Notes written on my whiteboard in the past few days:
Y'know what I don't recommend? Walking barefoot in the cold and rain, no matter how lazy you are (shoes have so many moving parts) or how sorry for yourself you feel.
Wah.
That is all.
---Sunday, February 25, 2001, 5 A.M.
I had just stayed up most of the night moping, partly about the fact that P. and I had just decided maybe he should only visit me one night a week so he could have a little more of a life and I could get more work done on weekends, partly because I was in a mood to mope, but not doing a very good job of it (usually a mope only takes a few hours, not an entire evening of sleep dep and slowly doing homework but not nearly enough). The walking in the rain was to return a friend's ecology textbook, from which I'd taken a few notes in preparation for a takehome exam due Monday at 5 P.M.; it was also what made it abundantly clear I was wallowing in my shitty mood, hence the semi-public announcement of that fact.
"I bet if I had enough monkeys on typewriters, they'd write my thesis."---some time February 28, 2001
In quotes because it's something I actually said, verbatim, just like that, and thought it was funny, so I wrote it down. Every now and then I can be witty, or at least think I am.
Mmmmm, thesis. Y'know what? I've all but completely lost my sense of what time it is. Yummy.---I have no idea when, probably within the confines of February 27, 2001.
Although I went to bed at a reasonable hour (~2 A.M.) Sunday evening/Monday morning, the rest of this week hasn't fit any semblance of a normal schedule. The past two nights I've ended up going to bed ~7 A.M., and I've been sleeping in random 3 to 6-hour intervals when I get the chance. Hence my internal clock's mutiny.
~5 p.m., 28 February 2001:
I am become one with thesis to the point where I can describe the basics of it (what doesn't require any technical language) in Dutch. It's actually kinda cool.
The fact that I put a time stamp on this sucka indicates that I'm getting pretty self-aware about the whole "thesis owning my life to a degree I didn't really think possible" thing. Not that it's stopped me from continuing along my merry procrastinating and writing at odd intervals and even occasionally but not nearly often enough making some code way. Nope nope nope. Anyway, I had just submitted the abstract for the thesis presentation I'm supposed to do in April, and was thinking about the fact that my grandparents are coming to my graduation, though they've never been to California and it's a heckuva trip from the Netherlands, and then I thought how I'd really like to be able to explain to them at least a little bit what my thesis is about, and I realized it wasn't actually too complicated, considering there's all kinds of weird evolutionary biology, math, computer science, and linguistics involved. Although I'm bilingual, I've never really been to school in Dutch, so it's always cool when I can talk about remotely technical things. Also it's cool to know I can discuss technical things without using excessive jargon, so that all made me happy. Then I was hungry and went to dinner.
The moral of the story: I dunno. Probably that I never learn, even from my mistakes. And that I should be writing thesis, and y'all are hereby cordially invited to send me harassing /msg's to that effect if you catch me on E2 when I should be writing (like now, for instance). Oh well. It's only a draft, and it's due in less than 16 hours, and it'll take less than that to finish it to a state I'm okay with handing in, since I want to sleep and go to class tomorrow (today, whenever the hell it is).