Breakup

It’s been a while since I’ve last blogged. I know this. A lot has happened in the past few weeks and sometimes I feel like a seesaw, where things are first great, than bad, then great again. As an example, over spring break, I spent the first few days working late at school to finish homework before Rachel came to visit. Then she came, and we had a few days of fun that were just awesome (going to hear Beethoven’s 9th at the Austin Symphony, day tripping in the hill country)… and then we broke up. And then work went really well. And then my car got towed from my own apartment complex. And then Easter was fun. You see what I mean.

The breakup was a little sudden, but mutual, friendly, and I really think for the better. E-mail me if you want the long version, but in short, it came about because of a combination of a few things, some related to being long-distance. I’m not at the point in my life where I feel ready to sacrifice my academic (and possibly career) goals for a relationship — I don’t know myself well enough, I’m not mature enough, and I’m just not ready for that. And I realized that there were many more things in the relationship that I would have to work on in order for it to continue to work, and not only am I unsure about how much I could do, being long distance for another year and a half would make it next to impossible.

Of course that doesn’t change the fact that ending a relationship that’s lasted a year and a half is no fun at all. But I think things are going well all things considered, and work last week as
really good. The program I’ve been working on for a while is finally functional (it’s been so long before I’ve written programs), and I’ve made a breakthrough in research (the online minimum variance problem, e-mail me if you want to find out what that’s all about) that may turn into a TRB paper or something.

Anyway, hopefully my life will be a little calmer in the weeks to come, and I can get back into
a semi-regular blogging routine.

A Night in the LRC

Night before last I pulled the second true all-nighter of my life (no sleep at all one night, and going to all your classes/work the next day). If you’ve never done this, it’s a really weird experience, mostly unpleasant and kind of surreal, especially if you do it the hardcore, caffeine-unassisted way like I did. It’s not fun, and I really don’t recommend it. Here’s a chronology of that night/day in case you’ve never stayed up a night and have no idea what sort of strange physiological/psychological changes happen when you are extremely sleep deprived:

• 8:30 PM Wednesday: Choir practice ends, I walk to the civil engineering building singing a mediocre Jane Marshall anthem that’s stuck in my head because we always end choir practice with it. I call it the Anthem of Unbounded Gaudiness because it’s the most overwrought, über-dramatic piece of choral music you can imagine. The dynamics range from ppp to ffff, the basses have to sing a low D-flat and low C, the sopranos get a high A-flat, it’s full of directions like “devotionally, with intensity”, “molto espressivo”, “sotto voce” and the like, and basically it consists of eight pages of “sing softly and sweetly, then swell a little bit, and end softly on a dramatic chord while singing a word like ‘die’ or ‘hell’ or ‘disgrace’ while the organ plays a really sappy and sentimental interlude” repeated a bunch of times before out of nowhere the choir bursts into triple forte and a Hollywood ending complete with dramatic pause. The text is all right (the hymn “My God, I Love Thee”) but the setting is so schmaltzy I have a hard time keeping a straight face while singing it.
  
• 9:00 PM: Mike calls me, announcing that he has won the election. Stupid-phat sweet.
  
• 9:30 PM: Eat dinner with Valdemar in Dr. Waller’s suite
  
• 12:00 AM Thursday: The computer lab closes and I don’t have an after-hours access card. Luckily Valdemar does, so I wait until the proctor goes home and he lets me in. While waiting I sing a little more of “My Eternal King” (the anthem I was just talking about) because it’s still stuck in my head. I go to the empty staircase where your voice sounds a million times better than it does in real life.
  
• 2:30 AM: Mike joins us as he decides to celebrate his victory by finishing Bhat’s homework with us.
  
• 4:00 AM: The three of us start saying really stupid things and talking to ourselves a lot. Mike comments that sleep deprivation is a lot like being drunk.
  
• 6:00 AM: I start to get very hungry as I realize I haven’t eaten anything for eight hours. Sign #1 that all is not well.
  
• 6:30 AM: Done with Bhat’s homework. Hooray! On to Morton’s homework.
  
• 7:30 AM: My body begins to lose its ability to regulate temperature. This is very annoying, because one second you’ll be very hot, the next very cold and shivering. Sign #2 that all is not well.
  
• 7:00 AM: “My Eternal King” is no longer stuck in my head. Instead, I’ve been humming “Stork Patrol” for the last few hours, which is starting to get really annoying.
  
• 8:30 AM: Gone as far with Morton’s homework as I can expect to get.
  
• 8:45 AM: Decide to go for a walk to clear my mind and wake up before starting the progress report for the toll roads project. The walk is a miserable failure and I’m no less tired than when I left, but I am a little more muddle-headed.
  
• 9:30 AM: Give up working on the progress report, as I have lost the ability to write complete sentences (Sign #3 that all is not well). I think I was somewhere between being awake and being asleep, leaning pretty heavily towards the asleep side of things. It’s like you’re dreaming. Here are some true examples of the things I wrote before I decided to stop:
  
  
  
  • “Choose consecutive intervals with greatest volume and the corresponding distances.” (There are no distances in this project.)
    
  • “Works better with intervals with fewer WAVES.” (No waves, either.)
    
  • “Also perhaps has greater theoretiacojusitification.” (Umm, spellcheck? Grammar?)
    
  • “Disadvantage of this method: can be demeaning to the profession.” (No comment.)
    
  • “Advantage: This allows different links to peak at different times also you could die.” (WTF?)
    
  
  
• 10:45 AM: Head to Morton’s class. I’m very thirsty and have been drinking a lot of water (enough that I’m having to pee a lot), yet my mouth still feels really dry and I feel dehydrated. Sign #4 that all is not well.
  
• 11:45 AM: In the middle of Morton’s class, I fall asleep in class for the first time ever. I’ve nodded off before, where you catch yourself in a microsleep, and I’ve done that on and off for entire class periods before, but today I full-out fell asleep and have no memory of what happened in the last half of today’s class, except that I woke up when everybody was leaving and everything was really foggy.
  
• 12:30 PM: Went home, about as scared as I could be since everything was still really foggy and I was riding my bike back. I could tell my reactions were dulled and I really thought I would hit a pedestrian or something. I think I would have been more scared if my mind wasn’t so cloudy (Sign #5 that all is not well). Since I was still really hungry I decided to eat. Strangely, I felt very full after eating very little food (Sign #6 that all is not well), so I took a shower, packed some more food for later on, and walked back to school, not trusting myself at all on the bike.
• 2:00 PM: Waller’s class. I feel strangely refreshed and alert.
  
• 4:30 PM: Last minutes of Bhat’s class, I start to lose it again. I struggle to stay awake until it ends and I go home and fall asleep a few hours later after eating some more since I am again hungry.
  

So yeah, that’s what happens when you stay up for 30+ hours. But I learned from my first experience junior year (where I stayed up for a full 40 hours): don’t try to “get back to your routine” by staying up until your normal bedtime. When you do, you will inevitably wake up to your alarm clock 8 hours later feeling just as tired as when you went to bed. Trust me, there is no feeling in the world worse than waking up with the same level of fatigue as when you slept, knowing that you have to make it through the whole day. Instead, I went to bed way earlier, slept about 13 hours, and today I was a perfectly normal, well-adjusted, functional human being, who was able to finish the progress report without any more lapses into strange phrases and has successfully avoided singing any of “My Eternal King” today. I call that a success.