The lows are low, but the highs are home
Month
I’ve been thinking about something for a little bit and couldn’t manage to explain it last night, so I’m going to attempt to work it out here. I’ll edit before posting until I’m sure it all makes sense and I haven’t exaggerated anything.
What I’ve been thinking about is how I’ve long had a kind of ideal image of Britt in my head, and that holding onto that was what kept me hopeful for a long time after we broke up. It’s not like I was completely deluding myself, just that I liked to think everything could go back to the way it was. Of course I knew it wouldn’t happen, but it was still a nice thought, and I had the odd dream about us getting back together and things like that.
The problem, though, is that this ideal I had in mind didn’t change at all in the last two years, regardless of the ways she’d changed. In some way, I still thought of her as I did during the summer two years ago when (relatively speaking) everything was going well. Which isn’t really that horrible, as the worst consequence to come out of it is probably my consistent surprise at her unhappiness. My reaction tends to be something like “oh, I thought maybe it might get better…” because that’s just how I’d like the world to be.
I started thinking about this a couple of weeks ago after a dream I had that, essentially, was really about this ideal image of Britt. I forget the details, but it was a nice enough dream, so take from that what you will. When I woke up, though, I realized that Britt isn’t anything like how she was in my dream - and that’s what made me question the fact that I’ve been doing it all along.
Britt and I spent the day together two days ago, and that was great - I think it’s the only time we’ve expressly hung out as friends… At least, it’s the first time I felt that way about it. Essentially all we did was cook brunch, talk, cook supper, and talk some more. Fun seems like an overly exciting way to describe it, but I enjoyed the visit a lot and it was just good to see her again. What I wanted to mention, though, is that it also let me recalibrate the way I think about her. I’m one of those odd people who like the idea of platonic love, so I’m going to go ahead and say that I love her as a friend, and I’m happy with that. Despite the things that have changed over the past few years and plenty of disagreements, we still get along, and that’s awesome.
So here’s to you, kid. These past five years have been wonderful. Looking forward to five more.
I started my tumblr in April, so my 2010 recap is actually a recap of everything I’ve posted. Which is why it’s a good thing everyone suddenly wants to read my tumblr, because they can just read what’s on this list and that’ll be good. Mostly, this is all my long posts, so if I’ve missed anything you think is worth mentioning, let me know. I can do a recap of music/downloads/links that I’ve posted, if anyone wants to see that, because those are pretty much the remainder of my archive. Oh, and this is in chronological order - from oldest to newest.
I think this is pretty representative of my personal growth over the past year. Overall, I think I’ve grown and matured a lot in 2010. Tumblr probably helped in some way, not the least of which would be serving as an outlet for me to organize my thoughts. If you haven’t gone through my archive yet, there you go - now you’ve got all the best ones right here.
I’m not going to include the things like candy, body wash, and socks that I received - know that I received at least two of each of those in addition to everything else.
The games and trip were all at my request, but the razor was a very nice surprise. My mom was buying things for my brother even yesterday to even out the spending - I couldn’t figure out why, because I thought the things I had already picked out for my brother were enough (Epic Mickey and Donkey Kong Country Returns for the Wii, Golden Sun: Dark Dawn and Rune Factory 3 for DS, Azumanga Daioh omnibus, Gunslinger Girl season 1, The Witcher + The Last Remnant + Super Meat Boy from Steam, a Lego boardgame thing, and a book) but I guess that was an expensive razor.
Bonus: You now know what my brother got for Christmas. Also he got a pair of skates but that was one of those “you really didn’t need to” gifts.
I’ve already posted that I’m with my grandparents for Christmas, and I ought to mention that Christmas is a religious event for them. Christmas, for me, has been purely commercial from a young age, without even getting into my lack of faith. They don’t mind going to Christmas mass - being stuck with far too many people in a hot, sweaty church listening to an excessively long sermon, late at night when you’d rather be in bed. I’ve been able to shirk the responsibility of going by way of my father a few times, because he isn’t religious either, but now I have no excuse.
My mother, it seems, is either religious or feels compelled to be religious to please her parents - I’ve never figured out which, as she doesn’t really . She has tried a few times to bring us back into the fold of Christianity, especially around the accepted ages for first communion and confirmation, but eventually we’d get lazy and stop going. So I’ve had my first communion and I’ve been confirmed and I’m “a member of the Catholic church” and as I told her today I don’t want or need that status. And, I think, she feels like it’s her failing as a parent that I’m not particularly faithful.
Earlier my mom told us that we would, in fact, be going to Christmas mass. A shame, really, because I was planning to learn Python at that time. Anyway, she took my brother and I aside to tell us that we would be going and we would be participating in communion (I’m sure that’s not how you’re supposed to say it). Some more backstory: I decided not to do communion at my brother’s confirmation, though I don’t remember what inspired that little rebellion. I know that I told my mom it would seem dishonest to do that when I don’t actually believe. At any rate, I told her that I would do the socially accepted thing and avoid making her look bad in front of her parents. She said that she knows we don’t go to church often, and that she’d like to fix that, and asked whether I would go to church with her in Ottawa. I said no, and that I don’t need or want it.
The part that makes me suspect she feels responsible for my lack of faith, and that it’s bad/wrong for me to not be religious, is that she said there might come a time in my life when I want to be religious so that my children will have a place to belong. I feel bad about that, but I’m doing my part and going to church tonight. I don’t, however, have an hour or more to waste every sunday morning. Sunday morning is when I buckle down and do schoolwork. If I’m going to replace good working time with something else, it’s got to be worth more than whatever work I could be doing, like fencing practise.
There’s no real moral or purpose to me telling you this, I just felt like making a post about it for the sake of exposition. So now you know, and my disk defrag is done, so I can get back to using my PC. My dad used to run a disk defrag overnight and forbid anyone to use the computer until it was done, and I guess I picked up the habit.
My vacation’s going pretty well. I’m catching up on my Read It Later list, I checked out a number of to-do list managers (spoiler: I realized I didn’t need any of them), and today I’m going to keep reading and start organizing music in my library. As far as what I’m reading, yesterday I read The Little Prince, a few Lifehacker articles, and a number of Click Nothing articles. Reading more of the latter today.
Highlights of the day, which I definitely recommend: LastPass - a cross-browser password manager - a program that tints your monitor based on time of day. LastPass is pretty nice, it integrates nicely into your browser and can autofill forms for you and hang onto personal info and stuff. Most interesting is their Security Challenge, which checks all your passwords and kicks you in the butt about having bad ones. It can also generate randomized passwords for you - such as 8DIy@!Y2%EtO - but the downside to this is that you will never remember these on your own, making you rely on LastPass forever. The reality is that you need to know the password (what if you want to check your e-mail on another PC?) but you’re more likely to lose the password to a database compromise (oh snap Gawker) than to a brute force attack. Anyway, have a strong master password and then modify it as needed.
Second recommendation is Flux - a program that tints your computer monitor to simulate a natural light cycle. In the morning, it’s the usual bright blue-white that’s guaranteed to wake your brain up and stop the melatonin flow. Later in the day, it’s a warm red that is a lot nicer on the eyes. It seems really drastic when you use the preview of the entire cycle at once, but if you change it to the slow setting (takes an hour to transition) it’s very subtle. When you first come to your computer and it’s a strange kind of red, it might throw you off, but it’s… oddly comforting. Trust me, it’s good for your eyes and your brain, so try it out.
Third thing that may not be any use to you is custom address bar search engines in Firefox and Chrome. If you’ve used chrome, you’ll know that typing something other than a website will automatically do a google search. Great, but it gets better, because you can add search bars from sites and access them with a keyword (at least in Firefox). Go to a site, right click any search bar, and click “add a keyword for this search”. I did this for a french translation site - so I type “enfr bus” and it gives me the translation for the word. You could do this for your favourite torrent tracker, for a blog, whatever site you visit that has a search bar.
You can also add keywords for your bookmarks by right-clicking and going to their properties - type f for facebook, t for tumblr, w for wikipedia, whatever. It’s pretty good. You should do it.
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Went to a family supper last night, but it wasn’t actually an awkward sit-around-and-chat kind of affair. We ate our food and rushed out to a coffee house at my cousin’s high school to see him play. Some of the music was bad, some of it wasn’t, eh. Honestly I don’t have much to say about the whole event! We didn’t spend hours together and it wasn’t horrifically awkward, so… Yeah, I guess that’s it. In a few days I may have a good story to tell.
So I realize I haven’t been posting much, and there’s a very good reason for that: exams. I even had to skip fencing practice saturday because I wanted to do a bit more studying… I kinda spent too much time talking to people on thursday and friday.
But anyway! The past week has been like this: Linguistics exam on monday (took me about 40 minutes), tuesday was Applied Linguistics (roughly an hour), wednesday was French (a little over an hour - my essay as twice as long as it was supposed to be, lol). Thursday I almost literally didn’t study, friday was more or less the same. I studied 3/7 chapters in those two days, which is like an hour and a half of studying across two days. And I read the easy chapters because I didn’t feel like studying. Friday I spent 3 hours writing up ineffective instructions for Rainmeter, and thursday I was talking to Britt pretty much all day. I even claimed I was leaving to study only to keep talking for a few more hours >.> So that’s why I avoid talking to people when I have things to do.
Saturday I thought I had my Computers exam at 5 pm. Around 5:30 pm I realized it probably wasn’t at 5 pm. I was hoping to use one of the public computers to check my exam schedule, except some stereotypical jock was on facebook for 45 minutes and then TURNED IT OFF WHEN HE WAS DONE. You know how display consoles at Wal-mart are in little boxes where you can’t touch them? Imagine how rude it would be for someone to turn one of those off, because nobody can turn them on again without opening the case.
So I was still afraid my exam might start any minute and didn’t want to spend 20 minutes going to get my cell phone, so I used a pay phone to call my mom and get her to check my exam schedule. As I feared, the exam wasn’t set to start until 7 pm. I told her I should be done by 7:30, because it was 45 multiple choice questions and I generally average 45 seconds per multiple choice. At least, on a normal multiple choice question.
This was not a normal multiple choice test. I was there for an hour and a half, spending five minutes or more on some particularly crazy questions. The questions required you to check every single possible answer - “which of these is not false”, “which of these is not a problem with this code”, “which of these statements is most true” - and was generally designed to be a total asshole. So that was unpleasant but at least it’s over.
We left my mom’s house by 7 am yesterday (sunday, day after my exam) to drive to my grandparents’ house in Fredericton. Took us ten hours total to drive there, only stopping once for gas and simply eating food we brought with us. My grandmother was worried we might be stranded in a snow storm (the weather was great) so we had supplies for two days. During the drive I finished reading The Art of Manliness, read chapter 9 in my psychology textbook (the first chapter we’ll be doing next semester, or so I assume) and read a bit about Python. Eventually I realized I couldn’t really learn Python just by reading about it, so I stopped.
Now we’re here, and today I’m going shopping for shoes, winter boots, and pants. I’ll be staying here until the 27th, at which point I’ll be taking a bus to PEI. Staying there until the 31st, then we’ll drive back home. And the best part is the realization that I don’t have to do anything. I read ahead for my psychology course, sure, but aside from that… I really should just relax for the next two weeks. And that’s awesome. I’m going to do whatever I feel like doing, and it’ll be great. Demon’s Souls got an extension on its server expiration date, and they’re doing a Christmas event again this year, so I’m going to play a whole lot of that :D Of course I’ll have to go visiting and shopping and things like that, but I’m old enough now to not cry and complain over not getting to play video games for 12 hours per day.
This is pretty good news, assuming they can learn something from it and devise a better/easier/safer/whatever way to do it.
In other, much less life-saving news: I got Miranda IM up and running, and it is beautiful. I have a small tab on my desktop for it. My contact list appears when I mouse over it. It does everything I liked from MSN, and it does everything I liked from Xfire (including launching games, displaying what you’re playing, and displaying what friends are playing) and it looks better and takes up less room. It took me several frustrating hours, but now I can share my knowledge with others.
And, for the first time in five years, I may uninstall MSN. That’s how good Miranda is. Expect that post alongside my super-duper post tonight. I’ll see if I can find out how to create easy installers for my Rainmeter stuff, and stuff.
Note: This article, sadly, isn’t on the Art of Manliness website. It’s great, though, and relevant to a discussion I was having earlier. Is it wrong to post one of the few book-exclusive Art of Manliness articles? Maybe, but I think it’ll be alright. If anything it should convince you to buy the book yourself.
One last thing - you’d be silly to think this only applies to men. It’s all good advice, though the relative usefulness depends on your situation - which includes the gender of your friend. Some people don’t like being grilled for information, others will be more than happy to talk. Go with what works, and recognize when you’ve stopped being helpful.
If you see your buddy going through a rough patch in life, it’s only natural to want to offer some advice on how to remedy the situation. But helping a man friend with a problem can be a sticky situation; men don’t like heart-to-hearts, they’re often too prideful to ask for help and a marathon of watching Sex and the City reruns and eating pints of Ben and Jerry’s won’t soothe their troubles. So when helping your friend with a problem, you must walk softly and carry a fishing pole.
Go do something together. Men tend to be uncomfortable with baring their souls. So instead of sitting your friend down and gazing into his eyes, go jogging, take him fishing or bowling, or play some pool. It’s easier to unburden yourself when you’re sitting looking outward, instead of face-to-face. In between fishing casts, ask your friend about his problem.
Get the facts. Before you can successfully help someone, you need to know all the facts about the problem. Harness your inner news report by asking who, what, when, where and why questions. And make sure you listen attentively while your friend speaks.
Enable your friend to discover the solution himself. Men are most likely to follow through with something if they feel like they thought of the idea themselves. And oftentimes a man simply needs to be able to think out loud to come up with the answer to his troubles. Therefore your job as a friend is to act as a facilitator. After you hear your friend’s problem, ask him very nonchalantly, “So what do you think you can do to fix your situation?” Usually he’ll start listening some things. When he says something that you think would be particularly effective, let him know and explore the idea further.
Ask him if he wants your advice. If helping them figure out their own solution isn’t going anywhere, ask your friend if he would like some advice. By asking before you jump into the ray, you respect your friend’s manly pride. If they say no, then it’s no great shakes. Just keep fishing or bowling and let your friend know you’re always willing to talk about it in the future. Don’t bug him about it; that’s the man code.
Don’t preach. Men hate being preached to. Don’t put off a smug vibe that makes your friend feel you think you’re better than him for being in this pickle. Skip the patronizing sermon of “shoulds” and “musts”; instead offer suggestions. Say, “This is what I would do if I were in your situation,” “You could try doing X,” or “I once had a similar problem and here’s how I handled it.”
Give ‘em some straight talk. Men don’t like to be preached to, but they do appreciate a justified kick in the pants. If your friend’s been a dunderhead, then you need to call him on the carpet. Talk to him respectfully and honestly, man to man. Sometimes you have to tear a man down to bring him back up.
Naturally the specific situation should determine your approach. If the problem is more sensitive, like his girlfriend cheating on him, be more sympathetic.
I went to a lab fair for Cognitive Science, which means various lab directors from Carleton sat down to chat about their projects and where they needed assistants and things like that. So aside from learning a few names and getting my name out there, I’ve also gotten a position as a volunteer research assistant (i.e. no benefit for me unless we get published), and names of a few people with research grants with which to pay people like me to do things. I’ll go through those in order.
First, the volunteer stuff. Met a man named Jim Davies, who carries five notebooks with him to write down his research ideas. He has also given a TEDx talk at my school. I haven’t watched it yet, though I will, but first I have some stuff to do. But anyway! So he’s doing research on building a computer that can imagine the way humans do. The ultimate goal is to construct a massive database of images, with various parts labelled, and have the computer construct images based on keywords. So, for example, based on its experience of “car” images, if you say “car” to the computer it will make a car and perhaps put it on a road or driveway. If you say “puppy” it might put it near some grass or flowers.
So my help with this is to create a Python program (note: I don’t yet know Python, so that’s step 1) that will submit queries to the Oracle of Objects, and so if I say (on the proximity page) “dog” it tells me there’s a 10% chance a picture of a dog will include a man. So that’s the basic “AI” of the imagination-bot, to go through its database of images and calculate these percentages and use them to generate its images. Now, one caveat is that it will be creating a kind of collage out of the images in its database - it isn’t going to spontaneously create these images like a human being might. So someone else needs to work on its ability to do photo-stitching, i.e. super-powered photoshopping.
So yeah! That’s something to do in my spare time. I have to report back on my progress January 4th.
Also? Jim Davies had two widescreen monitors set up in his office, except one was vertical (portrait orientation) and it was pretty cool seeing him manage them. Still kinda toying with the idea of more monitors. Also the main method of co-ordination with him and his assistants is shared google calendars. Thanks, Google!
Now the paid work, which is… well, much more interesting to my wallet. Carleton has a Language and Brain Lab, as well as a Logic, Language, and Information Lab. Both of these labs have acquired research grants, allowing them to pay undergraduate students to do work as research assistants for them during the summer. So, essentially, summer jobs doing interesting research. This is far better than my planned summer jobs working for the government. I have to send out a few e-mails to the people I spoke to today, but one in particular mentioned that he would be looking for applications soon. Perrrrrrrrrrrrrrfect.
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In unrelated news, I did a cool thing in Echo Bazaar, but it’s pretty spoilerrific. This is the culmination of a long series of silk hunting/spider extermination expeditions at The Silken Chapel near the Wolfstack Docks. Something that was immensely boring, unrewarding, and unsatisfying. Until this happened! Now it’s kinda cool. Image is here, if you want to see it.
Here’s a bit of psychology for you. There’s a structure in the brain, called the limbic system, which is (as far as my first year course is concerned) the basic location of emotions. Completely unrelated to the limbic system is the thalamus, a central station for your senses that passes information on to the other part of your brain. So, the signals processed by your eye go to the thalamus, which sends them to your primary visual cortex. However, your sense of smell DOESN’T go through the thalamus - it goes straight to your limbic system, creating a pretty close association between scents and emotions.
So I was going into my psychology lecture, and a girl in front of me was wearing a lot of cotton candy perfume. I was pretty confused for half a second (as in, where am I, what am I doing here), and then I came back and started to wonder why anyone would wear cotton candy perfume - would you be attracted to someone who smelled like a carnival? When we got into the class and I walked past her to find a seat, I was starting to enjoy the cotton candy smell in a weird kind of way. Still kind of confused about it, trying to form a proper sentence to explain my confusion, and yet there was a kind of attraction to it.
I got to my seat, sat down, and while I was waiting for the lecture to start I worked on sending Britt a text about how cotton candy perfume confuses me. I settled on “you know what I hate? People who wear cotton candy perfume. It’s so confusing when they walk by :(” She replied and asked me why it was confusing, which I had to think about, and ended up saying “because it’s like wtf, cotton candy!? And I’m able to be confused for half a second by perfume.” Her response: “I used cotton candy stuff all the time. I always sprayed my room with cotton candy perfume.”
I don’t want to beat you over the head with the significance of that and go into too much detail, but it’s so cool! As I told her, I didn’t remember that she always sprayed her room with cotton candy perfume. I couldn’t have told you that, if you’d asked what her room smelled like. But my brain knew it, and obviously I have a pretty strong emotional association with her room, because we hung out there a lot. So I smell someone wearing cotton candy perfume, and for half a second I’m just bewildered because cotton candy perfume = her room, as far as my nose is concerned. Then I lash out, questioning the reaction, and then it’s kinda pleasant and attractive.
So now you know how to make yourself strangely alluring to me. Though if you’re actually going to try that, go with vanilla instead. So now you know that psychology is legit! I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried. And this is in no way a plug for my excellent repository of notes.
