The Desert of My Dreams

I think I dreamt about blogs and my thesis last night. I don’t remember much of the dream. I just know that it wasn’t a nightmare or a good dream, either. It just felt tedious.

I don’t want to dream about my thesis or blogs.

When I was younger, I used to have a very vivid memory of my dreams. For some reason, over the past few years, I just can’t recall hardly any of my dreams. I wake up in the morning knowing that I had dreamt about something but I just can’t remember what it was or how it happened.

I hate Excel - you know that sketchy place on South U. that provides cheap coursepacks by having students make the copies themselves and thus exploiting a loophole in copyright law. It stinks. It’s hot. It’s messy and dirty. The lines are always way too long. Their copy machines are super old and slow and the copies always come out misaligned and fudgy. This afternoon, I spent at least an hour getting my 300+ page infoviz coursepack - that included having to stop seven times to clear paper jams and then having to move to a different machine because the one I was at kept jamming (not that the second machine didn’t jam either). When I was making my copies today, I kept thinking that this place looks like a scene straight out of a bad John Grisham novel. It’s like we were all there trying to secretly make copies of confidential documents or something. That plotline kept me amused and silenced that voice in my head that kept saying, “Why am I here?!? Why can’t this coursepack be in a PDF on CTools? Why am I spending a perfectly nice, sunny Friday afternoon holed up in a hot, stinky room?!?”

I wish all of my coursepacks were at Dollar Bill. Sure, they’re more expensive but at least they’re quick and professional and I don’t have to make the copies myself.

And they also use the software that I worked on this summer! :)

I’ve been meeting some of the new SIers over the past few days. A few of them have come up to me and said, “I know you! I saw your web site!” I think a disproportionate number of them have checked out my portfolio because I’m the third person down from the top and I’m the only one listed above the fold who actually has a site. Every single time one of them approaches me, I keep thinking, “Eeeck!! Damn that selection bias!”

It has been a busy week in the bubble that is Ann Arbor and grad school. Nonetheless, I am still alive and doing rather well. The next semester will be very exhausting and busy, yet I am very excited about starting a few new things. My new apartment is awesome. I’ve been walking everywhere. School is a 20-minute walk and downtown Ann Arbor is about 10 minutes away. It is a very nice change from wasting three hours everyday just being stuck on the freeway. My apartment is still a giant mess, though, but I feel like I’m getting closer to getting organized. I’m hoping to unpack and organize the last few boxes by the end of this weekend.

I finished reading The Catcher in the Rye last week. It was really really good. I never got to read it in high school because my junior year English teacher was too preoccupied with her personal life (no kidding . . . she was getting a messy divorce). It was too bad because she was an awesome teacher, from whom I learned a lot about literature and writing (some things I still remember to this day).

Back to The Catcher in the Rye . . . I think I might have enjoyed it more in high school, though. I think I could have identified with Holden at that time in my life. I probably could have gotten more out of it too had we actually read it in class. There is a certain level of analysis of literature that you only get in classes and when you discuss books with other people. I sometimes have a tendency to go through books way too fast when I’m just reading them for my own enjoyment, which sometimes means that I totally miss symbolism and other literary devices.

In a little over one day, I’ll be back in Ann Arbor. What happened to the summer? How did it fly by so fast? I still feel like I have so much to do before the semester starts, which is stressing me out. Nonetheless, I’m excited. It should be an interesting year. I really can’t wait to get back and meetup with all of my friends whom I’ve missed this summer. I also can’t wait to finally unpack for good and to get settled in to my new apartment.

I have a lot to do in the next twenty four hours.

Ok, so I modified the top banner image of the theme that I downloaded. Now that I’m using my own photo, I don’t feel like a big generic loser.

Much to my dismay, I think I’m going to use a WordPress theme. The whole moving my entire online life to a different domain and different platform is pretty messy and time consuming as it is, without having to figure out how to create a custom theme for WordPress. As a designer, I really hate using a theme that somebody else designed. I feel defeated in some ways but I just need to move on. I do realize that this is my blog and personal site and in light of everything else I need to do before the semester starts, it isn’t important. I just need to finish it up and start working on other stuff. I doubt anybody (other than me) will think any less of me because I’m using a theme. And I can always go back and create my own theme at a later point . . . it certainly isn’t the end of the world. Ok, so now that I’ve justified it, why don’t I feel better?!? Blah.

It is also super hot and humid in St. Louis right now. And I still haven’t gotten over a cold I picked up when I left LA. And I’m feeling very impatient right now.