Today is Saturday, and I haven't updated my page since Tuesday. I've noticed a slow slip in my frequency of updates, which kind of bothers me. I'm just going to give a brief summary of what's happened since then, though, because I want to get on and talk about something else as well.
On Wednesday, I don't think anything memorable happened. I turned in my first physics lab notebook (like you were really interested in that). I worked more on my graphics assignment (in O'Caml!). If I get inspired/bored over the weekend (and believe me, I've got plenty to do), maybe I'll write a howto on setting up and getting started with O'Caml and the image library and OpenGL bindings. I finished the assignment on Thursday. Friday I had office hours but almost no one came; later I went to see Memento but arrived ten minutes late. Let me tell you, that is a fucked up movie to arrive ten minutes late to and watch with slightly low blood sugar. When it ended, I thought at least half of it was still left - that's how screwed up my perception was. Anyway, it's a very good movie, and I recommend that you see it at some point.
Now on to what I really wanted to talk about: the raison d'être of this section of my web page. When I first began it, I had an inkling that other people were up to the same thing (I think I may have briefly seen LiveJournal beforehand), but I had no idea of the extent of it. There are apparently a very large number of people who've chosen to post journals, or something similar, online. It's even acquired a name, "blogging" (short for weblogging), which I positively loathe and which you'll be very unlikely to ever catch me using to refer to this page. The reason for the movement's popularity is obvious: the Internet presents a never-before-seen opportunity to send out a broadcast to absolutely anyone who's interested (and, perhaps equally important, absolutely no one who isn't). The only rough equivalent in the pre-'net world I can think of is the Christmas letter, that pretentious, once-a-year broadcast that certain people (or, more often, families) insist on making to the certain annoyance of people like me. But the Web isn't even quite like that; if you sent out Christmas letters once a month, you would be looked upon as rather odd, but updating a web page weekly or even daily is simply taking good care of it.
I should have realized that this movement would be so popular (and even exactly why it would be) before starting this page; it would have saved me a bit of vexation, because one of the goals I originally had in mind by doing this was to be special, and the experience of trying to be special but finding out that everyone else is trying to be special in exactly the same way is one I have rarely had but of which I now understand the unpleasantness. Furthermore, this web page is not particular well-trafficked; I only know of 5 people who read it on a regular basis (you know who you are), and that group doesn't include several people who I've considered close friends in the past and who I wish would read it.
But despite those somewhat discouraging facts, I have continued to update this site. My updates have slowed recently due not to disinterest but to being somewhat busy and overstressed. Why? Because my purpose in creating this page is not quite as simple or one-pronged as it might appear. In years past, I remember thinking many times how if I did not keep any kind of record of what was going on in my life, then many of those events would be permanently lost as I forgot them. At that time, my records consisted mainly of ICQ and AIM logs - logs which, to be sure, are very illuminating when I still have them around (I lost a lot of them in a hard drive crash - hopefully my last! - a few years ago). Those logs have now been backed up on all three of my computers (and I will soon put them on CD-RW, stored at home, to guard still better against their permanent destruction). But nevertheless, there are holes - events which I want to have recorded but which I never got around to mentioning to anyone, extended periods of time when I didn't have Internet access, and so on. Furthermore, it's much more difficult to weave these logs into a cohesive narrative that gives me a sense of the flow of my life.
So, this web page was made as a broadcast to the world - you are one of its intended audiences. The other intended audience is me - me as I will be in the future, wanting to remember what my life was like in the past, what I was like then. It is a very important thing for me to have, and I deeply regret not having started it - or something like it - sooner. And, in a way, it can serve as another sign of the drastic change I've undergone in the past year or so - from someone who perpetually worries and wishes to someone who tries as hard as he can to achieve, still working with limited willpower but with unlimited aspirations.
I realize this next part is going to sound strange, because it's almost impossible to communicate much emotion with words - except in stories. But thank you to everyone who's put up with me, who's supported me, who's told me to believe in myself. And to anyone who's truly tried to hurt me, to put me down, to make me think less of myself (I honestly can't think of anyone like that right now) - and to the little voices of doubt in my head that still make themselves heard from time to time - I always knew you were wrong. I just needed some time to prove it. Now I am.
Do you ever feel like you want to give God a hug? Do you ever want to tell the World that you Love it?
Why is it that when I get emotional, I go for a walk? I've been doing this for several years now, but I only noticed that it was a pattern this past evening. Part of it is the physical feel; the dark, the fresh air, the cold, and the movement of my legs all have a calming effect. Part of it is acclimation; there have been may times in my life when my parents wouldn't drive me somewhere and I would walk 1, 2, or even 5 miles just to get wherever I needed to go. But part of it, too, is symbolic. I always walk by the Hill area, and I think of the people who live there who've touched my life - Mitch, Sheila, Ed, Priya, and... Alison. If I imagine that area as nothing but a wireframe mesh, then I see the locations those people inhabit as glowing spheres.
Not too much actual life has happened since my last update. I failed utterly to watch the Super Bowl - I just didn't see how it would be interesting at all, and I had other things to do. I did go to KGB meeting yesterday, which was fun. I solved the configuration management issues and got my kernel to actually compile with demand paging support enabled. It immediately crashes, but I'm hoping that's because I haven't added support for the new demand paging bits yet. I'm drinking an Amp right now in an attempt to stay up long enough to finish my philosophy summary which is due in about twelve hours.
I started a conversation with Alison via ICQ last night. It was good to talk again.
Sometimes it seems like the Universe has a mind of Its own.
The one major problem with updating this section only every few days is that by that time, usually an appreciable amount of actual stuff has happened, and I shove out the philosophical discussions and the silly things to talk about them. I'm not worried about forgetting actual events any more; in fact, I probably write down more of them than I will ever really care about again. (What difference will it make to me in 20 years whether the TV shows I watched last night were good?) So, instead of updating my life, I'm just going to fill everyone (including my future self) in on a cute little piece of trivia: what I've named my characters in Final Fantasy 9 (assuming there aren't any hidden ones, this list is complete):
| Character | Name |
|---|---|
| Zidane | Kenn |
| Dagger | Teffeh |
| Vivi | Ixiel |
| Steiner | Mark |
| Freya | Alison |
| Quina | Joe |
| Eiko | Betsy |
| Amarant | Ed |
If you know me well at all, then you probably know where all - or almost all - of these names come from.
Lately every time I go to update this site, it feels like I'm stealing time from something else. This time I guess I am in a pretty palpable sense; I have a couple of shells that I need to do project reviews for later today, and I've barely looked at the first and haven't touched the second. It's not like I won't get them done, but at the same time I definitely have the procrastinator's gene. Yesterday I had my first two project reviews; they went tolerably well. I must say that it's much easier to review a good project than it is to review a middling one. (I don't even know what I'll do if I hit a really bad one...)
I stayed up all night to do work yet again on Wednesday night - graphics this time. I'm starting to make too much of a habit of missing Computer Vision. Speaking of which, the assignment in that was pushed back a bit, and if it hadn't been, I might well have been considering dropping the course already. Right now I still have tons of project reviews and grading to do, a meeting to grade the OS homework on Saturday, and Algo due Tuesday.
I watched Tron earlier this evening. Well, I sort of watched it - I had a lot of trouble staying awake for all of it. It wasn't enthralling, but I also didn't have a whole lot of sleep last night (as already mentioned). It was entertaining in a cheesy way, though.
I've come to realize that I don't use the word "lonely" correctly in my internal mental vocabulary. I feel "lonely" now, but it's not a feeling which can be mitigated by other people, even close friends. I don't even think a romantic relationship would alleviate it. Perhaps a better word for it would be just "alone". I hate feeling this way, but I hate even more to take the one response to it that I know would work - to dull my emotions, to make myself not care.
Single people, you realize that Valentine's Day is a fraud, right? I mean, there's the obvious way it's a fraud in that it would be no big deal if corporations didn't promote the hell out of it because it makes them money, but the fraudulence goes deeper than that. People who are in a relationship don't need a special day to celebrate it. They have every day, and if they need a special occasion they have their anniversaries, which are much more special to them than some generic holiday anyway. The only real benefit Valentine's Day could possibly have is as a day for singles to be a little bolder in their romantic ventures - right, like that ever helped anyone who needed it. The way its real effect rubs off on me is as a day for those who are couples to implicitly assert their superiority over those who are single, in an institutionalized and extremely difficult to criticize fashion.
Ahem. Now that I've dispensed that amazingly transparent (if not altogether inaccurate) piece of wisdom, back to work.
You know those homework assignments in OS? You know, the ones that only count for 2.5% of your grade each and seem like no big deal? (Probably not, since you probably haven't taken OS...) Well, those take a damn long time to grade. I was working on those for probably about 6 good hours yesterday, as well as doing one shell demo (had another one scheduled, but his partner didn't show up, so I rescheduled that one for today). I'm thinking maybe I should drop Vision if I just end up never going to classes like it looks like might happen.
I just went down to the store to buy 3 Amps. (Stocking up, not to drink them all now - that would probably kill me.) I don't know if I should have one tonight, though - I'm always a little woozy the day after a night with little sleep and an Amp, and I have four shell reviews tomorrow (two of which I haven't even looked at yet). I'm starting to see why TAing OS is called "brutal". Greg says he's going to try to hire some of the TAs from last semester to help grade the kernel and filesystem. I hope he can; the load is at least plausible for the shell, but it might move to ludicrous for the larger projects.
For what may be the first time in my life since I conceived of myself in a romantic relationship, I've found that right now I don't want to be, more for her sake than for mine. I'm simply too busy with things that can't possibly be put off to put what I'd really want to into a relationship right now. The loneliness still persists, but dealing with that is no different in principle from sucking it up to grade some ridiculous number of homeworks in, as Greg pointed out in very mathematical fashion, an average of at most four minutes or so each.
Updating this page is so relaxing, so... unrelated to OS. I've thought about little but OS for the past two days, and the next two don't look much better. I'm exhausted but I'm happy. I can't say that I didn't know what I was getting into or that I didn't approach it with a certain amount of masochistic "I will prove to myself that I can do this" bravado. And I will, because I am that good.
Well, my project reviews are finally done. Thank God. Of course, I still have to actually write up the grading files, but I have a general feel for who's got an A, who failed, and who's in the middle. The meeting to determine that is I believe on Wednesday, by which point I should have those grading files written.
Instead of actually doing any physics in physics lab yesterday, I played with magnets. Woo-hoo. By the way: magnets have absolutely no visible effect on LCD monitors. We didn't actually have to do any physics since they had nothing scheduled for us. After that Ed and I went to the KGB meeting, before which we kept taking control of the projector back, me for Robert and Ed for the lectern computer. KGB was fun again. I'm thinking of joining.
The X-Files wasn't on last night, but the rest of the TV shows I watch were good. I only saw the last few minutes of Futurama, which featured a giant fish chasing Bender's disembodied head, yet in the couple of minutes after that, they actually managed to make sense of the whole thing, which was thoroughly impressive.
I have sort of a vague desire to do something for Valentine's Day, but I don't think I will. I've got too much to do and no one to share it with, and I'm not going to let myself get bitter about it. I can't afford to be bitter again. I don't have the energy or the time. Still, I can't deny this extremely strong impulse to send someone roses or candy, which takes no note of the fact that no specific someone fits at all. Oh well.
After watching Shallow Hal last night, I headed over to the reviews at Amazon, which left me very disheartened with the intellectual state of America. There were two misconceptions. The first, which was less common, was that the movie made fun of the overweight; it does, a teensy bit, but so little as to be almost not worth mentioning. The more pernicious one, however, is that it perpetuates existing stereotypes. The people who have this conception must be so unbelievably dense that they honestly cannot understand the concept of being hypnotized, nor did they watch the second half of the movie. I suppose it's pointless to think this way, but sometimes I wonder if it's not that I'm so unimaginably smart, but just that most of the rest of the world is terminally idiotic.
I survived Valentine's Day. Actually, I barely even noticed it. Somehow I knew it would be easy this year. I even managed to get through the day with a minimum of bitterness over anything related to it.
The last few minutes of yesterday were spent heading down to the Wean clusters. Reason: the staff mailing list for OS was down, and I figured there would be a fair number of frustrated students there. I managed to help everyone who had stuck it out until that late, and I've been here ever since, except for a brief trip to McDonald's around 6am. I even slept for 4 or 5 hours on the floor in the cluster. That's either dedication or insanity, but I'm not really sure which one...
I'm starting to get slightly burned out and quite tired, and that's making me not work as effectively as I'd like to. I still have a little bit of grading left to do on the shell, and I don't really know how much coding to make demand paging work. Blah, I'm tired. I paid more attention in both Algo and Metaphysics than either of them deserved yesterday; the latter rewarded me for so doing, the former mostly failed to. (In Algo we were covering radix sort and tries, both of which I've seen before.)
Well, I'm not leaving the cluster (well, Wean anyway) any time soon... students still need help, and I have official office hours later this afternoon. I really must be crazy...
fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
I've been a fool.
I'm hungry but I won't eat. It would hurt more.
I'm tired but I won't sleep. It's just an addiction and it gives me a headache.
I feel - in several ways - unappreciated, unnecessary, ill-used. (Don't give up! The students love you!)
I have sacrificed, but evidently I have sacrificed at the wrong times, in the wrong places, for the wrong reasons. (Think only of the mission.)
The mission is lost, don't you get it? (You're being silly and overdramatic. Don't identify fantasy with reality.)
JUST... LEAVE... ME... ALONE!
It's time to face facts. The fact that I need to face is that God doesn't like the person I've become. I thought I was going in the right direction, but evidently I've been led astray. Have I heard one word of praise since remaking myself, praise I so deeply wanted and thought I had earned? Instead people seem to want to get away from me as quickly as possible.
I can only believe that it's my excess of pride. I can see nothing else I've done that could possibly be considered wrong. But I must be giving offense to people somehow.
I don't have the energy to remake myself again right now, and I can't fall back on who I used to be, because that person was too weak to function under this much stress. So I'm going to push through this semester as someone looked at with a slight sense of distaste. In the summer, perhaps, when things are quieter, I'll try to figure out in which direction I should go. In the meanwhile, I must expect every once in a while to crash, to feel dejected and worthless.
But know this: I have not given up. If it eats me from the inside, I will get through this, I will reach the light at the end of the tunnel. If I have to take on the whole world to prove myself, I will do it.
"I will not let go... I promise"
--Locke, Final Fantasy VI (in much different circumstances than mine)
Oh it's so funny to be seeing you after so long, girl
And with the way you look I understand that you are not impressed
But I heard you let that little friend of mine
Take off your party dress
I'm not gonna get too sentimental
Like those other sticky Valentines
Cause I don't know if you're loving somebody
I only know it isn't mine
Alison
I know this world is killing you
Oh, Alison
My aim is true
Well I see you got a husband now
Did he leave your pretty fingers lying in the wedding cake?
You used to hold him right in your hand
I bet he took all he could take
Sometimes I wish that I could stop you from talking
When I hear the silly things that you say
I think somebody better put out the big light
Cause I can't stand to see you this way
Alison
I know this world is killing you
Oh, Alison
My aim is true
My aim is true
My aim is true
...
--"Alison", Elvis Costello
I don't believe in coincidences.
I have a little request, not to any particular person reading this page, but to the Universe at large. Can I have a genuinely happy birthday? And I don't just mean the presents or the friends, but the attitude and the emotions to enjoy it. I sort of feel that I've been gypped on birthdays in the past - not that they've been horrid, but they've never been really great. If that's too much to ask, then I will understand, but I hope it's not.
Your faithful apprentice,
Kenn
Work work, work work work. Work work work work. Work work work, work work work, work work work work work work.
All my classes seem to have swooped down to crush me in the past few days. Here's a list of the things I've had in the last and have in the next few days, all carried out rather badly at the last minute:
Of course I've known about a lot of this stuff for a while, so I have no one but myself to blame for letting it all pile up like this. And thankfully the load from TAing OS has been relatively low this week (it will pick up again when we start grading project 2, which was in as of last Friday).
I will say that there's one good thing about having this much work: no time to mope or worry about anything else.
Over the past week of inestimable stress, I have retained pretty much normal function - except for one thing. I've only been eating one meal a day. I can't really say why this is so. It's not that I don't get hungry - by twelve hours after my one meal, I'm starving. And I don't adhere to this "rule" rigidly - sometimes I have a meal and a snack. But there are always these long stretches when I just don't eat anything at all.
Right now I'm trying to think of reasons why I would act this way. The physical ones come to mind first, of course, but they are just as easily dismissed. I'm not sick, and I do get hungry, I just don't eat.
Then we get into the much more tenuous realm of psychological speculation. It has always seemed quite an effort to me to make myself eat enough. It may be that I've felt too weak to keep up that effort along with everything else that's been going down. Moving slightly into the outlandish, I have in the past had people suggest that my undereating involves a lack of belief in my own intrinsic value, but this is part and parcel of the "food-as-love" theory, which I reject. And then again, it may just be my desire to create an "extreme" state so that I don't forget that some things are seriously different from what they would ideally be right now.
I did manage to get everything that needed to be done this past week done, but it was some of the shoddiest work I can remember doing. I hope that situation improves.
It seems like a lot of people around me have been finding relationships lately. I've often thought that it seemed funny how the universe moves in waves of similar events (this happens to me on a very regular basis). Sometimes I wonder whether it's just that I tend to notice things of a certain type when I'm in a certain state. But I really don't think that's adequate to explain all of the patterns that I observe.
Through all of my years of abject hatred of Christianity (which still continues although in much milder form), I never realized that the Lord's Prayer doesn't actually refer to Christian dogma at all. It's actually kind of nice.
Our Father who art in heaven,
Hallowed by Thy name.
Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread,
And forgive us our debts
As we forgive our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from evil
For Thine is the kingdom
And the power
And the glory
Forever.
It's my birthday. So far today has been occupied by 1) reading Count of Monte Cristo, 2) involuntarily falling asleep while wishing to continue so doing, 3) waking up for a few minutes - without benefit of alarm - around my birth minute despite extreme sleepiness, 4) waking up again, thinking I had missed my appointment with Prof. Seidenfeld, and then realizing that I had not, and 5) going over to meet Prof. Seidenfeld only to find that he is, in fact, out sick today. It's very cold outside - enough so that were it not my birthday I would find it mildly unpleasant, but I sort of vaguely hoped that it would snow on my birthday, and it is, so I'm not displeased.
Although I make this page available for all to see, even my worst enemy should I ever have the bad fortune to make one, I sometimes wonder why certain people continue to check it, and why certain others never do (unless urged to do so for cause of some new act of weakness and depression which I have committed). I suppose such things are for God to know and me not to worry about.
I haven't opened any of my presents yet, but the only ones about which I know are those from my mother and father, and a gift certificate to Amazon from the family of one of my mother's sisters. I don't doubt that there will be more than that, but I am equally dubious that the day will somehow erupt into an enormous fête in my honor. I fear that it will be a long time - if ever it happens at all - before others learn to recognize my birthday the way I'd like them to.
Update: just checked LiveJournal. Priya, while it may not be quite the soirée I would prefer, I know how busy you are, and your post is warmly appreciated. Although to the best of my knowledge you don't read this page, so you probably won't even see this message. I'll try to thank you later on in the day.
Well, I have a lot more to say, but I think I've received a divine signal that now is not the time to say it, so perhaps I'll write another entry this evening or night.
Kenn Hamm
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Last modified: Fri Mar 1 11:47:25 2002