Or so it seems. I depart for Atlanta on the 11th, which is just around the corner. I sure as hell am looking forward to it: to seeing Nicky again, after what feels like forever; to doing something useful with my life, which I conspicuously haven't been doing this summer. My LinkedIn profile looks pretty bleak at this point, and I'm debating whether to spam the inboxes of everyone I know with "I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn". Why does it have to be so spammy? Seriously. Find a better way to do these things. Even Google+ does it in a way that doesn't make them seem like a spambot, and that's saying something, because Google is obviously a robot. Get a load of their emoticons on Hangouts. They look NOTHING like the ASCII characters they claim to render. It's like watching an uncanny-valley computer try to fit into human society, but fail miserably when it comes to facial expressions. It's the creepiest thing.
That was a strange departure from my original train of thought. I'm looking forward to being in Atlanta again (readers of this blog will recall that I was there in the summer of 2013, doing something useful with my life, and I was very taken with the place) - to being in an actual city for a change. I don't care what people say about materialism and consumerism and human civilization being so out of touch with nature, but nothing beats living in the city. Atlanta is 40% trees anyway, so it's not that removed from Arcadia. I have family in Atlanta, too. My girl cousin and her mother live there, and now my other cousin is going to be there with his family for an indefinite period on some kind of corporate project.
This is going to be pretty awesome. Grad school, here I come - and all that. Hopefully I don't slack off, though I am conscious of a growing desire to do certain things at GT that I wasn't able to do at UIUC on account of simply not being in the right mindset and being surrounded by people who played video games all day, and whose idea of doing something together was playing video games in the same room. They were sterling chaps otherwise (maybe), but I am just not a video game person, which in this day and age seems to be a rarity. I used to play Pokemon a lot, but that was in my youth. I played Spelunky a great deal as a way to keep myself distracted when the alternative was getting bored to death, but I haven't played it in over a month, and it doesn't look like I will anytime soon, which means that my life is completely and utterly video game-free.
As for fan fiction, I seem to have come a long way with Wintry Games, which I wasn't expecting. It was originally supposed to be a gateway fic that would ease my return to fan fiction, but the words seem to be flowing now. I've had to take a hiatus, because I was afraid that I would ruin the fic if I permitted myself to write unsupervised. Looking over the eight chapters I've posted so far, it's difficult for me to discern anything in the nature of an overarching plot, though I hope that's only because I'm handicapped by being the author of the fic. Maybe if I put some distance between myself and the fic for a while, I might be able to read it with a critical eye. I only hope I can keep any inclination to write fan fiction at bay when grad school starts, except during breaks.
Oh, and on an ominous note, I discovered that the man whom I referred to as Anantaraman in my recent FIITJEE stories is actually named Anandaraman. Not bad. The only time I heard his name spoke was when a certain biology teacher told it to me in hushed tones, and I didn't think my fuzzy memory of the event would prove so reliable. My mental image of him corresponds EXACTLY to his actual image. That's no surprise, really, since I did get to see him a decent amount at FIITJEE, and my memory is above average, if I say so myself. It turns out he is a hyper religious (ULTRA RELIGIOUS) guy, who fancies himself some kind of enlightened spiritual entity. Too funny for words.
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