Alice

From Facebook, I can see that a lot of my classmates are mentally done with the semester: showing up late for class (or not at all), writing papers the day they're due (or not at all), etc etc. But I can't afford senioritis!* Currently on my plate: two important group projects where all of my teammates are slackers; preparation for our taiko concert which is in three weeks and we haven't learned half our playlist yet; research, which is not progressing fast enough; the 5+ long or important emails that I owe to people; and the fact that I am dumb enough to sign up for an online, no-credit NLP class (offered by two Stanford professors, actually a pretty cool setup) because I need to feel like less of a complete beginner in this field.

Web Programming is killing my soul. It's taught by my advisor, which can lead to some weird moments, like last night when he emailed me to ask about my progress on the latest assignment and if I needed more time (he's trying to gauge the class through me but still. Awkward). He's also a fairly uninteresting lecturer and he posts all the material online but still takes attendance on occasion, which means that everyone shows up to class but spends the whole 75 minutes playing games on their phone or browsing the internet on their iPads. One kid who sits in front of me must have a GBA emulator on his phone because I've seen him playing both Fire Emblem and Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire. And then the prof asks questions and no one answers and I hate raising my hand in class. I also give zero fucks about programming sudoku in PHP (our current assignment). Sure, I'm learning a few things, and I'd never have tried PHP of my own volition, but it's such a boring problem and pretty much all my other responsibilities seem more important by comparison.

On the bright side, we had some gorgeous weather this week. Several days of over 70F and dry and not too humid! I didn't get out much because I had work to do, but on Wednesday my advisor canceled our meeting so I spent an hour before taiko relaxing and reading outside on a bench and ignoring work. I've picked up Observations again so I was eating a chicken salad sandwich and giggling at mind melds are like vector spaces. I love fic so much sometimes. And last night, Anna and Otouto and I went out for froyo and then stayed up past 2am playing Tales of Vesperia (finally got Flynn as a playable character for 10 minutes, and he and Yuri are so married). Good times!


* Okay, technically I could probably get all Bs and still graduate summa cum laude, but it's the principle of the the thing. I didn't work so hard for the last four years just to give up now!