At the #computer and a bit lucid so I'll try to recap the last few weeks.
Spring break was quiet. Binged Severance the weekend directly after coming home on Friday. Ms. Casey is my favorite character, both for her elegance and also the potential cultural-racial component — she's Asian and has pretty limited expressiveness as Ms. Casey, but we also learn in Chikai Bardo that she has 24, 25 other innies. So many fragments of self. On Wednesday I woke up early for the roadtrip to Big Sur with Julie and Canni/Michelle, the latter of whom I hadn't seen in a year (or maybe longer) and around 7 we stopped by Kathmandu Cuisine for dinner and to celebrate Julie's birthday that day. The rest of Spring break was continuing to be grateful for the quietness of being back home, though I wish I drove a bit more just to check out some other spots in Milpitas and North or East San Jose; or even to get my car serviced, which I'm overdue for. It was so nice to talk to my high school friends, and see how they've gotten their lives together. Half of the people at the Kathmandu dinner were employed as software engineers, and the rest were finishing up their last year of university. Canni's got some GIS thing with waste disposal in her internship which sounds super cool. I didn't feel any envy at all. I felt proud for them, and I felt inspired knowing that this could be my near future if I play my cards right. Even the way we joked and riffed off each other felt comfortable and grounded. (When Sasha and the Hitchcock Lounge group joke, it's to memes that have never crossed my Instagram or my Twitter. I'm just out of the loop in their sphere.) It really did feel like coming home.
The feeling of being lost crossed over all the hours today, accompanying me through all the social interactions today and everything in between and all the places I went to. I did so much today, but I feel also I did very little. Part of that must've been all the splitting attention today. The other part is a cognitive bias. As an aside, I did see in a psychology paper yesterday from Hannah Hausman that metacognition is not intelligence. Intelligence seems to be implicit. Or, at least, it works best implicitly. Where am I going with this? Structure is a fresnel lens for action. Well, you can pick up the pieces.
Back to back lectures yesterday Tuesday, April 1st, were not fun. They weren't back to back per se, but it did feel like it. I had two lectures over Zoom back to back, on account of the strike (which was why I felt so awful that morning — I had to play DoorDash to get some breakfast for my roommates as well, and wound up being late to an empty classroom); went back to dorm to sit out the rest of the Zoom calls and tried to do some work.
Wednesday today was, like I said, both busy and not busy. I woke up early enough to get breakfast at a reasonable time, I think around 8:45 or 9:00, and Ansh (Richard's roommate) stopped by and we chatted about the upcoming quarter and plans for off-campus housing. He seems to be doing well, if a little grizzled by the school system. Still boyish, with flashes of a teenage vigor. He headed out, and I did too. Made some coffee on the Hario Switch with basically the last of my coffee beans, 21g/350ml. Rushed off to Psyc 123 discussion section ... only to find some random guy there (polite, though). So I turned back and went back to the dorm and watched the Psyc 116 video about social media's effects on children (or lack thereof!) for homework until 1:30. Deciding I needed a break I went down to West Remote Parking until I remembered I had actually parked my car in East Remote, and I caught myself just in time to reroute myself to the nearby bus stop. I boarded the bus around 1:50 and went to Trader Joe's to get some coffee and a couple snacks. I looped around to Santa Cruz Coffee Roasters to get some iced coffee around 2:45 and use the restroom (I did not trust the nearby public restroom), and then boarded the bus back to UCSC. We went down a road near the boardwalk, and then headed up. I closed my eyes to rest them for a bit,