530A — Pour cement on the spot in the desert...

This blog post is long, but writing it was a sort of exhale from a tense day, and I feel so much better having written it.

Today was a good day. My anxiety levels were higher than usual today, which was unfortunate, but I think there were a variety of factors which resulted in this outcome. Part of it is, of course, that I don't have work to bury my emotions in, but there are other evident ones, which include my distaste for any form of human conflict, however necessary, although the specific incident I will not discuss here. In any case, I spent a lot of time with friends, and this was exceptionally nice, even if I didn't get much work done.

I woke up this morning at around 5:20 and struggled to get back to sleep for about half-an-hour or more. I woke up again somewhere around 7:50, but decided that I did not possess the willpower to actually get up, which resulted in me eventually getting up around 9:40. I got ready, ate a very little amount, and then headed over to MacGregor to hang out with a friend and try to get some writing done. During this time, I bought a ticket to see Mean Girls: The Musical in two Wednesdays, which only cost me about as much as a ticket to see Rent at home in South Dakota, so I saw this as a pretty big win, although I'm literally sitting in the last row. I'm super excited though—this is the second musical I'll see live, and it should be pretty good. Eventually, at some point after this, we headed up to Maseeh via Burton-Conner to meet up with some additional friends.

From here, we headed out to Spring Shabu Shabu, which I had previously visited once in December. The Uber there was actually kind of interesting, since our driver had a relative who lived in South Dakota, and we got to discussing the weather. The wait for the restaurant was around 45 minutes, so we visited Petco while we waited and I wrote around 70 words or so, which was basically all the individual work I did today. The hotpot buffet was just as excellent as it was last time though—I ate a lot of vegetables, some fish, some beef, and a ton of noodles. Personally, I find it more like a soup with a rotating cast, but I think this is just because northern Chinese preferences for lamb meat specifically, although it turns out these two traditions have diverged significantly over time according to a cursory Chinese Wikipedia search. In any case, I ate far too much, including some truly excellent soft-serve ice cream.

I returned to campus afterwards and immediately got dragged to Target/H-Mart to buy ingredients to make sugar cookies brownies, and, following a walk back to New and Next House, we immediately set to work baking them, although this was a bigger struggle than I could possibly have imagined. In any case, we produced food that bore a reasonably high resemblance to brownies and tasted pretty good, so I don't have any particular complaints. I visited MacGregor afterwards again to talk to a different friend, primarily about RSI miscellany, and then trudged up Dorm Row for a Think meeting.

Today's Think meeting was not as much of a struggle as last one, but it still ended up taking two hours to whittle 14 projects down to 6. It was a little more soul-crushing though, since we ended up having to kill a few projects which were pretty promising, but lacked various specific aspects. It was unfortunate, but we eventually made it, and the finalists are now selected. Now we have to start working on logistics, which may be difficult, but at least the hardest part is over.

I walked home with the rest of the Think team after this, and then took the opportunity to just call and talk to my parents for almost 50 minutes, which was really nice. I think I really miss the random discussions I can just have with them, although perhaps this is the benefit of getting older and starting to think more on their level.

Some thoughts about work which I've been developing recently. I can definitely sit and code for hours on end—probably two or three hours, at least—and I find that it comes relatively easy for me to think about problems, break them down, and solve them from the ground up. I feel like it would be so easy to just get more knowledge and end up working as a software developer but I can't say or pinpoint if or how it is particularly satisfying, apart from the satisfaction I get when I solve a problem. I obviously have plenty of time to think about what I want to do, but the uncertainty is large. I love sitting down and writing too, and it's challenging, and it's similar with a lot of different academic interests as well, but I don't think I have the same attention span. It's very interesting, and I guess more work will be able to help me think through this. Plenty more experience to gain, I suppose.

Tomorrow, I have a strict albeit ambitious set of goals: write Chapter 14, practice West Side Story, read A Short History of Chinese Philosophy, and update the "Proud Corazón" arrangement. This is a lot, and I'm pretty confident not all of them will happen, but one can only dream. It's snowing pretty hard outside though, so I'm pretty sure I'm not leaving home, which will probably be a boon to my productivity. The thrill of being warm while snow falls outside and working—it's truly beautiful.