Name your god and bleed the freak

In a (chronological) nutshell: birthday dinner, Ruby Skye, Telepopmusik, soccer, another birthday dinner, pool hall, Vienna Teng, dinner at the Cheesecake Factory (thanks Jen!). Vienna was awesome, and I’m already waiting in anticipation for her next show. And, of course, happy birthday to Umesh, Michelle, and Ray.

Could I be less motivated? Probably not. Advisor stuff isn’t going so well, and TAing, usually pretty fun, is now becoming a chore. We’re giving a midterm this week, which means an extra review session, the usual two sections and two office hours, extra time to do and proofread the test, administering it Thursday night, and then grading it starting at 8am on Friday morning. Ouch. Hopefully things will get better next week.

I can’t figure out what I’d regret more two decades from now: working a lot in grad school but missing out on all of the fun that comes with being in my twenties, or having a great time but just getting by academically. Professionally, of course, the first choice sounds best, but I think too often we go down that road because it “makes sense” and end up forgetting about the existential pain that comes with trying too hard and realizing that you’ve not really accomplished anything at all. Or maybe I’m just rationalizing my decadent lifestyle :).

Vienna Teng is alternately inspiring and depressing: she was a CS major at Stanford and then a software engineer before dropping it all to do music full time. Of course, that’s what I’d love to do (or at least study biology…) but then she’s so good and I’m not, and it’s around this point in my thought process that the sobering fact hits me that for most people life is a tradeoff between what you’re good at and what you want do to. It’s not like I haven’t come to this conclusion a thousand times before; I think I’m just getting more frustrated about it this time around :).

Oh yeah, in my last entry I was trying to describe what life here is like. A typical week: a day or two of soccer, volleyball, ultimate or tennis; classes; TAing; typically one late night doing work; several sessions of table tennis (I’m totally addicted); playing lots of guitar; an hour or two on the weekend of piano or drums; one night at a bar or club, one night in SF, and one night playing games (Taboo, etc.); an IHouse-wide coffee hour on Wednesday night; occasional trips to the RSF; a huge amount of time spent chatting or gossiping late into the night. It sounds fun, and it really is — I just feel so aimless sometimes.

I guess one of those “sometimes” is right now, hence the depressed tone. How boring would my LJ be if I were always happy, though? Trying to make things entertaining, that’s all :)…