My god, I have no idea how those six days just passed with no entry. It might have been a subconcious nudge that I needed a break from this. Then again, it just might have had something to do with the absolute shitloads of work I had to do: On Friday, the massive computer science project Patrick and I were working on was due. Naturally, we hadn't organized our time, and as of Wednesday evening still had half the project to do. We began coding at 8 on Thursday morning, and excepting classes and hurried meals, kept going straight through till 9 am on Friday morning, just before class. Yes, you read correctly, we pulled an all nighter.

Actually, it was my first of those treasured college traditions. A few friends of mine and I tried to stay up all night talking once last year, just for kicks, but passed out by 6 am. Patrick and I were prepared, though: we drank pints of harsh french press coffee and celebrated the dawn with a hand-rolled unfiltered cigarette. Luckily, our winds of energy came relatively simultaneously, so we rolled over through waves of sleepiness at the same time. At one point, I believe I commented that our little adventure was like "a slumber party with no slumber". As you may have guessed, it also turned out to be no party. Despite our valient efforts, we were forced to throw in the towel as classtime approached. Our prof had earlier said that if anyone needed extra time, they could turn it in Monday in exchange for a cut in the grade, and we definitely needed the extra time.

You can just imagine us in class that day: we were deathly tired, incredibly discouraged, and pretty sick of each other. Additionally, I was most decidedly NOT in the mood for the Geek Squad and their terrible sense of humor. One fellow, who is sometimes known as 'Moose', made some horrible crack about the similarities between an unbalanced binary tree and rednecks. You don't even have to hear the punchline (and it was so traumatic that I blocked it out) to groan at that one.

Over the course of the weekend, we probably spent another twelve hours or so on the assignment, trying to pick apart the segments that weren't functioning properly and cursing at ourselves proliferously throughout the entire affair. I came to the conclusion that the project was rather like birthing a child: long, incredibly painful, seemingly never-ending, and producing only a semi-functional being. Once we finally got the clunker to work, I believe I shreiked. And then let out a long yelp of built-up tension and frustration.

Fate must have intended the whole ordeal to be hell from start to finish: this morning, with the whole thing complete, on disk, and print-ready, it took us over 40 minutes of running around campus trying to find a functioning printer attached to a computer that would read our disk. We finally slinked into class 15 minutes late. At the end of the period, we dropped the thick stack of code on the front table about as ceremoniously as a pile of cow shit. Which, really, is probably an apt quality comparison.