Category: Chapters

I was putting a book on my shelf today when I knocked another book down. I found this folded piece of paper stuffed in the book, used as a book mark almost 2 years ago. This is the paper:

The pen rests in my hand, my finger twitching. I reach back to scratch my neck, closing my eyes as I rub my dirty hair. I want to write, I want to tell you what I think, I want to let my thoughts flow onto paper like paint, where that can coalesce into something I can begin to understand. Sometimes I tell myself I don’t want you, that you’re mean and treat me poorly. But one smile and I’m yours again. You don’t let me stay free for long, even though you don’t really seem to notice.

I never really cared about his bumbling of his relationship with his girlfriend, I just didn’t want the person so close to me to hold what I wanted so much. It’s puzzling that I would fend of others from that which I dare not touch. But then again this has never been my most successful game.

Daemon – So why haven’t you done anything, Samuel?
Me – I don’t know . . .
Daemon – Wrong! You know, tell me.
Me – Uh, because I’m a pansy?
Daemon – Wrong! Tell me.
Me – I’m shy!
Daemon – You are not shy and you know it. You can treat absolute strangers like they are your best friends!
Me – (stammering) Um, it’s cause I can’t find the best time to say something!
Daemon – Fool! You think about things your friends don’t dream of, you must know that such a time does not exist unless you create it!
Me – It’s cause I don’t want to lose her as a friend!
Daemon – Well, you aren’t exactly chums right now, are you? It would seem that all this talk of keeping her as a friend has made you so uncomfortable around her that you can’t do even that.
Me – (silence)
Daemon – So where do you stand, Samuel?
Me – I . . . I . . . stand nowhere but here . . . by myself . . .

As I look at this scribbled nonsense, I wonder what you would say if you read it. Would you know it was about you? Or would you say “Boy, this poor poor child has too much time on his hands. Sam, go program a loop and let someone else give this creativity thing a shot.” I doubt you’ll ever read this, as most of my ramblings end up where I somehow think this is headed, the trash.

Scenario: Girl is complaining because her guy doesn’t know that she’s mad at him, so she gets madder.

I don’t quite understand what is so difficult here. I know I don’t know what you are thinking, so if you don’t tell me, I’m probably not going to figure it out. You said you were tired of telling me that you were mad at me. Well, I’m tired of you being mad at me!! It doesn’t help to know that you are mad at me; it helps to know how I can make you happy. Tell me what to do; don’t respect my ability to read your mind.

I admit it, I am just a guy. Not a renaissance man who will serenade you with poems and flowers at every turn of the corner. I can’t afford to take you to fancy restaurants every weekend, and frankly I can barely afford Wendy’s every weekend. I forget to call, I forget to visit, and I had a life before I met you that I’d like to continue to lead to a certain extent.

I didn’t see you in your winter hat from across the street, but that doesn’t mean I don’t care and was trying to avoid you. I didn’t see you since Thursday, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t want to, it doesn’t mean I don’t miss you. If there is one thing that I dislike about women (and there is really so much to like), it is the obsession with being subtle. I may say stupid shit every once and a while, but at least I don’t expect everyone to spend hours poring over what I said to understand some finer detail.

I’ve been going out with you for over a semester, and I really like you. If I just took a mid term and I’m a little dazed, don’t take it as a personal attack if I am unresponsive when we walk a block together. If you find a guy that won’t do the things I do then you should run to him, I want you to be happy. But if you love me as I love you, then please let me fuddle my way through this.

– This is what I wish someone I know would say to his girlfriend. Again, I have no lady I am crooning over, but I am friends with both sides of a couple and I hate seeing the girl getting upset over things the guy doesn’t even know he’s doing.

Scenario: Girl and guy in car on turnpike. Girl is thirsty, a rest stop is coming up.
Girl – thought: (I am thirsty.)
Girl – speech: “Are you thirsty?”
Guy – thought: (Nope.)
Guy – speech: “Nope.”

Couple passes the rest stop

Girl – thought (I can’t believe I had sex with such an asshole!)
Girl – speech “Why did you pass it by? I was thirsty!”
Guy – thought: (But you didn’t say you were thirsty!)
Guy catches himself before he is hit with a purse
Guy – speech: “I’m sorry honey, I’ll stop at the next exit.”

I have always been slightly bitter about good weather. I don’t know where the feeling came from, maybe it has to do with being home schooled or living in Alaska, I don’t really know. But when the sun is out, I am just a little less happy than everyone else.

When the sun is out, the runners take to the track, the tennis players to the courts, the boaters to the lakes, the basketball players to the courts, and so on. But I am none of those.

When the rain comes, and the wind picks up and cuts through your coat like a knife, then everyone is cut down. No one wants to go outside to weather the elements. Instead you are in survival mode, your goal being to stay alive and healthy.

One thing I say a lot is that “There is no such thing as too cold, only insufficient clothing.” I believe that, and I relish the full conditions. I like the windy dreary days much more than the sunny days, because when the conditions get bad, you can tell who you can trust.

I was hiking with a friend in the Grand Tetons. We were at the end of a 20 mile hike, and we had reached the mouth of the canyon we had explored. A storm had chased us down the canyon for hours, and had finally caught up to us. The lighting exploded every minute, and the rain hit our ponchos us hard. We were climbing down a cliff that was so slippery if you took a bad step you could fall over 40 feet to the rocky outcroppings below. I turned around to find my brothers gone, no where to be seen. The thunder echoed down the canyon in a tremendous rumble like the roar of a god. I turned to Justin and smiled, how often do you end up in this situation? He smiled back.

Every day is an adventure. The weather determines how you handle each day. What fun is a bright and sunny day that makes you work to have adventures? In full conditions, when your first thought is survival, just standing still is an exhilarating experience.

Last semester my roommate got a Fredericks of Hollywood catalog in the mail. Giddy, he started to cut out the pages and put them on the wall. Since we shared the room, it was my duty to either protest this or join in the fun. Being a warm blooded male I got out the scissors, and after a flurry of activity, the wall by the windows filled with 98 pictures of scantily dressed women.

My roomy was proud and immediately invited down a girl from upstairs who had scantily clad men on her walls. She expressed absolutely no interest in making the trip, and to this day looks down at our messy floor to avert her eyes from our wall. When it was first established, the Hollywood wall drew many comments, mostly from the girls. “Wow,” followed by leaving the room was in the same crowd as “Hey, I have that!”

I draw no particular pleasure from the sight of these lingerie models anymore. They have stopped being fun to look at, and have reached the point of being an eyesore. The only images that still catch my gaze are the ones that are closest to fully clothed. I doubt I could ever get tired of looking at gorgeous women, but there is definitely something to be said for leaving things to the imagination.

I tear my eyes away from the screen to look at my clock. 2:30 AM. Damn, later than I thought. I glanced at my roommate in his bunk, gently snoring as he had been for the past several hours. Must feel good to be a physics major.
My monitor attracts my attention again, and I turn back to the project at hand. A grey window sits in the center of the screen, saying simply

The instruction at “0x00402612” referenced memory at “0xcccccccc”. The memory could not be “read”.

It didn’t go away. I’d been over the code what seemed like 100 times. The pad of paper to my left that had my notes was filled with abstract trees filled with numbers, letters and hexadecimal memory addresses. I had started right after dinner, the night before it was due. Shruti did also, and she told me she was done at around 11:00. I asked how she had done the problem, and she said that she used a matrix. It was fast, efficient, and it worked. She said goodnight and I started working again, trying to figure out why my trees didn’t like to grow past being decrepit stumps.

A matrix.

I was using a vector to store inputted values and then quick sorting the contents. Once quick sorted, I made an array of 0 depth binary trees and then went through the sorted list adding elements together dynamically into an ever growing single binary tree. Once done I planned on an in-order traversal to get the final list.

A fucking matrix.

3:40 AM: Restate my assumptions. The easiest way to do a problem rarely impresses anyone. I know my way works. I know it in my head, on the paper, but not on the screen. I have had every error you can imagine, even one that said “Internal error 42167: Contact Microsoft technical support or reinstall Visual Studio”. Unfazed I kept on, not flinching in my goal of combining 6 different chapters into one beautiful and fluid program.

The extent of this complication force on my life is great, to the point my friends have come up with a term for what I do, when I complicate a problem: Baconize.

I turned on some low techno, even though it could have been loud, Dave wouldn’t have noticed. Turning back to my computer screen, my head filled with vectors and nodes, and I continued into hour 11 of what turned out to be an 18 hour project. I continue to remind myself that I’m just a freshman, and that it’s downhill from here . . .