Not Much Busier, but Stress++
February 2nd, 2011 • Academics, Student Life
This morning started out comically good compared to most other mornings. Generally, I take one of the express buses along to get to school which is fine so long as you leave early enough. With a 9:00am class, “early enough” is generally around 7:30 to 7:45- an hour and a half early when you live ten minutes away! Otherwise, the bus degenerates into a teeming, sweaty cattle car where you are literally squished against the front windshield, and that’s if you get lucky and a bus actually stops.
Not the best way to start the day.
Alternatively, there is a smaller bus (no, not a “small bus”) that comes once an hour. Whenever I can, I take it since it is hilariously better than the other buses. For example, this morning I managed to catch it at around 8:00ish. The bus route moseyed along Spanish Banks, which looked out upon the pink and golden sunrise against the ocean and the North Shore mountains. The driver was a charmingly jovial elderly man that greeted each person with a little quip. I actually saw puppies gamboling along the beach. Upon arriving to school with time to spare, I grabbed breakfast from Bernoulli’s and strolled leisurely to class in the frosty sunlight with a toasty bagel in one hand and coffee in the other. Tiny birds and butterflies alighted on my shoulder and, at one point, I saw a unicorn! (Not really, but the morning was so nice that I may as well have.) The picture above, by the way, is one I took during the bus ride.
I’m thankful for the pleasantries of this morning because I’m so exhausted right now that anything more stressful would have made me collapse into a pathetic, whimpering heap of stress and bus-induced misanthropy. I’m not really significantly busier than last week, but I feel like I am getting a lot more strung out. I’m not entirely sure why- I’ve been OCD-ing out about stuff for a bit so that probably has something to do with it. I just finished my Stat200 assignment (boring, frustrating, overly simple) and after this I am going to spend the rest of the day studying for my CS320 midterm (interesting, frustrating, challenging) tomorrow. After that, though, I have the rest of the weekend to work on the 422 project JX and I are doing due on Monday. It’s a fun assignment so I’m really looking forward to having the time to focus on that and only that. My boyfriend and I might go to Vancouver Island to visit some friends of ours during the weekend too, so I’m super excited for that. Our friends live in the most idyllic part of the island imaginable and the last time I went, I saw baby deers!
Something that might be of interest to my CS-friends is a talk being given tomorrow by Nando called “On Learning”. Based on the abstract, it seems like it’ll just be a general talk on Machine Learning, which is my favourite thing ever, so I’m looking forward to it. If anyone wants to go, it’s from 3:30-4:50pm in Dempster 110. Details are here.
