in front of our house: it was cut in when the house was built. And this damn tree leaves about three feet of grass to mow before the drop-off to the driveway. Anyway, this tree is more like a big bush, and it's really hard to walk around and maneuver underneath it. The branches are about three feet off the damn ground. So I was working around it, and I bumped the lever that engages the drive so that the mower will propel itself. I just bumped it lightly with about as much force as you would exert on something that you brush accidentally with your leg as you walk by.

And the stupid cable came lose from someplace under the mower. So I finished the rest of the tiny patch left without the self-propulsion mechanism. (Harder than I thought: the grass was pretty long.) And then I tried the owner's manual instructions for adjusting the cable tension. But that wasn't the problem. And so today I tried to put the mower into the car, but I couldn't lift it. It was too awkward. It weighs about 85-90 pounds, and the weight is distributed all over the place, so if you lift the front up, the handles drag, and it's just a bad time and impossible to lift by yourself. So my mom was mad at that because I'd promised to take it to the repair shop. For once, though, I wasn't shirking, and I really couldn't do it because it was just too hard.

And that's the end of my long-winded and uninteresting story.

I also converted all my old WMAs to AAC so I can listen to them in iTunes. Funny thing, they were poor MP3s that were converted to WMA, which degraded quality further, and then I converted them to AAC, yet another lossy format. So I've Imagine taking a poor photocopy and photocopying that, and then photocopying the result from this second copy. That's about how bad the results sound. I'll have to work on replacing them with higher-quality MP3s.

I went to the library this afternoon, and ended up reading quite a bit in a book about Fermat's Last Theorem (Fermat's Enigma). It was pretty cool. The most interesting stuff was some math tidbits that I intuitively knew but never really thought about. The notion of perfect numbers, defective numbers, and excessive numbers. A perfect number, of course, is where the sum of the divisors is the number itself. Take six, for example. Its divisors are 1, 2, 3. 3+2+1=6, obviously. Therefore six is perfect. Twelve would be an excessive number, because it's divisors add up to 24: 1+2+3+4+6 = 24. And then all prime numbers would be defective, having only themselves and 1 as divisors. (Clearly there are defective numbers that are not prime; 9 for example.)

Fun with numbers. Anyway, I was in an introspective mood, and was thinking about my previous blog entry about the nature of perfection. The world was created in six days, yadda yadda perfection blah. I wondered if a "perfect" Deity of sorts would define perfection, or if perfection was entirely independent of said Deity, and rather define the perfect Deity itself. I guess that's kind of the age-old question of the chicken and the egg, though. Basically, who the fuck knows. Fundamentalist types would assert that since God came before everything, he must have created the rules that define everything about our Universe, and therefore that perfection stems from him. But if God were a Deity created by physics and the Universe itself rather than existing independently (as physicist Dr. Frank Tipler would assert) then God is perfect simply because the physical laws and mathematical principles that govern the Universe are perfect. Ultimately, though, if a Deity were "perfect" then I don't think it matters how they got to be that way.

Whatever. I could talk myself in circles all night, probably. It is an interesting line of thought, though. Maybe I'm just crazy.

I went to the beach today. Being in a mathematical state of mind, I looked for fractal patterns in the sand, but there weren't any. I guess the sand wasn't fine enough. The moms and I talked for a while: it was a good conversation, not unlike our conversation earlier in the week about life in general.

I sat down and listened to an MIT lecture on computational biology. About 25 minutes in, I realized that I wasn't going to understand the presentation because I hadn't had biochem. That'll be rectified in less than 48 hours, so hopefully by the end of the summer I'll be able to understand more. I'm not worried about the programming theory behind it, just the damn biology.

Along the same vein, I talked to David this morning for probably 45 minutes to an hour. Unfortunately he was out-of-town, so we couldn't get lunch and chat. And then he's leaving for France on Tuesday for nine weeks, so that rather truncates the amount of time we'll be able to discuss some business ideas that we've been tossing back and forth for a little while. He's planning on Stanford for his PhD in CS, so he'll be busy for a while, as will I. I'll probably finish before him, but like Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who knows what could happen while in school. He's got the CS knowledge, and I'll have the life science background, and we've both got the entrepreneurial spirit and like-minded interest in computational biology and (perhaps primarily) an eye for how the medical field could be radically changed (for the better), and more accessible to researchers, practitioners, and everyone in between. Unfortunately, it's a crazy and completely unrealistic idea, but we've both got nothing to lose, so fuck it. Why not give it a go? Until that time though, I should brush up on my somewhat rusty programming.

Here's to hoping I won't have to use Perl when it comes to proteomics. Someone should write some libraries in C. Maybe I will. Oh wait, no I won't. I'll start and then stop like I do with just about every major project I undertake. Unless someone keeps pushing me, I invariably get distracted by something (anything) and stop about two days in. Two days is probably fairly generous. It's probably more like 24 hours. :rolleyes:

I watched this movie the other day with Kim the night before she left. I'd seen it before, and I remembered liking it. There were more than a few complex themes that I'd never noticed before, and I recall thinking a number of times that there were a few things that I wanted to almost jot down to think more about later. Concepts, that is. I recall watching the movie and seeing Robin Williams's wife go slowly down the tubes of severe depression, seeing her blame herself for the deaths of her children and husband, and thinking that she knows intellectually that their demise is not her fault, and yet her subconscious tells her it is.

It doesn't surprise me that one's subconscious has the power to destroy a person's conscious. At one time it would have, but it doesn't any longer. Logic is a poor substitute for emotion. It does seem interesting that purely cognitive changes in one's thought process can affect changes in the biochemical makeup of the brain. Perhaps then, could it be implied that chemical imbalances in the brain can be corrected by purely cognitive means? Can imbalance be fixed by one's self without the help of pharmaceuticals? Yes and no. Sometimes it can be and sometimes it can't be; it all depends on the person.

I don't know why I wrote that. It seemed much more interesting two nights ago. I shouldn't be surprised, really, that it seems somewhat dull now. Trance music is playing in the background and I've said many times that if I'm not looking out the window, and I zero in on what I'm doing on the computer for long enough, I'll end up thinking it's raining outside even though it might be 85 degrees and sunny. Curious.

Back to What Dreams May Come. The whole movie is a phantasmagoria of dreamlike images, which is what the past few days have seemed like. The train home with Kim Thursday afternoon; taking a nap; eating dinner; watching the movie; tucking Kim in before bed; getting up the next day and moving everything; the silence from the irritation at one another that inevitably comes under the influence of a stressor like moving; and then the drop off at the airport. I almost cried driving out, and I talked to Paul because I thankfully almost got lost, which was a distraction from the emptiness I was feeling inside. The emptiness that is not gone, despite the day's activity.

I went and saw Van Helsing last night with Paul. I liked it. He didn't. Oh well, it happens. Well there's a first time for a happening anyway; I think that was the first time that we went to the movies and didn't have the same opinion on it. I'm sure it'll happen again eventually.

We chatted a bit about life in general last night, and I ended up staying up much later than I had intended to. Not that I was really surprised, though. Paul and I have this habit of talking a lot longer than we think we have. The amount of fluid we consume while talking should be some indication of the length of time we talk, but we don't really notice. He left around 1.30 or so I think, I don't really remember. I didn't call Kim because I didn't feel like talking, and it was super late and my eyes felt as though they were about to bleed. I guess that's what I get for not blinking late at night.

I got up today and took my Adderall, feeling pretty good about most everything. Wasn't feeling sad, but I was a little annoyed at the mess that was — and is to a smaller degree — my room. I can actually see the floor now, which is cool. I did a bunch of computer work on the website, which I was glad to do: small things like making an index for our newsletter, adding more content to the restricted section, removing the right sidebar, and making a guide so people can upload pictures on their own. I did other shit too, not frat-related. It was awesome to have a day where I didn't have to wake up to an alarm clock, and where I didn't have anything that absolutely had to be done. Well, except for cleaning my room, which had to be done, because I'm a little OCD about clutter, despite what Kim thinks. (I just didn't live in my room for the last couple of months so I never noticed my bed, sweetheart. Had I been living there, it would have been cleaner. ;)) It's a lot better, but still has a little way to go. I need a large box to put my notebooks from this past year in so I can put them somewhere. I hate getting rid of anything that is information. If I could find an easy way to digitize everything, I would, and throw away the paper copies. Too bad there's no way to do that, really. I seem to have lost my physics binder too, a fact which is irritating me: I hate losing information just a little bit less than I hate throwing it away. At least one of the two is involuntary.

My Uncle came down from Vermont for Mothers' Day tomorrow. I saw him for about five seconds, and I'm pretty sure I said "Hello," but that's about it. I came to the conclusion that I have precisely nothing in common with the rest of my extended family. They're good people but damn if they don't just scream "white trash." Wow. That sounded insulting, but it's not meant to be. They are my uncles and aunts and cousins, and I do care for them quite a lot. I just don't interact with them too well: I'm not really a gossip fan.

Speaking of Mothers' Day, I haven't gotten my mom a damn thing. It's not for lack of thought, however (for a change) — rather it's because I've got no idea what to get her. I want to get her some perennials for the back yard, but I don't have a vehicle to drive myself around in, so I don't know what to do. I want to get some bulbs and plant them in the ground so she doesn't have to. I should also see about opening the pool up in the back yard, but I have to talk to my boss first.

I've got work tomorrow with Rich. I'm not sure if I'm happy or not about this, but as usual, I'm sure I'll have a good day once I actually get there. I've got to talk to him about the pool to see if he can come over sometime this week while I'm actually home, and open it up, and run down the basics of pool maintenance.

Weird, but I know a whole shitload about pool chemistry. The reactions to take chlorine and convert it into anything from 1?, 2?, or 3? chloramines and hypochlorous acid, and the pHs, temperatures, and amount of UV rays (B, not A) that these reactions occur at, and exactly how chlorine (and chloramines to a lesser extend) kill microorganisms (they interfere with sulfur-containing amino acids to ruin DNA synthesis). And yet I couldn't tell you how to maintain the proper pH, or how to vacuum a pool. So much impractical knowledge. Oh well; it's fun.

I should ask to work Monday through Wednesday. I bet V would love to take three days off, and that'd give me about 33 hours of pay, and still have half a week off to shit around or do whatever.

Speaking of money; I sold my car yesterday. $300 into my pocket that I wasn't betting on having, which is good. Now if I sell my G4 iBook this week, that should be at least $1500 which could probably pay for my August vacation with Kim and rent for three months without having to get a job in the city if I didn't want to. (I will, though. Sitting around the house for 4 days a week with nothing to do would be hell.) I plan on studying quite a lot though. Now that finals are over, I miss studying for organic chemistry. I never thought I'd say that, but nothing has ever given me an intellectual run for my money like that class. I miss it; I need to email my prof tomorrow morning and ask how I did. I think I might have gotten an A on the final, which would help my grade tremendously.

I'm thirsty for another intellectual challenge now, though. I keep thinking programming again, but there's nothing I really want to program. So then I think "database design" and then I realize that I have no need of an RDBMS, so then I think "Fuck! Where do I turn my energies?" Answer: I have no fucking idea. I'm thinking something that's not related to chemistry or the life sciences, but I do have this medical terminology book that I should get around to reading sometime this summer… But I'll probably end up doing something computer-related.

I talked to my mom quite a bit today. Something was bothering her, and I wanted to know what. It was a good conversation: probably 35-45 minutes of nothing but quality talk about ourselves, thoughts on things, and anything else that came up. I haven't had a good conversation with her like that in a long time. Usually we're busy fighting or otherwise not being agreeable to one another. I wish we had more quality conversations. Maybe I should take her to dinner and be sure to take my Adderall IR so we can have another one tomorrow night. It's good to know what she's really thinking and feeling about things that are bothering her and on her mind. Maybe I should tell her to email me about them. Sounds stupid and impersonal, but that truly is the best way to reach me to talk about things sometimes. And it's not because I'm an anti-social bum anymore! It's actually because I'm so busy being the opposite: involved in seemingly everything (relative to when I was involved in nothing) that I don't actually stop to think about what might be bothering my mom. Or my dad. But he usually just tells me.

Curious how one long interaction with someone can be so much more meaningful than short interactions. This is probably why my relationship with my dad is so much more meaningful than the one I have with my mom: my dad and I see each other once every week or two, and we don't talk on the phone, so when we do see each other, we're too busy enjoying one another's company that we don't have time to squabble over petty bullshit.

Did you know that inability to sleep due to a racing mind coupled with involvement in many things is a good sign of clinical depression? Good thing I sleep like a baby almost all the time, unless Kim and I are fighting, in which case I don't sleep well at all, and I'm sick to my stomach.

I'm still writing and writing and writing. I don't know why. I haven't done much, and I haven't seen many people. I took my Adderall immediate release a couple of hours ago, so I doubt it's the stimulant making me talk a lot. (When I don't have anyone to actually speak to, words just flow out be they in IMs, emails, or on IRC to people I don't actually care about.) Since 5:03am I have tapped out 37,541 keystrokes. That's way more than usual, and I still have two hours before I go to bed tonight. Well, an hour and twenty minutes, now. I'm surprised I don't have wrist cramps yet. I haven't typed on the computer in a sustained fashion like this since NaNoWriMo. Who would have thought that coming here with nothing to say would turn into the world's longest blog entry. Well, my personal longest. Woohoo for breaking meaningless personal records.

The real question is whether I'm writing for the sake of writing and making this blog entry even longer. The answer is no…

Jasper and I talked once earlier this winter about the meaning of life, something that I didn't have time to think about for a while due to pledging in February, and then my intense involvement (and resulting productive output) with and surrounding the fraternity. But lately I started thinking about it again, and wondering what, truly, is the meaning of life?

I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian home, and I know their answer to that. But I'm an agnostic now, so that explanation doesn't work for me. I see no need for a God: current physics provides adequate understanding for how life began, and evolution explains why life is the way it is. Interestingly, if there was a God, and he was omnipotent, omniscient, and every other omni in the book, it stands to reason that he would create a world so perfect that the physical laws governing it could explain every aspect of its existence and origins so perfectly that there would be no need for anything but the physical laws to explain why things are the way they are, and how they got to be that way. Quite the mindfuck. Kind of interesting how such a Deity could create something so perfect as to explain itself right out of the picture? Why would a Deity do such a thing? Probably because if said Deity was absolutely perfect in everything, perfection would mandate such creation. Anything less would be imperfect.

Because of my agnosticism, I do not think that there is anything after death. And if there is nothing after death, what is the meaning of life? To have a good life, enjoy one's self, and have a good run while it lasts? This would seem to be the only logical answer. It would seem to be an empty answer, too. It does not satisfy me, and so I keep searching for the meaning of life. In my head, anyway. People say that the meaning of life varies from person to person, and that each must find his own purpose for being on Earth. Pity. A single, known goal to work for would make life so much simpler.

But that would also relegate some to failure: those that did not achieve the goal.

Because the meaning of life seems to be fairly arbitrary — one could, presumably, live to do nothing but eat coconuts and be the happiest man in the world and have as full an existence as someone like Gandhi — I wonder about morals, and where they come in? Because there is no absolute goal, what makes it wrong for someone to murder? Or steal? Laws? Hm. I doubt it. Laws seem empty without some moral high ground. Where do morals come from? Since there is no need for a God, they must come from somewhere else. Something unequivocally superior to any one individual. So I'd have to guess that they come from life itself. Biology would seem to dictate moral behavior. Anything that brings harm to the species in any way is morally wrong.

But that would lend itself to some fairly Hammurabi-esque legislation. But seeing as how that was the way law was, it would make sense that as life evolved, so did the laws of the land. But I don't think that legislative evolution took as long as biology. Perhaps, then, biology was the initial framework, and then legislation followed something that evolved more quickly. Technology, perhaps. The more refined a civilization is, the more technology is usually has, and the less barbaric its laws generally are. There are and were exceptions, of course, but I'm speaking in generalities.

It would also seem that a supremely perfect Deity could remove itself from the moral picture, and allow morals to be dictated by Life itself. Because anything less would be less than perfect. And like I said before ultimate perfection would allow for nothing less than the existence and creation of perfection.

What an odd world we live in.