Brian's World

End of October

The end of October has always been a unique time for me.  Halloween always comes very quickly, and November follows even faster.  I’ll tell you a little bit about my Halloween, since there is a very low probability I’ll be celebrating this “holiday” as an undergraduate student ever again.

Fundamentally, I’m not opposed to people dressing up in costumes pretending to be something else. I certainly see the merits of escaping from your present struggles, be it as a student, young adult, professional, etc.  People take vacations to get away from this stuff, so putting on a silly outfit for a day seems like a much more cost effective way of handling this need.

Me?  I’m not a huge “dress up and pretend to be something else” kind of person.  I don’t see many long term merits to disguising myself as something else for a few hours, and the short term worries far out way any potential benefit.  Choosing a costume is a challenging task; despite your desire to repeat an outfit, you really don’t want to do so in the event someone recognizes you from a previous occasion.  Reusing a Halloween costume is almost as deadly as reusing a dress at a high school formal.  Never mind the whole appropriateness of the costume…  I’ve found that most females choose a Halloween costume that maximizes exposed skin.  This makes little to no sense, it is the end of October; it is going to be cold outside!  While the girls are busy minimizing their clothing, the guys are maximizing the perceived coolness/popularity of their outfits in an attempt to attract the girl who has the minimum clothing on.  I’m not sure what is desirable about mating with someone who doesn’t understand the weather and intentionally exposes themselves to near-hypothermia conditions… alas I digress.  I’ve always been a fan of the simple ghost costume, consisting of a large white sheet draped over your body with a few strategic holes cut in it.  Not only can you make it yourself, but if you prepare it correctly you can stitch the holes back together and have a white sheet when you finish!

But like I said, I haven’t dressed up for Halloween for quite some time.  I like to cite all the reasons above as secondary reasons that are far easier to explain to people than some of the deeper issues at play.  I get stuck in the following dichotomy when evaluating the Halloween concept:

1. What am I disguising myself to escape?  While I’ve run away from my fair share of problems, I’ve never put on a ghoul mask and pretended they didn’t exist.  That’s a stupid approach when you think about it applied to the other 364 days of the year.  If there are some issues that I’d like to escape on Oct 31, maybe I should find a more feasible solution to them… one that I can pull off Nov 1 if it persists.
2. Aren’t I in a good enough disguise as it is?  There is definitely a limit when putting on extra layers accomplishes very little, and I think dawning a costume definitely exceeds that point.  Is dressing up as something else really going to do a better job of obscuring myself than the tools I employ every other day? I’m lead to believe that what I do every other day works pretty well, my current mask is pretty well glued on.

If I could identify which one of the above situations applied I might be able to identify something acceptable to dawn on Halloween but this time of year rarely presents the opportunity to engage in such a exercise.

Good night moon.

Third Party

I will tell you about a strange night.  When I was walking back from the Union to BARH I passed someone, as I usually do.  There was some sort of large party happening near the Union and there were a higher than normal number of people dispersed outside on the sidewalk and surrounding areas..  This time, instead of acting startled or just ignoring me after a quick glance they said “Hi”.  I was unsure if they were talking to me, so I waited 2.5 seconds before responding with “Hi” and accelerating my walking pace.  They proceeded to keep talking to me or about me… but I decided responding wouldn’t be in my best interest.  For all I know, they could have wanted to know how I was doing so they could stall me and stab me or something.  Anything’s possible on campus these days.

But in all seriousness, it was strange for a few reasons.

1. People who I don’t know rarely communicate with me.  I’m not very outgoing and tend not to engage in communication with everyone I see.  The reverse is also true, where people don’t feel like I’m the most approachable person.  I’ve found people are more like to speak with the people around me than to me.
2. I don’t think anyone has randomly said Hi to me after 10:oopm.  While not common, its not unheard of for someone to enter the Web Tech Group office during class hours (Sun-Thur, 2pm-7pm) and say “Hi, can I borrow a stapler.”  When people do that I always wonder, are they talking specifically to me (when I’m alone in the office, as I often am) or if they are just proclaiming their desire for a stapler out-loud in hopes that I’ll respond.  Usually I do lend them the stapler.

On a side note, I enjoy using an <ol> any chance I can get.  That is probably one of my favorite html tags.

I think I can count the different parties I interact with on a weekly basis on 1 hand. so there are less than 5 of them.  Usually, I can rely on one of them to be in positive territory, and the rest to be in negative or neutral territory.  In recent weeks, it seems everything has fallen into a recession, no positive parties around.  This is making my life slightly less pleasant than normal since its harder to find an outlet where I won’t be scolded.  Traditionally, I think I’ve used some sort of tipsy-turvy spinning disc model to balance things, controlled, in part, by my advanced hula-hooping skills whereby at least one party would be up (positive) and some parties would be down (negative).  Clearly I have lost my hip rotating skill or the hula-hoop has gotten heavier, possibly a combination of both.

Unlike the financial recession, I doubt that anyone will hand me money to get better.  (Despite the fact that money probably wouldn’t solve my problems, it would be nice gesture.)  I think that one reason I was able to always keep something in the positive was the rotating action, where I could use the existing momentum to pull something else up into the positive.  Now that I’m starting with no momentum, or in some instances.. having to stop the negative momentum… things will prove to be a challenge over these coming weeks.

I avoid admitting defeat, but its hard to see the bright side when every thought/idea you have is tossed aside.

Maybe I should try poetry.

Hello October

I can’t remember what I usually think of October.  I want to say that I’m usually fairly neutral towards it, but this year I feel like its soliciting some emotional response… maybe good, maybe bad, I can’t tell.  Its an awkwardly placed month, transitioning from summer into winter.  The leaves are falling down off the trees outside it seems, but seeing them linger on the grass or walking through them scattered on the sidewalks is something I miss at college.  Unfortunately for me, RPI keeps on top of the falling leaves.  At least twice a week they clean up the grassy  hill outside my window, leaving me little time to remember that winter is coming.  Most of the walkways I’m on are surrounded by concrete and the other one I stroll on from BARH to campus (on Sherry) is too busy for leaf accumulation.  At least I’ll have my walks on Burdett to Commons each morning, where very few of the houses care to clean up their leaves.

The heat snuck on in my dormitory earlier this week.  Luckily my thermostat was set to 40-something so I didn’t get a full blast of it.  Last night I dared to raise the temperature to something useful in the 60s to ensure I didn’t freeze overnight.  The heat seemed to respond well.  I’m going to try and keep a better eye on it this year so I don’t always have to keep a window open mitigating the difference.

Last week in Professional Development 3 we had to deliver a “60 second sell” to someone about ourselves.  It seems this presentation is somewhat notorious at RPI, but I knew nothing about it.  I spoke about myself for the required minute and received some decent feedback, figuring I’d probably get a B or a low A.  Alas this week the Professor indicates that two Brian M’s were among the top 6 performers.  Buckets!  What was the probability there were 3 Brian M’s in this class?  I assume very low.  Unfortunately this is one of those teachers who makes you do extra work if you stand out, and somehow my performance qualified me for the exact opposite of the experience I had wanted.  She indicated that the 6 of us should distribute ourselves evenly amongst the groups that we were to form and we should be responsible for presenting another 60 second sell to the class.  Luckily my group didn’t ask my name and I pretended she said “Ryan M” so I didn’t feel as guilty.

Sometimes I go out of my way to accomplish something or make progress on a task only to find my efforts fail, go unnoticed or unappreciated.  Take it from a technology perspective:  Everyone is getting used to really cool websites.  If my sites don’t look graphically appealing and have fancy AJAX search boxes they’re just less cool.  Unfortunately for me I’m no expert in AJAX and my version of graphically appealing consists of background-color: blue.  People may rate me as some amateur developer because I can’t make a website that visually competes with site X but I can probably get the pageload just as fast as the other site or the database query to be as efficient as possible.  Another example, the social platform.  I’m known for eating alone, not participating in social activities, and avoiding fun like the plague. That said,  I recognize that such environment may not be as conducive to others.  My attempts to accommodate have gotten me nowhere, leaving me to wonder what faults I’m demonstrating.

Good night moon.