vacation
Ahh, vacation. The long lazy lounging days of having nothing in particular to worry about or feel like you should be doing. Too bad my brain doesn't entirely work that way...
So here's the weird thing. I'm used to exactly two types of vacations in the past. Vacation #1 (most common during high school and during grad school application season) isn't really a vacation at all - it's just a chance to stay home all day long working on homework or applications or projects of various sorts that didn't get done during term-time proper. Vacation #2 (the Tech vacation) is when you drive yourself within a hair's-breadth of your breaking point in the weeks & months leading up to it, and once the vacation actually starts you collapse and spend most of the time sleeping and recuperating.
Strangely, what we seem to have now is a whole different type of vacation - the unneeded, undeserved vacation. There wasn't any huge crunch of work and exhaustion leading up to it. There wasn't even much of a feeling of productivity leading up to it. Nor is there any particular work that needs to get done during this vacation. What's "worse", I can't do any work even if I wanted to because it seems that the entire compute cluster I need to run jobs on decided to crash and burn the day after the computer officers sent out an email saying they were leaving for the holidays and no more computer help was happening until January. So now my brain is confused. It's saying "Hey, I'm not exhausted and shutting down yet but there's no work for me to do. I'm going to spontaneously explode now and make pictures of prancing alpacas."
I tried to do some background reading - catch up on all that pchem I'll be expected to know at my Viva, but somehow I can't make myself concentrate. I think my brain is getting all atrophied and lazy already in grad school. I can focus alright at work, but generally there isn't really much thinking involved - just endless coding and debugging and testing. I can't seem to make myself seriously study or think about anything without some kind of specific test or something looming in the future. It's so easy to just gloss over everything with a 'that doesn't look too hard, I could figure it out if I bothered...' sort of attitude. I am not pleased. Stupid brain - no biscuit for you.
At any rate, that's just something that's been annoying me more and more over the past few months. But that doesn't mean I'm not enjoying this vacation. We're in Tyler at the moment, but heading back to Fremont tomorrow for some upcoming New Years' hilarity. Oh yeah, and some shopping for things that are far easier to buy here than in England. Mmmmm... I'm gonna get non-blistery shoes at last.
Also, I'd just like to say - two liter soda bottles here look weird. I don't remember them being so short and squat before! And why is a Texan accent so much easier to pick up than a British one?
So here's the weird thing. I'm used to exactly two types of vacations in the past. Vacation #1 (most common during high school and during grad school application season) isn't really a vacation at all - it's just a chance to stay home all day long working on homework or applications or projects of various sorts that didn't get done during term-time proper. Vacation #2 (the Tech vacation) is when you drive yourself within a hair's-breadth of your breaking point in the weeks & months leading up to it, and once the vacation actually starts you collapse and spend most of the time sleeping and recuperating.
Strangely, what we seem to have now is a whole different type of vacation - the unneeded, undeserved vacation. There wasn't any huge crunch of work and exhaustion leading up to it. There wasn't even much of a feeling of productivity leading up to it. Nor is there any particular work that needs to get done during this vacation. What's "worse", I can't do any work even if I wanted to because it seems that the entire compute cluster I need to run jobs on decided to crash and burn the day after the computer officers sent out an email saying they were leaving for the holidays and no more computer help was happening until January. So now my brain is confused. It's saying "Hey, I'm not exhausted and shutting down yet but there's no work for me to do. I'm going to spontaneously explode now and make pictures of prancing alpacas."
I tried to do some background reading - catch up on all that pchem I'll be expected to know at my Viva, but somehow I can't make myself concentrate. I think my brain is getting all atrophied and lazy already in grad school. I can focus alright at work, but generally there isn't really much thinking involved - just endless coding and debugging and testing. I can't seem to make myself seriously study or think about anything without some kind of specific test or something looming in the future. It's so easy to just gloss over everything with a 'that doesn't look too hard, I could figure it out if I bothered...' sort of attitude. I am not pleased. Stupid brain - no biscuit for you.
At any rate, that's just something that's been annoying me more and more over the past few months. But that doesn't mean I'm not enjoying this vacation. We're in Tyler at the moment, but heading back to Fremont tomorrow for some upcoming New Years' hilarity. Oh yeah, and some shopping for things that are far easier to buy here than in England. Mmmmm... I'm gonna get non-blistery shoes at last.
Also, I'd just like to say - two liter soda bottles here look weird. I don't remember them being so short and squat before! And why is a Texan accent so much easier to pick up than a British one?