15 Minutes
I was just thinking about 15 minutes and what can you do in 15 minutes and I realized, when I’m in an exam and the time is ticking, I can get from an “F” to a B” in 15 minutes, MoFo.
I feel behind. I hate this feeling. I’m not just slightly behind on the work, but worse, I feel behind on a couple of concepts in calculus and in CS.
Tried to catch up this weekend, but that’s never guaranteed. I even did the grody computer programmer thing and was so engrossed that I didn’t take a shower for two days.
I can catch up with the work on the weekends if I know what I’m doing, but my home situation doesn’t allow for the times when I’m trying to cram a shaky concept into my head, you know? Anyway, I’ll be staying late at school a couple of times this week because of it.
This CS project is a mother. It’s not terribly difficult, but it’s large. There is a lot to do, so when you come up against some concept that you don’t completely understand in the spec, you just don’t have the time to “get it”, but you have to, and it leaves me feeling like I’m losing my step on the treadmill, as far as the time crunch goes. I’ll get there; I’ll get all of this done. I have to.
Oh, did I mention I have my part (10 pages) of a 50-page team report due Thursday in my Engineering Ethics class? Yeah, guess how far I am on that one.
I just don’t like this feeling.
This girl
Remind me to tell you about this sour girl I had to interact with in the discussion class of one of my classes the other day. Fucking priceless. I have to wait until the quarter’s over, though. Because class.
OK, turns out my MATH31B midterm2 worked out OK. A 73, but it’s above the curve which means above a B or better, so— good.
Tonight I took my CS32 midterm2. I’m annoyed that a third of the test was on a subject that hasn’t been mentioned in lecture yet, so it was basically a “good luck if you know this”. Unfortunately, I had prepared only what we’d covered in lecture, so I didn’t have what was a basic recursion tree traversal in my head or in my notes. POO. Tried my best. I just hope my exam score isn’t a D or worse. There’s always the final—- >.<
Saw some friends who are important to me just before the CS midterm. They don’t go to the school; they had been visiting someone in the Medical Center. They were taking a walk through campus and just happened to walk right into the corner of campus I was sitting. Was really great to see them. I guess if that’s all the good that comes out of taking that exam, it was worth it.
A view of Paris in a study corner in the Engineering Library.
Took my calculus MidTerm2 today. It was hard. About a third of the class got A’s on the first midterm, so the professor vowed to make this one harder. He did. It was. I’m guessing I got only about 60-70% right and I really felt the time crunch. Afterwards, people were coming out of the exam expressing various versions of “WTF”, re: the difficulty of the exam. Maybe he’ll split the difference for the final. I fucking hope.
I went down a bit of an Internet rabbit-hole tonight and wound up at this video of me as a guest on the Arsenio Hall talk show in 1988/89. (His show, Johnny Carson’s, and Phil Donahue’s shows were the hot tickets back then) and so interesting to see myself at that point. FAMILY TIES (the show I acted on at the time) was just finishing it’s 7-year run as one of the highest rated shows in TV history. This was before the TV audience was so fractured, so a typical viewing audience might be 24-28 million people per week. To put it in perspective, the TOP “hit show” nowadays grabs about 10 million viewers per episode (and this is assuming DVR viewing). Most of your favorite “hit shows” get about 1-3 million viewers per episode. You know how much you love MADMEN? It averages 3 million viewers per episode. PARKS AND RECREATION? 2.5 million.
Anyway, funny to see me in that moment where everything seemed to be so fluid and easy. If you were on a top TV Show at that time, EVERYONE knew you. Everyone. Even though I worked hard at acting and on the show and other projects, it’s not really working hard when the wave is just going your way. There’s no other feeling that compares with everything “going your way”. You can’t create it, you just get to ride it if it’s there. I guess it helps if you had no general plan (besides going to college) before the good fortune fell into your lap, but it’s interesting to think about early moments in life where your “path” just unfolds itself to you and it doesn’t seem like you have to put much effort into it to keep it going.
Christ, this is not that. My life now, I mean.
I have a great life, it’s not that, but the professional progress proportionate to my effort is so opposite from my life in the 80’s. Maybe it’s I’m far more specific about what I want to do or that I feel so beholden to these ideas about The Future of Entertainment that I can’t NOT pursue this tech-related path. I was thinking the other day, in what had to have been a PMS-influenced moment, “What am I doing? I could just pick the kids up from school every day and go to Bed, Bath, and Beyond and get bath mats, etc for the house. What am I doing going to school and doing all this hard work and pursuing one of the most difficult degrees available?” Then I thought, “Pull yourself together. You’re not going to feel like this in about 48 hours. Your the one who would stick a fork in your eye if you weren’t working. Get your shit together.”
So, I hammer math problems and try to cram a collection of information in my head related to Quantum Mechanics or C++ coding, etc in 3-week spans (between exams) that should really be absorbed in 8-week spans.
It’s like being a competitive runner in-training. You just hammer it as hard as you can so you’ll be the best you can be at your races, but damn, it would be nice to just walk there sometimes instead.
Can’t wait for my 60% score on that midterm2!!!!
After my study session in the library last night, I was heading down the stairs of the parking garage and I heard loud drums from the floor below.
Check out this drum practice. (It may be this group.)
(I left my steadycam at home, so you’ll have to put up with my shaky, NYPD BLUE camera work.)
Seen on campus outside Boelter Hall
Women’s bathroom humor : college edition
Damn, I feel underwater a bit lately. Have a calculus midterm (#2) coming up this Friday. Hell of a lot more info for this midterm than for the last one. Also, the class did pretty well on the last exam, so we’ve been assured that this one will be harder. CRAP.
CS32 is into recursion now. Hard as hell to trace recursive calls through a debugger, so I’m trying to do what my CS TA’s urged me to do a while ago and “just trust that it works”. Want to be carefree with recursive coding, but this was the first project that I had to take time to “get my head around”. Time-SUCK.
Also have a ton of research to do for my Engineering Ethics class. Have a 6-page paper due as well as my part of a 50-page “team project” that I have to get on. “Technical writing”. So pleasurable.
Staying late on campus studying tonight, natch.
