Fixing the problem almost always leads to thinking “Damn, I wish I had done that earlier”. Why do people do that? Maybe everyone has a tolerance for putting up with life’s miscellaneous  annoyances and thus never really find it necessary to fix. Maybe it’s just the false perception that the time and effort required to alleviate the problem isn’t worth the 1 second inconvenience caused by the problem.

Venturing away from the abstract leads me to think of one of the most illustrative examples I can think of. My ex-roommate had a small fridge in his room for his own personal stock of beverages, eggs, and other random shit. This fridge sat on a rug which in turn naturally sat on the floor. Well actually the fridge sat right in front of the rug. The preposition matters because the door was blocked from opening by the edge of the rug… so you had to step on the rug a certain way in order to let the fridge door pass over the top of it.

I watched him struggle with that for two years, for no reason. The solution? Taking 30 seconds to put some old magazines under the fridge to prop it up enough to give it clearance over the rug. Problem solved.

Take the time to evaluate the integral of annoyance over time. Compare to the effort required to solve said annoyance. Reflect, act,  and continue with your life… only better.

Can’t really blame people, though. Acoustics play a large part in it, especially in large venues. But even still people should understand the speed of sound matters once you get far enough away from something, so scratch that… you can blame people.

What absolutely kills it is when the piece features tempo changes or ritardandos at the end… you hear the audience struggle and ultimately give up as their feeble understanding of musical time and temp falls apart around them like a lean-to in a category-5 tornado. I can’t imagine what would happen if they tried to clap along with an odd meter song like The Ocean by Led Zeppelin or Take Five by Dave Brubeck…

Besides, clapping along to music is just about the corniest method of music expression out there. Shake your ass, dance, fist pump even… just don’t add your own cacophony to the performance en masse with the rest of the musically challenged audience.

Anyway, so I’m reading up on the MAX5154 12-bit DAC chip that I’m planning on using for one of my labs and I decided to bust out my 80 GB Zune. The Zune, by the way, is a seriously underrated MP3 player; I like the interface better than the latest iPod. Also, the display uses a highly reflective screen background with white text, so even in the horrible glare fest that is a Texas afternoon, the display is perfectly legible.

Back to tutoring– the tutors sit at a huge 30-person conference table and wait for students to walk in and sign up. Even with only 20 people or so, the room quickly gets VERY loud.

So I queue up T.I.’s latest album (Paper Trails) and unroll my headphones. As I bring the buds up to my ears, the buzz of activity… tutors talking to students, some guy drawing on the whiteboard, and a few frustrated freshmen all instantly disappear… replaced by the phat production of ‘Paper Trails’ slamming into my eardrums at 761 MPH. I ceased to be part of the room.

I no longer have any ability to effectively interact with anyone else… all I can do is look around the room and imagine what is going on. Like watching a TV show… everything is so one-way and inaccessible.

After a few hours of listening to music… it’s time to leave. Popping the buds out of my ear, I return to being part of the world. Turns out the token stoner EE guy has been bitching about not getting a sandwich he ordered an hour ago from Jimmy Johns… and of course those frustrated freshman are 10% closer to switching their major to liberal arts.

And so for two and a half hours, I wasn’t part of their world. Nobody talked to me… I couldn’t hear them anyway. Their stories and interactions served as nothing more than a slightly-out-of-focus backdrop to my life while I starred at this screen.

I wonder if I really missed anything?

The thing is, there’s no excuse for doing your job poorly… but especially if you have an easy-ass job. For instance:

The movie ticket-taker person: An exhaustively simple job, free from any real stress save standing around for hours at a time. Take the tickets, tear the stub, and say “left” or “right” to direct the movie-going patrons to their respective theaters. Can’t really mess that up right? Wrong. The other day, I went to go see Wanted with Anita… and our ticket taker SUCKED. Not only did he not greet us (kindly or otherwise), he struggled to tear the tickets (slowly)… and then left it to our own deductive abilities to determine which side of the theater to go to. It was rough.

Another popular variant is the fast-food cashier that not only rings your order up incorrectly, but then seems upset when they have to get the manager’s authorization to rectify their mistake. The best is when you ask for extra ranch sauce and they act like it’s the most arduous task ever… sauntering over two feet to the “sauce rack” (or whatever) and laboriously selecting the requested flavor packets before disdainfully slamming them down on your tray.

“Will that be all?” they ask. Yes. That is all. THANKS.

But this summer and last, I had a chance to see what life might be like working a typical 40-hour-a-week corporate job for a big company. It’s all there: the daily commute in shit traffic, the infamous cube farms, the meetings, and all the bureaucracy and processes you would expect to see in a Fortune 20 company with over 90,000 employees worldwide.

Corporate culture is funny to me, though. Everyone seems to have this personality they put on when interacting at the office– almost like this faux-casual way of talking, but in such a way as to not offend anyone or say something too non-PC.

There’s also the semi-awkward closeness you can develop with people you work with on a daily basis. You interact with these people every day… maybe even go out to eat lunch with them and joke around some… but in reality… you aren’t even remotely close to them. Though you might spend more time with them during the week than some friends, you don’t have even the slightest idea as to what type of music they like, what their hobbies are… their dreams, hopes, fears.

From this sort of distance that you can put yourself from your co-workers coupled with the need to work well together to be an effective team, a very weird relationship is formed. Your team is basically a bastardized family unit; everyone has his own role, status, and importance while their “real” lives back home are immaterial.

At the office, everyone is expected to do their job without outside factors effect them. Regardless of background, emotional situations, family, race, gender… anything… the second you swipe your badge and step into the building you become An Employee, with all the accrued emotional and personal baggage you carry veiled behind the business-casual attire and 5′ 10″ cubical walls.

This isn’t to say you can’t have real relationship with people at work, or that you can’t ever get to know people and develop good friends at the office… it’s more of just a reflection of the general type of interactions I’ve noticed. If you never got to know anybody on a personal level… I’m sure work would seem like an emotionless hell-hole.

And who would want to work at a place like that?

My sleep schedule will slosh around throughout the week… stretching inevitably towards an unbelievably out-of-phase cycle that might more closely resemble somebody’s day in China than it would a person’s in Austin. Even for a college engineering student, the last glowing digits I see from my alarm clock as I finally get to sleep mockingly remind me how screwed up my circadian rhythms are.

I also eat like shit the majority of the time… and I feel this is largely due to my impressively unpredictable schedule. When you get hungry at 5:30 AM, 90% of the time you’ll end up eating something that exchanges nutritional value for taste and/or ease of preparation. Some days, I’ll realize rather indifferently that I haven’t eaten anything all day, and then proceed to superficially satiate my hunger with some less-than-healthy meal, or half-assedly eat a small snack only to perpetuate my permafucked eating schedule for a few more hours.

My regularly scheduled workout routine from last semester has all been for not… as my infrequent and irregular visits to the gym serve only to unabashedly remind me that I am a fatass.

Yes… I have a shit ton of work to do. Yes, this is the most work I’ve ever had to do for school… ever. But there really isn’t any real reason as to why everything in my life has to been so shitty.

Regardless of the reason, I can only hope that the summer will bring change. Working a 9-to-5 will help regulate my sleep schedule, and unless I want to emerge at the end of August as a fat, pale, all-too-true-to-an-engineer’s-stereotype BITCH… then my fat ass will get in gear at the gym and the pool. With nothing to do besides work, I have no excuse to stand idle and let my life continue to be a chaotic mess of tangled biological absurdities.

The summer (and change) cannot come soon enough.

I hope the lack of nutrition I’ve experienced for the past 2.5 years of my life won’t have any lasting consequences extending past the short term, because all I eat is shit. The usual college limiting factors of time, money, and laziness take their greatest toll on my eating habits (mostly), and I find myself either eating way too little or way too much.

I wonder if there will come a distinct turning point in my life in which the allure of free food will cease to overcome the normal barriers erected between yummy and yucky; because everyone knows that right now, food tastes the best when it’s free.

If you haven’t guessed already from the necker-cube-esque title or the inane preceding paragraphs, this entry has absolutely no point whatsoever.

Continuing:

When I was a kid, I used to love mac and cheese loaded up with black pepper. Ever since then, I have been doing the same, but the amount of pepper required to reach my optimal level of seasoning has increased through the years.

I don’t know if this is indicative that I now have a larger area of taste buds that require more stimulation, or if I have basically fried my gustational abilities by over-saturating them a ridiculous amount of black pepper. My roommates love to think it’s the latter, and give me crap about it.

Anyway, I think I have done enough rambling. Due to cramming for an exam, my sleep schedule is out of phase by just about 180 degrees, so I might be up for a while.

It makes sense because everyone needs to fly (almost), it’s not that expensive (sorta), and since there’s not an airport every 50 feet, location bias doesn’t really come into account.

It’s just… refreshing and interesting… considering I live in west campus in Austin TX, so the average age is 21… with a standard distribution of like… three. And in the 2006-2007 year, 55% of the population was white, and only 4.2% were black.

It’s fascinating (to me, at least) to think that every person that you just happen to pass by, all the hundreds of people you just see for a fleeting moment, have full lives of their own; All with their own crazy dreams, friends, family, drama… everything. Everyone’s life is just as complex and extensive as yours. And to them, you’re entire life and experiences are just a fleeting moment to them. Perspective!

Some of those fleeting moments are more interesting than others. I sat across from a man on the plane, whom I will dub Physics Fun Man. I first took notice of the awkward, choppy conversation he was having on the phone with somebody. A dead give away that this guy was going to be interesting.

Anyway, Physics Fun Man was so called because he was holding in his lap a book entitled ‘Quantum Phase Transitions‘, and another one about percolation theory, which I’ve never even heard of.

So this guy was obviously pretty rock’n… but the image was complete when, as he got up at the end of the flight to get his bag, I noticed that in his shirt pocket (that was stuffed with misc. notes and random shit) also held a TI-83 graphing calculator.

You know, just in case you need to solve a system of linear equations or bust out a few trigonometric graphs at a moment’s notice.

Temporarily spared from waking up at any certain time (mostly), from walking 20 minutes to class, and from sitting in long lectures meagerly listening and longing to do…

Nothing.

Of course I ought to be doing… something. Like said projects, homework, and assignments… but there’s just something very therapeutically relaxing about just forgetting all that stuff and taking in the moment.

New Orleans has been awesome so far. I haven’t taken any pictures at all unfortunately, but even without the proof I have been having a badass time. In a few hours, I’m going to a craw fish broil, and then Nicolle’s orchestra concert tonight. They’ll be playing Beethoven’s Fifth (sweet).

So I will continue to hold on doing nothing for as long as I can, because at some point, I will eventually have to start doing something.

Approximately 1.3 seconds later the joyous smile has faded from your face… but with your eyes glued to the set unaware of everything but the flashing phosphorus in front of you, there remains a shitty “mouth halfway open semi smile” awkward face. Who gives a damn right? Well then you catch a slight movement out of the corner of your eye. Your animal instincts kick in! You look over to see what it was… but it was just your friend moving in his seat.

Too bad y’all made eye contact and he got a full-on view of your shitty awkward ass face. Whoops.

It happens. A corollary to this phenomenon is the “look over to the car next to you at a stop light” accidental eye contact. Do you look away quickly hoping they didn’t notice you? Do you wave? Give them the finger?

Of course a cute girl definitely deserves a wink or at least a smile… and a douche bag looking back at you deserves a mug… but what about less obvious cases? Contextual sensitive and situational evaluation is necessary.

So stop yourself from time to time… and look at your face. Does it convey the feelings of your soul? Or is it just shitty looking? Think about it.

“I Brake For Amazons, The only Bush I trust is my own, PAGAN Special Forces, Support Your Local Revolution, No War On Iraq, DEFORESTATION: The Gateway to Hell, Against Abortion? Then Don’t Have One, Who Would Jesus Bomb?, The most violent element in society is ignorance.”

And a few gay and Pagan symbols.

I’ve been driving my jeep a lot lately… man i really missed that. I’ll have it next year in Austin too… sweeeet. Anybody who’s been without their car for a while can relate.

Driving is a mix between being in love and riding a bicycle.

Like a bicycle because… you never forget how… duh.

And like love… after not seeing each other for a while… there’s always that weird period. Nothing’s changed… the handling, the response, the power.. it’s all still there, but you’re timid. You’re not sure if you should just jump back in and drive all over town as if you were driving just yesterday… even though you want to. But then after that… it’s just perfect. Just you and the car… and not a care in the world. All the time that you were separated disappears as you and the car are now back to being just like you were before you left.

Damn… I love my jeep.

And if you think that’s weird then obviously you aren’t getting enough out of your diving experience and maybe you should consider the way you approach transportation and/or life.