Holy God I Am Still Alive

I stumbled out of my sixth final and was immediately filled with a rush of elation. It's over, I thought to myself, I beat the F08 semester. The end guy was hard.

Such moments of triumph in my life are generally short-lived, so I'm going to ride this one as long as I can. Hopefully, it will take me all the way back to Rhode Island - then I won't have to spend as much on gasoline.

--
don't break it down

What do you do when you fall off a horse?

"It pains me to watch you code," said Sullivan.

"Why?" I asked.

"You'll have something that's almost correct, except for one character, and rather than try to fix it, you'll delete the whole line and start over. This is why it takes you so long to write code."

I looked down at the whiteboard, anything to avoid his gaze, but Sullivan's best and worst quality is that he doesn't know when to stop.

"You give up too easily," he said.

"Let's get back to studying," I mumbled, blinking back tears and swallowing hard.

Granted, Sullivan is a bit of a jackass, but his words hurt because they were true, to an extent. I'm used to things being easy. When they aren't, I work at them until they are - or I just give up. This works fine as long as I don't want to do anything difficult, but most of the things I'm interested are pretty heady, and I'm gradually realizing that there's no easy way to get there; as my "head start" wears off, I'm facing the same long slog as everyone else.

These were the thoughts running through my head as I walked through the rain to my physics exam this afternoon. I had rescheduled it due to conflicts with later exams; unfortunately, this left me with about 24 hours to study. And study I did, until the sight of a differential equation made me want to vomit. I slept, poorly and insufficiently, and then it was time.

It was the longest exam I've ever taken (about 4 hours) and probably the hardest to boot. I started off confidently, but around the 2:30 mark, I encountered a problem of a sort that had slipped under my studying radar. After an hour of desperately trying to dredge up ancient memories from lectures and notes, re-deriving relevant properties from first principles, moving on and jumping back in an effort to startle the knowledge out of myself, and sheer wild guesswork, I was on the brink of tears. Digging my nails into my thighs, I resolved to give up and hand it in.

As I put my pencil down, I recalled my earlier conversation with Sullivan. Well, I thought, leaning back in my chair, I guess he was right. Here I am, giving up again.

I looked down at my paper one more time, then sat forward and grabbed my pencil. I wasn't about to give Sullivan the satisfaction of being right.*

*I don't think I got the right answer, but at least I tried...

--
stop me from thinking of what I once knew

Just Outside Of Your Front Door

I woke up bright and early* this morning and stumbled out towards the bathroom in my underwear.

Halfway across the living room, I paused - I could hear something from out the window. It's not uncommon to hear voices drifting up from the sidewalk three stories below, but this sounded closer.

Summoning all the energy I could muster at that ungodly hour**, I turned. Sitting in the branches of the tree not five feet from my window was a workman of some sort, avidly clipping branches with those long-handled shears and carrying on an animated conversation with his counterpart on the ground.

I stumbled back to my room to pull on some pants, then went over to the window and opened it.

"Hey," I said.

"Hey," the workman said.

Then I went to take a shower.

It's the little, surreal experiences in life, like waking up to find someone just outside your third-story window, that make it really worth living.

*1130
**Still 1130, give or take

--
he ended up sad