perspective shifting

time management: if you want to speed up the passage of time, think of all the things you have to complete before semester's end. if you want to slow it down, think of how much you want for the school year to be over.

one of my friends likes to think of our lives as being a novel's plot. something happened recently which could be interpreted as being symbolic and novel-like. on my key ring I've long had a square piece of leather imprinted with the university's seal. last sunday when I was locking the door, this leather square tore off.

I'm finished saturday may 10th at 12:15. finished forever.

it's 70°F and sunny. I walked home in my hoodie. this santa cruz ginger ale is delicious.

you may now begin transferring your knowledge to the scantron

tomorrow I take the fundamentals of engineering exam. it is comprised of 2 sections, with 4 hours allocated to each and a break in-between. the morning section is the same for everyone and has 120 multiple choice which cover the basics of many fields, chemistry among them.

the afternoon section has 60 multiple choice which cover in depth one of the fields covered lightly in the morning section. you're allowed to choose the topic area of the afternoon section you take. the expectation is that students take the afternoon section which corresponds to their major.

it's likely that, as part of the application process months ago, I had to select the topic area of the afternoon section that I would be taking. if this is the case, I'm sure I chose electrical engineering. in the off chance we're able to choose our afternoon section tomorrow, I'll go with something else.

my choice of afternoon section topic will depend on what I'm trying to achieve. if I'm trying to pass the exam, I'll go with environmental engineering, as it comes across as the easiest of them all. yes, even though I've only ever gotten A's and B's in the EE courses I've completed, I think I would do better on environmental, which I know nothing about.

if I decide I'm going to fail regardless of afternoon section topic, I'll choose mechanical engineering. the rationale behind this choice is that it's a field I'm curious about, and maybe, based on the multiple choice questions asked, I can glean some insight as to the concepts these people are concerned with. the sum of my studying for this exam was about 1 hour a few weeks ago and I'm unfamiliar with the function of my recently purchased FE approved calculator, so if I have the option of choosing, I'll probably go with mechanical.

last thursday I had an engineering signal analysis exam. it went alright, but as I was walking home afterward, I realized I'd answered a question incorrectly and, in some ways worse, knew what the true answer was. it's happened before, contemplating the questions after I turn in the exam and coming up with a solution I feel confident about but which doesn't match what I wrote down. it's indicative of the importance of being in different states of mind over the course of tackling a problem. there have been instances of people lying awake in bed grappling over some dilemma and waking the next morning armed with an approach they had never considered. too often, test takers only experience one state of mind, one that is partly concerned with the ticking of the clock. in my case last thursday, maybe the blunder cost me 10 pts. it shouldn't matter in the grand scheme of things, but it's aggravating nonetheless.

here, use this to chill your drink

why is it so satisfying to break the ice layer that forms over puddles during cold nights? it's like amélie shoving her hand into a bin of beans.

maybe it's the fun of breaking molecular bonds with the clean knife precision of cracks. it's also the rarity of opportunity. the visual, auditory, and tactile senses have only a few weeks of the year to be gifted with puddle ice layer breakage stimulation.

the water took its revenge on me about 20 meters later. I slipped on the ice and fell flat on my back. I remained lying on the ground a few moments, letting the disorientation fade, collecting myself, allowing the cold, dirty puddle water to soak my shirt. when you're dancing with gravity, nothing else matters.

zeppelin escher

there are paths on campus woven between dorm buildings. at some point along one of these paths there exists a staircase that might have been designed by a civil engineer who was angry at the world. it isn't so much a staircase as it is a series of overlapping cement slabs. it's more likely to have been "designed" by a contractor who was angry at the world.

whereas with most staircases we progress through successive stairs by alternating left and right foot, here the width of each slab is such that you have to walk approx three quarters of a stride in order to be in a position that allows you to comfortably step up or down to the next stair. this means that your conventional stair conquering rhythm is totally shot.

one way to reclaim, on these wide cement slabs, the 1 foot per step standard of staircase movement that we take for granted is to run. running up/down a staircase, though, is not conducive to maintaining an outward appearance of collected composure. it is not sloth-like.

things are starting to float

this morning, in an attempt to avoid a repeat of what he perceived as the studentry's tendency towards sleep last class, the business course prof played a short video of a beached sperm whale carcass being blown up by 20 cases of dynamite. the sense that my future depends on my leaving this place is so strong as to be palatable.

one of the requirements of graduation is that I take the fundamentals of engineering (FE) exam, an 8 hr multiple choice marathon put together by NCEES, a national organization, and administered by each state. the wonderful thing about this degree requirement is that I need not pass the exam, I need only take it. true, burning the $250 registration fee is a downer, but I have no motivation to cram over material I learned and forgot years ago when my laziness has gifted me with coursework that could actually keep me from graduating if I neglect it.

the campus pub mailed me a ticket to the 13th annual graduation bash. it's the saturday before finals week. I'm going to go. as the music pounds and people down their drinks and shout in exuberance, I'll sit quietly at a wall booth, carried away by the shock of 7 years at university spelling the end.

whispering to the leaves

I can't keep a secret from everyone. it eats me from the inside. if I couldn't tell a person, I think I'd share it with another animal, or at least a tree. it can be very therapeutic to hear yourself say things out loud, I don't know why. I think it's even better to speak secrets in the presence of another living thing.

in a similar vein, I don't think it's a good idea to tell any one person everything. not only would it put you at risk of being very hurt, but they might feel overburdened by the weight of what you've shared with them.

some things shouldn't be investigated. when using a key to lock a deadbolt from the outside, does the thumbturn change positions on the inside? I don't even want to think about it. finding out, by locking the bolt with the door open and looking around to the other side, would diminish the size of the habitat of the unknown, where demons and ghosts have thrived for ages.

Tremors betray the coming storm

When I was much younger, I would often accompany a parent on errands. In particular, I remember my dad would ask "do you want to go for a drive?" My mom probably asked something to the same effect, only in French. There usually wasn't an obvious reason for them to make the offer. I don't remember being good for conversation while a passenger. Maybe they preferred my silent company to driving in an empty vehicle. I think this is one of the reasons I would go; because I sensed in the way they asked their question that what they were really doing was making a request "please come do errands with me." I'm not so unselfish to go for that reason alone, however. I liked, and still do, to look out the window at moving things, to feel the seat and door press back on me securely during turns or acceleration.

If my mother was driving, the post office was one common intermediate destination. When we were parked, I was handed the P.O. Box key as well as a few letters to be mailed. I sorted them into two groups, one in each hand, before leaving the car, so that my mother could approve my work and keep the envelopes from being sent on misguided journeys. The two groups corresponded to the two bins for outgoing mail in the post office. One was labeled 'local', the other 'out of town'. Each bin had a pull-down swing door, like the type used on street corner mail depositories. There have been some recent changes at the post office. One change concerns these bins. There are still two of them, but the labels have been replaced. Now one is labeled 'outgoing mail' while the other is labeled 'Netflix'.

My sister named her pet leech 'symbiotic'. It escaped its open-air water-filled container within a week.