Pretravelling
AAAAAH. Why is there always so much damn stuff to do before leaving? Last week I was SO SURE that I could undergo regular working hours right up until about 3 hours before my spoke flight, at which point I’d get casually whisked off in a car and dumped pleasantly at the airport terminal. As the days of this week have progressed, so has my panic been ramping up. And it’s not purely unreasonable panic — the list of crap to do before leaving has grown exponentially. Yes, exponentially. First there was one thing, then two things and now there are totally about FOUR things on it.
I’m not even away for very much more than one week. And that week is chopped up into little packages of visits, so the entire thing is like a handful of candy, and will have passed before I’ve even really started to appreciate the jetlag. And yet that has just about zero correlation with my level of stress.
I could bitch about specific things (e.g., my supervisor coming back from holiday right after I leave, making it look like I have taken a disproportionately large amount of time off; the weather forecast predicting T storms for Thursday…) but that would be probably be really boring. So I’ll hide them in those parantheses, instead, and try and put on a happy face for another 48 hours.
And if that fails there’s always the airport bar…
Backup
Yo, I’m feeling a little happier now. Part of that is because I booked my annual flight back to England without my supervisor freaking out, so that’s a huge relief. It was also fairly cheap, despite being about to happen in 4 weeks. I guess this recession has some advatanges… Another reason for feeling better: I made an unexpected 20 bucks helping some parents fix a flat tire, while they were trying to perform the annual extrication of their daughter from her residence hall. Then I spent it on a set of oil pastels. Oh, and I started taking fish oil capsules again. PRODUCTIVITY!
Back to the real-world weekly work experience tomorrow though. Whaaa.
The Drain
There are some weeks where graduate school saps away almost every grain of remaining enthusiasm I have. I spent the last three days trying to duplicate a result from several months ago, which is only a minor precursor to everything else I have to do before my supervisor will even consider letting me graduate. It’s terrifying thinking about all the things I haven’t done yet, and those thoughts seem to swim particularly strongly in the upstream of falling asleep. It makes a year seem like such a short time. It’s so little time to accomplish anything.
If I had stayed in England I would have graduated two years ago…
Must. Not. Whatif.
Pieces
I started writing a post last night and then my T-shirt started grabbing on my shoulder, and my flatmate started eating loudly, and everything in the entire world started to annoy me. So I stopped.
This evening I found my lost hat which is colored the specific shade of green that me and my sister are colorblind to. I wore it walking to the hotel bar in the middle of campus, through the drizzle, listening to Haitink conducting Shostakovich 15, last mvt.
Some dudes at Georgia Tech built and performed with a marimba playing, auto-accompanying robot Jazz robot. Yes, yes and yes, kids. Realtime music analysis and processing is the future.
Tomorrow is “Slope Day” a music/drinking extravaganza in honor of the last day of classes. Campus was warned via email to a) not get alcohol poisoning to excess; b) not to uprise if the concert is canceled by thunderstorms; c) not spread too much swine flu.
Keep Away From The Pigs
Especially when they look like this:
I have a huge crush on this style of illustration. I want to teach myself to draw like this. All Medievaly (I’m pretty sure that’s the academically established term for it, amirite?). This particularly undelicious looking hunk of pork was taken from here, through which I have spent about the last 10 years browsing.
Of course, this is all in reference to the media frenzy and general panic over the potential H1N1 flu pandemic. Something which people seem not to mention when trying to sell the fear is that ordinarily there are about 36,000 deaths in the US from regular seasonal flu, every year. So it’s a little premature to get so riled up over the 20 confirmed cases in Mexico.
Ah crap, I lost my segue. It was going to be: While on the subject of ye olde stuff, here’s the last thing I heard on NPR last night, before the 1 o’ clock news forced my remote hand into the off position:
I think I either liked the version they played on NPR more, or I liked the way it sounded through pre-sleep. The latter is kind of a recurring occurrence. I remember really liking how the, errr, violini lines wrenchingly blurred and pulsed into each other, and how that and the modality made me think of more modern pieces, in places. It’s still got some of that, but without the remembered near-violent intensity. Maybe I’ll listen to some of his other stuff while (inevitably) churning out PowerPoint slides tomorrow.