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This is Non Sequitur from August 15, 2007:

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Mirrored here to prevent future link rot.

Comics, Non Sequitur, relationships

I like numbers. I see patterns and symmetry everywhere. Usually related to the number 3. I can't help it. I have to make my brain not look for patterns in DOBs. I'm not a mathematician by any means, but numbers are just nifty. I will literally space out after I've written a DOB that looks neat and completely miss anything someone is saying to me because I'm looking for patterns. It's bad.

Anyway, we had this woman come in probably a year ago, and her DOB was 3/22/66. I was immediately jealous of such an awesome DOB.

I think 3/9/27 would be cool also.

Ugh, I'm such a nerd. And I'm unashamedly in love with the number 3.

3

Last night while waiting to board my flight in Charlotte, NC, I signed up for Harvard's intensive 8-week Organic Chemistry I and II classes (+ labs). Ironically it's cheaper than taking them at MCP (and nearly as inexpensive as taking them at UMass), and they'll be over more quickly. I tend to do much better in classes when I completely immerse myself in the material. E.g. Calc II, biology 1, college writing II.

$4600 including student health insurance, and it includes the labs — which are usually more expensive than the actual class. I have free parking a 10-minute walk from campus at Paul's place, which is completely awesome. I intend to get A's, which won't be a problem if I actually study.

However I am getting ahead of myself, so I'll back up a bit.

After turning in an undergrad performance that more closely resembles this cat than a decent education, I have decided to forgo pharmacy school entirely. Instead, I've made up my mind to attend med school. Where, I don't know. Nor do I particularly care, to be honest. Any med school I attend will give me the tools I need to pass all three steps of the USMLE, and then it'll be up to me to learn during residency.

I feel like I've been fighting this decision for a long time. Probably two or three years. I've been resisting it because of the way healthcare policy in the country is set up. I have issues with things like EMTALA being an unfunded mandate, inclinations toward socialized medicine, medical malpractice insurance premiums, residency, and personal shortcomings. In a bizarre way, I feel like I'm better equipped than most who desire to go to med school who have their idealism ripped right out from under them when they hit the Real World because I don't have any in the first place.

I'm not worried about the MCAT. I rock at standardized testing, and I actually plan to prepare for this one. I never prepared for the SAT, and I did extremely well, and MCATs apparently correlate fairly well with SAT scores. How much better could I do on the MCAT if I prepared rather than going in blind, tired, and unprepared like I did with the SAT? I'm hoping to score at least a 33, which is easily within the realm of possibility.

My personal statement will be excellent because I'm a good writer, and I've thought about med school from a real world perspective more than I've thought about anything in a long time. I'll have recommendations in spades; I have a list of 16(!) different people, all of them in the medical field, who have agreed to write me a recommendation if I ask them. Many of them in unique positions of influence. This is a comfort to me because of:

My main trouble will by my GPA. I've got to rip up and repave my undergrad career in a few key places: organic chemistry, microbiology, and (perhaps) general biology. This will take some money, and probably six months to a year. If I decide to apply to a foreign medical school — which holds a great deal of appeal to me — I could probably forget retaking basic biology. Oh, and I'll probably have to take Physics II (+ lab). Not a huge deal there.

Looking back at my old transcripts and thinking about how I used to (not) study makes me cringe. It's like looking someone else's life and saying "And did you want to set yourself up for failure later?"

Anyway, regarding personal shortcomings. Two main things stand out to me: I tend to follow the path of least resistance. It is, for example, easier to watch TV than it is to study. I'll have to watch myself carefully. The other is sleep. I worry that residency will be a disaster because I'm one of those unlucky fools who needs 7-8 hours per night, otherwise I'm useless.

But I'll have to get there first.

I have so much on my mind I slept like utter shit. I have to be at the courthouse in less than an hour, and I really don't want to be there. I'm not particularly interested in someone else's problems and how they relate laws I don't care about. I don't think I've been this annoyed about having to do this something since… yesterday, when I wasted 2 hours of my life at the registry of motor vehicles.

I'm supposed to work 8-6 tomorrow, and then Thursday morning, my plane takes off at 6.30am.

What fantastic timing for my "civic duty."

Related reading: Richard Dawkins on why trial by jury is not a good institution.

Jury duty

I've made a lot of plans over the last six years. Dozens of times I've made a plan only to change it later, or discard it entirely. I've finished maybe 25% of the things that I've started. That's not a good record. Yeah, I've got ADD, but that's not excuse in my opinion. It can perhaps explain the problem but it certainly doesn't help solve it. On the plus side of these failures, though — I start lots of things. Probably 3-4x as many projects as the "average" 20-something. So I've probably had a similar number of successes as the average person my age.

Looking back over all the discarded ideas, I've noticed a trend: I've always planned for what my ideal self, rather than my real self.

In short, I've planned to fail.

Having a fairly simple life over the last 18 months, I've had a lot of time to do self-inventory, assessing my own weaknesses and strengths. I'm happy to report that my strengths more than outweigh my weaknesses, but to be truthful, consistency is not one of these strengths.

I'm getting better, but I'm nowhere near my ideal. Which brings me to the point of this post — every time I have planned to:

• Return to school
• Be consistent with my finances
• Start saving money on a set schedule
• Go to the gym or exercising regularly
• Et cetera

I have not accounted for my own inconsistency in the original equation. I am great at digging myself out of holes, but I suck at climbing mountains.

So for someone who is largely on flat ground now — neither in a hole nor on top of Mt Kilimanjaro — how do I proceed? I'm at a crossroads in life right now, in a very real sense. I have two paths before me: one leads to great wealth, and one leads to a lot of hard work and an uncertain future.

The path to great wealth is the path of least resistance, ironically enough. But I don't care to choose this path. The other path requires much more work, but the personal rewards are far greater.

I don't have any solutions to my conundrum. How does one build in mechanisms to overcome one's own shortcomings? Wanting something badly clearly isn't enough. I have some possible solutions, but I don't know how well they will work in practice. In this regard, I am looking for some advice from people wiser than I am, who learned at some point how to get out of their own way.

Accountability

I like building systems. Systems take the thinking (and sometimes doing) out of everyday tasks. This can be simple: write down the instructions on how to program the garage door code so you don't have to re-figure it out every time. Or it can be complex: set up an automated task to execute which removes 1) doing the task by hand and 2) remembering to do it on time.

I like systems. Building systems in my personal life has helped me overcome many of my weaknesses in the last 18 months. But I never build in accountability, so I have failed at the Hard Stuff.

I always accomplish more when there is an outside force compelling me to do or accomplish something. I succeeded in high school simply because you'd get detention if you skipped class. (No, I never really studied.) College, of course, is a different story. Hence my spectacular academic implosion since I graduated from high school — I never went to class and barely studied.

But accountability is uncomfortable.

Inconsistency

I blow with the wind. This doesn't mean I follow the crowd, it just means that I'm not consistent about doing anything. Whether that's backing up my computer, or going to the gym, or writing for Ars for an appreciable length of time — inconsistency is my biggest weakness. I am starting to chip away at it with the help of the people in my life, and by immersing myself in positive media, but I'm still far from where I'd like to be, and I am afraid that this inconsistency coupled with a lack of accountability will continue to haunt me moving forward.

So much so that I am almost afraid to try something new, or plan something truly ambitious, because looking at my past, I know what I will do: give up about 3 weeks in, or at least start seriously slacking off. This is a new feeling for me, because I've always been one to jump in with both feet, probably because easy come, easy go, right?

I don't want to be that person anymore, and I am about to embark on something that is *completely* outside my comfort zone.

The problem with personality tests, you see, is that they don't account for complexity. I know how they'll make me out to be, and this just isn't the case. Even though the instructions say "Choose the answer that most closely matches" — and I do — it's not enough. Because usually I'm 60% one way and 40% the other.

I suppose this works for some people, but it doesn't for me. The results are much more polar than they might be.

Mutual exclusivity

The trouble with personality tests is that they use OR instead of AND. AND describes me, because many of these personality traits that they are supposedly measuring can and do coexist with one another. OR implies mutual exclusivity: one but not the other.

If you could ascribe percentages to the quiz options rather than being able to choose only one, they might be more useful. The world isn't binary, for goodness sake. But that would involve more complex backend math, and we can't have that, now can we?

It's important to remember that no survey can predict personality type with 100 percent accuracy. Experts say that we should use personality type to better understand ourselves and others, but shouldn't feel restricted by our results.

BBC personality survey

Could he daily feel a stab of hunger for her, and find nourishment in the very sight of her?

But would she see through the bars of his plight and ache for him?

To every captive soul and gentle heart
into whose sight this present speech may come,
so that they might write its meaning for me,
greetings, in their lord’s name, who is Love.
Already a third of the hours were almost past
of the time when all the stars were shining,
when Amor suddenly appeared to me
whose memory fills me with terror.
Joyfully Amor seemed to me to hold
my heart in his hand, and held in his arms
my lady wrapped in a cloth sleeping.
Then he woke her, and that burning heart
he fed to her reverently, she fearing,
afterwards he went not to be seen weeping.

Dante Alighieri - "La Vita Nuova" - Part III

This entry has to do with my ongoing love affair with "Vide Cor Meum"

Hannibal, Movies, Beauty, Vide Cor Meum, Opera

No really, it's quite awful. I pounded this out in less than five minutes. I'm sure some pieces don't make sense. For instance, Life is undefined.

Maybe that's the secret to being a great computer scientist for me: more alcohol. Good lord.

#include <iostream>
using namespace::std;

void die()
{
	Life l = null;
}

void death(string means, string last_words)
{
	die();
}

void bliss(string type, int number_of_children, string type_of_life)
{

}

int main()
{
	string answer;
	cout < < "Will you marry me? ";
	cin >> answer;
	if (answer == "yes")
	{
		bliss("wedded", 0, "world domination");
	}
	else if (answer == "no")
	{
		death("suicide", "I love you, Athena.");
	}
	return 0;
}

Today is the first day I've written code in 3.5 years. Odd that I've missed it.

Hoho, does it get any better than this?

Finger-lickin' good!