Woke up late, ate a quick breakfast.
Skyped with Grace–in doing so, discovered our hidden laundry-room study area, which was deserted and great. Grace was doing some really cool artwork for her thesis :D She seemed full of energy and optimism despite the dual crunches of her two theses in art and anthropology.
After a brief interlude I Skyped with Muriel :D That was fun. It felt a bit weird to both of us, I think, not to be talking in person. We talked about my songs from Glee and she played me some interesting similar music.
Decided to skip the biophysics seminar I’m auditing and do physics homework. Alex came over and we chatted a bit while I ate lasagna. Back to physics homework, made decent progress but the work was both challenging (because I hate having my intuations about space and time be consistently off) and tedious (because working through the mathematics and double-checking everything was not complicated).
Went to Lavin all-student meeting; saw Jamie on the way and said hi :) At the meeting, I ran into a few old buddies, got my burrito and chips at the food line. At the end of the food line, a stately older fellow nodded to me. I started to walk over–maybe this guy knew me–and then realized he was the keynote speaker, Geoff Ralston, a partner at YCombinator. I freaked out inwardly a little bit–he was kind of a big deal–but since I was already halfway into assuming a comfortable stance in his little conversational group, I bravely charged in. I probably completely disrupted the conversation that was going on, between the head of Lavin and Geoff. Soon we were talking about some alternative to TCP/IP he’d worked on in the early 90’s at HP.
I sat down with my food, at the front of the room since I saw some of my buddies there. Administrative stuff for Lavin, then Geoff came up to speak. At the beginning of his talk, he was asking the room why they would want to start a startup–and called on me! I balked. Me? I wanted to go to grad school, and then who knew? In the heat of the moment, I answered that I was probably the only fellow who didn’t want to start one (yet, at least). Damn, that was awkward :P
After the event, I hung around a little, and walked out with Ryan and Gaya’s old friend Favor. Somehow I was absolutely chill as a cucumber. It’s so difficult to predict my emotional and conversational responses to changing events.
I was going to go to Team Food (meet the others coming from Swing) but I just went straight back to Stevens and got going on physics homework. It took me a really long time to finish it, not counting a fun tangent into hyperbolic geometry where I actually learned a lot of interesting things, the analogy between circular rotations and hyperbolic rotations… :D
When I finally finished the homework, I was feeling kinda down, played a few games of chess, tried to work on a outline of mathematical ideas for the CompBio capstone, got bogged down, brushed my teeth… finally I decided to wash some dishes, and suddenly felt a lot better. Then I realized the cause of my malaise was simply not feeling any simple, straightforward progress on the day–the homework felt redundant, the Lavin meeting was weird. I have to stay aware of what I’m doing and why I think it’s meaningful, or else why I need to do it to get on with my life. And also not beat myself up for completely random things like that awkward moment with Geoff–I should be happy for going up and chatting with him initially.
In summary, a weird day. Life goes on.
Gratitude Journal 1. Great Skype with Grace–especially seeing her Knightmare masterpiece 2. Lovely walk back in the rain from the Lavin meeting 3. Running into Jamie 4. Delicious lasagna for lunch
Things to work on 1. Not letting homework get me down; maintaining an internal progress bar so that I can make work meaningful even when it doesn’t feel meaningful 2. Recovering emotionally from random things and not feeling too bad about mistakes–it’s more important to keep having fun and keep producing good vibes