615A — Some look for trouble while others don't...

Today was a decent day. I am much more on my feet than I thought I might be, but I still feel like I'm juggling so much that at any moment a task might slip out of my fingers and, while I'm not looking, fly out of reach and land on the floor, uncompleted, unsatisfied. Of course, the importance of dropping something varies drastically with the given task, but that doesn't mean I'm not concerned. The mild anxiety that keeps me on edge sometimes feels like the engine that keeps me going and allows me to do as much as I do, but other times when it's a little more zealous than usual, it begins eating up my mental state from the inside. It's something like the hydrochloric acid in your stomach—it's generally very useful and it's an inherent part of you, but if the mucus lining fails to protect you at any point, you're just toast, and it'll rot you from the inside.

Gruesome analogy aside, I did manage to accomplish quite a bit. I woke up with my alarm at 8:30 AM, read for about an hour, and eventually got up around 10 AM. Time passed for a bit while I oriented myself to take on my tasks for the day, and eventually I started by finishing up a pull request that I'd been working on for the company which I did my externship with. After completing that task and deciding the next task wasn't worth it, I did a section on sorting algorithms on Codecademy, before I found myself unable to really accomplish anything else. This was mostly related to a lack of food consumption throughout the morning, which I remedied with the consumption of lunch and a solid break for reading.

At around 2 PM, I finally returned to my work, although one of my first tasks ended up being a grueling repeat of yesterday's attempt to record my part for the Asymptones CP★ performance. With some marginally better mic settings and a different camera, I ended up getting much better quality on both ends, and after uploading that I continued to finish my Spanish homework for the weekend. Combined with some other marginal tasks, I finished this work session around 5. Taking a break to eat some "breakfast"—i.e. cereal—as well as a grapefruit, I eventually recuperated my motivation over the course of around 40 minutes, at which point I decided to sit down and attempt to complete as much of my problem sets for the week as possible.

Surprisingly enough, I managed to make a good amount of breakthroughs in my Real Analysis and Physics problem sets, and on the whole I'm about halfway through the two of them combined. My work on the physics problem set was interrupted by a 7 PM call with the CPW committee, where we finalized and submitted the vast majority of our CP★ events, after which I had dinner. I continued to work on various problem sets for a little while more, although I also spent some time continuing to plunk around on the piano in an attempt to accompany my sister on some concertos. My work gradually became less efficient, so I eventually decided to write this and call it a day; and so, week two of virtual school ends.

Tomorrow should, for the most part, be fine. The next week as a whole will be a bit of a doozy, however: a final project proposal due tomorrow, a Spanish exam on Tuesday, a problem set for an informal class due Wednesday, problem sets for real classes due Thursday and Friday, as well as my first week of online PE, not to mention the formal weekend part of Campus Preview Weekend. I'm just hoping to make it out alive. I think I will, but at what cost? We'll have to wait and see.