It only falls apart when I try to make it work

What a cluster fuck of things going wrong and not working out!  So my brother came up to visit for the weekend and I had hoped to have him and The Brewmiester hangout, cause The Brewmiester is a fun person and he plays World of Warcraft which my brother used to play.  So there is potential to get along there.  Plus, even if there was nothing going on tonight party-wise, The Brewmiester can find a party anywhere, or can just make one.

But The Brewmieser went away for the weekend.

Not a problem there are other people I know that I can party with and show my brother a good time.

But it's Passover and Easter weekend, so that number is effectively halved.

That's ok, I did my research and some key people were still going to be here.  Then one by one they had other things going on, there were no parties, everyone was staying in, it's the height of thesis season, AND ITS FUCKING RAINING!!!

Yeah, clearly not the night of fun and debauchery I had planned for my little brother.  Luckily my wonderfully fantastic girlfriend, The Old Friend, keeps her ear to the ground like no other and was able to get us some entertainment in the form of a comedy show on campus and then I took my brother contra dancing.

All in all, the night was not a complete wash, but I could have been so so SO much better.  It is times like this that I really miss The Roommate and The Shrink; even if they call it quits early to go to bed, they were always game to hangout and find something to do that was social.  

Now, could I have done other things and searched out people and hung out with them on an almost individual basis?  Sure, but to have my brother tag along it would be weird for him since he wouldn't know these people, plus it would be weird to be all, "Hey!  I haven't hung out with you in a while, by the way this is my brother also."  I could have done it, but I would have wanted to run all over campus in the rain doing it and that wouldn't be fair to my brother.  

Another possibility would have been my brother coming up next weekend everything could possibly happen.  :-P Argh!  I'm just frustrated about what could have been.  This brings up something I think about every now and then: regret.

The idealist in me feels that one should live without regret.  There are countless quotes about "if you spend all your time looking back, you miss the present" and so on and so forth.  I really try not to let regret seep into my life, because, well, the quote is right.  Life has no rewind or pause button.  There is no spell check for the long text of life.  No save points.  Only the constant forward motion, the world keeps on turning, the pen never leaves the page.  If we have regrets, then we shouldn't have done something in the first place.  Regret ends up being that which prevents us from going forward.  Regret stops us, while life continues to move on without us; like suddenly stopping on a treadmill.  

Because of this I try to live life without regrets and without shame; live in the moment and not the moments that could have been.  This has led to some very fun and interesting experiences, most of which I am thankful for and have enjoyed immensely.  

However, ideals are called ideals because they are not actually how life is lived.  As such, I have come to the conclusion that everyone has regrets because, well, we are human and it is just a fact of life.  So, do I regret that the night not turning out the way I wanted it to?  Yes, but only because I'm human.  

This week is all about me bitching

I hate working on a reading for a long time, barely understanding it as you're going along, only to have the professor send out the reading response questions and have none of them be clearly answered by the reading you have been struggling all day to understand.  

So, now I'm going to start another reading based on one of the reading response questions that I think will be more easily answered/more straight forward.

This is something I don't like about sociological and philosophical and metaphysical readings: they are operating at a level so far above me about things I take for granted every single day.  Which is like (this is probably the most famous analogy) talking to a fish about water.  Granted the sciences are the same thing, but for systems and the vocabulary is completely different!  In my Science and Technology Studies readings they use words that already exist and just give them different meanings!  What is that?!  Or...bah.  I am just frustrated that I really don't understand this reading and should stop blogging and move on to another one.

I guess I will just go to class on Friday (I know, it IS shocking for me to be doing readings in advance) and just say, "I found the reading to be very dense and difficult to understand.  I don't know if I am interpreting this correctly, but I think the author was trying to say this..."  I feel that I'll be alright if I say that.

Phewwwwww........ok, back to work.

A better day, with a positive outlook for the rest of the week, and a shout-out to sxephil

Today was grey, but not raining, which made things way better.  So here is a short list about the things that made today better than yesterday:

1. I didn't get coffee this morning.
2. I now know a different way to get the header file for my data to get the data to work AND I know how to upload it to the class server.
3. I still don't know how t find some stuff for my thesis, but I figured out who does and will contact them tomorrow.
4. Talked to my professor about having his house this summer (turns out it is faculty housing and I can't, but at least I tried).
5. Deciding to wake up at the normal time tomorrow (which by the time stamp on this post would be today).

Things are looking up!  I got my bs-ing out of the way today and yesterday and I am ready to get hard to work tomorrow afternoon on the things I have to get out of the way so that my little brother can come visit me and "experience college life" this weekend.  Oh he will experience it and it will be fun.

On a more serious note: I follow the video blogger sxephil on youtube.  He won't be posting this week because his father is in the hospital.  After having my father be in the hospital and passing away this summer I know the kind of stress this can put on a person.  As such I want to wish him and his family the best as his father recovers this week.  

The Blue Shag Carpet is wishing your dad a speedy recovery Phil!

Rainy day list

Blah. 

Usually I love rainy days, but today was really a drag.  Dark grey sky from the start and it just rained.  It didn't pour, that I would have enjoyed on a purely "wow, this is intense" sort of way, but no.  Just normal off and on rain.  So let me take you through my day with a list entitled:

10 things that made the rainy day extra grey:

1. Convincing my self I hadn't slept enough, even though I had and wining...or losing depending on how you look at it.
2. Getting coffee when I actually didn't need it and being jittery all day.
3. Walking all over campus and getting my hat and pants heat-suckingly-cold and wet.
4. Trying to view downloaded data for a final paper only to discover that it wasn't in the correct format due to a missing/undownload-able header file?
5. Getting lost in a hallway shaped like a C...with only one, well marked exit.
6. Not being able to figure out what exactly I am supposed to be finding for tomorrow's meeting with my thesis advisor.
7. Not being able to ask my professor about living in his house this summer.
8. Wasting a bunch of time discovering that google can do everything!
9. Not having any work immediately due and feeling incredibly unproductive because of it.
10. Deciding right now to wake up at 7AM.

Yay rainy Mondays!

Confusion leads to more confusion

This morning at 5AM the Malaysian Grand Prix took place.  I was going to watch it, but after a long night of partying I realized that this would be a bad idea and decided to just sleep the full night.  This was, of course, an excellent decision.  Two weeks form now is China at 3AM.  I will miss this too, but the rest of the season is further west on the globe and start at 8AM, which I feel is more manageable: gets me up early, I'll have the whole day ahead of me, it'll be better.

This means of course that I didn't see what was apparently a wet and wild Malaysian race, but there will be more races so I'm not too worried.  It was called half way through, so I really only missed half a race.

In other news, I missed my friend's, The B-flat, birthday party.  I thought it was last night, but apparently it was the night before.  I felt terrible, not only because I had missed it, but because I called her to let me into her building and woke her up because she had gone to bed early.  Yeah, I felt awful, but we decided to have lunch some time next week so the call wasn't a total waste.

My friend, The Shrink, says I don't talk about her enough on my blog.  There, you were mentioned!

Hell week is now over

Now that that week is over it is time to get back to the good stuff: watching movies, reading blogs, web comics, etc.

Yeah today has been very relaxing to say the least and the outlook for tonight is positive.

We are picking classes for next semester and I can't help feeling that a schedule less jam packed like the one I currently have is ok, but I am already done with basically everything I need to do.  I only need to finish up my minor, but that shouldn't be too bad.  I might have to have some classes be considered eligible, so we will see how it all works out.

That's pretty much it for this Saturday afternoon.  I know I have yet to update the Fantasy Garage.  I will get to it...eventually.  Every procrastinator's favorite word. 

:-)

And then life sucked a little less

So I just found out today that the paper I thought was due April 14th is actually due May 5th.  How awesome is that?!  I was really not looking forward to blasting through a data/research intensive paper in a week.  Many late nights spent analyzing data...it would've been bad.  Now I can do it in a more relaxed pace over the course of the month.

For this paper I have due Friday, a lot of it has to do with medicine and government groups dealing with medicine among other things and it reminded me of something that has always bothered me.  You know in commercials for prescriptions drugs they always warn that "women who are pregnant, nursing, or may become pregnant should not take ____", right?  Well what does "women who may become pregnant" mean?  Isn't that all post-pubescent pre-menopausal non-sterile women?  You know...most of the female population?  This is always something that has bugged me.  Some people have said, "Well Steve, if a woman recently had sex that could lead to a pregnancy then that is the type of woman who should stay away from it."  But that is such a wishy-washy answer!  So if you are a woman and you have unprotected sex and are not using any sort of birth control then don't take it?  That seems like a very unique and random sliver of the female population, not to say that most of the female population isn't also a awkwardly large group to choose.  Clearly this will just be something that I just shouldn't worry about since I am a guy.