What can I say? The Distributed Computing exam was a debacle, which I expected; and the Algorithms exam was also a debacle, which I did not expect. Happily, Prof. S. V. said he was considering offering a make-up exam toward the end of the semester, presumably because mine was not the only debacle in class. That makes me feel a whole lot better, notwithstanding the obvious decline in my mental abilities in this new unit, which involves topics ranging from modular arithmetic and RSA to graph matching. Hopefully, I'll be able to pull myself together soon, and these three semesters will pass me by in the blink of an eye. Let's not forget the endgame here: getting a Master's degree and then landing a good job afterwards. I can say without hesitation that that is the only endgame, as far as grad school is concerned, and this whole experience, with any luck, will prove to be something I shall struggle to remember many years down the line, from the (hopefully) bright vantage point of the future. Unless achieving my endgame somehow turns out to involve thinking about my privations in the sunniest terms. That would be cruel, to say the least, but Fate has seldom been known to be otherwise. Physically, I must say, Atlanta has done more to undermine me than anything else in the twenty-two years of my existence, which is more than enough reason to seek emancipation from this cruel and unusual form of annoyance. I had never heard of a "plantarflexed metatarsal" before Atlanta decided to throw one my way, and I shall no doubt become intimately acquainted with every debility and infirmity known to man before my time here is up. How people manage to live here, I can't imagine. I'm sure Dante had a far pleasanter time traipsing down the bucolic pathways of Hell with good ol' Virgil. If Virgil had brought him to Atlanta, there's no way he would have ever got to Purgatorio and Paradiso.
On a sunnier note, Halloween is around the corner, and I think I shall go off the beaten path, and actually get candy for the kids in my building. I'm sure it's stuff like this that Robert Frost was trying to get at when he went on and on about how there were two roads that diverged in a yellow wood somewhere. If I do get candy for the kids, it will force me to face two aspects of reality that I have always found exceedingly disagreeable: the existence of children and the fact that I am an ageing creature. The kids in my building seem well behaved/stultified for the most part (possibly because their parents are PhD students), so they shouldn't pose too much of a threat to my mental peace. If nothing else, I could leave a bag of candy outside my apartment door to obviate any disagreeable interactions with these People of the Future that could result from openly inviting their patronage. What really bothers me is having to acknowledge that I am now, certifiably, an old geezer. You can insist all you want that age is "all in the mind", but it gets difficult to keep up that illusion when the evidence to the contrary is so hard to ignore. (Go back and read the previous paragraph.) At times like this one must either accept the new state of things and move on, or descend into a sort of nihilistic stasis, in which it is impossible to sustain notions like "motivation" and "purpose". If you asked me tomorrow what all that meant, I'm sure I would be just as clueless as you.
On a sunnier note, Halloween is around the corner, and I think I shall go off the beaten path, and actually get candy for the kids in my building. I'm sure it's stuff like this that Robert Frost was trying to get at when he went on and on about how there were two roads that diverged in a yellow wood somewhere. If I do get candy for the kids, it will force me to face two aspects of reality that I have always found exceedingly disagreeable: the existence of children and the fact that I am an ageing creature. The kids in my building seem well behaved/stultified for the most part (possibly because their parents are PhD students), so they shouldn't pose too much of a threat to my mental peace. If nothing else, I could leave a bag of candy outside my apartment door to obviate any disagreeable interactions with these People of the Future that could result from openly inviting their patronage. What really bothers me is having to acknowledge that I am now, certifiably, an old geezer. You can insist all you want that age is "all in the mind", but it gets difficult to keep up that illusion when the evidence to the contrary is so hard to ignore. (Go back and read the previous paragraph.) At times like this one must either accept the new state of things and move on, or descend into a sort of nihilistic stasis, in which it is impossible to sustain notions like "motivation" and "purpose". If you asked me tomorrow what all that meant, I'm sure I would be just as clueless as you.
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