"Hahaha. It's in BH-213."

That's what the damn kid told me when I asked him for my bag. Dark complexion, seemingly bratty but precociously smart. BH-213 for Black Hole 213, by the way.

Class was over, it wasn't so good for me, and all of us were leaving.

But just as the last of us walked out, he called us back in.

The classroom had transformed in those few seconds of our absence. For it wasn't the same sunlit, cheery place. The curtains had been drawn and the sense that something had gone wrong crept into my suddenly alert mind. The tables had all gone. They'd been replaced by a multitude of chairs, chairs with desks hinged onto them. The kind that you got into and then closed around you.

He sat us down and started dictating monotonously in a manner most atypical of him. We hadn't even taken out our notebooks as yet.

Me, being me, couldn't seem to find my bag. Initially, I just looked about in search of it. But in no time, I grew panicky. He continued dictating ostensibly unaware of my dilemma.

I got up from my place in the front on the class and turned around in search of it. The class seemed longer than usual. And there seemed to be a lot more of us than I thought. No, they weren't my classmates. Who were they? Some of them looked so much younger than us.

I reached the end, all the while searching. But to no avail. I looked up to the front of the class. He was still dictating. But I could barely hear him. One kid, short, dark, exuding an aura of prodigious intelligence and sharpness looked up at me. Trying my luck, I asked him for my bag.

That's when he laughed. No child-like laugh. Rather, one that represented a defined emotion and frame of mind: pure sadism.

It was while he laughed his laugh that he pointed at a black-something attached to the wall. Not in my two months of study in that classroom had I seen that thing. On closer inspection, it seemed like a vortex.

"Your bag, is in BH-213," he finally replied.

I edged towards it. With every step I took, I needed less physical effort to walk. It was as if all the forces in the universe wanted me in BH-213. Black Hole 213.

It grows three square millimetres every single day.

Backlogs. The single most wonderful effect of procrastination.

And It's backlog clearing time for me. Like this unbounded stack of things to do. And some ten hours a day to do them.

Ah, but complaining's my forte. You don't get better than me when it's whining your doing.

My sister claims to have noticed a clear 1200% jump in my focus. Off the charts, people!

It's like this: There's Chakko in the morning. I saw this book on his desk, covered with some kind of butter paper, neatly titled "Synthesis of Subsonic Airplane Design: An Introduction to the Preliminary Design of Subsonic General Aviation and Transport Aircraft with Emphasis on Layout, ... Design, Propulsion and Performance."¹ I think the non-homophobic fraction of me fell for him right there. This guy, he takes Physics and Math for me right in the morning at 6:15. And he cheats too. I swear having entered at 6:13 to see him already explaining the next big thing. I mean, the next chapter.

Then there's coming home. Alter Bridge. Coming Home. Four minutes, twenty seconds of aural bliss. Orgasmic stuff. I've never, ever had a favourite band. Clear status change there. My favourite band of all time: Alter Bridge. Digressed but again, haven't we? Where was I? Ah, coming home. I reach home, wake my household, breakfast, yada-yada, study, yada-yada.. lunch, yada-yada, study, yada-yada, FRISBEE!

Frisbee with my little sissy. Must be the second happiest time of my day. And you won't dare laugh. It's intense. And the reason for the very many bruises all over me. Fun. I never thought I could jump half my height ever. Or dive across double my height. Or any of that Michael Jordan stuff.

Some more study happens, then dinner, even more study and then it finally gets funky. Because by eleven, my upper and lower eyelids find togetherness. Even though I prefer them otherwise. And before you know it, <graphic, reader discretion advised> my head finds itself in a viscous puddle of drool, paper, ink and even some graphite if I'm lucky.</graphic> For sleep overcomes me, right there on my desk.

Off with me, now.

Crybaby.

It's apparently common that people have a hard time understanding the Galilean Transformation Equations.

Well, I don't. I mean, I do. But I can't really use them very well. If at all.

Okay, okay, it's called relative velocity in a Physics text near you.

Ahh, I'm slow but it will be elucidated.

 

Day before, was my Calculus AP. (Read previous entry; you gotta' love my pre-exam incoherence.)

So it didn't go very well.

Sorry CollegeBoard, I still love Calculus.

More than I ever will, standardized tests.

 

Computer Science before that, was relatively better.

Yeah, relatively.

I know it's all I've been doing since I was this (.) small. But the stuff that's part of the AP syllabus, has been stuff I've /wanted/ to do, but never got down to doing. Let's see. malloc(). I kinda' know how it allocates memory on the heap: list of pointers along with a size bound for each pointer; gets appended to, on each call to it; truncated, on each call to free(). But I never actually knew how that list worked. But then again, I never thought I needed to know. I used to think it was rote stuff, sorting and searching through a list: not something that'd be interesting. Something the clerk does at a multi-billion dollar company office. Not snazzy.

But that was a long, long time back.

I stumbled onto Knuth, a bit later.

The guy spent half his life writing a book series on searching. And sorting. And finding random numbers. And other 'rote' stuff.

Killed me, 'cause I couldn't get through two pages after the preface. I don't think I liked how every other exercise problem had an AM next to it. Indicating Advanced Math. And how his terse prose went right damn tangential to my skull.

Since then, though, I've always wanted to be an algorithm guy. Not just someone who could code a network stack* using a library AVL tree. But someone who could write the damn tree. And optimize it. And not just someone who vaguely knew how OSPF was used in implementing big, badass border routing protocols. But someone who could do another OSPF all by himself.

 

I'm happy with myself today. And I think it's because today's planned. Phone switched off, when it needs to be, music turned off when it accounts for more than half my miniscule attention span and y'know, stuff like that.

Well, not actually. But it will be planned by 10:45. And I'm going to stick to it. Any which way, I'll get back to you at the other end of today. Until then, I'll let the dots do the talking.

 

Edit: I can't code network stacks, damnit. It just sounds that much fancier. And well, I had to keep it dramatic. :P

The Morning..

Luck.

Please.

God.

Science.

Faith.

Work.

Well.

Have.