I’m busy, too busy to think about anything in a linear fashion
sometimes, and I fall into a sort of whimsical scatterbrained frame of
mind that I feel defines my life here at MIT. Unfortunately with that
frame of mind come a lot of questions when I do finally get to sit back
and think clearly for a little while, and sometimes I get somewhat
uneasy with their answers.

What have I been doing with my time? Where does it all go? What can I
do to change things? I have no idea. It probably doesn’t help that I
cannot remember most of the things I have done even a few hours after
they’ve been done. What I do remember involves not sleeping because of
some crazy, inordinate amount of work. Everyone wants me to do
something for them more frequently than I’m willing to, and then I don’t
actually get done what I planned to, so what am I really doing?

I know I have some sort of plan somewhere, but I think I lost it. It’s
great to have a plan. I like plans. Usually the plan never goes as it
was intended to go and I think that’s the best part of a plan – planning
for things not to go as planned, planning for extra time and
interruptions in your plan, and planning for new plans that have the
same problems as the old ones. Unfortunately there’s never enough time
to follow all the plans through to completion. I had a plan to finish
my website a while ago, but now I am not really sure what the address
is. I think I’ll have to start over on that plan.

What have I been doing with my time? My mother asks me that when she
calls at random times of the day a few times a week, assuming I can
answer – but I don’t think she remembers what I tell her, which is that
I’ve been working on school . I’m fairly sure I give the same answer
every time. Without fail, she asks anyway. Maybe there’s something to
that question. If I were always working on school work I would run out
of school work to do – theoretically.

But I never do seem to run out of school work, partly because there are
so many other things to do! I could help my friend machine parts for
his safe-cracking device, watch television (what’s the news again?), do
my laundry, run, work out, go climbing, build random things around the
dorm, hang out with friends, party, take pictures, make origami, breathe
fire, blow things up, drink water, cook – anything really. There are so
many other things to do, in fact, that it seems silly to spend all of my
time on school work, but it seems that that’s mostly what is on my
mind.

Sometimes the work incessantly preoccupying my mind is interesting. At
times I get so involved on some little intricate detail of a lab report
or reading assignment that I spend hours learning about it or trying to
make it better. Recently I re-wrote the code that runs a survey that I
was supposed to be filling out for a homework assignment. I have no
idea why I looked at the code, saw that it was inefficiently written,
and decided that it would be more fun to write code than to do my
homework, but I did it nonetheless. The HASS-CI people did not
appreciate my coding ability as fulfillment of their requirements.

Sometimes the work is not interesting at all. “Describe the lab setup
and what you did.” I didn’t do anything for that lab myself; I just
watched the instructor do it, and I still don’t know what one of the
machines looks like. What was the point of that section in the lab
report? I’m handing my lab in to you, the person who designed the lab.
Don’t you know what the lab setup looks like? Why are you asking me?
You didn’t show me anything.

Whether or not the work is interesting, however, it still needs to be
completed and presented in some way or another I some timely manner to
professors and TA’s and other students so that they can tell me what
grade I get. That makes perfect sense, but what about that “timely
manner” part? What happens when I can’t finish everything on time? Can
I show you some other neat things I’ve learned over the assignment’s
duration and go with that? No? Why not?

I think the hardest thing to cope with involving time or the lack
thereof is the sleeping epidemic. It’s an epidemic! Everyone sleeps,
and they call it ‘natural.’ I can’t sleep on a twenty-four hour cycle.
It’s too short for me. I think I’m broken. I always try to get myself
to work with the cycle, but after a few days I find myself unable to
sleep, needing to go to class the next day, and being out of options.
At least I get more work done. The night is less distracting than the
day. People aren’t up at night, and if they are, they’re usually not
beckoning to play because they’re working too.

What have I been doing with my time? Nothing. Everything.

It doesn’t matter to anyone but me as long as my work gets submitted on
time, unless I talk about it to people, unless it changes my student
status. It matters to me though, because what I do with my time affects
my future, and I’d like it to be one where I get to choose from lots of
options and complain to my friends because I can’t make up my mind
rather than one where I have no choices at all. I hope in my storm of
whimsical actions, as much as they seem to be taken as an afterthought
to something that might actually be a part of a whole instead of the
whole itself, that I end up somewhere near the place I’d like to be
headed. I hope that in the end all that other stuff that I do that has
absolutely nothing to do with my mechanical degree here at MIT comes
into play somewhere, that my uneasiness was for nothing and someone
somewhere will say, “Hey, this kid knows Mech. E. and all this other
stuff. Let’s hire him.”

Date: Tuesday, March 6th, 2007 at 0:47 Category: Writing.
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