The Triangle

Issue date: 2/15/08 Section: Blog

Clickit clickit clickit. Clickitclickit. Muscles and cerebral cortex stopped talking to one another three hours ago. Red goes on black. Keep the diamonds and clubs together, stack hearts and spades. Remember to place a deck card on a row before a pile, if possible. Don't make needless moves.

Organization is soothing for me; perfect schemes and patterns and electronically exact diagrams pacify the OCD tendencies.



Click, click. Comps on Friday. Need to create a study plan. Don't use a deck card when you can use one already in play. Figure out what's important in which classes, then set up a review regimen. Skip class tomorrow to catch up on sleep and stamina. Make sure there's room to lay down kings. Clickit! Read through IS and make corrections. Add onto the end as much as it needs, and try to forget your adviser uttered the words "six pages". Don't work on it tonight but try to finish it this week even though she said it would be ok to put it off even longer since comps are coming. Don't freak out about piano lesson tomorrow and needing time to practice, it's like this every week and you haven't flunked yet. Clear through the smaller stacks first to make room on the board. Don't wait til the end to start adding to the goal pile--you can always use it as a resource later. Calm down, and don't fret about not making it to the gym tonight, or at all this week. If you spend [an] hour and a half playing video games, reward yourself with a fresh ambition to hit the books. Don't let thoughts of self-pity obscure the fact that you want to be doing all this work. Clickit click click. Don't allow thoughts of work to serve as an excuse for self-pity.

Black on the screen is better; red hurts your eyes. Don't get dyslexic and try to put a jack on a ten. If you're dealt a completely unplayable hand, take a moment to respect the mathematical improbability you just encountered. Keep an eye out for the perfect hand that doesn't require you to replay the deck once. Double-clicking on the cards makes them fly to their score piles faster, and if you place the completed stacks in a row, you won't waste mouse movement. The order of the piles is always spades, hearts, clubs, diamonds. Forever.

I process important information and sort it into a game plan better when my index finger is doing the same thing for the computer screen. If I need to get rid of excess emotional runoff, I play music, too. Always instrumental, can't have words.

Mental yoga. I guess that's what it is.

***

This was an entry I posted to my personal blog a week and a half ago, keeping my non-college friends and family acquainted with what daily life is like for me here. It’s a good illustration of the challenges I’ve faced here and how I’ve handled them for three years (the constant pull to breakdown and the self-prescribed disciplinary therapy, no matter how lame). I became a solitaire addict as a sophomore (freshman year was blissful and carefree, naturally), but with one set of comps now past and the IS in its death throes, I’m finally starting to taste the fresh air on the outside, feeling the warmth of a post-graduation sun that hasn’t risen yet—and I’m wondering how my attitude toward life will change. For awhile I’ve just worked mad coping skillz designed to keep me numbly “zoned,” free from anxiety and the need for much sleep, inexplicably competent when it comes to balancing all the demands of college, but with the unfortunate eventual side-effect of making me eighteen times more fuzz-brained and forgetful than I’ve ever been in my life. There have been too many times when a week, a week and a half felt like one endless day. And the longer I’ve been here and the better I’ve tried to do, the more I feel trapped by the system. That turns out to be an illusion each time I get completely fed-up with it and buck the duedates, assignment instructions, scheduling rules, and PC social protocol. Maybe all those profs and mentors and admin people have just learned to back away and leave me be until I decide to play their game again; however, perhaps they’re just all tacitly on my side, since this padewan has learned from the best of the secret dark lords. For instance, he advisor-who-will-not-be-named has encouraged, nay, insisted that I procrastinate on my IS for the past three weeks. I saw this person a few days ago, at which time I was assured, once again, that if I wasn’t going to procrastinate, this person surely would for me. No registrar’s office can withstand the power of the Dark Side!

So by the end of this week I’m thinking to myself, huh, I’m not going to need this amazing ability to choke motivation or hurl insolent assignment papers across the room in my mind once I leave this galaxy far, far away from normal life. Solitaire will become a vestigial reminder of trials endured, fire trodden upon. Heck, what does one *do* as a has-been confused sith/jedi?

Ok, I’ll stop with the SW crap.

But seriously. I’m looking forward to getting out. I’m hating the idea of not getting to work with all these great people or study these incredible topics anymore. At the least, I’m going to need a new obsessive practical-illustration metaphor for my new life, and I have nowhere to look (it might have something to do with the fact that I have no idea what after college is going to be like). Maybe I’ll finally become a hardcore RPGer and need this stuff like I need lifeblood... or experience points. Maybe I’ll trade in solitaire for the veteran honors of Minesweeper. Maybe I’ll start having healthy, non-structured relationships with real people who live near me again (negative example for parallelism)—but since when is life straightforward and manageable enough to serve as its own explanation for being the way it is?

Maybe after college, when I can finally make my own rules—or not—to follow—or not. Maybe that’s when.

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