October 07, 2004

It Was A Dark Night

Mmm-hmm. No sleep for Ardith tonight. She's going to try and catch up on the assignments she's still behind on after being sick all last week.

w00t. The Statistics students seem to have a test tomorrow, so I won't have to grade homework over the weekend.

Weekend. I like weekends. But they need to be three days long. Seriously. No sooner do I get into my "Ah, it's Friday, and I'm going to enjoy this weekend" mood, but it magically becomes Sunday evening and I have to do homework again. And all of a sudden, it's almost halfway through the semester.

It's a good thing Fall Break is coming up. I think I'm going to spend it all sitting in my room, playing games, doing homework, and watching movies. Being anti-social and reclusive. But mostly not going anywhere, and not doing anything important. Maybe I can even catch up on the books I bought but haven't got around to reading yet.

Maybe... hah. And you thought I couldn't ramble on anymore. It's nice and quiet around here right now; everyone's asleep, except for me, and I think I'm hitting my second wind. Or maybe it's just the Mountain Dew kicking in.

Ever since my mom and sister started blogging, I've been wondering why I've taken to it so well. They've always been the writers, after all. Not me.

I hated writing with a passion in highschool. I could never make what I wrote anything beyond the stilted sentences that still make up most of my research papers. Oh, it's grammatically correct, and even reads fairly well. But the creation process is like pulling teeth. Not like this, where I can write nearly as fast as the thoughts come. And oddly enough, they do come. I think better when I've written something out. The same sort of thing can happen when I talk a subject out. Which might be why most of my random thoughts take the form of internal conversations. Re-hashing past events, coming up with alternate ways of dealing with a situation, trying to calculate the odds of putting the next assignment off making me go insane later when trying to finish it at the last minute. All sorts of things.

I guess they're not always internal conversations, per say. Quite often it's like video editing. Or making spreadsheets in your head. I'm forever trying to connect things together in my head; like the world is a giant puzzle, and if I turn the pieces around enough, and try enough different combinations, it'll all fall into place.

Except somebody dropped the puzzle and lost about 20 of the pieces. And thus we have Ardith's Description of Why Life Does Not Make Sense. Clever, no?

Keys.

I have six keys now; keys to my apartment and campus mailbox; two keys for the car, a house key from home that lets me in at 2am if I so desire, and a key to the computer labs. Because I'm trusted around 50+ computers.

Working for IT is interesting. All my hours this semester are lab shifts; 3 in the morning, and then another 3-hour shift one evening a week. Plus whatever extra shifts I take up for people who can't make it. But the labs are actually interesting most of the time. Dude. I get to sit in front of a computer and get paid for it. How great is that?

And I keep the printers full of paper, and answer the phone, and answer questions from people who walk in, and just act generally helpful. Which I seem to be able to do fairly well. I haven't had anyone actually get upset with me over the phone yet.

Oooh. Almost 3am. And another assignment almost done.

I may actually get to sleep tonight; I hadn't planned on that, so it's a nice surprise.

I don't like the way the Software Engineering book smells.

*begins writing 1-page software document*

*takes 20-minute catnap*

Yeah, vocabulary is one of the first things to go after missing a lot of sleep. It's a little after 4am now, and I'm starting to have trouble remembering which word I'm trying to use. Development. Yes. That's the word I was looking for. Wait, no. I just used that one in the last sentence. And the thesaurus is no help, because it doesn't think in IT-documentation-speak. Implemented. That's it.

Oooh. It's 5:30. Time for a 3-hour nap.

Posted by Ardith at October 7, 2004 05:28 AM | TrackBack