The Quiet Cynic Blog

The Internet Gods Love Me

admin — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 01:25:16 +0000

It’s 8am on a Saturday morning.

Sane people my age would wonder why I’m awake. The truth is that I was trying to fix my Internet connection. Some time last night it died, and although my much more pressing goal was to complete my math project and hand it in today, I wasted a few good hours tinkering on my MacBook, trying to understand why it just died.

It was about 4 in the morning that I gave up and started focusing on work. Math is ridiculously hard to do when you haven’t slept well in over a week, but for idiots like me, that’s 80% of the fun. Challenges are fun, right? Self-inflicted challenges that could easily have been avoided with rudimentary time management skills are fun, right?

By the time I finished the task at hand, it was already far too late to go to sleep. Sure, I could live on the wild side and risk sleeping through the very narrow window to turn in an assignment on a Saturday, but I guess there’s something about the mild delirium brought on by sleep deprivation that makes me behave myself. With nothing else to do, and an innate need to fix things that are broken, I went back to trying to fix the damn internet.

It was actually very simple: The ISP had suddenly required that you use a password when you connect. It had never been that way before, and I suppose they chose yesterday to start checking. Nevertheless, the answer was so annoyingly obvious that when it worked, I was actually more surprised than pleased.

And as if the return of the Internet wasn’t good enough, with all my driver updating and configuration tweaking, I had actually managed to make the stupid thing go faster. My internet now flies. And I’ve decided that it is because the Internet gods love me, and they are rewarding my procrastination-induced labor with fast, fast internet.

There’s a lesson to learn from this, but somehow I don’t think it’s the one I should be learning.

New Year, New Beginnings

admin — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 18:33:18 +0000

The first post of a new blog is the hardest to write; it has to set the tone for all the other posts to follow. It has to captivate readers and convince them to keep coming back for more. In essence, it is the foundation of the blog, and that may be why Iâ€™ve put off writing this post for so long. The thing is, though, that I want my first post to be like my New Yearâ€™s Eve celebration: Ordinary.

Obviously, I donâ€™t want it to suck, but at the same time, I donâ€™t want it to be some spectacular literary masterpiece that will only serve to provide an insurmountable target in subsequent entries. No, I want it to be average. Standard. Normal.

Normal is a good start for someone that has spent the last few months under very abnormal circumstances. Normal is where I want to find myself as I start at a new school. Normal is how I want to feel again. Iâ€™ve had enough â€œcrazyâ€ and â€œexcitingâ€ and â€œscaryâ€ and â€œwonderfulâ€ and â€œheartbreak.â€ All those things do is cause me trouble, anyway. So back to normal is what I want my next year to be. Back to The Quiet Cynic.

Sorry Iâ€™ve been gone so long. Happy New Year.

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admin — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 16:19:56 +0000

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Stopping Stumbling

admin — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 16:19:56 +0000

Sometimes life gets complicated. You start to worry about all the various things — some big, others small — that are falling apart around you. Soon enough you realize that you’ve lost your footing, and you’re in a perpetual state of almost falling over; those two seconds between stumbling and hitting the ground, where your feet are trying to catch up with your falling body, extended over the course of weeks, months, or, if you let it, even years.

And there you are: Not quite fallen, but unable to stop, and unable to really see where you’re going. You are what I call “stumbling through life.”

I ply you with my imagery because, up until a few moments ago, I was in such a perpetual state of almost falling. I was stumbling through my life, knocked off balance by my recent failures, when I suddenly realized that I was wasting my time. So I stopped worrying about transferring out of SC, and I stopped worrying about her, and I took a look around and figured out what I want to do and where I want to go.

That’s not to say that I’m giving up on higher education or the prospect of getting back my best friend; far from it. What I’m saying is that living a reactionary life is not helpful to anyone. Yes, I’m still going to be depressed when I hear that the Trojans lost, and my heart still aches when I think about her, because the fact is you can’t close the door on the past. The difference is that now I understand that even though all the baggage is still there, I have the present to deal with.

And so I’m back. I hope you will forgive the extended absence.