Important Lessons in Life

The mean-value theorem doesn't apply to complex-valued functions.
You can't just discard summation signs, even when doing asymptotics.
If your blunt estimate didn't work, use more information!
You really didn't need to re-write that solution 8 times.
People take breaks for a reason, damnit.
Also, you should figure out what you're doing about Monday. Probably.

Wake up

Go to class
Take midterm
Go to class
Eat
Struggle with pset
Go to sleep
Repeat cycle
Pffft. Did someone say the words, "empty shell"?

You're special ... so what?

Somehow 特殊 or 特别 just doesn't carry the same set of positive connotations that "special" can in English. (Particularly American English and its descendants, I suppose.) The Chinese doesn't carry any particularly negative connotations, it's just ... not so special. Something is an exceptional case. Okay. No big deal.

Considering how all of those are [seem to be] born from similar etymologies, I guess it's probably a product of cultural and social attitudes more than a linguistic thing.

Listen.

What's really bugging you.

[in particular, at this point in time.]

1. Failure of Proposition K and wider ramifications.
2. Diversion of Senate resources during crunch period.
3. Morphine withdrawal.

The gloom of the world is but a shadow.

Behind it, yet within our reach, is joy. There is radiance and glory in the darkness, could we but see; and to see, we have only to look. Contessina, I beseech you to look 

.... 

Life is so full of meaning and of purpose, so full of beauty--beneath its covering--that you will find earth but cloaks your heaven. Courage, then, to claim it: that is all! But courage you have; and the knowledge that we are pilgrims together, wending, through unknown country, home.

Boston

The Athens of America was unhospitably cold when we visited: so cold the local weather forecasts passed on "clear" in favour of "frigid". It didn't help that we picked the coldest day of all to walk the Freedom Trail--the whole length of it starting from the Boston Commons, winding through Downtown and up the North Bay, and finally across the Charles River, ending at the Bunker Hill Monument.

History is often wrong,

but in our cowardliness we mortals give learned explanations of why its decrees were just, why what happened was inevitable, and why our noble dreams deserved to die.

(Amin Maalouf, Origins, 108)

A Sense of Space

New Jersey seemed so empty the first time round, especially coming from Singapore. Sure it might have the highest population density in the States, but it simply can't compare with East Asia.
Campus felt empty and spacious---as though there were room plenty enough for at least half as many again people---even when the semester is in full swing. It wasn't an unpleasant feeling, but it did feel strange.
Now it feels normal, and Singapore feels crowded. How are there always so many people, everywhere, all the time? It's not an unpleasant or uncomfortable feeling though; it just feels odd.
Of course nothing compares to the vast emptiness (empty vastness?) of that volcanic smouldering surrounded by the North Atlantic, where you can look out and see nothing but the mountains and the sky and the one road you're travelling on for dozens of miles at a stretch. Perfect for claustrophobics and introverts ... (maybe there is a link between the two after all.)

The Post-Apocalypse

The hills around Reykjavik were apparently once full of birch woods. But the woods disappeared less than a century after the Settlement began, having been turned into wood and charcoal for the growing number of Icelanders. Now the area, as is much of coastal Iceland, is largely a denuded, barren wasteland.
The southwest apparently used to be a centre of intensive agriculture--intensive by the standards of then anyway, before motorised farm vehicles and chemical fertilisers and all that jazz. Then Katla and Hekla covered the plains in lava and ash, and now there's only the odd farm here and there.
Is this what the world would look like after an environmental apocalypse [of the sort alarmists like to trumpet about]? A world of ice and of vast emptiness and of harsh, unpredictable weather. At least it's not without its beauty, and by no means unsurvivable. So, y'know, maybe everything will be alright after all, in the end. In its own way.

Completely. Unmotivated.

Moral of the story: listen to yourself and commit yourself to doing the one or two things that you really do want to do. Also there's probably a "crash after the sugar rush" element involved here. Go take a break and start afresh.

Think of a noun. Any noun.

Sen: Kedi
Nur: Köpek
Ani: Köpek
Huh. Well.

Before the dive

and rimmed with runes of running laughter

Faith ever will I hold
firm, unyielding,
though strife and storm
stand about me.

Wait, what?

I wonder if you aren't the first person to knowingly, deliberately will yourself into a stuporous haze. Whatever on this earth ... 

I should be doing this.

Learn to banish the word "should" from your vocabulary.
One the one hand, do you really have so many "responsibilities"? Where did they come from, anyway? And if you start dropping them because there're too many of them to handle, how is that better than just cleaning disclaiming some of them in the first place?
On the other, there are many, many things that can be great learning experiences. Until you try to do too many of them at once, and then you'll be too busy to learn anything from any of them.
Bottom line: do less. Live more.  

But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought

Well put, sir. Very. 

... and there goes the semester!

Come to think of it this kind of knocks George's "shortest lines in PCT history" right out the window.

You should keep up this streak of randomness. I want to see where you end up.

不知量力

Maybe I'm just really greedy.
Don't be. You aren't going to able to do everything, and you're only going to mess up everything you're trying to do by trying too hard.
Or maybe I just don't deal with uncertainty well and try too hard to hedge.
But then of course such half-hearted hedging is doomed to fail. Just set your sights clearly, keep your wits about you, take a breath and GO. And never look back once in a while you can look back, but you really shouldn't be trying to move forward with your gaze on the road behind you, the other roads by the side, anything but the road in front of you. 

Swans on Water

The very picture of effortless grace on the surface, but underneath they're paddling furiously just to stay afloat, let alone move forward.