Ask me whether what I have done is my life.

Some time when the river is ice ask me mistakes I have made,
Ask me whether what I have done is my life.
Others have come in their slow way into my thought,
and some have tried to help or to hurt:
Ask me what difference their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look at the silent river and wait.
We know the current is there, hidden;
and there are comings and goings from miles away that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say

William Stafford, (c) 1977

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.