Brian's World

Pillows

This is a post I’ve been meaning to write for a few years now.  No time better than the present to detail this information, I’m unsure what my bedding situation will be next year.

For those of you who have been in to room at some point over the past 3.5 years you may have noticed I have 3 pillows positioned vertically at the head of my bed.  Unlike home, I don’t have purely decorational pillows, but I do my best to create an aesthetically pleasing bed.  The first pillow in the queue is a smaller pillow (maybe 18 inches x 18 inches), and was stitched together by Katie Boudreau sometime in Middle School.  Graphical in nature, this pillow contains elevated sections of 4 dogs on a scenic nature background.  The second pillow is a regular-sized pillow but is moderately thick.  None of these pillows are stuffed with feathers, and this pillow’s thickness peaks around 8 inches at the center.  As a thick pillow, this pillow is moderately soft and compresses to provide a mildly comfortable sleep environment.  Last in the pillow line is another regular sized pillow, with a thickness peaking around 4 inches thoug.  This pillow is not terrible soft and doesn’t compress comfortably.  I suspect when my head is laying on it the pillow compresses to be 1-2 inches thick.

Every night I use the last “brick-like” pillow to rest my head when I sleep.  While turning down my bed, I relocate the large poofy pillow to the floor next to my bed.  I’ve tried using it once or twice when I first installed it, but I fear that using it too much will compress it down to be hard like the brick pillow.  I’ve concluded that its best left unused by me, available for the rare instance I should need to provide a pillow for someone else.   Since most people enjoy soft pillows, it seems logical to keep that one soft and available.  Pillows are not as easy to acquire as say, matches, so you really have to think about how to be prepared here.  While I haven’t done the math, this pillow stands dormant, in the ready-stage, most of the year,  always available for emergency use or alike.

As for the smaller “graphical” pillow, I place that under the covers on top of my chest while I fall asleep.  In the winter it helps keep my core warm, and I think it would also serve to slow down the blade of anyone trying to stab me in the chest while I slept.  Wouldn’t want that LOTR stabbing thing going on without some very very very mild protection in place.  I could also use it to absorb blood if I was stabbed and started bleeding. This is a very unlikely scenario most nights.  Since I have not mastered the skill of sleeping perfectly still the entire night, it does drift slightly during the night.

I use the less-soft, mostly hard pillow to sleep on night after night here in college.  It is not very enjoyable, but I does make me feel better to know that a more comfortable pillow is available if the need were to arise.  There have been a few nights I’ve been resting in bed thinking “Hrm self, you might fall asleep faster if you used the other pillow.”  I have managed to remain steadfast and never given in to my temptation to use a more comfortable pillow, serving as a constant reminder that I am on a decent course.

Well, I should get horizontal and rest my head on this pillow.  I think I’ve actually used rocks which are more comfortable.  That wasn’t a metaphor, I do not bring pillows when I go camping.  If I really need something to rest my head on, I can improvise.

Goodnight moon.

Attitudes

A few days ago I was viewing the world in a very negative light.  The lack of knowledge regarding anything-my-future was casting a pretty large shadow over everything I was doing.  I was coding very slowly, sleeping too late (10am!), and my back was hurting.

I actually think my back was hurting from spending a few hours in a crawl space moving my mom’s old boxes around, but that’s a different problem.  I commanded my back to stop hurting and so far it seems to have stopped ailing me.

What I realized, was that I wasn’t taking my own advice very well.  I remembered the advice I used to give people who were feeling depressed, homesick, or downtrodden for whatever reason:  Is someone gunning for you today?  If the answer is no, then you don’t have anything to worry about; life could be a lot worse.  If someone is in fact gunning for you, then you can complain all you want until the problem is resolved.  I ran the “how many people are gunning for you with a high probability of success” query and, as expected, I shouldn’t be complaining about anything.  Things could be a lot worse.

I guess I was then feeling nostalgic, because I then proceeded to remember lots of other units of advice I would issue or those that were issued to me by far humbler men.  Based on the fact that it isn’t raining, I have a roof over my head, food readily available, wash facilities that work, the means to complete my current mission, AND the fact that no one is gunning for me: I must be living some form of the high life.

That’s not to say my life is perfect and I wouldn’t change a thing, but on a very basic level things are going pretty well I guess.  Sure, socially I might not be on par with the course, but I also don’t have anyone in the foreground who is actively serving as my enemy.

I’ve been trying to identify the correct way to describe how my spring break has gone and its tough.  Usually I would say “mild” or “mediocre” as a way of saying “well, nothing exciting happened… but my house didn’t burn down” but I feel I should increase my descriptors to something a little less vague where people actually have the ability to respond.  If you’re wondering, I’ve used words like mild and mediocre because they’ve very effective at stopping a conversation.  If someone says they had a great break, you ask them what they did or say “that’s good”.  If someone says they had a bad break, you ask what went wrong.  When I say my break was mild, people tend to just look at me like I have 8 eyes or say “mild?” to which I respond “yea, like the salsa.”  So far, only one person has managed to extend this conversation beyond salsa and back to the subject at hand, but they are a well trained conversationalist.

But like I was saying… there isn’t much exciting news to report.  This break is playing out very similar to the last one, my dad sends me a stack of places I should apply for internships… out of which there might be 1 that uses the words “HTML” or “internet” in their field of work.  This year there are 0 that say Ruby on Rails :-(.  Mom continues to harass me regarding my weight, believing that once again my stomach has shrunk and that is why I did not eat 2 donuts for breakfast or only a can of soup for lunch.  I have actually gained 1.5 pounds, which I will attribute to a lack of motivation when it comes to exercising sir.

Well, I should head off to bed.  Katie is out partying with some friends,  later today I might party it up with Concerto 2… that is where it is at these days.

Good night moon.

Turbulence

I originally opened up may laptop to write to tell the tale of another day in the life of me.  The thought did cross my mind, that these stories don’t tend to help me and I might be better off going to sleep. I guess I’ve convinced myself otherwise.  Even if this account goes unnoticed, it will at least contribute to the records… providing a bigger pool of data for whenever something comes along that needs it.

These past few days have been pretty rough for me, far from the smooth sailing days of say 3-4 weeks ago.  Sure, 3-4 weeks ago I was still trying to figure out that rest of my life bit, but at least 3-4 weeks ago I had just submitted some applications online.  Now that all the time has passed I’m started to float two ideas in my mind. 1) I’m doing something very wrong in the application process or 2) I have no future working at a company that I’ve identified/applied to thus far.  I’m hesitant to discredit #1 because then I’m left only with #2 which I really don’t want to accept at this moment in my life.  Maybe next week will be a better week to swallow that news.   I suspect that my GPA is probably to blame here, only because my resume doesn’t provide me an adequate platform to say “… all while I’ve driven the development of N web development projects and done a bunch of other useful things.”  If you are looking to hire me to design circuitry, my GPA is a pretty accurate reflection of my skill and knowledge, if your looking to hire me to develop cool pieces of software you really should look elsewhere.

Now that I’ve lost the readers who skim just the first paragraph with that pretty bland material, I’d dive into the more distressing topics.

I filmed three hockey games over the past three days.  If you know me well, you know that I am not a hockey fan at all.  Names like Malchuck and Pirri sound like Pokemon to me, not players on a team.  I filmed the games because RPI TV needed help and I was around, if the usually 40-person crew was available I would not have been there, but twas not the case since it’s spring break and all the freshmen head home.  I’m going to save my discussion of the filming of hockey for another blog…

But I’ll certainly elaborate on some of the non-hockey non-filming things that happened.

For example, during the last game we filmed I learned I’ve been painted over in someone’s memory… at least in once instance.  I guess I should have expected it considering the memory was 3 years old, but I still remember these sorts of things somewhat well.  Let me provide a little dash of hypothetical background: lets say you once had what you considered to be a friend;  as time has passed that individual has transitioned from being a friend to more like an associate or coworker like everyone else.  That person proceeds to tell a story about something you did together, but replaces you with someone a bit newer in their life.  Of course the person you have been replaced quickly affirms their role in the story because they are always willing to associate with non-negative social situation.  Hypothetically, you might be left to think if they just accidental forgot who was there or they’ve done a find and replace of any memory of you as a friend in their mind with someone else.  I guess I shouldn’t fault someone if they have chosen to globally find and replace me, its probably safer that way.  You wouldn’t want any potentially unauthorized (by association)  actions to come to light in a background query these days.

I shouldn’t lie, my memory is poor as well.  I try really hard to provide accurate accounts, but when I do have to make up the details I try my hardest to make sure that no one could possible call or notice my bluff or I let people know that I’m completely guessing here.

Sometimes I get disappointed when I overhear others planning to engage in things that I’m not authorized or able to engage in.  I’ve gotten pretty good at handling the not-authorized bits over the past few years, its mainly the not-able items that get to me the most.  That is probably because I dislike things I can’t do.  For example, freshman year I couldn’t do 10 push ups to save my life, I can now do a very acceptable amount.  The ability to do push-ups is unlikely to help me much,  but I opted to do it just because I wasn’t able to before.  I can probably break “non-able” situations (there has to be a better phrase than non-able) into two groups, self limited and externally limited.  Clearly self-limited non-able scenarios are preferable because I’m the only to blame (like the push up scenario).  The externally limited ones are much harder to navigate, like navigating the parents-treating-you-like-your-16 river.  That is one river I definitely stuck in a canoe in.  I don’t like canoes very much, they are highly inefficient modes of water transportation, but I guess you can fashion them out of a tree if you need to.  Rowboats and kayaks are far preferable for any serious water transportation efforts.

Good night moon.