“I Will Finish It Tomorrow”

Ahem. I preserved a little of my vanishing-without-an-update tradition… Fine, I simply forgot to write. Let me rapidly wrap up the previous entry. In keeping with the principle that nothing in this diary should be serious if we can possibly help it—the actual principle is that I am a lazy dog—I shall skip the entire argument and leap straight to the final conclusion: the greatest disadvantage of a large class compared with a small one is that I have to wear my glasses to see the board! Of course, if I arrive early enough to sit in front, even that distinction disappears. (

What else did you expect me to write? As long as someone is willing to learn, class size is no obstacle at all. (Excellent. Your reward is arriving at the professor’s office only to discover the professor is not there.)

Today I used every second of a fifteen-minute break to participate in the ECS school’s scavenger hunt. Given the size of UTD’s campus, it felt like a miniature city-orienteering race. By extraordinary bad luck, a certain person had slapped his forehead on the way out and chosen a flimsy pair of sandals. Running was impossible, so all I could do was Hamon power-walk. By the end of the day, I had unquestionably met my exercise quota. At the finish, a staff member announced, “Congratulations on completing the whole course! Here is your prize!”—and handed me a UTD-exclusive tumbler I already owned.

Thus I began to contemplate the meaning of racing between buildings during my break.

After class, I stayed on campus for the Nebula club kickoff. Thanks to a few personal GitHub projects, I could follow the general idea as the upperclassmen spoke in torrents. No need to demand complete understanding. Joining an open-source project in a campus club may not support my future as directly as an internship, but it would at least be a way to build experience. Then, during a leisurely interlude with fourteen varieties of Minesweeper, I looked up and examined the schedule more carefully. The API-backend project I most wanted to join overlaps with my physics lab. (Tragedy.)

Another glance at the time: if I did not leave now, I would miss the train. But even while jogging toward the parking lot, I still had to slow to a dignified walk and salute every cool motorcycle I passed. A human speed bump, that’s me.

I rushed aboard Dallas’s Red Line that evening. The carriage moved unhurriedly through the city as passengers watched the world beyond the windows fade with the sunset, and then watched the city slowly light up. What was that last glow flitting across the horizon? Perhaps it could be called dusk. Perhaps it could be called autumn in Texas—although everyone knows Texas has only summer and winter. Or perhaps it resembled those brief fifteen minutes between classes. There is a charm of its own in one thing exiting the stage just as another makes its entrance. Maybe life itself is one enormous scavenger hunt, except that we have somehow lost the map—or perhaps the map has been within us all along.