Alphabet Project: Exam Day

I flip through the pages of my midterm, checking the answers one more time. I'm mad that I don't have a clue on the bonus question, but excited to be at a school where the professors are nerdy enough to ask the students to name all four members of teen girl squad for extra credit. It feels cool, in a completely uncool way. It makes me feel like I fit in, completely, finally.

I finish double-checking. Chemistry isn't my strongest subject and it would be awful to fail my very first college exam.  I think I got everything right though. Or right enough. Even with that awful song playing through my mind

I love frosh chem, I love frosh chem, I love frosh chem, each and every day

The sophomores were blasting it on repeat over every speaker on campus last night

I love frosh chem, I love frosh chem, I love frosh chem, in every single way

 Occasionally they interjected it with a loop of slightly more useful songs set to Beatles tunes.

nrt, nrt, nrt, nrt.  The pressure times the volume, nrt.

I'll never be able to listen to Let It Be again without hearing the revised lyrics. I'll also never forget the ideal gas law. I guess that's a win.

I walk to the front of the room and add my paper to the stack of completed tests. Then I turn and leave the lecture hall.

Outside, I take a deep breath and enjoy the Southern California sunshine for a moment before beginning the trek back to my dorm. I'd been hearing about this exam, the First Frosh Chem Test, since I interviewed as a prospective student. It wasn't nearly as bad as everyone had led me to believe.

I join the flock of other freshmen who have completed the exam heading back to our dorms. Everyone's chatting about plans for the rest of the day. No one has another class until the afternoon, and with the pressure of the exam gone it seems like we have all the time in the world to relax.

Approaching the residential end of campus I notice that it's a lot louder than normal. Normally the only people outside this early are either on their way to or from class. But most of the upperclassmen are outside. Running back and forth with water guns and hoses.

A water balloon splashes on the sidewalk next to me, followed quickly by another. Some of the frosh are trying to dodge out of the way, others are running to see what the excitement is all about.

The dorms are absolute chaos. A pyramid of dressers, drawers, and bookshelves is displayed in the courtyard. It seems to be as tall as the dorm itself. An entire room has been recreated in the courtyard as well. A couple of cages house freshmen who have been soaked and are now enjoying beers while upperclassmen occasionally hose them down again.

Another dorm has stacked 50 or more mattresses into a pile near the balcony. Students are taking turns jumping from the second story onto it.

A clothesline has been strung up diagonally across the courtyard with all sorts of underwear on display: boxers, briefs, panties, and bras.

There's a full-fledged water balloon fight happening, though the sophomores seem to control nearly all of the ammunition. Frosh are stealing what they can, but are usually promptly punished for their cunning with sprays of water.

I continue on to my dorm, on the far end of campus. I want to put my calculator away before joining in the fun. At the entrance to my dorm I encounter a hastily constructed labyrinth of fences. I have to go through it to reach my room, and there are sophomores stationed all around to pour buckets of water on me, drop water balloons, or spray me with a water gun.

I hold up my calculator in defense. One of them points to the alternate route that's been set up if I don't want to get wet, but I opt to simply hand her my calculator instead. They pass it along while I make my way through the labyrinth. At the other end, I feel like I've been dunked in a pool. Happily my calculator remains dry and functional.

My roommate has already been back to the room. It seems that she had to deal with a hundred Dixie cups stapled together and filled with water. I'm glad she got here first and dismantled them. I throw my stuff on the bed and dash back to the water fight and pile of mattresses. A campus-wide party is the perfect way to blow off steam after my first college exam.

I Hate Mornings

One mistake can completely throw me off.

It takes me a long time to wake up. I get out of bed an hour before I actually have to leave the house so that I can be somewhat coherent. Even then my brain lags a bit behind the rest of me.

This lack of cognitive function is the main reason I value my morning routine so highly. When I do the exact same thing every day, I know that everything gets done. I don't end up leaving the house without a shirt or forgetting to comb my hair when I stick to my routine. Changing my routine takes a while, and I'm still adjusting to the fact that we have a dog now.

This morning was mostly fine. I left the house and locked the door and walked over to the metro. I had a nagging feeling that something was wrong, but I tried to ignore it. Whatever I'd forgotten to do could probably wait until I get home. (There's a reason I feed the cat at night instead of in the morning. I've messed that one up a few times.) I said good morning to the man who hands out newspapers and got on the train.

In the time it took me to travel two stops, I realized that I shouldn't have locked the door. Kevin had rushed out with a hasty "good-bye" just before me. But he wasn't headed to work; he was walking the dog. He almost never takes his keys when walking the dog meaning that I had probably locked him out of the house. When I leave the house in the morning, I typically lock the door, remember that Kevin is walking the dog, and unlock the door. Today it took me a lot longer than normal to get to that second step.

I tried to call, but there was no answer on his phone. Convinced that he'd also left his phone in the house and remembering that he had an important client meeting, I hopped off the train and grabbed a cab. The cab would save me the time spent walking from the metro back to my house.

I expected that I'd arrive to Kevin and the dog sitting on our front step trying to figure out what to do. Instead the stoop was empty, and his car was gone. Having been locked out of the house the day before, he had actually taken his keys with him while walking the dog. Crisis averted non-existent. I ended up getting to work about half an hour late.

It doesn't seem quite as bad now that I've calmed down and realized that nothing was terribly messed up. Work didn't really care that I was late (luckily I didn't have any early meetings), and I'm out the cost of the cab fare which isn't the end of the world. But I'm still mad at myself for my complete inability to think clearly in the mornings.

Hello, Abs

Back in high school, I actually had decent abs. This was mostly due to a slightly insane ab routine I had to do twice a week in ballet class. The teacher would put on The Lonely Goatherd from The Sound of Music. If you haven't heard it, it's an incredibly fast song. Then we'd have to do crunches for the entirety of it, one on every beat. My friend and I calculated this once and it came out to about 300 crunches in less than 5 minutes. I'm not sure how I ever survived that.

Fast forward to today when I'm having a hard time doing any crunches. I have very few muscles in my lower back. This means it's hard to keep my back flat on the floor when I'm doing ab work. When my back arches up, I end up using my back muscles instead of my ab muscles to sit up. This results in pain - and not the good kind.

I do have exercises to strengthen my back that I've been doing, and they seem to be working. So over the weekend I decided to give my old crunch routine a go. Not the whole thing, don't worry. The routine itself was one I'd been doing for years that my ballet master simply sped up and made us repeat a few more times. It consists of eight crunches each in six different positions: both feet flat on floor, right leg straight up in air, left leg straight up in air, both legs straight up, legs straddled, legs bent at knee with lower legs parallel to floor. I decided to just go through it once to see how I felt.

The good news is that I survived, though I had to cut down to a partial routine for the next couple of days because my abs were absolutely killing me.

The better news is that a few days later, my lower back exercises finally seemed to kick in in a big way. Either that or my abs finally strengthened enough that 10 crunches no longer leave them fatigued. Either way, the last time I went to the gym, I was able to do my entire ab routine without using half of my focus to keep my back flat. This is definitely progress.

Now that I can actually work on my abs without injuring myself, I'm looking forward to getting back to a flat stomach. Assuming I can stay motivated.

Alphabet Project: Know-It-All

 Know It All

All freshmen are required to take Special Relativity during their first semester at Mudd. It's taught pass/fail which takes some of the pressure off. And really, the math is pretty simple. Just multiply all your standard mechanics equations by gamma and you're good to go. The difficulty lies in the concepts.  Time slows down and space stretches out. The only constant is the speed of light and it is always constant.  You cannot travel faster than the speed of light. Even if two rhinos are charging at each other, both traveling 300,000,000 meters per second, they will approach each other at 300,000,000 meters per second. The math works out, but it takes a while to wrap your brain around.

Worse, these new concepts lead to all sorts of ideas that seem to contradict themselves. Half of our time is devoted to unraveling these paradoxes and trying to make some sense out of them.

Professor Emeritus technically retired last year.  But he knows this subject so well that he decided to continue teaching it. He guides us gently through the many logical conundrums we encounter.

One day, the entire freshman class is gathered in the lecture hall while Professor Emeritus explains a particularly tricky paradox. As he finishes showing us how the math manages to remain consistent no matter which reference frame you're in, the hand of a student in the front row shoots up.

The nasally voice begins, "Well, have you considered...?" Clearly this kid thinks Special Relativity is as real as Hogwarts. He is also under the impression that he's the smartest person in the room. It was probably true in high school; most of the students here were the top of their high school classes. A few have yet to realize that this is no longer the case.

When the student finishes poking holes in the paradox and disproving all of relativity, he sits back haughtily. His profile belies his smugness, and I just know there's a self-satisfied smirk on his face. He's sure he has stumped the professor. For an instant, the class is silent, wondering what will happen.

Then Professor Emeritus throws his hands up in the air. The chalk he was holding goes flying. "Oh my god," he deadpans, "I hadn't thought of that. My career is over!"

All of the tension from a moment earlier is released as laughter. Professor Emeritus proceeds to explain, quite kindly, why the know-it-all is completely wrong. Meanwhile the know-it-all has been reminded that we're here to learn, not show off.

Mint

About a month ago, I signed up with Mint.com. This was in an effort to a better sense of my financial situation. I want to start saving more money and possibly pay off some of my loans a little quicker. Mint is great at giving you an overall picture of your finances. It also has several other features. I've really liked some of them, and I'm still learning to use others. Mint is pretty customizable, so I can always change settings when I don't like the defaults. But I've been laughing at some things.

The best thing about Mint is having everything in one place. I can see my checking and savings accounts, my debt (credit card, student loan, and car loan), and my 401k. By far my favorite thing is being able to play with my 401k. Mint provides several features that aren't provided by the 401K itself. For instance, I can see the value every day, instead of simply receiving quarterly statements.This allows Mint to build graphs that let me see performance over time and compare my own performance to the S&P 500 or the Dow Jones. It has me excited to start some other investments, though I still need to do some more research on that.

Mint also adds up all my assets and debts and lets me know my net worth on any given day. I was really excited to discover that this is a positive number. I can also see how it changes month to month. Mint is all about the graphs, which is probably my favorite thing about it. I can see spending or income over time and break spending down by category or merchant. It's pretty handy for looking at where all my money goes.

There are a ways to set budgets and goals, which I'm still playing with. Mostly I use the goals to calculate how quickly I could pay off a loan with this or that payment amount. But since they don't integrate well with the budgets, I decided not to actually set up any goals. For example, my required student loan payment each month is $211, but I've been paying $300 to pay it down faster. When I enter in the budget and the goal, Mint decides to allocate $511 for student loans which isn't right and skews the budgets I have set up. So I just allocate the $300 right off the bat and forget about the goal.

I also haven't been able to figure out how to make budgets work for things I don't buy every month. I can say that I want to spend x amount each month and break that into categories. Mint builds little bar charts to show how much I've actually spent in relation to what I'm planning to spend across the categories. But if I make a one-time purchase in a different category (like a Father's Day gift), the amount doesn't show up in my total spending. It just disappears into the ether. I have to keep remembering to add my "uncategorized" spending to my "total" spending to get the actual total. I wish there were an easy way to integrate the two.

Mint also occasionally has problems categorizing things correctly. When I transferred money from my checking to my savings account, it got recorded as additional income. According to Mint I'd earned that money twice. I've also had some problems with credit card purchases getting recorded twice. My card doesn't get charged twice, but it looks like it was. This mostly happens at restaurants, when the card is initially charged for the meal amount and then a second time with the tip added in. Even though this overrides the initial charge, Mint doesn't always figure that out. It led to me thinking I'd spent significantly more while visiting a friend last weekend than I actually had. It's easy enough to delete or recategorize transactions once you figure out what's going on. But figuring out what happened can lead to some stress.

There are other features that are probably helpful to many people that I just find funny. On the mobile app, mint shows your net cash flow every month as a simple income - spending calculation. Since I get paid on the last day of the month, this is always negative and doesn't end up being very useful for me. There are also a lot of alerts I've had to turn off. Over the weekend I had to stop at a gas station ATM to get money for the tolls on the Pennsylvania Turnpike because I'd forgotten to do this before leaving home. Mint immediately emailed me to let me know that the ATM had charged me a fee, something I was perfectly aware of. It also let me know when my rent check got cashed with a warning that "someone" had cashed an exceptionally large check.


All in all, the features I like make up for the ones that I'm finding less useful. There are a lot of customization options with Mint, and it's taking me a while to get it to the best state for me. I would definitely recommend it. Seeing the big financial picture has been a big help for me. Although I have yet to see if I actually succeeded in spending less this month than in months past.

Caring for Introverts

I saw this poster, and it rang really true for me. A lot of stress in my life is caused by someone not following one of these rules when interacting with me.

Source

There's also one for extroverts:

Source