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There are two sections to this post. One is about my personal dilemma of having lots of free time but never seeming to have any time at all. The second is a rant about textbooks.
Part one: Me going mad
I'm currently feeling a little bit mad. Don't worry I'm not some sort of pit of self-hate and angst right now, I just feel like I need a recharge, like the best thing in the world would be to lie down and sleep and sit and eat and not leave the couch/bed (I think when I own a house a couch that can easily be slept upon without having to sit my legs up on an armrest or twist my body into strange positions to sleep upon will be a must) for week. The thing is I don't think I'm overstressed or overworked, quite the opposite in fact.
I do get a decent amount of work prescribed in college every week, but I only just try to get through that and it's not extremely health for my mind. It feels like long streams of work with no reward. Seeing my mark on the page doesn't satisfy or gratify me. This is what I need. I need to feel productive. I feel like I haven't achieved anything in ages despite putting in lots of thought and mental work into my course just to understand and keep up with the material.
One of the major issues is my free time seems so scattered. I get an hour here or there between lectures, then I often end up at some friends' house afterwards as they live about thirty seconds from campus and then spend most evenings with my girlfriend. It's all lovely and I don't want to spend less time with any of them, in fact, I'd probably like to spend more but there are a limited number of hours in a day, but I don't seem to get much time to do anything productive outside of college work. I get a good deal of free time but it's dispersed far too much to feel like I'm getting anything really done.
You can't write something well by doing a sentence or two and then coming back to do the next two sentences later and you don't draw something by doing a few lines and coming back later. My free time ends up getting eaten by Cracked.com, forums and spending ten minutes trying to get the timing right in Abe's Oddysee.
Just to make sure we're clear on this; when I say "productive", I don't necessarily mean anything truly significant. Anything would be good. Writing half an essay, drawing a significant chunk of something (if I can ever find the pen for my graphics tablet again), finishing off my TF2 brainstorming thread or even just getting to sit down and play a single game and make progress in it for two hours would be fantastic. Of course I have weekends but I tend to spend these in a happy daze of forums and cartoons which I think helps relax my brain from college and I'm not sure I want to change that, but I think I should set aside an evening every week to do things. I haven't decided on it yet but Tuesday or Wednesday evenings seem to be best.
As such, on midweeks I hope to put something up on this forum, whether it's an blog-like article on my thoughts on a subject (which is, as it happens, what is what I have in store for you bellow), a drawing or comic to put in the imag dump, or an update to bump tthe in-progress thread I made in the gaming section. If I fail to produce things after this announcement, please feel free to call me out on it for if just fall back into routine I will be sorely annoyed with myself.
In any case tonight was the night I snapped. I was setting my alarm for the morning when I decided that I would get up early tomorrow and try to get something productive done. Then I said **** that and decided to do it right now. So out my laptop came and I have it over my lap as I lie in bed typing this. The following is my first blog-like musings on a matter that I plan on posting. I have a few other ideas, some of which I had to the good sense to save in a text file as a reminded, the rest of which I hope to be able to summon back when it's not 1am.
I'm already feeling a bit better just for having written the above rant. In any case here is another rant. This one is about college textbooks.
Part two: Textbooks
[There was supposed to be a little comic strip as an introduction, but as I mentioned earlier I can't find my bloody pen for my graphics tablet right now and I also don't have a scanner]
Dear textbook, **** you. “This will be left as an exercise to the reader.” What the flying ****? You are supposed to be tell me how to prove things, not the other way around. Why do you think I'm even reading you? I have a problem set due in three hours and I need this damn proof. I didn't spend sixty bucks on you (or download you as a pdf/djvu, but you don't know that) so you could tell me to do it myself.
What makes you think I have the mental capacity right now to deal with this? I'm doing a damn science course. I have several hours of lectures a day, a couple of problem sets a week and lab reports that take goddamn hours to write (not to mention the labs themselves, which also take hours). I am tired all of the time just from the sheer amount of thinking I have to do. I bought you to do the thinking for me. After a long day in college my brain has the consistency of warm icecream. I need to watch Friends reruns just to stop brain matter leaking out my ears.
This is what therapy looks like
Also, what the hell makes you think I have time to do your job for you anyway? Like I said earlier, I'm doing a science degree. I have lectures, problem sets, labs, tutorials and lab reports every single week. I currently have to choose to either hang out with my friends or play computer games. I don't have time to do both. The internet and books the only consistently available pastimes I have left. Are you really trying to make me choose between beer, Team Fortress 2 and deriving equations you're supposed to be teaching me? What in your papery little book brain tells you that I would even consider the third option? If you think this you must be mad!
MAD! MAD! MAD!
So please, just do your job and I'll do my job and no one has to tear up anyone else into little strips and set them on fire or have a nervous meltdown. I think that sounds fair. So let's put our differences aside. For science. You monster.
So in summary, I don't really know how to write a proper summary any more (thanks, college) and it's pretty sad that this is half the length of my rant about needing to flex my creative juices but that was probably too rambling in anyway. I look forward to the book-related puns.
Part one: Me going mad
I'm currently feeling a little bit mad. Don't worry I'm not some sort of pit of self-hate and angst right now, I just feel like I need a recharge, like the best thing in the world would be to lie down and sleep and sit and eat and not leave the couch/bed (I think when I own a house a couch that can easily be slept upon without having to sit my legs up on an armrest or twist my body into strange positions to sleep upon will be a must) for week. The thing is I don't think I'm overstressed or overworked, quite the opposite in fact.
I do get a decent amount of work prescribed in college every week, but I only just try to get through that and it's not extremely health for my mind. It feels like long streams of work with no reward. Seeing my mark on the page doesn't satisfy or gratify me. This is what I need. I need to feel productive. I feel like I haven't achieved anything in ages despite putting in lots of thought and mental work into my course just to understand and keep up with the material.
One of the major issues is my free time seems so scattered. I get an hour here or there between lectures, then I often end up at some friends' house afterwards as they live about thirty seconds from campus and then spend most evenings with my girlfriend. It's all lovely and I don't want to spend less time with any of them, in fact, I'd probably like to spend more but there are a limited number of hours in a day, but I don't seem to get much time to do anything productive outside of college work. I get a good deal of free time but it's dispersed far too much to feel like I'm getting anything really done.
You can't write something well by doing a sentence or two and then coming back to do the next two sentences later and you don't draw something by doing a few lines and coming back later. My free time ends up getting eaten by Cracked.com, forums and spending ten minutes trying to get the timing right in Abe's Oddysee.
Just to make sure we're clear on this; when I say "productive", I don't necessarily mean anything truly significant. Anything would be good. Writing half an essay, drawing a significant chunk of something (if I can ever find the pen for my graphics tablet again), finishing off my TF2 brainstorming thread or even just getting to sit down and play a single game and make progress in it for two hours would be fantastic. Of course I have weekends but I tend to spend these in a happy daze of forums and cartoons which I think helps relax my brain from college and I'm not sure I want to change that, but I think I should set aside an evening every week to do things. I haven't decided on it yet but Tuesday or Wednesday evenings seem to be best.
As such, on midweeks I hope to put something up on this forum, whether it's an blog-like article on my thoughts on a subject (which is, as it happens, what is what I have in store for you bellow), a drawing or comic to put in the imag dump, or an update to bump tthe in-progress thread I made in the gaming section. If I fail to produce things after this announcement, please feel free to call me out on it for if just fall back into routine I will be sorely annoyed with myself.
In any case tonight was the night I snapped. I was setting my alarm for the morning when I decided that I would get up early tomorrow and try to get something productive done. Then I said **** that and decided to do it right now. So out my laptop came and I have it over my lap as I lie in bed typing this. The following is my first blog-like musings on a matter that I plan on posting. I have a few other ideas, some of which I had to the good sense to save in a text file as a reminded, the rest of which I hope to be able to summon back when it's not 1am.
I'm already feeling a bit better just for having written the above rant. In any case here is another rant. This one is about college textbooks.
Part two: Textbooks
[There was supposed to be a little comic strip as an introduction, but as I mentioned earlier I can't find my bloody pen for my graphics tablet right now and I also don't have a scanner]
Dear textbook, **** you. “This will be left as an exercise to the reader.” What the flying ****? You are supposed to be tell me how to prove things, not the other way around. Why do you think I'm even reading you? I have a problem set due in three hours and I need this damn proof. I didn't spend sixty bucks on you (or download you as a pdf/djvu, but you don't know that) so you could tell me to do it myself.
What makes you think I have the mental capacity right now to deal with this? I'm doing a damn science course. I have several hours of lectures a day, a couple of problem sets a week and lab reports that take goddamn hours to write (not to mention the labs themselves, which also take hours). I am tired all of the time just from the sheer amount of thinking I have to do. I bought you to do the thinking for me. After a long day in college my brain has the consistency of warm icecream. I need to watch Friends reruns just to stop brain matter leaking out my ears.
This is what therapy looks like
Also, what the hell makes you think I have time to do your job for you anyway? Like I said earlier, I'm doing a science degree. I have lectures, problem sets, labs, tutorials and lab reports every single week. I currently have to choose to either hang out with my friends or play computer games. I don't have time to do both. The internet and books the only consistently available pastimes I have left. Are you really trying to make me choose between beer, Team Fortress 2 and deriving equations you're supposed to be teaching me? What in your papery little book brain tells you that I would even consider the third option? If you think this you must be mad!
MAD! MAD! MAD!
So please, just do your job and I'll do my job and no one has to tear up anyone else into little strips and set them on fire or have a nervous meltdown. I think that sounds fair. So let's put our differences aside. For science. You monster.
So in summary, I don't really know how to write a proper summary any more (thanks, college) and it's pretty sad that this is half the length of my rant about needing to flex my creative juices but that was probably too rambling in anyway. I look forward to the book-related puns.
. Though it is annoying when they do that. The only bad textbook experience I remember was when it kept using the phrases "obviously..." and "of course..." everywhere.
