This is going to have to be quick- unexpectedly, my life has gone rather insane recently. All of a sudden, I spend 12 hours a week in class, 12 in meetings, 30 doing schoolwork, and 10 more for various sundry life-arrangement-type stuff (finding summer job, housing, etc). Really, I LIKE being busy. I can't explain it, but I derive some sort of sick satisfaction in being in the permanent state of having to go somewhere or get something done. But then, the busy life leaves little time for introspection, or at least, for the recording of such introspection.

I had a large homework assignment due in Computer Science, for which the process of creation once again reminded me of the ephemeral nature of the discipline. I spent the better part of Sunday afternoon staring at the same 10 lines of C++ code, a constructor for an infinite precision integer that simply would NOT run. The code looked 100% right, clean and concise, but unfortunately my compiler didn't agree with my assessment of perfection. I cursed, I cried, I would have thrown it against the wall had it been material and not digital. I finally called Patrick, who sat with me on the phone for 45 minutes trying to figure out what was wrong, while I tried to keep from bursting into tears out of sheer frustration. I was probably (and quite unintentionally) more than a touch cranky with him over the phone; in retrospect I'm very appreciative that he didn't get exasperated and tell me to quit whining and figure it out myself.

In the early evening, I had a break for dinner and the QU meeting. Miraculously, when I returned to my computer, something just 'clicked' inside my head. I spewed out the rest of the assignment in under 3 hours, and veritably giggled with delight that I had created something that worked so deliciously perfectly. I was in bed by one, fixed a final error this morning, and turned the whole damned thing in. Hours of frustration, hours of coding, all boiled down to just two moments: the moment it worked, and the moment it left my hands as I placed it in the pile on my professor's desk. And you know, all the hours of awfulness were worth it- because in the end, I had created a functional entity, I had something to show for all my labor.

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Hearing: a Deep Forest CD Patrick lent me- it's good coding music.

Reading: a chapter out of my psych disorders textbook