i recently discovered the joy of throwing a flying disc. last year (freshman year) i stumbled across many a chill person who was in on the ultimate team here at ucsd. this year, as i thought more about life and wondered where it was going and how it could be better, i slowly realized that not trying out the ultimate team here would be a mistake. over winter break i threw a lot with cousin milo taylor (thanks for throwing milo taylor!). i started going to practice this quarter (winter 2012) with the squid army. we call ourselves air squids. there is an 'a' team and a 'b' team. people on the 'a' team are dedicated and go to practice every day. i see different people on the 'b' team every day, but some people attend regularly. despite this, the atmosphere is amazing! there are team captains and coaches that tell you what to do and everyone is cooperative and enthusiastic, and the people in charge are organized. there's something really great about being told what to do. one thing i really missed about about high school was having a cross country / track coach telling us what to do. i felt very welcomed and everyone is nice and not a douche bag, which is supposedly not how it is on other teams at ucsd. and at the same time, there is still pressure to be on your toes socially, and people are still cool and stuff. being not mean and not lame at the same time is priceless! so there's the great atmosphere and organization, but there's also actually playing ultimate. there is no better feeling than catching a disc and passing it to someone else, being a part of a successful play, blocking a disc when the opposing team throws it to the guy you're guarding, contributing to a team... good times. there is a downside to all of this unfortunately. first, i am very behind on everything. i don't understand the lingo so when people explain things to me it's difficult to follow along. there's so much more to learn. second, it's time consuming. the ultimate team has track workouts on monday nights (so much fun! people think i'm fast. :) ) and 3-hour practices on wed and thurs nights. on friday i practice frisbee with a cool frisbee friday group that one of my friends (eric weise) started. this leaves me with tuesdays and saturdays to just run. (sundays are for church of course, hehe.) i went on a pretty long run today by myself.
esperanto! the international constructed language. it's the solution to everything i hate about english and spanish (which i had to learn in high school). english: words not spelled how they sound. spanish: arbitrary assignment of gender to all nouns (using 'el' vs 'la' for different nounds). english and spanish: irregular verbs. and irregular ways of making things plural. esperanto has none of this nonsense. it is designed not to have any irregularities. people voted on aspects of this language to make it the best it can be. if only everyone would learn esperanto, international communication would be so much easier. everyone who learns any language other than english or esperanto is contributing to the problem of having so many languages! so now i refuse to learn spanish. also, learning spanish only makes it easier for spanish speakers not to learn english or esperanto. so i made a lernu account and started teaching myself esperanto. i am happy that proficiency in esperanto will satisfy my language requirement for revelle college.
this quarter i am sadly left with no time for esperanto. i can only have so many priorities. i have school and ultimate, and occasionally work for my dad. earlier in the quarter i would study esperanto whenever i had a spare 30 minutes. now when i have a spare 30 minutes, i desperately need it to read for humanities. i am always far behind on reading. there are so not enough hours in the day. there is so much i want to do, and there is so little time.
i went to a job fair earlier in the quarter and handed out my résumé to about 8 or so companies that i thought looked cool. i filled out a candidate profile for intel online per their request (so they liked me), i had an interview just yesterday with cubic corporation, and i will have an interview the week after this week with microsoft. the interview yesterday went very well. the people there were nice, and it looked like a cool place to work. the first part of the interview was the recruiter (cute young guy--same dude i met at the job fair) and human resources lady meeting me briefly and telling me about interning at cubic, and then the recruiter toured me around the labs. the labs have one of each type of thing that people walk through to get on to a subway, and the machine that buses have to get your money, or the kiosks people use to buy train tickets. they do revenue collection for transportation. they have to deal with all kinds of cities' problems. each place they deal with has ways that people want to pay. this transportation stuff is what this particular cubic office does. they have 2 other parts of the company too which are related to the military, but that happens in their other offices. the second part of the interview was two older guys asking me questions about myself and testing me a little on my knowledge of c#. they were very nice and we had a good time. the third part was a grumpy busy guy trying to find something i didn't know, and he succeeded with his deep questions. he had been programming since he was very young, just like me. at the end i shook hands with the recruiter again and he said he'd send me an email later. then i went home, except not really because on the way back i went to utc (a shopping mall) and bought shorts (like regular shorts, for walking around in) and cleats (for ultimate). but back to cubic, there's one small problem. at the first part of the interview with the human resources lady and the recruiter, the recruiter told me that interns work differently there than at other places. most places take interns, have them work on a project over summer and send them off. (oh, that's no good right? (that's just what i want! shh!)) but at cubic, they take you during school and it's more like a real job. he said they convert a lot of their interns into full time positions. this sounded cool to me, and i got that feeling where i really just want to say "yes!" but i think they're either going to have to take me during summer or not have me at all. popsa said that since i am lucky enough to be able to enjoy my time at college playing ultimate and being social and meeting people, i should. there is no need to jump straight into a life of work. i agree. i'd have to put in 15 hours a week with cubic, not including transportation. if i was going to do this, i'd have to drop ultimate (pretty much the one thing i have right now) and my grades would probably suffer. i'd much rather work full time during summer. also if microsoft still loves me after my interview with them i'll have to consider that too.
i've discovered a way to help me read. normally i space out while i'm reading. i start day dreaming about something random, or even something that relates to what i'm reading. then 10 minutes later i catch myself, read a few more sentences and space out again. i can easily spend 5 hours reading 30 pages. there is simply not enough time in a week for me to read a book, so usually i don't read certain book and read half of other books. i've been trying all kinds of things. first i wore a hat of silence to avoid being interrupted by suitemates while reading, but this did not prevent me from my own brain distracting itself. then i made a program called concentrate which beeps every 60 (or however many you want) seconds, reminding me to pay attention to what i'm reading and helps interrupt daydreaming. but when the beep went off, one of these was usually the case: 1) i was reading, and the beep caused me to lose my concentration, or 2) i was not reading, and i ignored the beep as i trained myself to because all the beep did was cause me to lose my concentration when i was reading. it also required that i sit at a computer when i read. so then i tried using an index card, and had to keep moving it down the page as i read so if i stopped reading then i'd feel my hand stop moving the card. but my arm would get tired, and usually the card would move so slowly anyway that i wouldn't notice when it stopped. then i used a pencil and followed along with each word rather than each line as with an index card. this helps with speed reading too, if you move the pencil at a fast and consistent rate and force your eyes along. but eventually the pencil started to follow my eyes rather than my eyes following the pencil, so it slowed down until it went so slow that it stopped, the transition still so slow that i didn't notice when it happened. so i tried reading out loud per my roommate's suggestion. he reads out loud all the time and it's really annoying and i hate him for it but it's okay. so i tried reading out loud, and my voice got tired and i wasn't paying attention to anything i read but rather i focused on saying the words. it didn't matter what i tried. it wasn't a matter of will power. my brain was just not capable of reading. i just.couldn't.read. but guess what! i found an iphone app that makes my phone beep every so often (i set it to 1:30) just like my concentrate program, and if i combine this with a pencil, it kind of works! what i have to do is force myself to turn the page every time it beeps. to keep pace, i use the pencil. the trick is actually using the timer to pace yourself, not to just remind you to keep reading. so i read 1 page every minute and 30 seconds. sometimes i read a page and have no idea what just happened, but at least i get through stuff and keep my eyes moving. i just try to absorb whatever i can. every few pages i take a 90 second break to relax.
right now half of my apartmentmates are drunk. there was a big party in our apartment a couple hours ago. there was one 1 straight guy and these two girls and everyone else was gay. we had an awesome cuddling dog pile on jorge's bed. i'm glad the bed didn't break with 5 people on it. i like drunk people.
it's good to take some time to think about life, to analyze how it is and how it could be better, to question everything. it's thinking about things that got me to realize i need to be on a sports team, and thus i'm learning to play ultimate and actually have some fun. it's thinking that got me to go to a job fair and landed me a couple interviews so that i will not have a 4.0 gpa and 0 work experience. it's thinking that got me on dating websites where i find people who make me feel happy and complete, and teach me what i like in a person. it's thinking that helped me realize the error it would be to learn spanish, and thus i'm learning esperanto to be part of something good and to make the world better. it's nice that i like to think. oh how it is better than being a robot, living day by day remaining ignorant of the possibilities, cheating yourself of opportunities.
i'm learning about writing efficient algorithms to do things with graphs in cse 101. it's fun, and the professor is a great speaker. we have online quizzes every week and homework due every other week. one of the teacher assistants had a seminar on how to use latex to do the homework on a computer. you can't just use microsoft word for this stuff because you need to write crazy symbols and greek characters.
cse 100 is data structures and is boring because the professor is boring. there's nothing i can do about that tho, since the only other professor that teaches cse 100 is also boring. the material is related to that of cse 101 in a lot of ways.
hum 4 is fun because the professor is interesting. i still hate reading though, and writing is only fun when you know what you're writing about. i don't like the books we have to read. the other humanities professor is not as good of a professor but he has readings that appeal more to my taste - philosophical and political stuff, rather than fiction.
i usually only get breakfast burritos from the dining halls since they all serve breakfast burritos now. sometimes i get pasta from plaza, but with marinara instead of alfredo sauce, even though i like alfredo better, because sometimes their alfredo sauce tastes very bad and makes me want to puke. at my apartment, i know how to eat cereal, make peanut butter and jelly sandwhiches and cook macaroni and cheese. i went to ralphs once this quarter too and i bought cheese its with baby swiss cheese, wheat thins, chocolate, cinnamon pop tarts, peanut butter nature valley bars and a bag with a mix of pretzels and cheetos. i finished everything very quickly except the nature valley bars. don't worry, i take costco daily multi vitamins every day, and the breakfast burritos from the dining halls have carbs (hashbrowns, tortilla) and protein (beans, eggs) and veggies (veggy patty). oh also i bought 2 bottles of spicy v8 from ralphs and downed one so far.
wow! i love getting a glimpse of what you do! it would be a blast to see an air squid game one day. :)
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