Continuing from: Part 1
Pendulum: a weight hung from a fixed point so that it can swing freely backward and forward, esp. a rod with a weight at the end that regulates the mechanism of a clock.
- Figurative used to refer to the tendency of a situation or state of affairs to oscillate regularly between one extreme and another : the pendulum of fashion.
There. Properly defined. JK = Pendulum.
On Caffeine
Oh… that fateful day when Craig and Alex decided to be Venture Capitalists (more like… drug pushers…) in my journey to stunt my growth… I still remember it quite vividly. Front row, Honors Physics, Refrigerator in the back room… Yikes.
Caffeine has become synonymous with hardcore programming. I mean it. You have to be a caffeine junkie to be an awesome programmer it seems. The healthy programmers are few and far in between, and those are the pansy ones. (I’m kidding!)
During my crazy PHP coding years (senior year in high school, freshman year in college), I probably… drank… quite a bit of Dew. I feel like I needed to be up at 7 AM, writing code to properly handle FTP through a HTTP GET request. I remember that Saturday to this day… and how aggravating it was, unable to keep my hands steady as I typed away.
Sophomore and Junior year… not so much. Junior year I got caught up with being all healthy, and so that’s when I reverted back to going hardcore non-carbonated/non-caffeinated. This is the first pendulum swing of this story.
But when Senior year hit… I found these. And I started keeping them in a nice little box, until the day I moved out of my apartment in August of 2006.
I have no clue how many bottles of Bawls I drank that year. I remember some crazy Operating Systems MP (Machine Problems, what UIUC calls programming assignments) which required some Buffalo Wild Wings and two bottles of these lovelies. (Kurt Becker, I miss you!) I remember some crazy case studies I had to pull out for some of my business classes… only brought to you by these blue bottles.
Sidenote: The reasons why I like Bawls so much is that they:
- Taste Great: I hate Red Bull for this reason. They taste like crap. Bawls, though, taste fruity and delicious. You don’t know that you’re getting jacked out of your mind
- Bottle: Plastic bottle FTL. Glass dimpled bottles FTW
- Guarana: Much less jittery than normal caffeine, IMHO.
Very recently, I fell in love with these 59 cent fountain drinks at the nearby gas station. Derek and I would hit them up while we had our Spinter Cell: Choas Theory Co-op fun. Then… I bought three 2 liters, just to start drinking STRAIGHT OUT OF THE BOTTLE. How recently? Try… last month.
However, I’ve gone hardcore hard turkey again. Only things that I drink are milk, water, and juice.
Second pendulum swing.
Maybe the next time I start taking caffeine again, it’ll be in small doses… I mean, come on, caffeine does help when you need that extra kick!
Oh right… I like tea, though. Tea and honey makes me all happy and warm inside.
On Lessons
I’m a proponent for growth. I think this is why I love learning: ANYTHING. I’m afraid I’ll find something that I don’t want to learn… but that’s going off on a tangent.
But as I desire growth in life, I think I’m unsatisfied at times at how slowly I’m growing. Even then, regardless of the pace at which I’m growing, I feel like there are lessons to be learned.
I can’t stop shaking the undeniable fact that I won’t be able to learn all of the lessons. This is why I started writing really really long entries in my journals to begin with: It’s because I wanted to write them down, so that maybe I’ll figure it out, then and there, who I am and why I’m doing such and such. I wanted to find the equations to Josh Kim… more like… the Josh Kim algorithm.
if (JoshKim.getEmotion() == X))
return Y;
else
return Z;
But it all goes back to pride: I want to be able to tell myself, “Yes, Josh Kim, you did it all on your own. You used logic and philosophy to deduce what the next step is to come.”
What the heck? I have to learn to understand that if I miss the big lesson the first time, it’ll come back and hit me again. The little ones… just stop worrying about them. Prioritize your issues, and then attack them top-down.
Wow, Josh Kim, you’re quite the motivational speaker, even to yourself!
Irony
The irony is that as I just typed that last paragraph, I felt just a little bit better about myself. Yes… I feel like writing is my escape: Heck, it’s the only “art” form I can be somewhat coherent at. I can’t draw, take pictures, make movies… even though I want to… learn…
Maybe one day my dreams of becoming xkcd with a programmer’s twist will be realized. But until then… JK^extreme.
Time to get myself to the gym, and then sleep to the extreme.