[Title of Blog]

“Keep your chin up, and your head out of the clouds”

After a tiring few months, my Spring Break is here, and I am glad.  It’s a great opportunity to sit back, breath, and get my life back in order.  In the last two days, I’ve cleaned my room, caught up on classes, and went out with friends, all with such energy that I didn’t think I would still have, yet managed to find somehow.   I just hope I can carry through the rest of this semester with this!  Life with a clean room is unbelievably satisfying.  When I get up in the morning, I feel refreshed, like I’m finally put together right.  I guess I’m a sucker for order; but hey, that’s what civilization does, right?  Try to impose order, at least.  Well, at any rate, I’ll try harder to keep myself tidy during the year.  Maybe some real good can come out of it!

If you weren’t super duper friends with me in Freshman year, you might not know that I’m a huge Vienna Teng fan.  Well, her fourth album is finally coming out, and although I’ve already pre-ordered it, I couldn’t stand waiting anymore, and went and downloaded the thing.  I’ve pretty much been listening to it nonstop for the last two days, and, while the style is definitely different from that of her last three albums, it’s still beautiful, in its own way.  I don’t know why, but to me, Vienna Teng’s albums were never like other artist’s, where there were just a few tracks per album that you would look forward to listening to.  When she releases an album, you like the whole thing.

Currently: looking forward to making some music of my own.

I went to a talk yesterday, where a professor from U Chicago talked about a field that he was pioneering, Geometric Complexity Theory.  Apparently, using methods of Representation Theory and Algebraic Geometry, he was able to bypass the natural barriers to P vs NP that are plaguing computer scientists.

Listening to the talk got me very excited.  Not only because he claims that the problem can be solved at all, but because he got to it with some very advanced maths.  I can’t wait to take Algebraic Geometry and Representation Theory now, so that I might be able to understand his papers some day.

On the other hand, the room was full of Computer Scientists, with a few Mathematicians here and there.  You could tell that nearly no one could fully follow his talk.  Of course, that’s dangerous, because when you’re delving in a topic that’s the specialty of only a few, then you are in danger of being completely wrong, and with not enough people checking you, mistakes could be checked.  I’m afraid that as long as he kept on saying “through representation theory!” to the uninitiated masses back there, we would have bought anything.  But, hey, he seems credible.  I guess I can’t know until I read more of his stuff (or more on his stuff).

I have a small break right now from work.   There is a paper due soon, and a complexity problem set to write up, but there’s more cushion time for those, so it’s not too bad.  I’m in the reading room right now, and am going back to basics: reading wikipedia, reading my RSS, and trying to figure things out.  There is a lot to learn, but I think I can do it.  After all, if I think about it, the amount of knowledge I’ve gained since this time last year is just ridiculous.  There’s no reason why a similar jump can’t happen between this time this year, and next year.  Ai, one can only hope.

I’ll be leaving tomorrow afternoon for California, where I will stay for a day and a half before catching a red-eye back to Boston.  I’ll be interviewing with Facebook for a summer position(fingers crossed?), but more importantly, I’ll get to be in warm weather at last.  Cali better be sunny when I get there; I’m getting sick of the cold!

Just kidding, it’s actually pretty fun for the most part.  Of course, papers get repetitive, but if you choose a class that you actually like, it can be really rewarding.

There was more on my mind, but I don’t feel up to writing it down. I guess I’ll have to spend some more time mulling over it myself.

The majority of my super terrible week is over.  All psets, done (I’m looking at you, 6.841).  Paper… written.  Most of my interviews, over (or skipped, because I was just too tired to go).

I don’t know what it is about my body.  I was running super sleep deprived yesterday - staying up forever - but still woke up today, naturally, after six hours.  Does that mean that I’m still not, at some level, getting the amount of rest that I should be?  How confusing…

At any rate, I’m going to be doing the following things in the next few days:

• Work out well
• Read some papers in complexity
• catch up on my RSS
• Start and finish two more psets
• Go to ITASA! =D

Ah, it’s a cloudy and wet day outside today, but from my room overlooking mostly-frozen Charles, it looks wonderful.  Happy Thursday, friends, and don’t forget to smile.

:o)

Edit: on the other hand,

(12:03:46 AM) David: gGgGggg
(12:04:39 AM) stumbling stephany: oooohhhhh, ubrasil?

As of now, I am almost done with 2 psets(6.875 and 18.901).  There are two more, one of which will be do-able(18.312), and one of which will be very long (6.841).  I think I’ve been using my time very efficiently in the last few days.  Hey, at least things are getting done, right?
On another note in the completely opposite direction, someone just asked me about the third roots of unity, and I was thinking, well, it’s gotta be something like , right?  And I just stood there trying to check it by squaring, and getting frustrated over and over when it wasn’t coming out to one.

I didn’t expect this semester to be a piece of cake, and here it is, coming at me with full force.  I guess this is just a bad time of year.  Applications and interviews for the summer cycle have deadlines soon, and I have my hands full with those.  That, and all my classes are math classes, so there’s plenty to think about…

I don’t have much to say right now.  I’ve stopped checking up on my RSS feeds, because there simply is no time to look at them.  I auditioned for and quit Next Act, because I want to stick with Tae Kwon Do.  And there is less and less time to stop and breathe in the fresh air all around.

Regardless of the weariness that is already starting to set in, I have a very positive, can-do attitude: I am motivated, I believe in myself, my blood is flowing strong.  I only hope that this feeling can last me for the next few months.  Let’s hope so.

On another note, a recent study here shows that people who spoke up, even when they don’t know what they’re talking about, were seen to be more competent and intelligent by their peers.  Personally, I hate saying things that I’m not sure about, and so will keep my thoughts to myself.  Perhaps too much.  I should make an effort to change - but I don’t want to be so brash as to be that guy who talks just to say things.  I mean, is it because people are unsure and hate to make decisions, and so are relieved when the first person to speak up takes that burden of choice away from them?  Is that what people expect of an effective leader?  How then, do I reconcile what other people are naturally inclined to with my own habits, likes, and dislikes?(after all, we can’t expect everyone to spend time thinking about the grou pdynamics).

Oh, bother!

The Spring ‘09 term has started here at MIT, and I am very excited with what I will be doing in the next three months.  Because I’m almost done with my degrees, I’ve been able to select a great deal of interesting classes this term.  I think it paid off - out of the three lectures that I attended yesterday, two of my lecturers were simply captivating.  I can only hope that today’s classes will be similarly exciting!

In addition to academic life, I’m trying to expand my meager list of recreational activities.  This IAP, I took the sport Tae Kwon Do class, and at the end of it tested for my Yellow belt.  I’m receiving the belt tonight, and will hopefully be able to keep on practicing with the TKD club.  I’ve had a great deal of fun kicking around with them so far, and would highly encourage enrollment in the PE class for anyone who hasn’t tried it so far.

Also, I auditioned for Next Act last night!  Next Act is the annual spring musical of Next House.  It’s a pretty laid-back production - everyone who auditions will get a speaking role.  I did it in my freshman year, when we did Beauty and the Beast, and just loved it.  You get to sing, dance, act, be silly, and best of all, you have the opportunity to meet some really awesome residents of Next House that you otherwise would never have met, or talked to.  This year’s production is Sweet Charity - come check us out come CPW!

I recently downloaded a Sticky Notes program that lets you leave “Stickys” on your desktop, hiding and showing them as you please.  It’s awfully convenient, and so far has allowed me to keep track of my To-Do’s with great efficiency.  Get a free Stickynote program here.

I don’t have a special theme for today, nor am I feeling very organized, so here are some thoughts in no particular order.

• LeaderShape was very, very fun.  I highly reccomend it
• I spread myself too thin
• I need to vacuum the carpet
• Reading is terribly relaxing
• “The King of the Golden Hall” is a fantastic song (from The Two Towers soundtrack)
• I need to change my lifestyle for good.  It’s no good being a dreamer and not a doer.
• I want to end this with a poem by Mary Oliver

How everything adores being alive

What

if you were

a beetle,

and a soft wind

and a certain allowance of time

had summoned you

out of your wrappings,

and there you were,

so many legs,

hardening,

maybe even

more than one pair of eyes

and the whole world

in front of you?

And what if you had wings

and flew

into the garden,

then fell

into the up-tipped

face

of a white flower,

and what if you had

a sort of mouth,

a lip,

to place close

to the skim

of honey

that kept offering itself -

what would you think then

of the world

as, night and day,

you were kept there -

oh happy prisoner -

sighing, humming,

roaming

that deep cup?