Erica: February 2006 Archives

Sam posted Sunday and yesterday about his goals (axing polyphasic sleep from them yesterday). Among them:

• Blog once per day from here to the end of 2006
• Return to the Lost Path that is the Atkins diet - including cutting out caffeine
• Start rising at 5am every day, and shift to biphasic sleep (so include a nap during the afternoon/early evening low)

This is my "me too". I think a huge amount of my stress level can be attributed to the fact that I can't manage my time effectively. I can't manage my time effectively because I'm always too tired to focus. I'm always tired because I'm busy, true, but I also don't make sane sleep a priority, I consume way too much caffeine, and I'm carrying around a lot of weight that saps my energy. All of my goals are designed to help my stress level and sanity. Blogging should keep me honest about it. I will make one edit to my goals: I won't be eliminating caffeine entirely. I have an entire box of green tea in my desk at work. It's got all that nifty antioxidant goodness, and about a quarter of the caffeine of coffee. I don't feel like a midmorning cup should throw off either my diet or my sleep - my naps are all going to be sufficiently later than that. I really enjoy it, and something about green tea tells my brain it's time to focus on what I'm doing. (Grading, when I had my cup a bit ago.) And for Will's benefit - I promise I'm not going back on the diet out of some kind of body image obsession. I'd like to look better, true, and I'd like to be able to fit in nicer clothes, naturally. But the compulsion to go back on the diet actually comes from my memory about how much more energy I had, when I was on Atkins, before.

Like Wikipedia? Want it all the time? You can have it. Only 753mb, too, so you're not eating much into that precious music space, but you're adding to the utility of your iPod a lot. (Granted, it's a static copy, but still - having a relatively recent copy is still valuable.) Fantastic. Now I just have to wait to get mine back...

I have friends who knit. Friends who knit a lot. I crochet. I've tried knitting; I find it clumsy and I can't imagine how one would vary the stitches to make patterns. I find crochet simple, and building new stitches and patterns on existing skills straightforward. I grok crochet "theory", if you like. So a question for my knitter friends: am I doing something wrong? Is there some secret method that makes knitting magically delicious?

Mine does. None of the troubleshooting steps work; I can't restore it or update the software, as it won't be recognized by my computer. Wonderful. Sending my iPod in for service is my favorite thing in the whole wide world.

I wasn't feeling well yesterday - a mixed product of lack of sleep (I gave up on my optics homework at 4:30am, then had to get back up at 6:00am to get ready to go to school), stress (over said homework and the looming dates of various tests, the grading that I desperately need to get done in time, the labs for which reports are due just far enough away to make me paranoid about forgetting to do them), malnutrition (in the "I have no time to eat properly so I guess it's ramen and instant oatmeal again all week" way, not the "I live in one of those third world countries my mother held over my head when I didn't want to finish my dinner" way) and probably a bit of actual illness (who knows). I wound up going to school for a couple hours - talked with my classmates about the optics assignment, finished all but half a problem, gave the end result to one of them to hand in, and went home. This strategy netted me four additional hours of sleep, a desperately needed half-hour shower, and something like ten waking hours at home in which I was emphatically not doing homework - which I enforced by not bringing any of it home with me. I paid for it in five missed classes, one of which contained a quiz. That's micro-economics, and since my time at home was higher valued than the potential ten points on the quiz (I have a freaking A+ in that class so far - it's not going to hurt me), I'm calling that opportunity cost, baby. I needed yesterday, anyway. I've been scrambling hard to keep up in my classes, with my teaching, and everything's just so stupidly difficult. I mean, don't get me wrong - I love physics. It's awesome. I get conceptually googly-eyed at least twice a day. You can't buy that. (Tuition notwithstanding.) The pace of seventeen learning-credits and two teaching-credits is just killing me, though. I have labs that need to be graded by 1pm today (this blog post brought to you by the phrasee "mild irresponsibility"). I'll be teaching for four hours today. Tomorrow I'll have six and a half hours of class, followed by time for more grading, followed by another four hours of teaching. Thursday I should perform some lab experiments and study a lot and do homework, as I have an assignment due in math methods on Friday and the first of three exams for optics as well. If I told you this was unusual, I'd be lying. It's been like this for three weeks straight. I spent most of Saturday and Sunday doing optics homework, and I spent Saturday night from 5:00pm to 9:00pm doing my optical diffraction experiment. After this week, I still get no relief - I've got optics homework due Monday, and a math methods test, and I think I might have a caclulus test, too... Anyway, the point is, I'm so, so stressed I don't know what to do with myself. 90% of my time is eaten by stuff that I absolutely have to do. In the remainder, I'm typically so braindead I can't do a lot of the stuff I usually do for relaxation (like text-based online roleplaying). So last night, I ate a little ice cream (coffee ice cream with bananas, strawberries and hot fudge, yo), I talked to Will for a bit (which always elevates my mood by ten billion), and then I grabbed my new yarn (Lion Brand Wool-Ease Thick & Quick in Pumpkin and Spice) and started in on an earflap hat. Two movies (The Wedding Crashers and Batman Begins) later, it was done, and I went to bed ultimately satisfied with my ability to make adorably cute articles of clothing. It's stripey. It's orange. It's pointy. It has, if you like, three corners - one at the top and two at the bottoms of the earflaps. Crocheting is an awesome physical activity for me, because I can do it when my brain is mush, and the end product restores my faith in myself. I will prevail. To those of you I'm neglecting, I beg your patience. You know who you are. Heart you all. * "Mein Hut, der hat drei Ecken" is the beginning of a traditional German folk song. It means "my hat, it has three corners".