originally posted november 24, 2000

man of inaction

Before I applied to universities, I consulted many books presenting opinions and statistics. In one of them, I noticed one student quip about Carnegie Mellon, "School, friends, food, sleep: Choose three."

Well, I'm trying to keep my grades up, and I haven't lost any weight yet this semester, so the remaining two are battling it out for that one remaining spot. As I sit here on a Friday night, doing the same boring old shit I do every Friday night, I can't help but wonder if I could get by with less sleep.

quote of the month

"Jason Weill is my bitch." -- Tobin Coziahr, a CMU alumnus whom I've never met in any form, in a November 15 bboard posting.

In last month's update, I casually remarked that I had never pulled an all-nighter during my time at CMU. Well, I can scratch one item off of my "Things I've Never Done" list: on Sunday, November 5, the only person sleeping in my room was a student visiting for Sleeping Bag Weekend. Two empty beds, and one sleeping bag on the floor. After popping my all-nighter cherry, I felt perfectly fine at first. It helped that I woke up at around 1:30 PM on the fifth, after a long trip home from Washington got me back into Pittsburgh at around 2:00 AM that morning. At hour 18 of my consciousness, as I got out of the shower to fix myself some breakfast, I felt like this was no sweat. At hour 22, as I'm leaving my morning Japanese class, I still felt like I could get through the day.

Then came statistics lecture.

"Today, we'll be talking about --" thud.

After 25 hours of being awake, I experience the deepest sleep I've had in quite some time, just ten feet from my professor. (Fortunately, college professors seem a bit more tolerant of this practice.) After lecture, my friends wake me up, and I hustle on back to my room before I collapse. This effectively kills the rest of my day as I try to collect enough energy to do anything coherently. Of course, I can't, my homework goes unfinished, and I fall right back behind schedule. Net gain: zero. I still don't understand how my roommate can claim he does three or four all-nighters in a week, although I have a newfound respect for how he can fall asleep instantly at virtually any hour of the day or night, not to be awakened by any blaring music or noise around him.

So with that behind me, I'm back to my usual strategy of time mismanagement. My duties as secretary of CMU's College Bowl club have taken me to such exotic locales as Delaware, Cleveland, and Washington this semester, where I recreate by closing myself in classrooms with men and women who have managed to convert their lack of social graces into a profound ability to recall all sorts of bizarre information. (Incidentally, CMU's team placed second overall at TRASH Regionals in Washington, losing in the finals to a team of graduates named the "Major League Assholes.") As fun as this is, it's also a good way to avoid doing homework and assignments, as my pathetic assignment grades in my CS class have certainly shown. Furthermore, in my year-to-date tenure as the news director of campus radio station WRCT, I've managed to accomplish... nothing. That's right, nothing. Nothing at all. I occasionally go to meetings, get yelled at for doing nothing, pick up my mail, with which I do nothing, and then leave. What a way to spend a Saturday afternoon. It's not like I want to do nothing; all this comes back to the refrain of my third semester at CMU, "Something's got to give."

I think I'd just like to call a do-over on this entire semester.

For the radio, I do nothing. In my programming class, I might as well be doing nothing: a thousand monkeys working at a thousand terminals could produce more workable code than I could. At work, I do nothing: after all, that's what desk jobs are for. Socially, I do -- is there something worse than nothing? If so, that's what I do. I think I'd just like to call a do-over on this entire semester.

Maybe things will perk up. Maybe I'm still dreaming.

class by class

Last update before finals are done, and I get to return home yet again.

15-212, Principles of Programming. It's not that the material in this course is that hard to grasp; in fact, a fair amount of it bears at least some resemblance to material covered in classes past. The main problem with my performance in this class is, as I relayed to my TA, that I can't program in ML for shit. ML is a very strictly-typed language, he replies: just make sure everything type-checks, and go from there. Me, I go from there to getting zero credit for problems that I actually put a lot of effort into. I do not want my "major GPA" -- that is, based on courses only in the core curriculum -- to remain below 3.00, but it doesn't look like things are getting any better here.

33-104, Experimental Physics. For a class that most people take just because they have to, the staff still keeps things awfully strict. Unfortunately, this obligatory class doesn't appear to be an easy A, so long as nitpicking and strict grading keep things more tightly fitted to a curve. Still, this is the only class where I actually do productive things, while remaining in an environment sufficiently controlled such that I don't screw everything up and end up staying until all hours of the night. Other labs, I've heard, can be like this.

36-217, Probability Theory and Random Processes. Sanctuary! I'm within striking distance of earning an A in this class before the end of classes, due to the way things are structured, meaning that I won't even have to go to the final exam. Although I sleep entirely too much in this class, the professor doesn't seem bothered too much to go over some of the concepts that I missed. The fact that I work in a group trying to understand the material is also key. Considering that I only have four classes this semester, this class appears instrumental to keeping my overall average up.

82-271, Intermediate Japanese I. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to invest as much time as I would have liked into this class; being that it was my best class at the halfway point, I might be getting a little complacent. When push comes to shove, my Japanese homework sometimes finds its way to the bottom of the stack, only to be completed the following morning if at all. Still, my performance in this class otherwise has remained pretty good, and I feel confident that I'm learning more about the culture and language of Japan. Is a semester or year abroad ahead for me? Possibly. Computer science is hard enough in English.

Back to November 2000, or to the year 2000.