Sam's L33t Journal

Odd dreams last night. Two disconnected scenes:

( Long But Not Necessarily Interesting )

A few other snippets from my life:

Anime club is running marathons of series during January, so I went to see all of Chaos Head this past weekend. I saw the first few episodes before and liked it, but it takes a bad turn midway through. It goes from an awesome psychological drama to a poorly plotted scifi adventure show with tons of clunky technobabble exposition. Argh.

Also, even though I've been in a quieter mood lately, it's been good having my social life pick up again post-winter-holidays. Yesterday, went to Diesel briefly and had dinner with Shoshana. Today I'm going to Medieval Dance practice (not that I'm really involved in SCA stuff again, but I'm looking forward to the break from routine).

I don't know why I'm feeling as stressed as I am this weekend. Part of it is that I'm in the mood for quiet, and Maya has tons of guests over, so things are rather rowdier than I'd like. But I think I was in the mood for quiet because I was already feeling stressed. Not that I have any clear reason to feel that way...

Had a really intense workout today. Read quite a bit. For the most part, the day was fairly relaxing.

Last night, had an anxiety dream that was very similar to the ones I had sometimes in college. Except this time my dream was maybe set in college (my college anxiety dreams were set in high school) and it was about failing a science test (my college dreams were about being too tired to go to class). The only detail I remember was that the grader had filled in correct answers along with the marks, there was a page on the test I'd left entirely blank and the grader had filled in an entire essay, printed neatly in red pen. It was one of those features that broke the immersion of an otherwise real-seeming dream a bit because it was so odd.

Found out today that our dryer is broken. I'd thought it was just a tripped circuit breaker before, but no such luck. Wound up carrying a load of laundry through the snow to the local laundromat, which is fortunately only a few blocks away.

Friday: DJ's birthday party at the Sunset was awesome. My diet is ruined forever. Met a cute woman at the bus stop, shared a cab back to Cambridge when the bus didn't show. Got her number, even.

It has gotten really cold again.

Had a dream where I don't remember the details of the plot, just that it was on some movie studio set with cheap cardboard backdrops. When I asked a stage-hand why my dream didn't get the usual quality of scenery, he said something about the economy. You know the recession has gotten bad when...

Today: Workout, not much else. Wandered to Union Square for dinner.

Tomorrow: Yelp Brunch.

Last year, I had this recurring stress dream, where I was cross-registered for a class (at MIT, I think), but I was too tired to make it too class or do any of the work or even look up any of the assignments (this rather scary aware-but-unable-to-move feeling). Sometime last week, I had a dream in which I looked at my grades, and saw that I had gotten a C in that class. (I don't know what to think of that ending, except it's funny...)

Huh... I wonder what these guys will do now that the world has failed to end...

DDR is a pretty good cure for random depression. Feeling bad when things are going well sucks...

Again, I plan to write, and, again, I'm scatterbrained.

I feel awful. For the final project in POE, our group is making a robot that dances to music. I'm on software, and I'm totally failing to find any libraries (preferably in Python), that will let me play music and analyze the waveform in some manner such that I can do beat detection. Very frustrating...

Plus, I've got a report for social psych (on the Rawandan genocide) due in less than two weeks (and I haven't started it). I've got some other reading for that class as well. Plus, I've got a lot of computational modeling homework due on Monday.

I've been having an annoying recurring dream where I sleep in and miss a class, can't remember the work that was assigned, and (just to make things as absurd as possible) can't even remember the topic of the class. It's one of those dreams that's obviously a dream while I'm dreaming it, but seems like a memory when I wake up (until I think about it and realize that it's extremely inconsistant with reality).

I took the train in to MIT on Friday to return some stuff to the Anime Club library. I remember being startled out of sleep when the conductor shouted, "South Station, final stop!", and getting the impression that I had been thinking / dreaming about something terribly important, but I couldn't remember what it was.

I read some more of Cryptonomicon. I had to put the book away on the T because I couldn't keep from laughing out loud.

There was a mech design challenge this weekend, so people were building hovercraft from random junk, remote controlled propellers, plastic bags, and blue foam. The end results were pretty nifty...

Last night, I had a really strange dream. I dreamed I wasn't happy at Olin, so I was going to MIT instead, but I was worried I wouldn't be happy there, and I was talking to my mom about this in an airport terminal. When I woke up and I was very confused for a few seconds because the dream was so vivid. I didn't make any sense, as I am happy at Olin, as things are so crazy and new here, and the food is great, and the classes are interesting, and I have to leave wherever I am only five minutes before one of my classes begins, but I guess I wasn't prepared for how different the engineering stuff would be. And as fun as a curriculum that currently centers on jumping insects and bottle rockets (as ways of looking at Math, Science, and Engineering) is, I'm not sure how practical or useful it will be... It's odd, this is the first time I've been at all worried about my Olin education. It's different from what I expected...

But I do enjoy it, and the material is interesting, and the work is manageable (so far). Maybe I'm just suffering from newness overload. I've also been somewhat less social during the past few days. I'm going to have to put a little more effort into that... it's just a bit overwhelming at the moment.

Thursday is engineering day for me. (Not that everyday isn't engineering day for me, but Thursday I have all three of my engineering classes (Software Design (SD), ECS, and Design Nature (DN)).


On other topics:

Nation-States is a lot of fun, and the roleplaying that goes on in the forums is quite good.

I created a livejournal quotes community, imquotes (for quotes from AIM and the like), to fill a gap not covered by other quotes communities. _redpanda_ supported me by linking to it and allowing me to advertise it on metaquotes. It's been in existence for about 3 days, and currently it has 39 members and 41 observers, so things look promising for it's continuing growth.

That's about it, I guess...