Life, The Universe and Everything (Well, Google, but that's close, right?)

Life,

Apparently I have been wandering around since New Year with 'flu. It seems to have gone now: exchange program with the common cold. My blood test also showed virtually no vitamin D or folate registering in my system at all. This is considered a bad thing, thus, more pills, and food.

Now, I have been trying for a couple of months to eat everyday, but I'm not a fan. It's like the effort it takes to eat outweighs the energy I receive. This standard of diminishing returns feels pointless, as does the time it all takes. However, it seems imperative to keep up the whole eating lark for the time-being, so I hope I adjust soon.

The Univers(ity)

The end of my time in Bristol is approaching at what feels like an accelerated rate. I have roughly updated my Uni blog with what's happening, but it hard to do since I haven't been with it for a while now. Unfortunately, this not only impedes my ability to discuss work, it also disrupts the work itself. Therefore, I have made the decision (probably a few weeks late) to take a couple of days off in an attempt to let both my body and mind recuperate a little so that I am in a somewhat better state to complete the necessary work in the 5 weeks leading to the Easter break at which point I can refocus on the last stretch to my finals. I hate taking time off, but I am only missing 2 lectures and I think missing 2 and understanding the remaining 18 is preferable to recording 100% attendance and 0% competency.

And Google

Last week I had my final official session with my Google mentor. I had't intended to take part in the mentor programme when first I was offered it for a number of reasons, for example:

• It simply didn't feel very fair - I have not had the best education when it comes to programming: we weren't taught in school, my C lecturer was useless, my Java/Haskell lecturer was out-of-date and clearly apathetic about the whole thing, and I taught myself C++. Clearly, this would make improving my coding skills a mammoth task.
• Inter-personal relations are not my strong suit - I hate being rude, but I have problems understanding generic social boundaries and have to adapt to each individual's as I get to know them (not always a quick process), after which there is always still a chance that I'll say something insulting without even knowing it.
• I was sure I'd be useless - I spend most of my time exhausted, and when I'm not I need to be working on Uni stuff, so finding time to do anything outside the sessions was likely to be impossible.

However, I was told to do it and I think I'm glad I did. I don't know what experience the other students on the programme had, but I would hazard the opinion that I got the best one. I've always had a lot of respect and sympathy for anyone who has had to be my teacher, but for my Google mentor I think it must have been especially hard. How do you work with someone who basically doesn't know anything, who never has any time to reinforce the information you've passed on, and is mentally broken? Well, I still don't know, but he managed it - and stayed cheery throughout as well! Here are just two of the non-programming-specific things that he taught me:

• When faced with a problem, try and break it up into little chunks, or sub-problems: Small problems are generally more easily solved (and/or compared to other problems whose solution you could recycle).
• Never ignore your first idea: Writing it down may help you see where the main issues are, or suggest new ways to break the problem down. It also "gets the ball rolling" which is always a good thing.

Ok, New Plan...

I don't want to go back on anti-depressants again.

The problem is that it's looking increasingly likely that I will soon be in a position where I essentially have no choice. (I know, we always have a choice, but external pressure is a bigger thing than you'd think, as is the shadow of suicide, hence the "essentially" modifier.) I want to stave this off for as long as I can. Luckily, my doctor is almost impossible to get an appointment with, so that helps.

If I want to get anything done I'm going to need to reimpose some semblance of structure into life. I am not functioning at anything even approaching optimal, in fact there seems to be far less than 50% operational efficiency, and I know that lack of structure and routine clouds my mind. Therefore, reinstating this would seem to be a logical thing to prioritise. If my hypothesis is correct, it should at least mitigate, to some extent, the debilitation I currently seem to be experiencing. So, not so much new plan as reinvented old one.

A theoretically public forum may be expected to produce a sense of obligation to maintain standards set, and thus I have chosen this blog as one of the starting points for this regime shift. I will attempt, in particular, to begin using a Word of the Week type premise again, in order to have something in my new routine which is not work related but may be subjected to analysis and is a compatible activity with the need for timetabling.

Any other suggestions, besides "pull yourself together" (or equivalent), would be gratefully received and taken into consideration.

Looking for the Answer

There's a shed-load of stuff going on at the minute. I really didn't think that life could get much more complicated than it has been in recent years, but, as has become the standard, I was wrong.

I find life pretty confounding at the best of times, and these are most certainly not the best of times. What with University work, health (or lack thereof) issues and all the other things that the majority of people seem to think are par-for-the-course in daily life, I am utterly bemused and not entirely at ease.

University

I recently discovered that my skill set and unit choices have me headed (if I survive the year) towards a career involving programming - in no way did this scenario ever present itself in any previously considered 'game-plan' of my life. Thus I am having, whilst still attempting to do the relevant coursework, to completely reassess my plans and adjust to the thought of becoming a code-monkey.

Now, I had just decided that I actually did enjoy programming, particularly Java, and then I went and failed my Autonomous Systems Coursework. Don't get me wrong, I think I have established the problem, and there is a chance that I could fix it, but I'm somewhat broken myself at the minute. I got myself worked up into such a state that my parents were willing to come and pick me up, take me back to Hounslow, and let me forget University altogether. I ended up handing in the broken code, and I now can't look at the program without verging on the catatonic. Weirdly, this does not suggest 'programmer' to me.

Oh, yes, and I have a number of other units and my thesis which are suffering similar fates, partly (although I suspect not entirely) due to the extreme, over-arching reaction generated by the catastrophe of Autonomous Systems.

Health

This is currently a substantial area of concern for me. There's a lot going on which is complicated and may or may not have a bearing on the majority of my future decisions. I will, I hope, have a few more answers on the health front in the next couple of weeks, but I'm very much in limbo until then. This limbic sensation is also bleeding over into my academic work and being very disruptive to my thought patterns and motivations. It is very distracting.

Daily Life

From getting out of bed in the mornings, through to diving under the duvet at bed-time, people seem to do an astonishing number of 'things'. For a start, while they may not do it willingly, I have noticed that most people don't seem to feel that getting out of bed in the morning is the sort of event which is tremendously momentous or requires much careful planning, weighing-up of variables, and overcoming the gut-wrenching disappointment over the fact that death did not make a delivery during the night. This is how my day starts, and it tends to continue in a similar vein. The level of difficulty seems to be increasing, and trying to explain, and even justify, this way of existing is almost impossible. I think it likely that a lot of the stigma I feel is self-imposed, but when I hear how other people are 'getting by', it really does seem like I have gone substantially wrong somewhere.

Every day is a struggle against the desire to end it all. When you live like this, to scare, no, petrify, even yourself with the intensity of your own suicidal urges, that's a situation to take note of. To make matters worse, we were told today that the new project for Autonomous Systems had been posted on the unit web page. I opened the page, but before I could get any further I was struck with the same feelings I had at the end of the last project. Not only did I wish more than anything that my head would burst into flames and burn my brains away, it felt like I was experiencing something about as painful, but unfortunately not as fatal.

The general consensus is that you should tell someone when you feel that bad. God knows why, but my pride won't let me say it out loud, although it will let me post it here - perhaps it's a stepping stone. Anyway, here's me telling 'someone': I'm on the edge and the cliff is crumbling.

The Voices

My schedule has my final "Work" period of the day down as 1900-2100, but having been a bit under the weather lately (I caught a couple of the "start-of-term" bugs that're always flying around academia at this time of year), I have let myself stop at 2000 instead, with a few more breaks during the day as well. Hopefully as term progresses and my health improves, I will gradually increase the number of working hours again - I see the coursework decreeing a few "all-nighters" in the (not so distant) future too... If you want to know the sort of thing my coursework entails, I have a blog chronicling my final year which, although currently quite sparse, will hopefully, during the year, shed some light on what is apparently quite an obscure discipline to a lot of people.

In the meantime, here is a poem I wrote about 10 minutes ago - it's a bit "meta" since this was written to try and quell some of the noise to which it refers:

It's noisy in my head,
Like a telly on the blink.
But the noise is more than static -
There are madmen in my attic.

How can I make them see,
That these half-formed words and sounds
Just flood my brain and knock me down -
It only takes an inch to drown?

I hope they mean no harm,
But their presence all the same
Really does me no good at all -
True thoughts displaced by inane drawl.

Here We Go Again Then

Who would have thought it - I made it to the start of my Master's year? When I was growing up, particularly in my teenage years, one of the things that I considered to be an inevitability in my future would be the acquisition of a degree. The astonishing effort to get this far was not something that I remember featuring in this prophecy, and the exhaustion which it has generated was more than a little surprising and deflating. I am thus looking forward to my final year with mixed feelings. In principle, University has been fantastic, the majority of my units over the last few years have been things that, had I been in better health, would have been of great interest to me, and so I should be tremendously excited... There is, however, also the increased sense of trepidation which has been steadily growing since I was told that I had passed last year's exams, and is in fact only the latest, almost seamlessly transferred, incarnation of fear which has engulfed me for a number of years. Basically, my anxiety seems to have more lives than the Master - every time I think it's dead, it glows a little and returns in a newly regenerated form of madness.

This time next week I will have had my first day at Uni. I say day, but I think that it will be one lecture only on Monday. In fact, before Christmas I believe I have an average of 8.6 contact hours a week. Don't be fooled into thinking that this is one of those degrees where you have a couple of lectures a week and then spend the rest of the time drinking and sleeping - I will study 8 units and write a thesis (with accompanying website and poster design) in the course of this academic year, and I can quite easily envisage putting in a lot of 60 hour weeks before I am through. If anybody is reading this and happens to be interested in the work I do, I plan to maintain an online chronicle of what a final year in Engineering Mathematics entails, hopefully at a level accessible even to the sciencephobic.

The hope is that this year will progress in a smoother fashion than those preceding it, but as I am not renowned for my optimism, I am not going to lay odds on it. As usual - and based on everyone insisting that it's the healthy thing to do - I will attempt, during term-time, to assign more recreational activities to my schedule, which probably means I will try and reinstate my Word of the Week hobby, and perhaps begin writing and taking photos again. The likelihood of renewed panic seems to be quite high, and as this site has been designed as a venting place, I imagine numerous dark and/or inane ramblings will appear here in the near future.