#computer
Home at Milpitas this weekend. Yesterday I attended Psi Chi's induction event and met Anna, Connor, and Billai; met with Georget and Emily to discuss our last Round 1 videos; and drove home a bit late, around 5:10pm, and my eyes had a harder time adjusting; and the drive felt more daunting for some reason. Talked to parents and uncles at Fosters Freeze; and headed home. Uncle Udam is here! He had been back for 10 days, from Cambodia. Dinner — bottle gourd soup and smoked fish.
Slept in today, but way longer than I thought. I was out until 9:50am. Yikes. I thought I got decent-ish sleep this week. I'm definitely waking up early tomorrow. Mom saved some leftover potstickers for me and I had some vanilla yogurt with blueberries. I tried making a latte later on my NanoFoamer but the foam wasn't stable at all. Locked in from like 12 to 2:45 doing MatLab homework.
It was fine. I did ask ChatGPT and Claude for hints, but I actually got 90% of the code there with my intuition, testing, lecture notes, and MatLab help before running into a block — so my computational thinking has definitely improved since community college. If I started earlier, I would've been more comfortable spending twice as long, reading up on documentation, and learning when and how to nest decision trees and loops inside of each other.
After that I bounced between clips of the Golden Girls and Marvel, and reddit and X and Bluesky. Apparently Epstein liked /pol/. Who knew? Epstein on 4chan and Maxwell on reddit. Good fucking lord. Our clown timeline started in 2015 — no, earlier. Knocked out some reading for Brainwaves seminar but I didn't feel that into it. (Mostly because I already have my own way of reading a scientific article. Hemera (2023) was the best thing I ever started for my college education.)
I'm not sure I can backdate my entries for this month, January. That stupid cold lasted for 3 weeks from the 1st to the 22nd, and Trump's Greenland shenanigans got me doomscrolling in a way I've never really done before, which really filibustered my attention. I do feel my baseline mood for January has been the best it's ever been since 2017 or 2018, but I wish I were slightly more present, had more working memory slots, and were just less tired.
All vague goals, that last sentence there. Called Aunt Kun and Uncle Mike, briefly updating, and mostly hearing from them to exercise my upper body and make some daily routines. I think I'll do that last bit: daily routines. Heaven knows I haven't scheduled consistently since Spring 2021. Big plans, smaller actions, acting over a script. My optimism waned, but I won't collapse. Eyes open. In my body. Seeing my hands move across the keyboard. I don't hear the words in my head. These words are minimally planned. Old habits die hard. I started journaling in 2016. Ten years now of this occasional habit.
I remember more wins now: I met and talked to Ruhi this Tuesday. She asked me about the room number the seminar was in, then we got to know each other and where we were from. She's premed student and minoring in biology at the moment. Talked about off-campus life. Apparently she likes what I have to say in seminar. Her questions are focused and direct as well. And on Thursday, I finally made it to Dr. Boudewyn's office hours to clear up some lingering questions about this week's readings. Attention and language... delta waves... prediction errors... I need to follow up there. That's what most engaged her, I think; and deep topics in my Helios slipbox.
Social skills, working memory, schema, automaticity, theory of mind. There's a small coredump. I haven't had those in a long time. Memorizing the verbal gestures of getting to know someone. Ruhi and Psi Chi — half those gestures I did automatically. The other half I blanked on. Am I still learning, then? It's the most likely conclusion.
Home is a necessary break, and good. I know it because I've written this long and this coherently.