ThePanda

It’s a week and a half before Thanksgiving, I detest this semester/wish I had made different choices/wish I hadn’t made too many choices, and am hence looking forward to Thanksgiving. I have had a not so great week, though a lot of things seem to be setting themselves up in strange ways for later, and I hope this later actually materializes, and I haven’t actually done anything too intriguing this weekend. Wait I did have fondue, which was great, I guess, I also met WNS and had a discussion about life, the universe, and courses, something I hadn’t done in a while, was introduced to a condensed matter theoretical physicist, and umm told him that I once wanted to be him, but no longer do, only to realize significantly later that these are perhaps not the best words to mention to someone. I also communicated with the man from the land of the kangaroos, after a significant period of time, realized that in a wonky way, he’s one of my favorite professors of all time, and I wish I had been in more classes with him, or at least had the option of doing so, interviewed with a financial software company, realized I am really unsure about working there ever, went to an info session for a company I once knew about, realized I detest them, and most companies I end up meeting, got through stage 1 of my Apple applications, realized I still want to do a SURF, but need to make other decisions if I want to do so, and need to make them soon, realized that I have issues with altogether too many people, and after trying to be nice to one of them yesterday, realized I don’t really want to resolve too many of them, realized I loved sleeping, missed classes for weird reasons for the first time since school, realized I don’t really want to miss them, decided I am doing to many things, made important decisions about work in future semesters, decided money matters very little, and decided on a few other things that I have since found really hard to implement. I also sort of autonomously decided over the past few weeks, mostly because of recurring incidents with people who surround me, that humans are altogether too weird, and smart people do not necessarily have good short-term memory, and Brown does accept people with dysfunctional/deficient short term memories, and that standing in line sucks, because not everyone wants to act like perfect angelic beings, even though they would, given a chance, guilt trip you into believing not being one is bad. I also realize, that is one hell of a long sentence, shows that I have too much on my mind, and I am not going to discuss too much of that, perhaps none of that in fact.

So I no longer know everyone who reads this blog, I stopped monitoring hits a few weeks ago, and umm perchance if there is someone from Caltech visiting these pages, and umm if you know of any Math, or CS professors, umm OK let’s concentrate on the later half of that list, I’d be really really grateful to find out about them. That being said, I also realize I had this page up on my recruiting profile for a while, so I am not sure about who if anyone is visiting from any of the companies I have submitted links to. I also sort of am divided about too many things, and if there’s anyone who wants to pitch/explain what umm let’s see, mathematicians, computer scientists, and other people do when not earning money to buy their next I don’t know what, because as much as I would like to own a Lamborghini when I am 27, that’s not what I want my life to be about, and while I seem to have an inexplicable love for things which are scarily expensive, I don’t actually know what to do with them, and I want to be an academic/do research/get one of those five jobs at Pixar which Pixar said I couldn’t have.

Also I have decided I am going to get a single next year, and live in there alone, and umm do funky things, and find new things to do, and umm I don’t know, read more books while I am in college, and other such things. This is of course subject to change, and shall be confirmed when lottery time rolls by next semester, but this seems like a very good idea right now, and would perhaps be implemented, I don’t know, I hope so. I saw Guster live in concert yesterday, and this is perhaps the first time I have seen a band I actually like live in concert, and this is a good thing, except a lot of the people there where high schoolers and were acting like dumb wits in there, and crowding me in, and not accepting the fact that they should have gone to the front of the concert space before Guster actually came on, thus making me decide that I really don’t like crowded places, and my feeling that I don’t was not a weird untested feeling so far. I also read some sad stuff about the concert hall I was in, and ugly things about one of the performers who’s going to be performing there soon, and I feel sort of bad about going there, seeing as they shouldn’t really be inviting this performer, but I already had tickets to Guster, and that as far as I know, was the high point of my weekend. Seeing as it is 12:40 AM on Monday, I am pretty sure nothing’s going to make it higher than this.

This is going to come back to haunt me, so as a disclaimer I claim that no one’s really responsible for this, but I had a really crappy birthday this year, which is fine by me, but had me worried about upcoming birthdays in the years following this. Do birthdays actually get worse as time goes by, because I really don’t have interesting 18^th birthday stories, I spent much of it worried about the future, and this is sort of the future, and I love it, on most days I do anyways, and I don’t know, I want interesting birthday stories to share with people, hell I want interesting stories in general to share with people. This is strange, and complaining about too many things I know, but let’s see before I turned 18, I had more interesting things happening in my life, I saw tigers bathing, was charged, and nearly picked up by an elephant, had an elephant tap my head, swam in a river where there were supposed to be crocodiles, tracked two tigers by foot, saw tigers performing pre-mating rituals, had a fishing eagle drop fish on us, and other such things. Post turning 18, I haven’t really seen a tiger, haven’t really seen too many elephants, was thrown out of my favorite jungle, don’t want to go back for fear of being thrown back out, and have generally not done anything too exciting. This needs to change, I know all of my life can’t be interesting, but I miss parts of the old arrogant, haughty, overconfident me, and while many believe I am still arrogant, I want to do more cool stuff. Oh towards me doing exciting things, I have grand (and hence destined to fail) plans for a program I want to write over the winter, hmm which reminds me I should really discuss winter plans with my parents, I want to go back to programming cool things, I coded in assembly for the first time after many years, and awful as writing a gigantic program in assembly was, it made me feel cool, it reminded me of old times, and cool things like that…

Exun 2k5 is supposed to be coming up, and as every year goes by I know fewer judges, I know precisely one this year, most of Exun does not respond to my e-mails about change of information, and for the first time since I graduated from high school I received no pre-public release information about Exun 2k5, something which is completely understandable, and yet sad. I am and always will be an Exun alumni, but I think we have moved on, and while this is something I realized over the small part of the summer I spent in Delhi, no matter what comes next, that part of my life is gone, and it doesn’t sadden me any more, I loved Exun, but too much has changed and we’ve all moved on. The stuff I did in Exun, while exciting is not completely what I want to do next, and someday I will finally be able to go back to Exun and look back at all that being a part of it did for me, but now is not the time. I might go back to school the next time I am in Delhi, but it’s not going to be something I absolutely need to do, and while I am sure there are people in there who would not understand my decision, I will be back someday, someday when I have accepted all the changes that Exun has gone through.

I am done with this entry, it’s not happy, and I still have a story in my head that needs to be posted, and other things that need to be posted, perhaps they will be somedays, perhaps they won’t ever, for now I have a differential geometry midterm I need to complete, so I can concentrate on my analysis midterm.

Ze Panda

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 13th, 2005 at 9:57 pm and is filed under article. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.