if you haven’t already heard, i’m taking a gap semester this spring. what i talk about in this post isn’t really why, but it’s probably related. this post is about what my life has looked like since September - next week I’ll write about my plans for the gap.
classes
i’ve heard that every college student needs a Major crisis, but i didn’t believe i would ever have one. linguistics in and out, then grad school. i considered computing & linguistics for a while but decided there were too many stats classes. then, midway through the first week of classes this fall, CS1 told me i should also major in computing & the arts. after some introspection, i decided he was right.
i’m not one to make big life choices on a whim, but i didn’t consider this a big life choice - it wouldn’t change the classes i’d be taking all that much, and that was part of the reason i liked the idea. the only classes i’d need to take that i wasn’t exactly excited about were those in the CS intro sequence: intro (201), discrete math (202), and data structures (223).
AR was taking 223 in the fall as well, and he told me that i could in fact test out of 201 and go straight to 223. the test date had already passed, but there was a makeup in two days, so i emailed the prof and studied the syllabus like crazy and passed, not ever having taken a cs class before. i felt very proud of this, and i actually liked the subjects on the placement exam, so i also felt hopeful. this was the start of the end.
i loved taking 223 in some ways, and hated it in others. i genuinely enjoy programming, especially debugging and helping other people debug, and i think i gained a much greater understanding of how programming languages work and how different languages are related. it also helped that my three other classes also gave coding homework: html/css/js for interactive design, R for phylogenetic biology, and latex for semantics (the last one doesn’t really count as a programming language, but semantics is very related).
unfortunately, the psets for 223 took up an extremely large amount of time (~15hrs a week). this is one of the main reasons i have been bad at keeping up with you.
(do i regret taking it? probably not. i knew it was going to be a tough semester - i knew i was going to be taking the hardest class i’ll ever take, in all likelihood - and i geared myself for that. i just didn’t exactly gear you.)
other sources of busyness
cs223 was not the only reason i had a busy semester. it was also my first semester as editor in chief of the cortex collective, perhaps the most creative and inspiring group i’ve ever been a part of. i also got a job at the ccam. both of these new commitments were amazing - especially in terms of the people i got to meet and become closer with - but they were also time-consuming, particularly the first one during recruitment season.
i also decided to volunteer for the position of story lead for amoriem labs, yale’s game dev club, which was a big mistake commitment-wise. unfortunately, i like the people too much to leave my post.
effects of busyness
the result of all of these things combined was a snowball of problems.
around the end of september, all of my daily routines vanished, and my eczema started to get really bad and stayed that way pretty much until thanksgiving break.
i think i didn’t realize how much stress can impact my body2, and i underestimated how much of a negative feedback loop this would create. it wasn’t just physical routines like exercise that i lost, but emotional and spiritual routines too: i journaled much more infrequently this semester, and stopped putting on tfillin most mornings. the initial cause of these things was the eczema - i had to sit with my arms stretched out for about an hour before and after bed every night waiting for my moisturizer and steroid cream to dry (i usually spent this time pacing back and forth or watching an inordinate amount of music theory youtube), and i also didn’t want to make my eczema worse by wrapping leather around it every morning. showers began to hurt a lot, even when cold, and thus i lost the three most peaceful parts of my day.
i stopped reading before bed. i stopped getting up early. i called my family less often, and stopped going to office hours to talk to professors. for a few weeks, i stopped going to my linguistics lab, and i stopped revising my paper to be published.
around that time, i also started seeing friends less. almost all friends to some degree, but particularly friends who i didn’t have scheduled commitments with or who didn’t live with me. it was just hard to… want to see people.
it became hard to go out in the world with my eczema, knowing that people would notice it. having people comment on it. having people ask if i was ok. one guy asked if i’d been in a fight3. i often felt like a ghost, wanting to spend as much time as possible in the shelter of my suite. (i ended up spending too much time in 223 office hours instead.)
this lasted until about thanksgiving break, and i still don’t think i’m truly over it in terms of the effect it had on my mind, and how tired i am.
this is why i have been bad at keeping up with you.
concluding thoughts
i’m not sure why spotify gives me so much Sade on my mixes when i haven’t listened to her for years. i’m not sure where i’m gonna park in new haven next term. i’m not sure how to connect the ten-dollar monitors i got at the ccam yard sale to my computer or where i would even put them once connected. i’m not sure whether to use distrokid or something fancier for distributing music. i’m not sure why my stuffed animal flying bison dmitri has gotten so fluffy recently - maybe he needs a bath. maybe everyone needs a bath. maybe i need a bath.
one thing i am sure about though: i’m glad this semester is over, and i feel hopeful and excited for the future. when do you ever just get eight months to do whatever you want? (yes, i’ll have a job, yes, i’ll have commitments, yes, yes; we can talk about this next time…)
in a way, i’m glad that i did so many hard things this semester. i think a lot of good came out of it, and sometimes you need to do hard things to get places. i think i learned a LOT. i got a great job and became close to my coworkers and bosses in a way that will be really nice for hopefully years to come. i recruited a bunch of freshmen to a club and i think really got them to care about it.
but maybe i shouldn’t have done all of these hard things at once. i’m not happy with the toll it took on me emotionally, socially, spiritually, and physically. maybe i’m only looking back on it in this light because it’s over and i’m still alive. maybe we only see light because we sleep in darkness.
…or maybe i’m just a stupid optimist who likes to cope, for if we truly evolved in darkness, we should not be able to see light, and if we evolved in light, should we not be able to see more varieties of it?
while i didn’t finish any of the personal projects i thought i was going to finish this semester4, i now have a long time to do things, and a clearer view of what makes me happy and what i want to do with my life, and which projects are actually worth prioritizing or pursuing at all. or maybe not a clearer view, but at least a more expansive one. sometimes you have to get a bird’s eye perspective before you can delve deep5.
who is a computing & the arts major himself, but on a different track than me
my room was also drier than last year
actually, i think i appreciated the people who asked me about it an increased amount, even if maybe i didn’t seem that way in the moment. i also found a few people who had gone through similar things before and talking to them about it was nice: thanks to dean YR, MW, and RG for this.
the personality quiz i coded; keeping up with my youtube channel; writing a webnovel
butttt other times getting a bird’s eye view is disorienting and you go too high and the wind pushes you away and you get lost, and maybe you just should’ve stayed closer to the ground to begin with, and that way reach your destination faster.
beautiful