On what I did last night

[3rdragon]

At about 6:15 last night, I suddenly became very tired. I wasn't terribly surprised by this; the fact that I had gotten 9 hours of sleep the night before and the fact that I'm sick had been warring with each other all day, and clearly the being sick won.

At 6:30, I had a discussion with the members of the table at my colony that consisted of them going, "Miriam, you should sleep," and me going, "yes, I know, but I can't go to sleep yet."

At 6:40 I gave up on social interaction and went up to my room. I then took a shower, in which I contemplated major reorganization of my life (this is what I do when I'm sick. I'm too wiped out to do anything but think, so I think deep thoughts about things like moving all the furniture in my room or taking a different academic course in my college career). After that I called my mother, exchanged a few words with my brother, and did a cursory checking of e-mail.

At 8:00 I went to bed.
At 8:30 I still hadn't fallen asleep yet, so I turned on The Planets very low (yes, I know it's not terribly going-to-sleep-ish, but for years it's been my remedy. I think that having to focus on one thing (like music so quiet one can barely hear it) makes me let go of all the other stuff that's rattling around in my head). It didn't work. I blame this largely on the fact that my cd player continues to get older and crankier, and is now very noisy in turning a cd round and round and round.
At 9:00 I turned off The Planets, because Jupiter was far too bouncy (I generally don't get past track 3 or 4 - Jupiter is 5).
At 9:45 I called up Madison and told her that I was sick and tired and bored out of my mind and that I'd been lying in bed for the past hour and fourty-five minutes and hadn't fallen asleep yet. So Madison provided conversation for an hour.
At 10:45 I let Madison go back to doing the things that she ought to be doing, and tried falling asleep again.
At 11:15 I gave up again and read La Celestina (Pleberio had a giant 6-page monologue about his daughter being dead, but I decided that that was allowable since he's only had one other scene. I was a bit fed up with Melibea's pre-suicide speech, though. I suppose that it was shorter than it could have been.).
At 11:40 I finished La Celestina and tried going to sleep again.
12:00 was the last time I remember looking at the clock.

For those of you who were sitting at the table, this is why I was resisting going to bed early.

To recap, last night involved:
dinner
25 minutes of Spanish reading
an hour and a half of talking on the phone
two and a half hours of lying in bed either staring at the ceiling or pretending to be asleep, neither of which worked
and one pretty awesome dream that was like a cross between the second half of The Princess Bride and that one Firefly show where they sneak Simon and River into the hospital.


I hate being sick. If I hadn't been feeling rotten last night and had been productive, I could be finished my Spanish paper by now.

I called Damon and told him that I'm not coming in to work today. I think that I'll go to Ed Psych, in which I will be useless but which I should go to because we're presenting, and then I'll come back to my room and turn on Sense and Sensibility and pretend that I can actually take naps.

Edit: We didn't actually present today. I guess I'm glad I went; the other presentations were pretty good.

And for those of you who have been following the epic of my math final,

Hi Miriam,
I am having so much trouble with writing up the Latex document. Can I please write my paper in paper?
Or else you can help me again.
---

Dear ---,
It's not that hard. I know that it's an array inside the double-lines for length, the entire quantity squared, and that the other time it's the square-root of the inner product of the array comma other array close inner product close square-root squared, but to be perfectly frank, that isn't that hard. For goodness's sake, the vector only has two coordinates. And there aren't any factions this time. Maybe if you tried to read the code instead of just looking at it and saying, "Oh no, I can't do that," you could make some sense out of it.
Honestly. I could give violaclaire \left| \left| \vec v \right| \right| ^2 and the output (which is more or less ||v||², and if I gave her a five-second tutorial on how TeX works, I think that she would figure out that \left| makes a |. And she doesn't make any pretensions to liking math. You, on the other hand, are planning to do science-things, like majoring in bio, or something, and then going on to med school, and it might behoove you to learn this program, especially since I don't think that taking this class will complete your math requirement. I know that you're terrible at LaTeX, but it's easier than either HTML or CSS. I should know; I've taught myself all three. In addition, you have a great resource in the course notes, which are conveniently posted on moodle in the raw TeX. Of course, to utilize that, you would have to read the TeX as a language rather than looking at it and freaking out because you don't know what it's saying.

Cheers,
Miriam

What do you want to bet that she's having trouble because:
a) she forgot the \end{document} or
b) she's copy-pasting the code from our last paper to make the |'s, and is therefore picking up extra parenthesis, not to mention sub-scripts and super-scripts because that was integrals rather than length. Life would be so much easier for all of us if she could figure out how to read code she doesn't understand.

I told her to type up what she could and send it to me, and that I would do the rest of it. I don't have the time, energy, or patience to nurse her along any more. It's much easier to just finish it myself.