I Am

Well, the first three weeks of the semester went pretty well. I ended up dropping an international relations class so I could do more research and spend more time on OS...it was really liberating to be able to say "this just doesn't sound interesting; I'd rather be doing engineer stuff..." and then be able to change things around to my liking. OS should be a good class, even if I do end up putting quite a few hours into it.

I spent a long time in the lab earlier this week trying to make some headway, and didn't get very far. I talked to my adviser about it yesterday and we figured out a way for me to start making progress on some other things, hopefully without losing too much of the work I've already done. CMU has so many amazing faculty members...I'm really going to miss it after I graduate.

OS has been getting pretty intense also. We got feedback for our first (ok, zeroth) project today, and I made a couple really silly mistakes, though I don't know how my actual grade came out. They have a policy of releasing the comments and feedback before we see our grade, and I think that's a good philosophy since it forces us to actually look at what they said and learn from it.

I got somewhat behind on the current project from spending so much time in the lab earlier this week, and so I may not sleep much between now and Monday. The good news is that I'm enjoying it. I don't think I'd be able to handle the workload and the stress if I wasn't really interested in spending the hours working on it. I'm relatively sure that I'll become less and less chipper about it as the semester goes on, but for now things still seem pretty good.

In other news, I have a new pet peeve. It makes me uncomfortable when I'm talking to someone, and they turn everything that gets said back around into a segue for them to talk about themselves. (This is distinct from sitting around swapping anecdotes, which is itself a really satisfying form of conversation). It's just frustrating because when people talk to me I generally take the time to actually listen and respond to their situation, so I tend to assume that people are going to be willing to do the same for me. I know it's only human nature to be more concerned with one's own life and situation, (and you could probably argue that it's a bit self centered of me to expect that a conversation be about me) but sometimes it starts to feel really dehumanizing.