20.5

Thanks to an informative lunch with Eugene on Wednesday, I discovered that today (Thursday) was my half-birthday. Who knew?

I had a good half birthday. I had four classes, two TA sessions, one legitimate meal, and an incredible level of distraction that has left me with unfinished quantum mechanics and a blog to write at 1 in the morning, but tomorrow is Friday and I'm in for another glorious weekend.

So for now I'm hoping to have this post published by wake-up 'o-clock in GMT +1 time. Perhaps I should be more precise about my upload time. For now, I will guarantee to have all of my Thursday updates published by 2:00 am my time, which means I'm 40 minutes early today. Excellent!

This week's photos:

Today

Today I'm a little blond-haired boy, playing king of the castle with my dad on the stumps on my way to the stop. Today I'm going to wait for the bus all by myself. When it comes, I will look quietly out the window, playing with that squishy padding as we drive over the old bridge with its big metal trusses. When I get to school, I will enjoy the few minutes I have with the marble chutes before Evan comes and I have to let him play with them. The other kids like his designs better. He tells them he is going to make a marble go straight up.

Today I'm a dolphin, swimming happily through my freshwater tank. But the enclosure doesn't bother me: it is the Atlantic Ocean. And the Pacific. It's the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico and the lakes and streams of the American midwest. Maybe these aren't ideal places for a dolphin, but that's ok.

Because today I'm the breeze. I blow cool and refreshing on a hot summer day in Wyoming, amplifying the smell of a simple grilled cheese sandwich to transform it into a feast more grand than that enjoyed by any king. I blow over the waves on the beach and I sting the cold rosy faces outside on a winter day.

Today I am a lover. No, today I am love itself. Today I am God. I am everywhere and in everything. I am the deep magic that governs the properties and the particles you will never find with your microscopes, telescopes, or Large Hadron Colliders – even your theories – because you, Horatio, will never even scratch the surface.

Today I am tired. Both physically and mentally exhausted, I'm feeling the strain of the schedule I've decided to take on this semester. My to-do list keeps growing and my nights keep getting later and somehow I have only been here for two weeks. But I'm happy. I'm content with my life in a way I haven't been since I started college.

So bring on the classes, the meetings, the sleep deprivation, and the missed deadlines. Bring it on because I'm only going to work harder. Bring it on because I am ready. I am physically and mentally strong. I am frustration and I am passion. I am love, anger, sorrow, joy, fascination, and peace. I am a man. I am a lion. I am tiger, a monkey, and an eagle. I am a little boy with the lunchbox my mom packed, happy and quietly curious about what comes next.

I am a dolphin. Thanks for all the fish.

Temptation

It's late, I'm tired, and I only have two classes tomorrow. Surely I can put off this update until then? I've even posted once this week already. But good bloggers don't make excuses. They make regularly scheduled posts. Henceforth, my as-yet nonexistent crowd of followers, I promise to be a disciplined publisher. Every Friday, without fail, you will wake up to a fresh serving of piping hot paragraphs topped with sugary sweet pictures of the past week.

And now a more general note about temptation. This evening I went to the first spring meeting of The Forum, our campus's club for part-time philosophers, designed to discuss those "Big Questions", well-summarized by its iconic image of The Thinker, and formed by my very own and awesome roommate Stephen. But despite the questions now floating around my brain of morality and ethics and whether there is really anything objectively good in the world, I can't help but cling to my intuitive sense that there are some things we should and shouldn't do and that those things are neither subjective nor negotiable. Yet even if I was persuaded to drop these naive and perhaps fundamentally meaningless views, I would retain unflinchingly my respect for people who both hold and follow them.

Whatever your resolutions or moral systems, there's something incredibly honest and fulfilling about sticking to them. It's just the sort of good old-fashioned character building that Calvin's dad was so keen about that really makes you feel like you're doing something right. But see there? I'm back to feelings again. I guess I'll have to go to some more Forum meetings to get this intuition thing sorted out.

But until I undergo some thorough mind-changing on this issue, I'm resolved to be more resolved about my life. For the goals and resolutions I already have, I'm resolved to putting higher priority on them and, to help me do so, finding new ways to enjoy them. For the areas of my life that need work, I'm resolved to identifying them and improving them. Any input from you would be appreciated on this one.

***

The subgroup of you who are quite definitely part of my imagination may be thinking that it sounds like I have recently faced some other temptations that I haven't told you about. Zarquon knows what, but I faced them. Another subgroup of you may think this was only somewhat more than incoherent psychobabble, this paragraph very much in particular, and wonder when I'm going to settle down on a topic I can commit to writing about with significantly much more structure. Finally, a very real group of you who I very much doubt extends much past me has not only caught all of the media references in this post (actually I only count three... this shouldn't really be hard if you try) and has thus gained a little insight to my priorities in life. And more importantly, being me, you have come to realize that seemingly unworkable, on-the-fly writing like this somehow frequently turns out to be pretty decent, and will be happy to hear I decided to write and publish it.

For the rest of you, I thank you for being real and for taking the time to read this. Hopefully it was interesting and made you a little intrigued to see where I'm going with this blog, if only you didn't have to wait a whole week to find out more. And with that, I give you my week in pictures:

An Imperative

Go listen to Breathe In by Frou Frou. I just gave you a link. You have no excuse not to.

Week 1

As promised, here is my first weekly update. I spent most of this week working on various projects I took on during break, and spent the rest of it in some particularly awesome classes. I still haven't decided on a general theme for the blog, but I am hoping to take it in a direction away from being simply an online journal. For now, it can at least serve as a repository for my Project 365 photos -- one picture per day that serves more or less as a photojournal.

I'm hoping to figure out a more structured way of presenting these, but for now this will do. My past week:

The time it took me to get those centered right very much lessens my opinion of Google Blogger.

Hello World

It seems procrastination can only take me so far, and though I have, as yet, no idea what this blog will be about, it's here and it will be updated once a week, hopefully with a regular theme. And since I already know I have at least one reader, I am confident I can at least keep that schedule. To give myself at least the next week to debate an answer to the theme question, I will make this entry just a brief bio and leave it at that.

If you are computer-programming-oriented you may have inferred from my title that I am as well. Realistically if you are reading this first entry you already knew that about me, but I'll hold to my high expectations and from here on out assume I'm addressing a wonderfully large and diverse audience. I'm interested in a large number of subjects, but probably fell in love with programming in particular because I was able to pick up on so much of it outside of class.

Yes, I am the kind of guy who does math and science for fun. I enjoy just about every school subject, with the glaring exception of writing. This was the case throughout high school and held true through my semi-mandatory Writing 1 class one year ago in which I learned, most memorably, that I tend to write in far too informal a tone for college papers, and probably for professional-looking blogs as well. I might have to work on that. In which case, it's a good thing I have a blog! I'm feeling the beginnings of a mission statement here. I'll get back to you on that soon.

For now, here is my picture of the day for January 8. My dog Otis: