I’ve been going through a rough point in my life involving heartbreak, depression, and a general apathy toward accomplishing anything with my life. One side effect is that all these schmaltzy songs which I normally think are cloying and just plain stupid have been affecting me more than usual. In particular, I hate James Blunt, but I heard that song “Goodbye My Lover” recently and I was connecting with the lyrics. Of course, I’m in an emotionally dangerous state so it’s somewhat understandable that I would relate the heartbreak in the song with my own but that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing. It’s like if you went to your friends and wanted consolation and they said “I’m really sorry that you completely ruined your life, cause she was perfect for you and I don’t know how you’ll get over that” while you’re thinking the same goddamned thing. It’s not helping the situation if you know what I mean. I spent most of my adolescence in that never-ending spiral of regret and pain and I’m perfectly (ok obviously not perfectly) happy without it.

Master of None. That’s what I feel like recently. I’ve been spreading myself so thin that I haven’t been finishing any of my projects. I have over ten prospective blog posts in various stages of progress. Some are an opening sentence leading into a further discussion and some are virtually fully written but I’m so burned out that I don’t even know if I agree with their point of view anymore.

Obviously, I’m taking the time to write this post but it’s considerably less thought out than most and I’ve been slacking on my blog and I’ve been trying to make a concerted effort to sustain the momentum of this blog so I need to write about something even if it’s about my lack of perspicacity. I am currently trying to maintain my courseload (already heavier than a typicaly heavy courseload), keep up with the changing world of JavaScript and jQuery in particular, learn Flash and c++, obtain some level of proficiency with the Adobe Creative Suite, attempting self-taught graphic design, reading up on neural networks, continually trying to learn new aspects of computer science, and in the back of my mind floating amid the maelstrom my future 41x design project which seems more daunting with each passing week.

I sometimes feel like I need to put certain things aside during the school semester so I can focus on what matters, but then I wonder if I do these things to distract myself from the kind of things I that don’t interest me in school. The only dwindling hope is that at some point in the not too distant future, I’ll have a real job and my free time will be my own and not the school’s.

Well over the years I’ve spent a great deal of time trying to solve the Rubik’s Cube. At first I was satisfied with solving only one face; anything more seemed excessively complex and I didn’t want to dedicate the mental effort of planning the whole procedure out. Over time the sheer challenge forced me to continue my efforts. I didn’t get very far after that simply because I neither was willing to put the effort in or willing to find out if the effort would be worth it (that is, if I could actually manage to solve it on my own). So I began browsing Rubik’s Cube solving sites, which are a fantastic resource if you’re looking into the problem. I initially expected to find a rote technique which I could follow mindlessly to make myself feel smart. Now I know that, while there is a great deal of memorization involved, strategy still weighs heavily on the mind. Obviously, the longer you work on Cubing the better you will get and the more mechanical the movements will become, but the root of that knowledge lies inside actual deductive capabilities. Long story short, I just finished solving my first Rubik’s Cube. It took a little while and the final steps contained complicated movement sequences which I had to follow very very slowly but it is done. Now to get obscenely good at it and impress no-one seeing as there are dozens of websites which provide all the information you need to solve Cubes.