Since I’m a tool and decided to work the umpteenth Sunday for the last 2 months, I figured I should update, especially since the test I’m running has a huge amount of downtime. First off huge news! No more Mandatory O/T w00t. I mean sure it was only an extra 10 hours a week, but the extra thousand I earned didn’t feel worth it, especially based on the sheer amount of stress I was suffering as a result. Of course if I was getting time and a half, I’m pretty sure I’d be doing 60+ hour weeks especially if my rate was over $40 an hour. As of now, I’m guessing the next round of mandatory o/t will be November. I have a metric ass ton of work to get done, and progress isn’t exactly at its peak
In other news the “Letter of Intent” is making awful progress. I guess the idea of writing a giant letter about how awesome I am, doesn’t seem all that appealing. I seriously wanna include details like my favorite color is green and at nights I whore myself out to pay off my student loans. Unfortunately, I’d probably significantly decrease my chances of getting in to Iowa. This letter is requiring me to figure out what I like about Computer Science enough that’d I’d want to do research on it. This is where a lot of the blankness is coming from. I was thinking maybe doing something on mass distributed computing systems, sort of like SETI@home, though I have very little background on this topic. Also there’s a concept called DNA computing, which involves massive parallelism to solve polynomial growth style problems. Both seem interesting, but I don’t feel like I’m qualified to study either.
You know sometimes I wish I was just dumb. Not like mentally retarded dumb, but like the kind of dumb that is convinced Iraq blew up the WTC and that intelligent design should be taught along with evolution in schools. Of course, you could argue the above criteria would be the equivalent of mentally retarded, but that’s neither here nor there. Just having some level of intelligence makes life so hard. No tasks I ever get are easy on the ol’ noggin. I feel like I need to be running all cylinders 24/7, and if I ever screw up I get this judgmental feeling from everyone saying “I thought you were better than that”. Oh man, don’t I just sound like the most unbelievably condescending asshole ever.
I think what’s really bothering me is the expectations. Now you have to understand these are more self imposed than anything, but they are still there. I need to work long hours so I can move further in my job. I need to save all the extra money I make, so I can become independently wealthy. I need to get an advanced degree, so I can become a prominent figure in my field. I think high expectations are a direct result of being seen as an intelligent person. This is probably the way to go in life, but I gotta admit the life of the guy who has a menial task in a factory, who after work, forgets his jobs, goes to a bar, gets drunk, finishes up the night by screwing his girlfriend, wash, rinse, and repeat, all seems somewhat appealing.