Reflections on finals week

A list of lessons I'm still trying to drill into my head.

1. Saying no is okay. See "How To Say No" by Richard Brenner for a lovely primer. If I do not say no, other people will say no for me; if I want to be able to say no for myself, I need to say it more often.
2. (courtesy Amanda) Sometimes it's more important to get it done than to do it perfectly. Your ego does not need to make every piece of work a gorgeous work of genius; sometimes you just need to get some things done quickly so you can spend your time on what actually counts.
3. Your time is both finite and valuable. Use accordingly.
4. Sometimes to be unselfish in the long term, you've got to be selfish in the short term. Look out for yourself so nobody else has to.
   
5. You don't react well to caffeine. Seriously. Haven't you learned this already?

In other news, on Tuesday I proceeded to become a non-teenager as quietly as everyone else would allow me to; my birthday fell on the first day of finals, and I didn't want to be distracting, but my friends brought in a cake anyhow.

I never expected to live to be this old; through much of my childhood I thought for some reason I'd die in my teens. (Of course, now that I'm past them, I'm effectively immortal.) I've always thought of 20 as the threshold into adulthood, and I suppose it has been. At this time last year, I still thought of myself as a child. Now I think of myself as an adult. Not a particularly good one yet, but an adult.

I'd also like to say that I absolutely love working with my Robotics team. Between Matt, Andrew, and myself, we probably have enough on our collective plate to level a small army with exhaustion. I think it's because of this common understanding of pwnedness that we work so well together. Which reminds me - I'm supposed to be making that Expo poster right now.

DJ roped a couple of us into playing Muse's "Time is Running Out" for ExpressO this coming week. He's on bass, I'm on keyboard doubling up on the guitar part with Matt, Eric's drumming, and Amanda is on vocals. Jamming is addictive. I get sucked into music when I play it even alone, but when your music meshes with everyone else's, and everyone's going off partly on the fly, then... wow. I want to do this more! I wonder if I'll have time next year to do jam, either informally, with the Muse group, or even taking keyboard lessons (something I've wanted to do since I had to stop piano in 8th grade).

The bad part is that keyboarding, both the computer kind and the piano kind, is becoming hell on my wrists. I've got a family history of carpal tunnel, and I started feeling slight signs of it when I was 18; now that I'm 20, I'm thinking that it's going to start pushing into the threshold of pain within the next 2-3 years unless I do something. I've been wearing wrist braces and shelled out for an ergonomic keyboard, but it keeps on coming. I'm not sure what I'm going to do about this; any suggestions are very much welcome.

End braindump.