Meh. The more I ask myself this question, the more I realize, that not only is there no concrete, objective answer, but even if there were, I wouldn’t really care.

The real question: “Given that I am here, what the heck am I supposed to do?”

Over the last couple weeks,  a truth has slowly dawned on me: I am slowly and steadily losing touch with everything that I am passionate about. I find myself succumbing to boredom and procrastination because I feel like there’s nothing that I’m really excited about. Now don’t be alarmed–This is no call for help.

The truth is that I am terrified. I realize that my life is pointed directly towards a trap that could be disastrous. A trap that has been undoubtedly the cause for millions of mid-life crises. The trap? A comfortable and successful, yet less than satisfactory life.

I’ve had the privilege of coming from a strong upbringing and being taught a strong work ethic. After a combination of 18 years of hard work, luck, kissing ass, and reaping the benefits of being a phenomenal momma’s boy, I landed a spot at one of the most prestigious universities in the world. My continued success at this point is pretty much guaranteed. It’s in my nature.

So here’s my problem. Success and comfort isn’t enough. Not satisfied. I’m coming to grips with the fact that I’m slowly slipping into autopilot, just doing whatever is required of me. In short, I’m losing my passion.

People’s passions generally entail getting really good at something that they care about (an instrument, martial arts, etc) The learning process itself satisfies our desire to grow. Malcom Gladwell says that to be an expert at something takes about 10,000 hours of practice. That’s a year and 2 months of 24-hour practice! So if I were a perfect learning machine, at my age of 20 years and 6 months (180,000 hours) I would be an expert at 18 things! But I’m not an expert at anything… Now that sucks.

Like most people, I’m passionate about learning new things that interest me and getting better at old things that interest me. So I’m going to lay out a plan and use my time to do that. I will make a point of always having several projects to continue my interest, motivation, and growth.

And as you may have guessed by now if you’ve read any of my other posts, I’m going to go back to the uberman sleep cycle so that I’ll have more time to do all of these things. And it will double as another interesting project.

I’ve heard people say that they do things that they dislike 60% of the time so that they can do what they love 40% of the time. No thanks. I will live my life loving 95% of the things that I do.

I’ve big plans for the summer. I’ll be on campus doing research with my super-badass-founding-member-of-Pixar-graphics-guru-advisor screwing around on the IPAD! That’s right! Well… actually I hate apple, but it’s hard to resist the lure of the shiny. In my free time, I’ll hopefully code stuff–I’m working on a puzzle game right now similar to fantastic contraption. Perhaps I’ll be able to mess around with some sound visualization stuff. I’ve also got some ideas floating around for web apps… we’ll see. Weeeeeee!

Well I was… at 7 this morning. I guess I ate so much that the food in my stomach absorbed most of the crack-chemicals and I didn’t get to them until I finished digesting the meal. It was an interesting feeling. I usually have a lot of trouble waking up before (or after) noon, but I literally jumped out of bed at 7. I don’t know how useful/healthy this technique would be in the future but it’s fun to know yet another way to hack my sleep patterns.

I built it from individual parts. Fumbling around clumsily with a screwdriver around the fragile motherboard is always the scariest part for me. I tied my fingers in knots trying to get all of the miniature components in just the right places. After an hour or two, all the pieces were in place. I held my breath and hit power…

nothing.

ccrraapp.. no sound. nothing. I rechecked the connections and–well no wonder, the motherboard wasn’t being supplied any power. Fixed that and then, took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and touched the power button half-expecting some kind of explosion…

It worked.

Everything works! Yes! This nerd’s ultimate victory. And an occasion with enough celebration and energy to update this site after two months –I have to find something to do at 5 in the morning while the OS is installing.

Now I have two assignments due tomorrow… so it looks like I’m doing another all-nighter-uberman thing… Eh, whatever. It’ll all work out. I just took a 3-hour after dinner nap, so time to work now.

After my first uberman night, I was really hyper the entire next day and had a lot of (unfocused) energy. I played in a violin studio masterclass with my teacher and played one of the best performances of Bach I ever have… Being one day sleep deprived is an awful lot like being tipsy. It’s hard to focus and inhibitions are low… Apparently that’s good for public performance though.

I’m still pretty successfully a more organized person, but lately I’v slipped up. My room is actually kind of messy right now. But nothing as out of hand as it was last quarter. And more importantly, I know where everything is, and I can find stuff quickly. I’m keeping a calendar. It’s all going pretty successfully.

The time-management part of being organized still hasn’t sunk in. I realize that the only way I’m going to be able to get everything caught up over the next 2 or 3 days is by pulling several all-nighters. This sounds like a good case for uberman. I’m also going to switch back to being vegetarian as I felt it was giving me more energy. (did I ever update saying I’m not vegetarian? did I ever update saying that I was? I dunno, I’ve been neglecting this blog for a while…)

Lately I’ve been getting a terrifying amount of sleep. Over the past week I’ve averaged 11 hours a day. The worst was when I went to bed at 6:30 pm and didn’t get up until 10:00 the next morning. The first couple of days I felt really well-rested, but then I got really lazy, and thus the disorganized room and life… So I need to inject a little crazy into things, and uberman sounds perfect.

As usual I’ll try to update with any interesting experiences. I’m particularly curious about how hard/easy it might be to readapt after my previous experiments.

‘night :)

I was browsing some blog articles out of boredom and found one on new years resolutions and how to make a resolution that will stick. I was intrigued by the idea of over-the-top commitment, a philosophy similar to the military’s use of overwhelming force.

I got to thinking about what I’d like to change in my own life and realized that I’ve always been a disorganized slob. My room’s constantly a mess. It sometimes feels like the general disarray that I leave behind me wherever I go is a part of who I am.

I looked around and in a moment of inspiration thought to clean my room. I didn’t really know where to start so I cosulted google. I got “How to clean your room” and “How to clean you room, fast.” I realized that this wasn’t going to cut it. Sure I could force myself through an online tutorial, but there was a bigger fundamental problem — that I am — was? — a messy person. That’s what I really needed to clean up.

So I refined my search: “How to become an organized person.” Yahoo answers gave me a couple obvious answers, but I felt like my own computer had joined the ranks of nagging mothers. My two personal favorite anwsers were “Stob being such a slob” and “Get a girlfriend.”

But there seemed to be more behind this transformation than a simple “just do it.” I was struggling with the question “how?” and worse, “why?” So I opened up a text editor — vim cuz I’m a nerd — and began:

“I want to become an organized and neat person.

I am disorganized.

why is this a problem? why do I want to change that?”

I continued a dialog with myself until I found the motivation, how, and why for my whole plan.

The rest of the day, I spent cleaning my room more thoroughly than I ever have in my life.

I think the most important part for me was finding internal motivation and figuring out why a change is important to me.

But I really feel that by making this change now, I will improve my life and save lots of time/energy in the long run.

So the overall process was really frustrating, but I’ve never heard anything positive about customer service and they actually gave me a straight-forward fix. The solution to my problem was so simple that I just have to post it here in case anyone searches it.

Problem: You have a website, and you used cpanel to reroute a url to another url… perhaps when configuring a RoR app. Now you can’t get the rerouting to go away.

Solution: Edit the .htaccess file located in public_html (for BlueHost) and remove the lines for that specific reroute.

If you don’t understand any of what I just said, then you can just be happy for me.

Huzzah! My site’s back up!

I’m also going to start a new project with my roommate to make the webcomic www.itsnotporn.com… We’ll see how it turns out… it should be a learning experience.

I rediscovered energy drinks now that I don’t have to take frequent naps. I have to hit just the right amount to stay focused but not hyper — it’s an art. It saved my life during finals.

Until you browse again…

It was a fun thing to do over a weekend though, and over-sleeping these last few days has been pretty relaxing. There’s something about being awake when everyone else is asleep that feels a bit surreal. Everything is dead quiet, like the entire world is on pause and I have all that time to myself. I had forgotten how awesome that is… maybe I should take up everyman again. I could probably use the time this week.

While I was never really successful in my adaptation to uberman, the really neat thing is that I’ve trained myself to switch between different sleeping times really fast. I doubt that jet lag will ever be much of an issue again.