One of the big factors for me not doing a PhD was because of how hard and scary it was for me to read academic papers. This was before I knew I had ADHD, which explains a lot – but today I went and learned spectral clustering, and then read two papers regarding community detection for my graph ML class. I’m incredibly proud of myself because this is one of those things that I was terrified about before that now is not as scary.
Something that I'm afraid of is being forgotten or neglected by my friends. I don't really think it's the latter so I guess my fear is being forgotten. I feel like I kind of fade into the background and they forget I exist and their lives just kind of go on and I'm no longer in that chapter and that scares me.
When I got home yesterday something went wrong and I didn't have any power, and so I ended up asking S and L if I could come over. They said yes and I ended up helping L with math homework for a while which was nice since it's a subject I never really learned. They all got to see Hash and play with him which was nice. I both drove there and back with my new car, and looking back at it I feel like 14 year old me would think I'm living my dream. I'm not quite sure why I don't feel that way, probably due to the gradual changes of life as a whole and how my dreams and goals consistently shift with time. But I guess this is something I've been taking for granted that I just wanted to be mindful of.
Tomorrow my sections are starting and I slowly am getting more and more surrounded by past students, which is both a nice but also strange experience. I have a couple ULA’s in the class I’m now TA’ing that have been my students before, and even in my grad classes friends I’m making are past students of mine. I guess I’ve also been on the other end of this with R last year, and ngl that went pretty ass because of them so hey it is what it is lol.
I also did go to the engineering field day today, and to no ones surprise almost everyone in my dept was pretty antisocial. I’m proud of myself for pushing myself out of my shell and talking and starting conversations with everyone there. Our team placed dead last, without winning a SINGLE competition and I had so much fun. It was a blast.
I don’t think I ever write something truly light-hearted so how representative can this really be of a journal of me? I bought a bean bag chair on Amazon for the first time and I ordered the 6ft size because I thought it would be like long, and this way I could fully fit. Yeah no it’s like fully round. This thing spans my fucking bed and Hash loves it. 10/10.
Yesterday I went to bed at 6:30 pm and today I woke up around 10 am. I think that helped my headache a ton, and my body does feel a lot better. I’m hoping I’m fully recovered by tomorrow. I also finally got around to laundry today once I got home, but turns out I forgot the laundry is locked up at 8 – so my clothes are now going to be wet and sitting overnight and I have to wake up in the morning to go rewash and get them. Hooray.
I actually did it! I followed through with something I wanted to do, and so I found someone who offered me their heat gun to use. Their name was R, and they’re actually pretty cool! He helped me debadge my car and I got to learn about him, like his bikes and things like that which was cool. I think it was both a great experience in terms of results, but also because it’s another experience of getting along with people. I also had my first date with M, which went well and we have another date tomorrow. I don’t want to speculate too much about it as I want to not get in my head about it, but that’s something I’m excited for.
Short post to be intentionally cryptic, but I feel like I’m permanently moving the goalpost past what’s reasonable and I don’t know why I keep doing this. This feels like a recipe for regret.
Earlier today at the gym I was listening to Sabrina Carpenter after looping one of her songs (read your mind) for multiple months now. One album by her was called emails I can’t send or something like that, and I originally misread it as emails I can’t read. I thought that was a fairly interesting change on the trope, of instead it being something about the other person’s point of view. Knowing that there were things unsaid to you that you can never really hear, I wonder how that changes the perspective on things. In my eyes it kinda feels like a weird level of guilt, knowing you’ve done something bad enough to warrant someone needing to avoid communicating with you so badly, and I feel like you really want that closure and that information. But also what do I know, I’m barely lucid it’s late at night.
I hung out with some other friends today, and had a really good workout. I scheduled meeting some new people, and also had a lot of fun playing league with A. S messaged me which was really nice because I asked him to a bit ago and he listened and remembered which matters so much to me. I feel much better.