Twelve hours and some later, I have exactly the regret one might easily have expected. I did what I always do when I don't spend time on a presentation: I talked over everyone's heads. Oh well, there's always the third presentation, which should not provide the same problems. No, it should provide entirely different problems.
I'm on three hours of sleep with a long night ahead, but it's okay. I can at least thank the world for reminding me how much less sense I make when I haven't slept well, how weak I become. I'm working on character profiles again, try somehow to introduce my female lead. I still haven't stumbled across the revelation that will allow this particular piece to fall in with the rest. Apparently Brad and I came up with a character from an existing book for our social outcast story. There are depressingly few unique attainable ideas. Oh well.
People exist in form versus substance.
Never come to someone with a problem, come to them with at least two solutions.
Keep yourself oriented so that you're vulnerable in the fewest places.
It's better to do something and be wrong than to do nothing and be wrong.
I've got a twenty-minute power-point presentation to make tomorrow at noon. I know I'm in trouble when I start thinking of due dates in terms of the time rather than simply the day. The current length of the presentation would give a null pointer exception. That's a programmer joke that means my presentation doesn't exist yet.
Have we met before? This is really familiar.
I just spent three hours playing poker with Brad, after learning how to throw cards. Back up: this deserves its own explanation, and I've got all the time in the world to kill. I got to Pinehurst at 8:30 or so, to find Alex and Andrew throwing the spent spindle from a pack of CD-Rs around like a frisbee, trying to catch the thing only by the shaft. Hush. Eventually, Andrew broke it, and while he was fetching a new one, Brad pulled out his pack of cards and began to throw those at me. The thing about cards is that they disappear while approaching you because they are totally sidewise. You can't see them until they reappear, which happens as they pass. This means that you can't catch them by looking for them, you simply have to catch one of the many places where the card might be and hope that the waveform collapses in your favor. Eventually, he decides to teach us to throw. Hold the card between your thumb and middle finger, with your index finger extended along the short edge. Move your hand forward, snap your wrist back and pull with the finger as you release the card, tilted slightly downward. We picked up on this rather quickly, the period during which Brad mentioned that some people can stick cards into watermelons, and wondered what we could stick the card into. We hung up a sheet of newspaper and threw cards at it for twenty minutes. While this was going on, probably ten people asked what we were doing and were eventually taught, in theory at least, how to throw cards. I am Jack's wasted life. The paper is still hanging there, with the two decks we were using sitting upon the gaff tape that is holding it up. Wow, eh?
We played poker for quite a while, and discussed the nature of learning, memory in general, and psychic powers. Brad is a visual learner almost to an exclusive. I can learn by all three general methods (visual, oral, textile), but not as well in any one as he is in his primary. Likewise, he remembers things through visual representations, while I remember a combination of everything that was going on (which is something that photogenics do, it turns out, but with a cortical aspect that is sadly lacking in me). I can remember a precise conversation that occured months ago, but not what I learned in Topics yesterday (or two days ago now that the clock's big numbers went little again). This is something that has proven useful, but has also gotten me in to trouble. It's interesting to consider a situation where someone has a different view than myself of what happened on a given occasion. Part of why I am suspicious of the average person is because they claim to remember things differently. I know (I have to know, or I would be an awful wreck) exactly when I am right about something that has happened, so if someone else has a different story to tell, either they actually remember it differently from the way I do (which means that they were paying attention to a different set of things, or rather indicates that events are actually cognitively processed by the brain before storage), or they remember correctly but are recalling purposefully fabricated events rather than the truth. Would you rather live in a world where people knew that they were lying, or where they simply remembered just what they wanted to? Tough choice, eh?
Anyway, the point of this isn't to go anywhere but to put enough pressure on me to learn about my presentation topic so that when I wake up in the morning I'll be able to throw something intelligent together. I'm not there just yet. The psychic powers discussion was interesting. Brad is of the mind that he has never personally been exposed to anything that could be defined as paranormal. This is what one would expect from a physics major who enjoys card tricks. However, nearly everyone he knows has been exposed to some sort of paranormal activity. This means one of two things. Either the average person thinks in less scientific terms than he does, or he is simply missing out. The general conclusion is that psychic powers would be cool. I am of a similar mind in the most general sense. I believe, because I am forced to (which is the part I hope you understand), that some sort of mental or spiritual faculties exist that are not, as of yet, scientifically verifiable. Anything that I have ever experienced could fall in to the category of hyperactive intuition, an ability far too often taken for granted which generally pertains to predicting behaviors (with restricted but otherwise undeniable success... later). However, my take on psychic powers is very similar to my take on God (and no, I don't find the two to be mutually exclusive concepts). I believe in him/her/it, but I wouldn't have the slightest clue where to start trying to understand him/her/it. So I try a bunch of things. I've settled on an acceptable image of God, and it does well enough by me for the time being. I'm still working on the psychic powers thing.
What the hell indeed. It's almost 2:30. I've babbled enough, and I will probably cry if I read this for all of its horrible grammar and, well, content. Content indeed. Good night, everyone!
Mikaus, the three letters are e, g, and h. I forgot one: 'heh'. The distinction is that 'hehe' is genuine amusement, while 'heh' means that I generally disagree but will play along for tranquility's sake. For sake of completeness, I should explain that eh, my default, denotes an utter lack of concern (read "correct degree of perspective"), or alternatively some amount of rumination vastly removed from the current context, generally because the current situation is less interesting than what I'm considering. Egh usually means that something bad has happened, and is used interchangeably with 'geh' when that thing was unexpected. As a pessimist, I don't often use the latter of the two.
I had an exceptional day this past Friday. I went to French and was able to study for discrete, plus I dodged a bullet when the due date of an assignment (incomplete, of course) was pushed back to today, giving me plenty of time to compensate for my nature. Next, my topics class had homework due, and I couldn't find the solution to one of the problems. However, I went to class, got the answer, ran to the computer lab, re-printed the corrected homework, and was able to turn it in for full credit. Finally my third class, Big Discrete, which had put the fear of sets into me with the fast-approaching mid-term, ended up being really easy, so I'll probably get an 'A' in that class. After that, Greg and I went to the gym where we worked on Tae Kwon Do, and I might have fixed my back stance, as well as getting a good work out. That done, I went home and played Ocarina of Time for a bit more before showering and heading out to Rollins. While there, I met a very interesting person that still has me smiling at random intervals, and we played pool for a couple of hours. Finally, we drove out to Denny's and had a lovely dinner before the night drew itself to a close.
So yeah. Ellipsis.
Saturday was a standard programming practice. Sunday Greg, Brad, Jill, briefly Sarah, and I played cards after the longest Pinehurst meeting in recorded history. Jump to present.
