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It's my birthday
Mar. 2nd, 2001 02:12 amApparently it's Wednesday again. This is a little weird since, last I checked, it was a Wednesday too, but a different wednesday. Since then Twenty Eighteen has been barraged by a continuous series of guests, although some of the early ones were demons only I could see. I'm always amazed at the stress of having guests. I can only conduct so many campus tours before I die! But finally everyone is gone and I can hole up in my room and read from my burgeoning book collection and listen to selections from my woefully inadequate CD collection and write notes to myself and put off my analysis homework in peace. "Jester" is gone now too, the giant computer that kept our apartment warm and cost us at least $1/day in electricity and filled the air with the noise of a million spinning blades. Now the air is quiet too. Now, in fact, it's Saturday and this essay has been sitting here neglected for half a week.
Last night my roommates hopped on a bus and disappeared into the darkness, midnight greyhound bound south, destination indeterminate. I wouldn't have it any other way: the apartment all to myself, resonating with a pleasant quiet, presenting a vast stage for reflection and introspection. Sitting on my bed against the wall listening to the rain fall from the amber sky splashing on my window pane, playing CD after CD through high quality headphones, typing up an essay on my roommate's little Sony computer which calls itself Riverman. I spent the day at the art studio, working in the subdued amber ambience, working quietly with my hands and eyes, forming images on paper, images that linger.
Today is the last day I'll be twenty years old. Where am I, and where am I going?
I just wrote out a list of classes I need to take in the next three years. If I follow that list I'll graduate with two degrees: one in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, the other in Mathematics. There are fifteen classes on the list. ``That's a lot of work'' was all my roommate had to say about it. He's right. It's a lot of work and I don't really know if I really want to do it. It's tough to examine my motivations. I've settled into mathematics as a sanctuary from the toils of computer science classes. Math classes don't have programming projects, and they don't have a hundred stock-option-crazed unheigenic males competing for resume bullets. Math is a solid, admirable academic pursuit. Like art, it often has no clearly definable or readily apparent use or purpose, and yet it's a master for which we may toil in the darkness independent of the wild tempests of the world. When the sun explodes and when the sky is falling, you can always descend into subterranian darkness and hack out proofs, stumble in the dark towards a higher beauty and truth we speculate may exist. There is the essense of my faith. A degree in Math would be a rejection of the practicalities of engineering and the capitalist visions of the hoardes of EECS students -- to study something pure and elegant, yet in the eyes of many, completely useless. Something like Art.
It's an unpretentious pursuit, one Sysiphus might appreciate.
Neither of my roommates is a student now. College has a dramatically different flavor when your roommates aren't college students. All the urgency of studying and homework and academia is gone. Not good nor bad, just a new flavor. But if I were to do it all again, I'd be an English major. I've come to experience a new appreciation for arts. Not an appreciation for The Arts per se, but my relationship to them. I'm trying to draw, to write, to read, to photograph, to observe, to capture beauty and truth in those ways: in short, to exercise creativity, to flex muscles dormant for too long a time.
They say it doesn't matter if you don't know what you're going to do when you're twenty-one, and the many of the most interesting people with whom I've been lucky enough to cross paths had no idea what they were going to do when they were entering their third decade. Nonetheless it's a time for reflection: where am I going? I remember specifically how little thought I put into selecting EECS as my area of study. It seemed so natural: after all, that's what I'm good at, that's what I know about. It's easy for me. But there are a million other pursuits, many as or more captivating than that which I follow. In elementary school I sometimes fancied myself a writer. Since high school, I haven't read nearly as much as I'd like. I've resolved to remedy that, to read as much as possible. There is much honor, too, in becoming a great Engineer. The dot-com minions are unworthy of the title, I think. To this as well I think I must rededicate myself. It's easy to fall through the cracks into the sticky masses of mediocrity, but with some effort engineering too is a noble goal.
I suppose I do have my work cut out for me after all. Time to get to work.
Last night my roommates hopped on a bus and disappeared into the darkness, midnight greyhound bound south, destination indeterminate. I wouldn't have it any other way: the apartment all to myself, resonating with a pleasant quiet, presenting a vast stage for reflection and introspection. Sitting on my bed against the wall listening to the rain fall from the amber sky splashing on my window pane, playing CD after CD through high quality headphones, typing up an essay on my roommate's little Sony computer which calls itself Riverman. I spent the day at the art studio, working in the subdued amber ambience, working quietly with my hands and eyes, forming images on paper, images that linger.
Today is the last day I'll be twenty years old. Where am I, and where am I going?
I just wrote out a list of classes I need to take in the next three years. If I follow that list I'll graduate with two degrees: one in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, the other in Mathematics. There are fifteen classes on the list. ``That's a lot of work'' was all my roommate had to say about it. He's right. It's a lot of work and I don't really know if I really want to do it. It's tough to examine my motivations. I've settled into mathematics as a sanctuary from the toils of computer science classes. Math classes don't have programming projects, and they don't have a hundred stock-option-crazed unheigenic males competing for resume bullets. Math is a solid, admirable academic pursuit. Like art, it often has no clearly definable or readily apparent use or purpose, and yet it's a master for which we may toil in the darkness independent of the wild tempests of the world. When the sun explodes and when the sky is falling, you can always descend into subterranian darkness and hack out proofs, stumble in the dark towards a higher beauty and truth we speculate may exist. There is the essense of my faith. A degree in Math would be a rejection of the practicalities of engineering and the capitalist visions of the hoardes of EECS students -- to study something pure and elegant, yet in the eyes of many, completely useless. Something like Art.
It's an unpretentious pursuit, one Sysiphus might appreciate.
Neither of my roommates is a student now. College has a dramatically different flavor when your roommates aren't college students. All the urgency of studying and homework and academia is gone. Not good nor bad, just a new flavor. But if I were to do it all again, I'd be an English major. I've come to experience a new appreciation for arts. Not an appreciation for The Arts per se, but my relationship to them. I'm trying to draw, to write, to read, to photograph, to observe, to capture beauty and truth in those ways: in short, to exercise creativity, to flex muscles dormant for too long a time.
They say it doesn't matter if you don't know what you're going to do when you're twenty-one, and the many of the most interesting people with whom I've been lucky enough to cross paths had no idea what they were going to do when they were entering their third decade. Nonetheless it's a time for reflection: where am I going? I remember specifically how little thought I put into selecting EECS as my area of study. It seemed so natural: after all, that's what I'm good at, that's what I know about. It's easy for me. But there are a million other pursuits, many as or more captivating than that which I follow. In elementary school I sometimes fancied myself a writer. Since high school, I haven't read nearly as much as I'd like. I've resolved to remedy that, to read as much as possible. There is much honor, too, in becoming a great Engineer. The dot-com minions are unworthy of the title, I think. To this as well I think I must rededicate myself. It's easy to fall through the cracks into the sticky masses of mediocrity, but with some effort engineering too is a noble goal.
I suppose I do have my work cut out for me after all. Time to get to work.
