It's the first weekend in a long time that I haven't gone out...and I admit that it's not a bad feeling. I'm not spending loads of money and I'm not getting trashed. Instead, I've been doing some hefty programming in matlab and using my head for once. Now I'm amused because I'm not actually bad at programming. Considering how much pain CS has dealt me in the past, it's ironic and surprising. Today, I got a real kick out of programming 4-D matrices, though it was impossible to get any intuition from them and I had to downgrade to 3-D.
I guess I actually could enjoy learning if I somehow get past my mile-high roadblocks. But it's so difficult to learn something new very quickly...like matlab. I place too much emphasis on natural talent and not enough on hard work. It's not that natural talent doesn't go a long way, but I only have so much of that and moaning about the lack of it is not going to get me any further. I also haven't been working hard for a long long time now, which could explain why I feel like I don't know anything.
Making intuitive leaps is difficult, made more difficult by the fact that I always feel like I need to come up with such a leap and usually not being so lucky. It could just be the lack of knowledge or whatever. Or maybe thinking about making leaps stunts the part of the brain that's supposed to be making leaps. It's just a massive heap of delusional overexpectations, too much introspection, ...in general, too much thinking.
Sometimes I wonder if I actually would have liked academia in another life. I admit that I do feel comfortable in the environment. I get along swimmingly with my co-students. It's gratifying to find people whose sense of humor complement mine (or maybe it's just because graduate students tend to be nicer than people in the real world). However, there's some part of me that's not quite satisfied. I have a strong suspicion that it's not the actual thing but all of the baggage that comes along with it.
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