Morning: good-humored midterm prep. CompBio was fine–mostly writing code for something that should be in the libraries (Java’s libraries are rock solid but honestly kinda thin). Ran over to the midterm, which I think I absolutely pwned–I had time to check over all my answers. It was on Scantron and calculator-intensive–took me all the way back to freshman year :)
Went to Community Music, arrived midway through the discussion, nothing too crazy. At the end of class we picked up instruments and played a samba call and response percussion pattern :D
Got lunch with Ali and Stefana at a sushi place. Knew that dinner wasn’t too far off so only had a few happy hour sushi, good deal.
Ran over to Glee, sat on a sunny bench beforehand refactoring my silly little object. It turned out that doing it right, with the proper encapsulation and abstraction, was a lot of fun. It required a client object and an inner implementation object, connected by an abstract class.
Glee was fun, experienced that extremely general phenomenon of remembering some of the principles of singing I’d momentarily forgot to apply. This comes up in nearly every domain for me. I have a set of heuristics that taken together are very powerful, and if they could all be in System 1 it’d be great. But my System 1 training is spread across too many disciplines, and inevitably I can’t fit them all in permanently–they fall out and need to be stuffed back in with my System 2 (although my System 1 uncovers their absence.) Interesting! @Reader does this roughly match your experience of mentally managing an activity like golfing, singing, or even doing homework?
Met Winnie for dinner at Mee Sum. On the way from Music, where we walked, we ran into Donovan and a gal named Mary :) They came with us to Mee Sum and we had a kind of double date thing, which was interesting. I couldn’t help jumping in when Winnie was explaining her research to them, which was fun–Winnie was surprised how many details I’d retained. The bubble tea was delicious–I got a Grass Jelly–although they gave Winnie a Japanese pork chop rather than their specialty, a Taiwanese one. I even caught the cashier in the error during ordering and corrected her, but she must have been new.
We hung out a bit after Donovan and Mary left then proceeded down the Ave in high spirits. We studied together in Stevens for a couple of hours. I felt a great degree of social accountability on the work and focused well writing code for CompBio. Looking over my teammates’ code, it unfortunately did not meet my new ridiculously high standards :P but we’re hacking together something for this quarter, what are you going to do :) I’m happy I learned a more correct way to write my little piece even if it wasted some time. At intervals I would see what Winnie was up to, explain what I was doing… I got to show her detexify, when she was googling for some symbol in LaTeX.
Winnie and I accidentally got into a very entertaining tickle fight at the end of our labors. It turned out that her neck was ridiculously ticklish and the slightest touch would send her into convulsions. After this discovery, I couldn’t help divulging what youngerSisters.younger knows well–the weakness of my belly to poking. I tried my best to relax as Winnie prodded my solar plexus, but ended up curling into an undignified ball and fending off her hands with wild reflexes. After that episode, I walked her back to Cedar :D and we had a meeting of lips (after many tentative such endeavors). I was too frisky to go to bed immediately, so Trevor and I celebrated with shots of Trevor’s homemade Thai Ice Tea. Then I wrote this log and hit the hay.