I skipped class today. I was too tired, figured I had to come home and sleep otherwise I wouldn't make it through work tonight. I briefly considered going to the library and taking a nap on one of the upstairs sofas but decided against it. I actually did that once a couple years ago. I've also slept in my car before, but it was too hot to do that today, so I just came home and took a very satisfying nap.

So anyway I'm a little burnt out. I can't imagine working 8 or 9 hours every day. I'm this tired now, how is it going to be when I have a full-time job and don't have the option of leaving in the middle of the afternoon to take a nap? I guess I'll find out soon enough.

I'm stressed. Even when I'm not half-asleep like I was today, I wonder if I'm sleepwalking through life. I'm a very right-brained kind of person, very linear. I get set into routines and don't bother thinking about things. And, as usual, I am too self-absorbed, too focused on the inward and not enough on the outside. Lately I have been even flakier than usual. Think before you do, as my mom used to say, but sometimes I skip on the first part and and it turns out disastrous. I went to the copy center the other day and not only did I make copies of two pages I didn't need, I forgot to include the three most important pages. Where the heck is my brain? It's not like I was even in a rush, I was just doing things blindly and not even thinking about them. Like the pieces never came together in my mind. That really worries me.

So tired. I get to work, thinking this will be my last day of work until at least Friday. Then my co-worker informs me that I have to cover for him tomorrow and Wednesday and work the weekend as scheduled, too. I agreed to it, but I am a little irritated. I don't want to be a jerk but a little advance notice would be nice. I guess it wasn't really his fault. I am just tired, and that makes me on-edge and easily annoyed.

Anyway, I feel like I have a million things to do now. School stuff plus work stuff. I need to sleep, my eye is doing its little twitchy thing.

Interesting day yesterday. Two hours before my research group meeting, a prof hands me a paper and asks me to present it. The paper is longer than 10 pages and I have not read more than the title page all week (we're supposed to read it in preparation for the meeting but I hadn't). So I spent two hours going through it trying to make some sense of it and not make a fool out of myself as I've often done in the past. And the thing is, it didn't go badly. I ended up only presenting half the paper due to its length, and I think I did a passable job of it even with such short preparation. Is this a sign of progress? I hope so.

Then it was a crazy night at work. Very busy, nonstop activity for the nearly five hours I was there. It was actually kind of fun, the challenge of it, working under pressure. I was driving home feeling really satisfied with what I had done, like I had been put to the test and passed. Two blocks away from my house a police car pulled me over. Apparently my headlight had gone out and I hadn't realized it. This was my first time ever being stopped by the police. I handed over my license and insurance and the officer wrote out my ticket. I wasn't even really bothered by it, I just sat there like, this is great, what's going to happen next in this life? I got into my first accident two weeks ago and now I have my first traffic ticket. It looks like I've been officially initiated into adulthood.

I hate driving. Up and down the same stretch of I-10, through stupid traffic, getting into near accidents in my car that is so run down and has a green door that doesn't match the rest of the car.

I accidentally took my co-worker's pen home with me. I feel kind of guilty about it, he's going to go to work tomorrow and not have anything to write with. Oh well, can't do anything about it now.

I went to school around noon today. I was confronted with the joys of a commuter campus. It was packed. I could barely find a parking space. After finally making it to the CS building, I got some work done. The experiment is pretty much ready to go. I'm at a point where I should probably be doing more of the actual writing of the report than tweaking the experiment. I've come to realize that experiments aren't perfect, that there are going to be things I wish I had done a little differently here and there.

Today was my last first day of school. Well, hopefully, barring something catastrophic. I went to a defense of a project that I was involved with a while back. So weird to see what has happened with it in the two or so years since I stopped working on it. There is an actual working product now instead of just ideas and intentions.

So anyway I was surprisingly excited about going back to school. My last class ever is going to be on Aspect Oriented Programming, something I'd never heard of until today. I ran into some of the same people I saw last year as well as some new students. It's cool to be there and know I have a home there for one last semester.

Sunday night, actually Monday morning. My sister left for college again, and I knew she was leaving but it was just sad that she wasn't there to watch ER with me when I got home. And she won't be here any more except for weekends, and I guess that's life and all but I've grown pretty attached to her over this summer and I'm going to miss her.

I can't make up my mind about work. Sometimes it seems like this job is great and that it's a gateway to bigger and better things, a real opportunity, other times I see it as a dead end and draining to boot. I am tired a lot of the time during the day and I end up taking long naps and wasting time that way. And yet, I don't want to give it up. I guess right now I'm not in a good position to be making plans for the future, I should probably just hang in there for a while longer then figure out what I should do job-wise.

The accident. I want to forget it but every person I know seems to know about it now. I guess to me it just seems like I do one stupid thing after another, and this was just one of those stupid things, and I don't want to be reminded of it. It's like I don't know how to deal with the real world any more. I lack survival skills, I spend too much time in my head and not enough time in reality. Lacking a person to talk to, I spend some time listening to some comforting music while playing computer pinball for its numbing effect.

"Sounds of Silence" by Simon and Garfunkel

Hello darkness, my old friend
I've come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence

In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone
'Neath the halo of a street lamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence
And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence

"Fools", said I, "You do not know
Silence like a cancer grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you"
But my words, like silent raindrops fell
And echoed
In the wells of silence
And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said, "The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls"
And whispered in the sounds of silence

It's been a heck of a week. I got into a minor car accident on Tuesday. One-car accident. I had to get stitches for a cut on my head and I got some huge bruises, but otherwise I'm OK. My car was beat up but it should be salvageable. Mostly I just feel stupid. Sometimes I can show a huge lack of common sense. I guess I should be grateful that it wasn't worse, but mostly I just wish it didn't happen at all.

Sigh. I don't know what's with me lately. I've been feeling kind of down and this little incident didn't help. I feel tired a lot. Summer's coming to an end and I hate that. I'm nervous so much of the time, usually it turns to be for no good reason. I'm lonely, as usual. I've come to realize that shyness is kind of like a disease, like one of those weird compulsive disorders, and it will have to be managed every single day for the rest of my life. A life sentence, I guess you could say. But I don't see how fighting it could be any worse than surrendering to it. Right now dealing with people is a chore. I get very little joy out of being around people. I wish that were different. But how do I change myself? I try it for awhile then give up. I guess I will have to try yet again.

I was in about the crappiest mood ever yesterday. I really did not want to go to church. I hate being tired and church starts at the early hour of 10 AM, which doesn't sound early but when go to bed at 2 AM, it cuts off a few necessary hours of rejuvenating sleep. Plus I'm having serious doubts about religion, which I have mentioned before, and going to church makes me feel like an impostor. I go because my mom goes and if I said to her that I don't want to attend church any more, she would be pretty upset. I would also feel guilty staying home and sleeping in while my mom and sister went to church without me. So yesterday I dragged myself there like I do every Sunday.

Anyway the sermon was on forgiveness. Bless those who curse you. Wish good things for the people who have done horrible things to you. That is what Jesus taught and what he demonstrated in his life and death. It's a revolutionary idea, really, since it is exactly opposite of what human nature dictates. Revenge is like a reflex, someone hurts you, your first reaction is to hurt them back. Despite all my doubts about Christianity, there is something so right and perfect about the concept of forgiveness that my argumentative mind shuts down when I think about it.

Saw this website on Jay Leno last night. Pretty funny. The poor video quality makes the fake crying seem less fake.

This could be me!

Peter Jennings was always my favorite news anchor.

Problem: I don't know what I should do as a profession. I have some career choices to make now that are bugging the heck out of me. Those nagging fundamental questions: What do I want to be? Where do I want my life to go? I am just so confused. Sometimes I hate my life so much. I want the job description of sitting at home all day reading blogs and watching TV and being pretty much alone. Any jobs like that? Maybe kottke can pull it off, but I can't. It's not that I hate all the stuff I've studied in school. I guess I'm just really burned out at this point. Burned out with computers and programming and software, even before I've had an actual job in that field. And while doing that type of work wouldn't be the worst possible thing in the world, right now I just don't have much enthusiasm for it.

I've been trudging through college and grad school for five long years. I feel like I've been living this lie for so long that it's hard for me to really know what I want to be doing. The biggest problem is that even after so many years of study I just can't see myself being truly successful at technology. I could achieve some sort of mediocrity, maybe in jobs like setting up databases or doing basic programming, but I've never been the kind of person who cares much about technology. I've never really had fun with it. Never been into web design or trying to make cool new programs. Never really cared about video games or high-powered computers. If you need evidence of that, just look at my blog. I'm the kind of person who always did the minimum on programming projects. And, truth be told, I'm not really good at math. I'm OK at it, good enough at it to get passing grades in calculus and discrete math, but I'm really kind of ditsy when it comes to mathematical concepts. I learn math in almost the same way I learn history, mostly by memorization. It doesn't come easily to me, and I end up missing obvious relationships. And that's not a great trait in someone who really wants to make a difference in the technology field.

When I was a kid I used to think that I could be a journalist. I liked writing a lot, but I had a hard time asking people for interviews. I would put off calling people until the last minute, afraid they would refuse to be interviewed and/or tell me something horrible like "Quit being such a pest". That was always the problem, every single time I tried my hand at journalism. I used to think I could overcome that unease with practice, but how could I force myself to do something that made me so uncomfortable every single day as a job? A job as a reporter is definitely not for me. I still think I could write someday, but maybe in a different capacity, like writing books or long magazine features that wouldn't require me to be really aggressive about interviews.

Besides writing, I also kind of like the idea of doing some sort of research. Getting a Ph.D. in something, and being paid to do research and experiments. But I don't even know what field I would be interested in. At least now I know for sure that that field is NOT computer science :->. Psychology, maybe? Or biology? Archaeology? Those types of things interest me and seem like a better fit than computer science for a person like me (read: not so mathematical). However, I am not enthused about the idea of even more school. I would practically have to start over in college from the beginning. That makes me shudder. So much work. More money, more years of my life. For now, that idea is a no.

So I suppose I can't say that I'm totally clueless about where my interests lie. And that I just have to accept those things about myself that I often wish weren't true, that I'm a shy introvert and that I'm not good at math. I'm the kind of person who is interested in everything, to an extent. I can find something interesting in just about any class, any job, and any situation, which has actually worked against me because I won't admit to myself when I find something boring (i.e. five years of computer science classes). It's hard for me to narrow it down to just one thing that I'm interested in that I want to do for the rest of my life.

And it's also hard to translate those interests into an actual career. I guess the idea is to have a goal that you will get to eventually rather than expect someone to hand you your dream job right out of college. Even if I finally decide one day what I want to do, who knows if I will actually end up doing that. Sometimes survival has to take precedence.

Oh well, so those are my career musings for now. Everyone goes through this stuff eventually. I wish I had gone through this years ago, however, instead of now when I should be starting my career. I've been putting the cart before the horse, I know. Thanks for listening, Internet.

From an article about fantasy sports:

Roger Rotter is entering his ninth season of covering fantasy sports, having dispensed advice as Dr. Gridiron, Hector the Projector and himself. He's dreamed of becoming an astronaut and now is a fantasy editor for Fox Sports.

Why doesn't he just add "fantasy astronaut" to that list?

Went to Starbucks yesterday for a green tea frappuccino. Tasted OK, but mostly I liked it because it was green.

Things I'm obsessed with: Planarity, The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, Quantum Leap, Aimee Mann CDs.