Wednesday
There’s an unexplainable beauty in the unreliability of memories. Take myself, two days ago; I had a very weird yet interesting day, and we had to leave early (at 8am) the next day for Rockport. Yet if you could enter my room, you could see a tired Jose at midnight trying to desperately put everything he could remember into writing, lest he forgot what he had lived that day. I guess if I wouldn’t have had anything to do for the next couple of days I could’ve gotten away by simply trusting my memories. But I made mental maps of two very new places in the last two days, Rockport and Amherst, MA, to the point that I don’t think I can remember everything that happened on Tuesday.
Fortunately, I wrote it down. Here’s what I wrote: (a note on convention, I’ll write present edits to my past self’s writing in [])
Monday
As I was heading back from dinner, I was wondering how I should start this blogpost. A couple things crossed my mind: should I write it in the present tense, as if it were a story and I was guiding my readers (that is, you), or should I write in past tense, to give it an actual feeling of reflection? I believe you can guess which one I settled with. [As you can now tell, I found a much better beginning.]
A Day in The Life, Spring Break Edition
I woke up as my roommate was getting ready to go and grab breakfast. A friend left for Mexico City today, and we had agreed yesterday night that we would get breakfast with him before he left. That meant waking up at 10am, which at 10am today, I really didn’t want to do. My roommate left at 10:01, while I ended up getting to Maseeh for breakfast at around 10:30. My friend still hadn’t left and we managed to talk for a few minutes. For reasons still unknown to me, he left for the airport shortly after, at around 10:45am. His flight was at 2pm. Well, that’s not entirely true, I do know the reasons. He explicitly listed them out. What I don’t get is how he continues to believe that, as he was ready to board the plane by 11:40am, per his BeReal.
After our friend left, my roommate and I finalized some of the details for Tuesday’s trip to Rockport and Wednesday’s trip to Amherst. [Which, I’m glad to inform you, were amazing.] After breakfast I did laundry, mostly because I hadn’t washed my bedsheets in a while and I wanted to sleep comfortably for the rest of the week. For the first time in a while I did laundry even though I still had some clothes left, which felt pretty nice.
While my clothes were in the washer, I took a shower, got dressed (for context, I usually can’t do this because ALL of my clothes are in the washer), I moved my clothes to the dryer and went back up to my room to cut my nails. I still had around forty minutes left before my clothes were ready, so I decided to vacuum my room, as it had been a while since I cleaned anything under my bed. I took out and finished unpacking my suitcase from winter break, and I also threw away a couple a boxes that had lived under my bed for almost three months. After I finished vacuuming, I realized that I hadn’t set a timer on my phone for my dryer, but I went down to fetch my clothes anyway as I had a rough idea that the dryer should be about finished by then. There were still nine minutes left, but I looked at the wrong timer that said five, so I decided to wait downstairs. When I realized that I had looked at the wrong timer, there were only four minutes left on mine, and thus I decided I might as well wait four more minutes.
I folded the rest of my clothes and went to the bathroom, and I was back in my room at around 2pm. I had a UROP meeting at 4:30pm, and I had done very little for the past two and a half weeks1. I hadn’t forgotten. As a matter of fact, when I woke up, one of the very first things that came to my mind was that I had around six and a half hours before my meeting, and that I should spend the time as well as I could.
By this point, I decided it was actually time to do something, so I grabbed my computer and I biked to Sip Cafe (which was a 25-minute bike ride). No wait, before leaving, I lubricated all of my bike chain and gears with some Boeshield T9, as they were already noticeably red from all the dirt and rust that had accumulated over the past few months. Finally, I got to the cafe at 3pm. Now, it was actually time to work— on filling out a couple of forms I needed for my summer internship and sending a few emails about work authorizations to the EECS department and to the ISO. By 3:30pm I decided to start my actual work, that I needed to get done by 4:30pm.
If you hate me by this point, or you’re wondering why the hell didn’t I stay in my room and started from when I got back from breakfast until my meeting, you’re making very valid points, and you are probably right in feeling stressed out. I should have been stressed out, but I wasn’t. I did nothing that was necessary. I could’ve done my laundry tomorrow. I could’ve showered and cut my nails after my meeting. I could’ve filled out the forms after I showered, after my meeting had ended and I had finished my work. I could’ve worked for five hours instead of one, had I worked on the thing that “mattered.” Perhaps doing so would’ve gotten more done, I won’t argue that with anyone. But for the first time in a really, really long time, even if just for one hour, I enjoyed what I was working on. I was looking at the code, thinking of solutions, working on graphs, and I was enjoying myself. I had a delightful view, sitting on a table facing the park on the other side of the cafe, with massive buildings surrounding this little green space. I had a latte to my right with some beautiful latte art, an eighty five percent cocoa chocolate to my left. Conversations were happening everywhere, a group of old friends hanging together on the table behind me, two businessmen sitting to my left, in what looked to be an interview, a group of businesswomen entering the cafe after what probably were a few tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in trades. And I was there, looking at my code; thinking.
Of course I’m romanticizing everything a lot. Most of the time, working or psetting does not look like this, or feel like this. Monday’s I’m in the BC library, trying to finish all of topology so that then I can move on to the sci-fi reading I need to finish, I end up sleeping at 2am, to have to wake up at 9am the next day because I need to get to cell biology, or my Thursdays, which is the same thing again but with machine learning, real analysis, molecular biology lab and cell biology psets. And I know it will continue to be this way for the next couple of years. This one time however, if I’m going to have to work over the break, I might as well do so feeling well with myself. With a really good view, a really good cup of coffee, and a clear mind because I know that I’m done with everything else I need to do that day. It’s just me against the world— or in this case, against my code.
Obviously I was not able to pull off two weeks worth of work in one hour (to be fair, neither could I have done so in five). I did get kind of stressed out because of this, and I did end up moving my meeting to 6pm to get more time to finish something at the very least. I made up an excuse that I had gone to a cafe but had forgotten to bring my computer charger with me, so I had to go all the way back to my room to get it. It wasn’t entirely unfounded, the only seats with outlets were taken and my computer was running out of battery, there was no way I could have a Zoom meeting. As I got back to campus, to the biology undergraduate lounge2, I realized I hadn’t lied! I went to my room, got my charger that I realized I did actually forget to put in my backpack, and went back to the lounge. I finished as much as I could in that half an hour I had left, and I had my meeting.
And then my meeting went surprisingly well? I guess that while I didn’t have a lot, I could say exactly what I did and didn’t have, and to be fair, the code I’m working with is fairly complex. Sure, I get most of the code, but I also understand that I have trained to “get” the code, which is a skill many people don’t have. As such, I understand that even if I don’t finish, I bring value to the table. Of course I didn’t lie about the work that I had actually done (only slightly about the time I had spent on it), I documented all of my bugs, all of the weird results I got, and with my supervisor I spent some time debugging my code (after all, this eventually might become published research, and lying about the results is simply a waste of time for everyone involved).
I spent some more time debugging my code after the meeting, and then I came back to my room to read. I got to around chapter 34 of Educated when I decided I wanted to go and get dinner. I texted my roommate and he said he probably wouldn’t go to Maseeh tonight, so I decided to continue with this romanticized version of a day in my life, and went to Shake Shack for a burger (around a 10-minute bike to Newbury). When I was heading back it was raining, which I hated with all my heart, but I looked at the weather before leaving and I knew it’d be raining, so make your conclusions about that.3
It was around 9pm when I got back to my room, and my friend who’s also reading Educated had texted me to let me know that she had finished the book, so I decided to binge the six chapters I had left to be able to discuss with her. I’ll likely write a review that includes my thoughts and the results of our discussions at some point, so stay tuned if you’re interested.
I then did nothing for a while, then I opened my computer and started writing this post. I also would like to eventually to be able to write these posts inside the website, without having to push and pull to Github, I’ll see if I can make some progress on it (if you haven’t programmed before, it might sound like a trivial task, but how do you approach it? The data has to leave your computer, get stored on a server, and the website has to be redeployed. For some context, every edit I do takes around two minutes to be updated and changed in my website, and I have absolutely no idea how to make real time editing a thing. Hopefully Youtube and some more reading can give me some insight). I usually write in Author, and I also saw how to extract the text from the rtf file into Python, so at the very least I’ll make a script that integrates Author and Github.
- 1.I guess an under-appreciated part of programming is the amount of thinking that’s required before actually coding. I think a lot about the problem I want to solve, and even though I don’t write code, I still make progress on it. That said, code is the only tangible product, so ideally I’d do both.↩
- 2.Every major has their own lounge, and the Biology Undergrad Lounge is almost always empty, so I tend to take Zoom meetings in there.↩
- 3.In my first draft, I wrote an interesting rant about some of the things I want to change about myself. One of them is that I don’t do the things I want to do because of the most minuscule excuses, and not going to Shake Shack because it was going to rain felt like a very bad decision. But I still hate the rain.↩