#computer
Woke up late again, 9:30. Not sure if I'm overdosing on my melatonin gummies (I bite them in thirds-ish) or the gray morning throwing off my body clock. Had a turkey/egg/lettuce sandwich this morning, coffee a half hour later, and then headed for Santa Cruz around 2:00pm. Arrived in town around 3:45, and then at campus around 4:00, and then met Alex at his friend's house as they were planning a trip to Taiwan. We took our cars back up to campus and had dinner at Crown Dining (chicken tamales, self-serve! I had two!), an altogether cozy if spartan dining hall. Campus as a whole was super tranquil. Talked with him about his summer, plans for social work and intervening delinquency after graduation, etc. Never realized how often he used cross-disciplinary metaphors to explain his theories — or how lofty his ambitions for social work were. A "psychic ecosystem" and safe space peer discourse co-incidental to social media and social/home life? My phrasing is telegraphic, but still, that's the essence of it. I lent my cogsci knowledge to his concerns about developmental stages and ADHD and asked him for specifics on his social work, like what exactly this platform or webpage looked like. He couldn't give a clear answer. I'm not immune to lofty ambitions either; you could explain my work in Helios as trying to reverse-engineer the principal functions and behaviors of cognition, and instantiate (or find!) them in other physical systems. But I'm also interested in the immediate concerns of the tech sector's overreliance on centrated attention, rather than peripheral attention; or the interaction of communication platforms with short-term, long-term, and working memory systems; and how to better design software and products to accommodate what feels like a rapidly shrinking, flattening modern mind. I want to design something that feels and acts natural, something that can embed in the environment as a predictable item or object without extensive learning. We walked back to his dorm in Cowell, talked a bit about summer and upcoming classes, and met his roommate Ceasar; and headed down to East Field talking about travel and watched the city lights for some time. My mom called, asking when I'd get back, and told her I was about to leave. I couldn't quite mean it when I said goodbye to him. I think he knew, since he hugged me, and I hugged back, and then I said goodbye and good night properly and headed down to the East Field Remote Lot. It's likely I'll see him again before Fall quarter starts, but I can't shake off that feeling of finality. In any event, I'll try to text him more often. (After all, I need to do my share of asking him more questions about himself too.) The nighttime drive back home was a bit busy, with considerable traffic in the last third of the drive, but altogether safe and sound. Got back home, had a little bit of mom's seawood and tofu soup to fill up the rest of my stomach, and then chomped on a green apple (per usual) while working on Helios.