It's been a while since I've written anything here. The semester is in
full swing, I'm still working part-time, and I'm stressed out. That's
really all there is to it. I need an extra eight hours in the day, at
least.
I was reading a chapter of my psychology textbook last night when I
came across an interesting concept. The book mentioned that some
people are better at delaying gratification than others, and that
ability is often a huge predictor of intelligence (as measured by SAT
scores in this example, which is its own mess, but still). My first
thought was well, yeah. If you want to be the best at
school/work/whatever, you have to sacrifice all of your time to
it. That's the unfortunate truth of how the world works, or at least
as I've experienced it so far. I was "smart" in high school, because I
put the work in, but at the expense of literally everything else in my
life. I was miserable, and I eventually burnt myself out. I can
feel that happening again right now. I can't ignore it this time,
though. My general mental state is a bit better than it used to be, so
I can actually see the impact that things have on my life. I can no
longer use the excuse "oh, my grades are still good, so I must be
completely fine!". That's partially because I've broadened my
perspective of What Matters In Life, but also because my grades are no
longer as nice as I'd like them to be. Oops.
Anyway. As soon as I get the time, I'm going to find a
therapist. That's something I've needed to do for a long while,
anyway.
One last random note. The two big computer science courses I'm taking
this semester are advanced algorithm analysis and automata theory, and
it kind of feels like whiplash going between the two. Algorithms
classes are just about figuring out how to do things with the maximum
efficency, but automata theory is theory of computation stuff, so
we're just trying to determine if the problem is possible to solve or
not. We'll be talking about a problem in automata and my professor
will say something along the lines of "well, you could technically try
every possible path in a finite amount of time, so the problem is
decideable" and my first thought is always "oh god, the
runtime!". It's a good class, though. I'm excited to finally actally
learn what a Turing machine is and what NP completeness means.
I miss being more involved in tilde stuff and solarpunk and all of
these little associated communities that I got into around the same
time. I'm just... busy. I'll figure it out, though. I always do.
