crazy for jesus

Not really. Blog layouts - yes - if recent behavior is anything to go on. I'm loath to talk about this current layout (or the one before this, which you probably didn't get the chance to see, since I took it down just hours after putting it up), because I'm not sure I'll be able to shut up if I start talking about it. Everything you need to know (and, doubtless, more) can be found in About > Layout. In the process you will also be able to enjoy the feeling of blood coming out of your eyes when you begin to notice the underlying MS-Paint-ness of all my previous custom layouts, which I'm sure points to some desperate kind of psychopathy. H'm. That would explain why so many of my posts read like they were written by someone who is constantly tripping on ACID.

As you may have guessed, I'm only writing this entry right now as a way to escape the worldly responsibilities that are crowding around me like those wispy vapor ghosts that crowded around Voldemort toward the end of the seventh book. In particular I've got an algorithms assignment due on Wednesday, an algorithms midterm on Friday, and the distributed computing presentation I alluded to at some length in my previous post the following Tuesday. So many things, so little time.

Algorithms doesn't bother me as much as distributed. I'm sure I am capable of stepping into the role of the public speaker, albeit with some effort, when called upon to do so. It is the principle that bothers me. The audaciousness of a man like Casper ordering me to present something so that he won't have to is not something that you see every day. Things like this are what set off civil wars in less stable parts of the world.

I would be remiss if I didn't say something nice after all this complaining. In fact, I'm going to go out of my way and say several nice things about G. T. Even Casper deserves to be mentioned in positive light for a change. I have nothing against him personally. It's just that he's so easy to poke fun at, and he's always so conveniently there exactly when you need someone on whom to blow off steam. He also went to my glorious alma mater for undergrad, so it's impossible for me to be mad at him for too long.

This Tuesday, my RA is organizing a "Welcome Back Tea" for the residents of my building. Classy and unsettling. Just like me. So of course I'll be there. Not least because my RA is Finnish, and looks like someone torn out of the center spread of a hiking magazine. I have a sneaking suspicion that all of those postcard-perfect images of the great outdoors stuck to each apartment's main door were taken by him one Sunday afternoon at a time. It's hard to imagine that someone who does all that can find the time to be a PhD student in electrical engineering. I'm sure there's a very simple explanation to all of this: There was a hiccough in the fabric of space-time, and multiple independent threads of reality somehow converged in one person. That seems to me most reasonable.

As Nicky mentioned in her latest blog entry, the campus is rather aesthetically pleasing, even though finding yourself surrounded by steep hills in every direction can quickly get annoying. The sun overhead sometimes appears twenty times larger than it should appear anywhere on earth, and you begin to feel like a goldfish being slowly cooked in a concave bowl. This phenomenon, which even the brightest scientists are completely baffled by, seems to occur three to four times each day. At this rate I expect that I shall have to compose an elegy to winter, which simply doesn't seem to exist in this place. By contrast, winter at my alma mater lasted from October to April. How I shall miss winter!