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| they say a watched pot won't ever boil
well i closed my eyes, and nothing changed
just some water getting hotter in flames
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| me: i want to make an anti-abortion game based off the tomb raider series me: i'll call it, womb raider me: you have to go inside angelina jolie and personally kill her fetuses as they sprout up Frank: i thought she just adopts babbies? me: that's because the womb raider keeps aborting her real ones. | | |
| I owe an update. The good news is that I'm almost totally healthy now. I finished the last of the antibiotics seven days ago, and have been going to classes, hanging out, and attending a pig roast (interesting time yesterday. It ended with drinking cheap wine in the middle of the woods). Looking back, there was a point last Saturday night where it really started to bother me - I think I looked at myself and the mirror and the only thought that ran through my mind was "I'm not getting any better." I just couldn't get it out of my head. It had been eight days since I'd started treatment and still there was no visible improvement.
Thankfully the recovery was a lot quicker after that. A superstitious person might even say that freaking out was the thing that helped me get better. But that would be crazy.
The only thing I can't do is play ultimate, but I'm hopeful that I'll be able to play by the end of this week. It'll take me a few weeks to get back in shape but I think I'll be ready to play in a tournament at Chico, CA October 24th-25th. Good. This is good.
In other news - during the height of the MRSA, there really was no other news, being sick was just constantly on my mind - I'm trying to figure out what to do with my life. I don't think I quite understand the point of a Masters degree. And why I'd want one. The reasons I can think of are something like this:
- Companies will give you a better job if you have a Masters. OK.
- Companies will pay you more money to do the same job if you have a Masters. This is retarded and impractical. Silicon Valley is mostly a meritocracy, anyway.
- You actually learn some things that you didn't have time to specialize in as an undergrad. This is kind of silly too, because I think I've pretty much taken what I want to. Well. I guess I could find three quarters worth of classes I'd want to take. So maybe this one is the best reason of all.
- You get to delay entering the real world. Silly. But oddly compelling.
The only part of the real world that I'm worried about is the social aspect. I imagine it's pretty much the opposite of the rowdy freshman dorm. I might wind up living alone, although I'd love to find some friends to live with in Palo Alto, at least for a little bit. I can sort of imagine how my days would go: spend all day at work, come back home, make dinner and spend all night watching tv/lounging around the internet. I know that's what I'd default to if I couldn't find anything more interesting. It sounds kind of depressingly realistic, like that's just what you're supposed to do. I worked 9-5 this summer, but it was still a fun time because I had a fun roommate and was living on campus where most of my friends hung around. Now that I think about it, that might be why I want to work for a small company, so I'll have an excuse for letting it take over my life. Hmm, that sounds vaguely unhealthy (and a little depressingly realistic).
So, I now have three piles of job application materials on my desk: not gonna submit, need to write up, and already submitted. The middle pile is getting smaller and the right one is getting bigger. We'll see how this goes.
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| I decided a couple of years ago that health can be a fragile thing, even for an active, mostly-healthy young man like me. So for the past few years, I've occasionally thought about the condition of my health without any external prompt. I'd ask myself, "am I healthy right now?" The answer would usually be yes (if not, it'd probably be due to that recurring rib bruise, or the hip flexor strain, or a bad stretch of allergies...all nuisances, but nothing too severe). I'd take time to be thankful for being healthy, and I'd think about all the people who didn't have that luxury, and I'd count my blessings a little bit. I think /iI started doing this because I'd get sick, then think "damn, I'm ALWAYS sick", without really realizing that I'd just been totally healthy for weeks or months at a time.
I'm glad I did that. I think it made me a little more self-aware. And it rebuts the subtle but incorrect intuition that I'm somehow always sick from something - which is a pretty depressing mindset to get into.
Anyway. It'd almost be wrong to call my current sickness "not feeling well." I do call it that, of course, to most people who ask. But I have no fever, no cough, no runny nose, no malaise, nothing. I feel perfectly normal - except for these - I think the technical term for them is "abscesses". They're like pimples that you can't really pop and that don't go away. They spontaneously form in really inconvenient places and hurt like there's no tomorrow.
I had this physics teacher in high school named Mark Wentz. There was always this sense among his students that he had lived an immensely interesting life, and had just somehow wound up as a high school physics teacher in Kansas by some obscure accident. At some point during my junior year, Mr. Wentz contracted a mysterious "blood disease" and missed several weeks of school. We heard rumors that people came in to disinfect his office, his classroom, and everything he'd touched. There were rumors that his life was in danger. High school girls giggled with the absurdity of it all, and because nobody really believed Wentz could die.
It turns out the disease wasn't fatal, and it wasn't even really a blood disease - it was MRSA, a "superbug" version of a staph infection. Mr. Wentz was back within a few weeks and was his cranky old self. I found out today that I have MRSA.
I'm not going to die, and all things considered this isn't even that serious of an illness. It's more debilitating that anything else, and I think that's why I'm sitting (well, kneeling on my computer chair) here writing a 1000 word xanga entry. I've been sitting in my room all weekend. Literally, I haven't left my room except to visit the hospital once a day, use the bathroom, and fetch food/water. Honestly, I'm just a little bit lonely.
I've been struggling to decide what to tell my friends. I've gone with a generic "I'm not feeling well" lately - with a quick addendum that it's definitely not swine flu. I mean, MRSA isn't especially contagious, but it IS kind of severe-sounding, right? Or maybe that's because I associate it with the first time I heard it, as a threat on Mark Wentz's life. And the symptoms are pretty gross, enough that I wouldn't want to subject my friends to that level of detail. Don't google pictures of MRSA. Just don't.
I feel like there are some illnesses that you can be pretty open with people about, and they'll be sympathetic. Like, if you have mono, or pneumonia, you could just say it. I think the primary axes (as in, the plural of axis...not as in a hatchet) that semi-severe diseases are judged on are grossness and familiarity. That is, an ungross (closely related but not quite synonymous with 'non-contagious') and very familiar disease would be treated with the most sympathy and acceptance. A gross, unfamiliar disease - even if it was less objectively severe - would be treated more haltingly. That is, the person who contracts it is treated more like a deviant, like "wow, he was strange enough to catch something called MRSA...". Which, by the fundamental attribution error, quickly escalates to "he's the type of person to whom things like MRSA happen." Nobody wants to get too close to a leper.
So that's my silly, outsized, unrealistic, exaggerated fear. Here at a competitive school - and, really, anywhere - I think it's really important for a man to be seen by his peers as strong. And being sick just does not jibe with that. Men would rather be the one who contracts some serious disease, then beats it by somehow ignoring it into submission, as if such a thing were possible.
Anyway, I'm not going to class tomorrow, and probably not for a few days. I'll think about going back when I can sit still without being in pain. The one really pathetic thing about this whole ordeal is how little homework I've gotten done. Despite being alone in my room with no distractions for an entire weekend. I've got two problem sets, a program, and some dense reading to do. And I've done maybe 1/4 of the program and haven't touched the rest. I have, however, read about a million articles about fantasy football (I won this week, fuck yeah) and browsed about 80 different webcomics. So there's that.
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Completely unrelated: Matt Nathanson is a piece of shit. Listen to the beginning of this song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wF-7Pk4hxKE and tell me it's not a knockoff of this song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUe3PPStCu8
I think this pisses me off more than it should because I saw Matt Nathanson live this summer (at a free concert), and he was kind of a smug little bastard.
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| Sometimes I'm very concerned about who I am. These are silly, vacuous, unproductive introspective questions. I think about things like self-esteem and self-delusion, and the flimsiness of it all. If I have to reach outside of myself to be something decidedly good, am I being untrue to myself? I find that my instincts are often to copy, to blend in, to be innocuous and unsuperlative and hope that everything somehow happens for me. The trick is to be happy being who you are // but if your happiness gauge is miscalibrated or your 'you' instrument panel has the wrong buttons, jumping right to the finish just won't work.
Sometimes I can see the details of my future life so clearly that I suspect they must be a mirage.
It strikes me that I should add something comprehensible to this entry, so here's a list of things I've done recently or things I'm currently thinking, so I don't forget.
- I went to a Cougar Convention on Friday. It was just like it sounds. And I'm expecting to see a ridiculous newspaper article with my picture it in in the near future. CougarCon09.
- I am literally incapable of doing work now. It's really disappointing. I couldn't even bring myself to look at the code until about 4pm today, stared at it for a few hours, then just went home. If I'm still doing similar code-monkey work a year from now, I will have made a huge mistake. I kind of knew this from the start.
- This summer, I've memorized all 118 elements of the periodic table and all 53 countries of Africa. I'm getting pretty close to the countries of Europe and am up to ~150/181 of countries of the world. I don't expect to get the last one done, I guess, but I'll get Europe within the next few days. Is this useless? Indubitably.
- I like my college friends, but my best friends happen to be people who lack certain social skills. Like social self-awareness, or basic empathy. This is really disheartening at times. But it makes me secretly glad, in a perverse kind of way, that I have something they don't.
- I live in vague admiration (and occasional emulation) of those who live their lives hard. This type of person seems to do everything hard: he drives recklessly, focuses intensely, runs tirelessly, eats quickly, socializes mercilessly, and sleeps furiously. It's easy to see how any average individual could be out-driven, out-focused, outrun, out-eaten, out-socialized, and out-slept by a person with such tenacity. But I've come to realize that it's not a conscious effort of will with these people; it's just an innate characteristic. Just because I can switch it on for periods at a time doesn't mean I can gain that trait, which I wish I had about ninety percent of the time.
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