A New Beginning

Let me preface this all by saying there are no words in the English language to aptly describe the state my room was in. English wasn't designed to deal with horror on such a scale. It was appalling, it would have made my mother weep. You know that feeling when you spill sugar or salt on the kitchen floor and then walk on it barefoot? You know how irritating that is? That's how my floor was all the time. So yeah, it was bad.

Something like that.

Now I don't consider myself to be incredibly type-A like my older sister, in fact I'm so laid back I may in fact be around type-G or H. But there is a line, and having a filthy filthy room is definitely across that line.

But believe it or not, this entry isn't about how I cleaned my room, although it sort of is, it's like a metaphor (though that sentence was a simile....) Just hang on, it'll make sense I promise.

The way I got around to cleaning my room was by living in this terrible state for so long until I finally discovered that it was impacting my life in a very negative way. I didn't clean it before because I seemed to be getting along fine and to perhaps a larger extent, I was intimidated by the scope of it.

That's the same way I cleaned out some parts of my old life. Without getting too terribly contrived in the backstory, for the past 7 years of my life I've been clinging to this girl in some aspect or another. For 7 years I would've given nearly anything to be with her and I held on to the idea that one day, everything would change, that it was just a matter of waiting, even long after I knew if I wanted what I was waiting for.

Now at this point I could try and blame movies for instilling a false sense of what romance is like, but to be honest it wasn't movies. ( I can still blame movies for instilling a sense of how awesome it is to drive a car into a helicopter though.) It was me.

It was me. All along it was me.

So on the heels of this epiphany I realized something: I could let go. Now I don't mean to sound incredibly creepy or anything like that, but I had a box that had letters, tickets, and all sorts of sentimental knick-knacks. I can remember nights where I'd read through some of those old things and cry, and that box was so important to me that it was one of the things I shipped here to college.

Last night I ripped up and threw away everything inside it.

Before it sounds like I just went on a crazy rant, there is something important to realize. At no time last night did I feel angry or spiteful or anything less than resolved. It wasn't a moment of passion where I cried while burning photos or anything like that, it was just me acknowledging that part of my life as over, and getting rid of the old baggage that held me back, and what would have seemed so impossible to me not but 3 months ago was in fact so very easy once I started. I remember holding a letter in my hand and tearing it in half, and I felt relief. For seven years I'd been looking for closure on this, and last night it emerged from the scraps of paper.

The letters were the big thing, but I also shut down my old blog that was filled with my vague musings on the situation, and I shut down my myspace that was filled with messages about the situation. In essence I've got no more chains, I'm free.

So why now? Because I'm growing up. Because I've realized you shouldn't devote your life to someone who wouldn't be willing to do the same for you, and that you should love someone who loves you back just as much. Love isn't about not making mistakes, but it's about correcting them, and it's not about things being easy, but it's about the courage to do things that are hard.

I've come so far in the last 2 months, I've grown up more in the last 2 months than I think I have in the last 2 years. Though to be fair it wasn't an overnight transformation, I can see that in most ways I had already let go over the course of the past year, but last night was the finale. And now that I've resolved the biggest issue of my teenage life, I can start to fix the mistakes that I've made.

That's why you should clean your room kids, because it will change your life. =)

(Also it's nice to not have plates serving as petri dishes on your desk)

McCain speech remix

No matter how you felt after watching the election results, hopefully this will make you laugh as hard as I did. Oh the wonders of modern computing:

If McCain's Concession Speech Was As Bitter As His Campaign -- powered by Cracked.com

Work

So every blog in the universe prefaces an entry after a long period of time with something like "oh man, sorry about the lack of entries, I've been SooOoOooOo0Ooo-0-00-0 busy!"

That's pretty cliche, so I'll make something up instead.

Oh man, sorry about the lack of entries, my laptop was confiscated by the CIA for containing unusual levels of awesome and I was only recently able to prove to them that I'm qualified to be that cool.

Better?

Anyway, much to the disappointment of my physics fans, this post is not about the integral of Force dx (sorry guys), by work I mean actual work, like the process of expending yourself doing things you don't like because they're good for you. One of the things I've learned lately here at MIT is really what it means to work hard. I mean, I thought I knew what hard work was from high school, and to an extent that may have been true. But in all humility, I was a pretty smart kid, I didn't have to study as much as some of my friends and I never really read the books and I still did just fine. But it never really dawned on me that I didn't know how to work, I'd never really had to before.

A few weeks ago the thorough arse-whupping that was Freshmen Hell Week gave me that epiphany. At first I was disappointed with my grades because the first thing I thought was "I'm working so hard and this is what I have to show for it?" Then I thought about it and realized, I really hadn't worked hard. I hadn't read the book. I did the psets the night before. I didn't take notes. I goofed around with my friends all night. Where was the hard work?

So these last few weeks I've been doing something strange and applying myself, focusing on doing things when they need to be done and not just glancing through material, I've been making sleep and work schedules and going to libraries and studying and all the things I should've been doing and guess what?

I've never been happier.

There is nothing like making a 95 on a test where the class average is 55 and standard deviation is 10. There is nothing like getting a solid 5 hours of sleep every night (that may not seem like much, but this is MIT after all). Actually knowing whats going on during lecture and gleening some deep understanding that previously wasn't there is such a great feeling, and it's wonderful to be able to answer my friends questions. And the best part is that I didn't really need to give up anything to do it, I only stopped wasting so much time. I never realized that I wasted more time than an all day "Meet the Spartans" marathon.

So I guess the point amongst all this is that amidst all the great things MIT is teaching me right now, the most influential has been managing my time and improving my work habits. Who'd have thought? I love this place.

Cold!

So now that my entry titles have completely regressed into one word grunts, I'm fairly sure you can guess what I have to complain about today. It's really cold. Really.

Now I know there's going to be at least one or two people who read that and say "Oh just wait until the winter, then you'll see whats cold". Now that may (read:will) be true, but I'd like to bring up an important fact about weather. Temperature is relative. I'm sure the winter will be a dark bitter freezing time for all of us, but I'm at least smart enough to know to be prepared with coats and scarves etc. The Autumnal (EDIT: turns out I did NOT make that word up) temperatures took me by surprise, both by extremes and by swiftness. Seriously, in like one day it went from being 73-75, to a low off 44 degrees tonight.

Did you read that? 44! I realize that's not "cold" by absolute standards, (or absolute cold by any standards, hehe science joke), but considering in my home town it's 83 right now, that's a bit of an adjustment. I'm off to spend my paycheck on long sleeves and wool, I'll update you all when I have something else to complain about.

DANG!

wow this place speeds up quick, which is partially why there has been a distinct lack of posting. The other partiality (new word!) is because I've been pretty sick. But to keep you all updated, I have two tests this week, had an MRI today, blood labs yesterday and Thursday, Russell Peters is coming on Friday, and I'm a brother at Beta Theta Pi. I'll do a lengthy post about Boston in the fall this weekend.

Awesome=Picasa + Google Earth + iPhone 3G

Finally, I've been able to use one of the neglected (at least for me) features of the iPhone. The ability to make use of the geotagged metadata. (if you just said "huh?": a) you're cooler than me and b) it means the gps tags the location of where you took your pictures.)

Luckily Picasa has the ability to interpret that data, and google earth communicates with Picasa. I couldn't be happier with the results, check it out:
That's a view of pearland with my pictures overlaid on top of their locations, and it's really accurate. It's a surprisingly cool feature that really brings your pictures to life when you look at them, they no longer appear as fragments of memories, but together as one cohesive picture, like a giant memory quilt (that's the only analogy I could think of).

Check out this other one from Boston:
Super cool. I plan on utilizing this feature extensively. (i.e. I'll do this instead of pset -_-.... )

Tale of the Midnight Tool!

Last night I had my first tooling session. In complete honesty, it was entirely my fault, I'd taken the fact that I was pretty good with numbers for granted, and assumed having taken Calc BC (and should've got credit for it) that it would be easy. Indeed, I knew exactly what lecture was about, and glancing over the pset I saw that there weren't too many problems, no big deal right? a bit of review right?

Oh so very wrong.

After working all night on that pset (literally, I got home at 7.a.m. today 0_0) I've realized what exactly makes this place so hard. The problems don't test your knowledge of the subject, they test your understanding. Now if I'd heard that last year I would've said "same thing", but now I understand the difference. Knowing how to do a problem means you can quickly identify similar problems and apply the same generic formula to solve them, the difference is that none of the problems on the homework are like examples in class, but they all use ideas presented in class.

Take the derivative for example, in class you might learn chain rule, product rule, power rule etc etc and find the derivatives for a bunch of functions. Easy huh? of course it is, it's just like what you know. But here, you might have a problem which asks you questions about the behaviour of the derivative, like this one particularly nasty problem last night. Essentially you had to find the "(p+q)th" derivative of a product of two functions raised to the P and Q respectively. The breakthrough that solved it was to realize that the nth derivative of a function with exponent n is n!, and thus the n+q derivative must be 0, because at n it's just a constant. That one little idea that was never explained meant that several terms in a series ended up as zero, and only the last term mattered.

That's the difference, application, a deep understanding. I don't just know how to solve problems, I know how to figure out how to solve them. And though it's ridiculously hard, and sometimes impossibly daunting at times, the best feeling is finally figuring out the one piece you're missing that makes it all fall in place. To make one more analogy, instead of asking you to connect-the-dots to draw a horse, MIT gives you some paper and says "draw the horse", it's up to you to figure out how you want to do that.

In related news, no longer will I be waiting until thursday to look at the second half of the pset. =)