is a blog by Brendan
I’m sitting here at my computer and all of a sudden I start to feel the floor jump under my feet. What the hell? I’ve been living here two and a half months and I’ve never felt anything like this. I’m on the tenth floor of a solid-concrete building! And Kentucky doesn’t have baby earthquakes!
If I die in a pile of rubble or anything, somebody please take care of my piano.
Yo ho. I emerge from the shark-thick waters, knife in my teeth and a steely glint in my eye, having taken all three of my double-damned midterms in ONE DAY and lived to tell the scurvy tale. Yo ho.
And now, in lieu of booty, I go to Lexington. What reward holds Lexington, you ask? It holds Jon. It holds Monica. It will hold me and Ken and Maria, and most importantly, it will hold ANGIE APARO!
And I pulled another all-nighter (bringing our running total for this week up to–yes!–two) and I finished the whole thing this time, and it works, and it’s 18 pages of code and 10 pages of report in fourteen hours, and I am fuck yes proud of it.
Actually I’m mostly proud because last night, I learned Java. Like all of it. I’d never written anything besides a Hello World in the language before, and last night I sat down and implemented polymorphs and overrides and extensions like a fucking Sun cowboy. I’m thinking I probably won’t go to my last class of the day too often anymore, because it’s basically How To Do Java When You Only Know C++, and I think I just made that whole concept call me daddy.
It was a long night, but hell, I know a new language now. And although yes, I took a half-hour nap that turned into a one-hour nap and I was late for the class where I had to hand it in, I biked like a demon (on one hour of sleep) and got there without being too late at all. My professor didn’t seem to mind, at least. He’s bland, but he’s awfully nice.
Tonight I clean and nap and clean some more, preparing for my mother and sister to descend upon my apartment and find it wanting. Then tomorrow it’s Ian’s birthday. Happy birthday, Ian! I didn’t get you anything.
There’s a bit of rough going, as you might have noticed, as I try to install my journal software on the new server. It’ll be back, honest idjit. Meanwhile, things I’ve been meaning to talk about:
That’s most of it. With any luck, the journal will be back this week, but I wouldn’t wager any real estate on it. Meanwhile, if I have any updates of lesser importance, I’ll post in the (again) spanking new forums. Take care. Wear a jacket.
2212 hrs and Emma Hayes has tricked me into showing up at a party at her house, filled with cool hip extremely professional twentysomethings I don’t know. Emma Hayes herself is predictably not here, so I’ve vaguely procured a 7-Up from her roommate Dawn. I am lucky to have met Dawn once in a parking lot, and to have her mercifully remember me.
Here I am sitting on the front porch of a freshly warmed house, trying to look writerly with my pocket Moleskine. Perhaps, I think, this will politely make it less obvious that I have no idea what I’m doing.
Adventure!
Sumana is not actually the big sister I never had, and would probably be a little weirded out if I claimed she was, but she DID display a frighteningly big sisterish sixth sense in calling about half an hour after I wrote that down. This was wonderful; it gave me a good excuse to laugh for twenty minutes, recharged my ability to talk to humans, and gave evidence that I have a life outside of showing up at parties filled with people I don’t know.
Emma finally did show up at what, 2320 hrs? And it was great to see her, and I got to know some of the people at the party. By the time I hitched home (around 0300) I had actually had a good time. None of this outweighs the first panicky hour I spent retreating into introversion, though, really. There’s a reason for the fact that, in college, I only went to parties in my own apartment.
My boss just officially pitched me the do-you-want-to-keep-working-during-school question, and I’m torn. Working in a cube isn’t perfect, but it’s a lot more comfortable whatever retail or counter job I’d otherwise have this fall. Plus it looks a lot better to have months of programming experience already on your resume, even if it’s just as a part-timer.
On the other hand, I don’t like this job. The people are great and the environment is comfortable, but the work is boring, boring, boring and I’m only even halfway talented at it. At least if I (hypothetically) work at a bookstore I’ll be busy and competent, even if I’ll also be on my feet all day.
I just want to DO stuff. I want to be minting clean lean extreme code, not patching bugs in this enormous ugly proprietary system. It makes me tired and I look for distractions, and with broadband right here at my workstation, that’s not good for my productivity. That in turn makes me feel guilty about my work ethic, which makes me more stressed, which makes me tired, lather and rinse and so forth.
I know that I’ll probably start out bug-fixing wherever I go, so I should probably get used to it. The other thing, though, is that I have no idea what my workload is going to be like in grad school; my boss would clearly prefer that I keep my job uninterrupted, just dropping down to part-time, but by the time I get to midterms that could very well kill me. I don’t like taking twelve hours out of my day now, and I don’t want to find out what it’d be like to do that with homework. Also, I’m REALLY tired of getting up at 0630. I want an evening shift.
(It occurs to me that I’m posting this from work, and there exists the possibility of a random IT guy picking it up on a sniffer and sending it back to my boss with a cocked eyebrow. Just in case: Hello, IT guy! Your sister was great!)
Forty-five google minutes later, I’ve got a list of ten book or comic stores I could bus to. I think I’m going to make a bunch of phone calls tonight. At least thinking about this got me to dust off my bum and actually start thinking about what I’ll be doing in the fall. Sometimes questions find answers.
There’s one other thing to consider, too: if I keep up my secret practice project, it shouldn’t be too long until I’m confident about writing publishable short fiction. I know the money’s not great, but it beats all my other options until they spit candy. I also know that chances are slim, and that everybody and her grad school duck tries to write short fiction, but I do have one little in: not everybody or her grad school duck knows Nancy Zafris.
At least I’m in process now, which I think is the important thing. I could live on just my student loans, but I’d rather not, and it’s nice to be able to buy a comic book once in a while. I just need to figure out how and how much I can work. Hey, old people, anybody want to tell me what to do?
I got about seven hours of sleep last night, and today I feel AMAZING. For the first time in weeks I didn’t fall asleep on the bus in to work, and I have no urge to hide under my desk and nap now. I even want to actually do work more than usual. I honestly can’t remember what it was like to regularly get more than four hours, even on weekends; was it always this good? Man, I must have been spoiled.
I joke about it a lot, but the fact is I’m pretty thoroughly and seriously sleep-deprived, and I’m starting to actually believe it affects my functionality. The problem is that, with travel time added in, I spend almost twelve hours a day preparing for or actually at work. I have one hour in there, during my lunch break, to do anything that doesn’t involve staring at a screen–and of course, when I get home, I do even more of that. I want to do other things, running and drawing and working out and cooking, and I only get from 1800 hrs to whenever I go to bed (ideally, 2200 hrs; realistically, 0200 hrs) for them.
Genuine insomniac Maria will probably blame herself for keeping me up, but it really has little to do with her. It’s been this way all summer, and in fact during most of senior year. Actually, the whole thing probably started junior year; sophomore year was the last time I remember regularly getting eight hours.
Man, this post kind of got away from me. All I meant to do was note that I felt really good after a good night’s sleep. I really am looking forward to school starting, because for the first time in my academic career, I’ll have no classes that start before 1100 hrs.
I did it. Two finals and a scene analysis paper, today, on two hours of sleep. Smart? No. But when you’re Neo, you don’t have to be smart.
So I’ve only got one more final left in college, and it’s not until Monday, and even though noIdon’thavethecomicup I am still going to splurge. That’s right. Tonight, Nashville, Amanda and Jon and me and one more Angie show.
So I actually did it: Running on three hours of sleep, I wrote the ten-page culminating statement on My Theatre in three and a half hours, then presented it earlier tonight. And it was pretty good. I’m exasperated with myself for doing this yet again, but at the same time, I’m now fully convinced that I’m capable of flight and the picking up of cars.
I know there’s more to talk about, but I’m really too tired to be capable of rational discourse right now (even the paragraph above was written down on an envelope at around 4:00). But hey! New Guster!
Two hours of sleep last night, as I stupidly stayed up until three before I even realized that I still had to do my homework. I say “stupidly” because I wasn’t even staying up for any specific purpose–I just hung out with Michelle and Jessica and David, beatboxing and rhapsodizing about the Neptunes. That’s college, I guess, but then I thought I was supposed to get good at time management someday. Ha ha ha!
That wasn’t exactly the best night to skimp on sleep, either, as today was a big day: not only our biggest crowd at Chalk Circle, but my first ever show as the drummer for Grandma’s Genius! And it rocked! We’d practiced together on exactly one song, which we didn’t end up playing, and the PA was crap, which made for a frustrating beginning. As it turns out, though, once we got started we had a pretty flawless forty minutes. We’re good at this!
Then, just as we finished our last song (BNL, “Brian Wilson,” where I get to go crazy thundergod at the end), the first drops of rain started to fall… all over the band that had earlier refused to swap us time slots.
That’s right. God loves Grandma’s Genius more.
(Also, found while searching for Neptunes sites: Conch is their specialty!)