www.selfinjury.com/the_vent

For those of you blessed to not have experienced the reality of Ma Tech, a bit of insight to help in the description: there is no reality, only theory.

Reality comes later, I've been promised. The professor [insert any one of them here, it matters not] continually advertises how what we are doing now will lead to some very useful tools in the future. I finished last semester's course with the same question from ten years ago: "What did I just learn?"

Three weeks into Hydrology and I'm spending one hour between each class studying material that I'm pretty comfortable with, and 6 hours between each class trying to write a simple computer program to display the material.

Then there's Water Resources, a title that was randomly selected to help ensure students sign up for the course. The best face I can put on the course is that I think that I am being taught something that may help me in high-level computations of something in the future, assuming that I am involved with those computations for some reason. The first homework is a simple problem... except that it cannot be solved without computations... so let us venture into the world of computer programming again. While the general discussion topics are within conceptual grasp, I am 20+ hours into teaching myself MatLab, with not much working and little enery left.

I am hoping, praying, that somehow I both make it through this semester learning a bit of the class information, and (apparently) more importantly, how to program.

www.selfinjury.com

I just walked out of a Hydrology class at good ol' Ma Tech. I thought I knew what hydrology was. Thought I engaged in it on a regular basis at work. Thought I had actually taught others about the subject.
Apparently, I've been using the wrong word all these years, because what I thought was 'hydrology' must be something else. Today, in an hour of indecipherable rambling, I caught a glimpse of what the professor deemed as hydrology. Assuming he has the correct definition means that I don't know anything about hydrology, because I had no idea what he was talking about.
I am actually paying this place to make me feel dumb.

Vizzini: "Inconceivable!"
Inigo Montoya: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means"

facing your childhood fears

The Alan of the 80's was a bit different than the over-confident machismo you interact with today. Being the youngest kid in my neighborhood, and small for my age, I found myself partaking in the grand activity of watching others have fun.

For instance, I watched my friends conquer Zelda, play quarterback, pitch, pick first, cuss, talk about girls... I digress.

Not to say that there were no pleasures provided me. If anyone was needed to climb down into the storm basin to get the ball, I was your man (boy, I mean). Or, if a quick errand over to another's home to invite them out to play presented itself, and you could count on my fresh legs.

So it is now, at age 33, that I find myself faced with an enemy of all children of the 80's (that is, except for me, as I only watched other spew frustration): the Rubik's Cube. The Christmas present of my 8-year old daughter, who immediately asked her noble father to show her how to fix it. And seeing as though she still believes I hung the moon, I will spend the remainder of my natural born life tackling this object of wrath.

It is on.