Spring Break

Break is just now winding to a close. I'm going to be honest. I expected to get a lot of things taken care of during break -- read some organic chemistry, buy new shoes, play basketball, work out, read a lot of good Christian literature, longboard several miles, write a lot of blog posts, short stories, emails.

Nine days feels like a lot of time when you're underwater in schoolwork and don't have five consecutive hours free. But nine days really isn't that much.

The long and short of it is that I didn't check many things off my itinerary.

Really, I checked off almost nothing. The reasons for this are manifold. First of all, I had important things to do like hang out with friends and family. But what stole more of my schedule was a combination of three key factors:

Sleep, fiction, and Tiny Wings.

I'm going to start by saying I didn't know it was possible to sleep as much as I did. At school when I'm on a regular sleep schedule, I put in eight or nine hours a night and feel super. This is a lot more than a lot of people I know, too.

Over break, I slept ten or eleven hours almost every single night. And every morning I woke up feeling like a hungover zombie.

My sleep schedule was somewhat more variable than it had been during school, but I was still in bed by midnight most nights. There's no real explanation why I suddenly required so much rest. It's like my body detected my vacation and decided to maximize my new free time. By wasting it.

So according to my math, if I was putting in ten and a half hours of sleep a night, then factoring in waking up and showering and eating, I only had about half of my day's hours to work with every day.

This explains away part of my lack of productivity.

Another explanation is mindless fiction. I am an absolute sucker for books. And my family, well aware of this shortcoming, left several mindless fiction books laying around the living room.

Whodunnits. One minute mysteries to tickle your neurons. Well for starters, they take more than a minute each, and when you lump enough of them together they take on critical mass and consume entire afternoons. I will say that I got an exceptional number of mysteries right. I will also say that the opportunity cost for this success rendered it meaningless.

There were various other books laying around too. And it doesn't matter what, or how boring, they are. If they're there, my mind wills me to absorb their contents.

Books, however, weren't nearly the pitfall of the last-but-not-least distraction: Tiny Wings.

A brief synopsis for the un-indoctrinated.

In Tiny Wings, an app for the iPhone or iPod Touch, you play the part of a hefty bird with bitty wings who longs to fly. However, you can only glide. To simulate flying you must dive onto the downsides of hills and then fling yourself up the upsides of hills like ramps, gliding through the air a little ways before diving again.

It's a game of skill and timing, where you tap to send the birdie diving and then release to let him glide. This sounds like the most boring concept of a game imaginable, but it is engrossing.

The colors, sound effects and music of the game have been Scientifically Engineered to be entirely addicting. The bird makes little noises and the music is soothing, and the game provides little score multiplier incentives to keep you reaching for the next goal.

The end result: scientifically engineered addiction.

In short, I spent more time unlocking new achievements in Tiny Wings than my pre-med peers spent studying for orgo last quarter.

That's a lot of time.

Between me and my little brothers, we shot through those levels like greased lightning through a whirlpool. We racked up score multipliers like no one in history.

All this came at a cost, however, because between my copious sleeping, uninhibited reading, and addictive Tiny Wings playing, I failed to do any of the important things I intended to. I didn't read the books I had to read, work out, or update this blog, among dozens of other things. I accomplished nothing this spring break.

Nothing, that is, besides a 22X multiplier in Tiny Wings.

 -----
Note: My touchscreen pen didn't accompany me when I left my parents' house and that is why if the drawings in this post appear to be of inferior quality, it is because they were created with my index finger rather than a precision tool of graphic design magic. Apologies.

My Samsung Cell Phone

Over the summer, I was re-initiated into American culture by degrees. It started with the usual eating greasy foods, going to amusement parks, using a GPS. As time went on I began to get closer and closer to normal and by the time the summer was ending I knew the time had come.

I had to get a phone.

I knew my service would be AT&T. That was the plan some relatives were on and I would be able to tag along. This in mind, I went online and began careful research to determine which phone I was interested in. I had several very careful criteria I would be basing my decision on:

1) Is the phone aesthetically pleasing?
2) From all angles?
3) In terms of the software as well as the design?
4) Were the texts organized into conversations?

By the time I finished my research, I ended up discarding criterion #4. That left me with one very clear choice: the Samsung Impression.

This phone was everything I could have dreamed of in a phone. It looked good, it had a slide-out keyboard, it looked good, and it was aesthetically pleasing. The marketers cleverly concealed the fact that it didn't organize texts into conversation threads, but that wouldn't have mattered. This phone screamed sophistication.

We went to the AT&T store shortly after my research was concluded and, sure enough, there it was. The Samsung Impression, as gorgeous as it was online.

It sat there with that confident, I'm-sophisticated-enough-not-to-be-flashy coolness. I picked it up and held it in the palm of my hand. Perfectly balanced.

I glanced down at the card that articulated its features. And oh man. That phone could do anything but fly.

There was no need to look at other phones. My mind was made up.

My older brother, Cole, was also in the market for a phone at the time. He went for the Pantech Pursuit, to avoid us having the same device.

What a fool.

It might have been free with the service plan instead of costing almost $200 extra and it might have had conversation-threaded texting, but oh, he was the loser in this game. My phone was sleek and black and sophisticated. His phone was green and wide.

What a loser, I said to myself. Ha ha ha.

This was not the case, as time would prove.

However, at the time I was overjoyed and I made us race home to read the manuals and download apps and discover all the marvelous options our new technology offered. As soon as we got home, I wrung the manual open and scanned through. Oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy.

"Yeah," said the Impression. "Dude, check this out. You can get on Facebook and Twitter from anywhere in the world, and you can hop on the internet and YouTube and you can put widgets on my home screen and you can move them around and you can change my background and stuff, and you can take pictures with three megapixels and you can edit them on the go."

I was the happiest kid in the world.

I didn't care that the conversations weren't threaded, which meant I had to spend a minute and a half scrolling through the inbox to find any given message a person had sent me. This phone was the best part of my life.

I texted anyone I could whenever it was possible. This was sort of a limited activity because I had approximately one friend in the United States with a cell phone. But I made it work.

And over time more of my friends from Thailand started to come back to the States and get cell phones and I started to make friends in America and I downright abused my texting faculties.

And then one day something funny happened.

I didn't get a text.

Which wasn't weird in itself because I was accustomed to long time spans where no one acknowledged my cell-phone-self's presence. But it was weird because my mom said my dad had sent me a message. And why in the world hadn't I gotten it?

No worries. The Russians probably just shot down a satellite or something right as the message entered it.

No worries. My phone was fine.

And then a couple more days went by, during which I, for some reason, entered a texting lull. I didn't send or receive any texts during that time because my life was kept occupied, so I didn't notice anything unusual. Just that I wasn't texting much.

And then came the day when Mom and I were at Taco Bell and I needed to tell Dad that Mom and I were done shopping and would be home soon and to put the meat on the stove. I punched in the message, hit send, and then my phone got weird.

It just sat there on the Sending... screen, the little periods scrolling out and disappearing like the phone was thinking. But nothing was happening.

I sat staring at my smug little phone for a whole minute. And then I canceled the text. I checked the reception.

Five bars. Pretty good reception for Nebraska.

I tried sending the text again. My Impression just sat on that Sending... screen, so I gave it some time to work things out and ate a few tacos. I checked back.

That was a lie. This message was not sending. Lying little Impression. In my anger I turned the phone off to give it some time to reflect on its behavior. When my anger had subsided, I turned it back on.

It spent some time initializing its messaging capabilities and then all of a sudden its alert screen popped up.

7 NEW MESSAGES!!

Oh my gosh. Seven new messages! That was 3.5 times as many messages as I had ever had unread on my phone at one time.

I eagerly leaped into the inbox. There was the message from my dad from several days ago, a message from my future roommate and then several more from an assortment of other people including a couple "text me bak wut are yoo doing fool?" messages.

I freaked out and started texting everyone to clear things up as fast as I could. I sent all the messages without a problem and then, relieved, set down the Impression and glared at it.

What are you up to, phony?

"What are you talking about? I'm just doing my thing. Sending messages and stuff wanna check Facebook?"

Okay sur- No! Look me in the eyes.

It didn't. And after a few more test messages to myself I was convinced that it was just a random fluke and that my Impression was still a sophisticated piece of high tech gadgetry.

I was so wrong.

The problems developed over time. About a month went by and things seemed okay -- but every now and then I realized that I had typed two letters where I meant to type one, or forgotten to insert some letters. This was unusual because I'm the world's biggest perfectionist*, but I wrote it off as human error.

Foreshadowing.

One day I was expecting a text from a friend and it just wasn't coming. I felt like I was being stood up and I was starting to get peeved. Finally, my annoyance building, I wrote them an angry text, capped it with exclamation marks, and hit send.

Sending.... . . . . . .

Oh man. I'm the world's worst friend.

I turned the Impression on and off as fast as I could, waited for the messaging to initialize, and sure enough -- 3 New Messages.

"Mr. Impression," I said coldly. "What are you playing at?"

"You know very well what I'm talking about. Is there a setting I have wrong? Is this a user feature? Am I hitting the wrong button? Talk to me."

It didn't. And so I went home to talk to Mr. Internet.

I googled "samsung impression issues" and I just wasn't even prepared for the onset.

"Why won't they recall the impression?"

"Almost daily errors with my samsung impression!"

"Samsung impression errors???????"

"Shouldn't have bought this phone!!"

I followed a link to a forum where dozens of users were all complaining about the issues they were having. "It stops receiving messages and I have to turn it off and on to get it to work again," said one guy. "The frequency that this happened with increased over time. Right now it's every 37 messages."

What a specific, fateful number. Thirty. Seven. Messages.

I read on. That was the most prevalent problem, but certainly not the only one. "Sometimes it types two letters when I hit it once," said another forumer, "or else it doesn't recognize a key press. Makes me look like a sloppy typer."

It wasn't my fault. I was still typing like a pro. It was this demonic little device.

I stared coldly at the evil little gadget. It had cost me respect and joy. It had sabotaged my texting life. And the worst part -- it was only going to increase its reign of terror.

In response, I declared war on my Impression.

It was under the two-year protection of AT&T, but thankfully it only had a few weapons to use.

It had the fact that every certain number of texts, it would refuse to accept more texts until it had undergone a reboot. I quickly reached the 37 message limit, which appeared to be the lowest it would go.

Second, it would mess with my grammar.

And finally, it would occasionally disable the alarm clock without warning in an attempt to sabotage my morning schedule.

It had a variety of lesser glitches which would crop up from time to time -- disabling silent mode, changing the alarm times, forgetting about tasks I entered -- but I could ignore these.

The other three glitches I took on in force.

Whenever I had gone a day without any new texts, I would text myself or reboot the phone to make sure that I was still getting texts.

I started telling my friends that using multiple letters in my texts was my new style. "i doo ths on puurpose"

And I bought a clock.

We started a war against each other, me and my Impression. We threw our worst blows at the other, but in time we reached a stalemate. It couldn't sabotage my life and I couldn't coerce it into behaving like a normal phone.

And that's where we are today. An uneasy peace. A careful truce.

Me and the Impression.


-----
*not entirely factually accurate
Note: Cole's Pantech, threaded-conversation and all, still runs perfectly to this day.

Late Night Paper

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Orgo

Orgo. Good stuff.

Today I had a midterm in organic chemistry. That was enough to basically ruin my whole day.

I had squandered all my keeping-up-with-schoolwork time writing raps over the past week or so, so I was left with quite a pile of work to do before my midterm. Thankfully, I got back on task last Saturday, which gave me the slightest hope of getting caught up.
But.

I had to read a chapter of orgo and do problems out of two. When it's put that way, it doesn't sound like that much. Which is what I thought when I sat in the library and developed sick lines for hours. But that actually entails about 12 hours of work -- maybe a little more. And so even though I managed to buckle down and hit the homework load hard, I still found myself swamped, and there's always too much to do on top of homework, and sometimes a lyric is so poignant you have to jot it down even when you're working and then you work a little slower and then even after glaring at organic chemistry pages for hours there's still practice exams and flashcards and six hundred (ish) other things and you're not even sure if you're remembering what you're reading but you just have to read read read and-

The point is, I was in no way prepared for this exam.

I have a graph for proof.

I caught up with the reading and problems at 5:25. The exam was at 6:30. That meant I had like 15 minutes to glance over my notes and flashcards before grabbing a quick supper and heading to the exam.

To put this in perspective, most of the class started studying in earnest last Thursday. They were done with the chapters before we started them in class.

And the whole class is graded on a B- curve.

I was sure I was toast. Which meant that my entire day was awful. It was like there was a big black cloud of misery just- just pooping on me. All day long.

Even when our seminar today proved to be excellent.

In this seminar, we had a professor come in to tell us about biochemical research. Earlier in the year, I had gone to a Biology Students Association meeting and, weird coincidence, this same professor had given the exact same talk there. He's a really in-your-face, engaging kind of guy and he likes audience participation so he always asks lots of questions about things.

Which meant that when he gave the talk last time, I remembered almost everything he said.

Which meant that this time, I came off as an absolute genius.

Meade: "Blah blah blah science science. And in conclusion, we can now identify four different kinds of genetic diseases. Now, what do you suppose would be the problem with this?"
Long silence.
Nolan, with confidence: "Health insurance costs."
Meade: "Exactly."
LATER
Professor Meade: "What do you think these black and speckled shapes are?"
Honest Class: "Neurons? Bone fragments?"
Nolan: "Huh, they look kind of like tadpoles to me. Like tadpoles with two heads or something."
Professor Meade: "That's exactly right. These are genetic mutant tadpoles."

I knew what these were.

Actually, the hardest part of the class was tempering my confidence. I had to try to throw in umms and uhhs as I answered every question right on the money. But I think I was successful because he showed no recognition of me and seemed genuinely pleased with my competence.

But. As fun as seminar was, the misty gloom of orgo was still pervasive and it didn't take much longer than lunch after class for despondency to set in again.

I tried to lift the gloom by heading to SPAC to work out, but there was still that sinking feeling in the bottom of my stomach, like when you're about to start in a basketball game or perform in front of a crowd. And it was all the worse because I knew it was my fault and that I could be on top of things if I hadn't wasted so much time writing raps.

And then I had afternoon class, which cost more study time, and then I was cramming in the last little bits of knowledge before supper -- and my head just couldn't hold all the facts and I knew I was going to get like 20 percent on the test, and every part of the future looked like a long black tunnel full of misery.

And that's when my day started to get good.

The funny thing about orgo is that as bad as it is, everyone knows how bad it is. They've heard from someone or another about the twelve thousand reaction mechanisms you need to memorize and the six thousand other compounds and the pages and pages and pages of benzene rings and catalyzed hydrogenations and Diels Alder reactions and Wittig reagents and Friedel-Crafts Acylations and maybe not that specific but they at least have an idea.

Which is really cool.

Because it's kind of like being a gladiator or on death row. Everyone who knows you have a midterm is like, "Oh, man, orgo today? I'm so sorry for you." Or, "Wow, that bites. Best of luck. I don't envy you at all." Or, "I would conceivably trade one of my children not to go through what you're going to go through in a couple of hours."

And if anyone's laughing or joking, you just tell them that you have orgo and then their faces get as sad as yours and they're like, "Oh snap. That's the worst." And you've ruined their day too for a bit.

On a totally sincere note, it's really awesome. Friends are encouraging, they say nice, untrue things about your intellect, they pray for you, they empathize totally. In some ways, having an orgo midterm is sweet.

In other ways, I probably just failed that test.

But I would gladly have another midterm tomorrow -- just so I could tell everyone