refoveo [refresh]

In case you've been wondering why the blog here has been silent for the past six weeks, it's school.  School happened, and suddenly all my hobbies were swept away.  Goodbye, my former life.

Actually, all that school means is that I just have to relearn (once again--I swear this happens every semester) how to have a life.  School will do a great job taking over your life, you know.  Especially if it's Engineering school.  And especially especially if you let it.

So this is me saying, "Hold on, school.  You are not the single most important thing about my life.  You do not have a monopoly on what defines me."  If I don't look out for my hobbies and explore things that interest me here and there, this education thing will obscure my mind.

And yes, right now I have a few more pages to read in my textbook, and a quiz to study for, and several engineering problems to work out before the morning comes again and brings new assignments as effortlessly as refreshing a webpage.  I put all this stress and effort into this long list of assignments, and every morning someone pushes a big F5 and everything I had checked off of my to-do list the night before is suddenly there again, box unchecked.  I turn in one assignment only to receive a new one. The world is mocking me. Evidence can be seen below.

Behold, evidence.

Anyone who has completed tasks such as laundry or doing the dishes will recognize the feeling of always having more work to do and never truly being done.  It's like running on a treadmill; you can crank that sucker up and run as fast and as hard as you can.  You can pace yourself and run for hours.  You run until you can't see straight and your skin is soggy with sweat.  And when you get off, you're still in exactly the same place you were when you started the process.

Behold, the treadmill of engineering.

But there has to be some value to the process of running in circles, because otherwise treadmills would be known only as torture devices, and engineering school (or any study or discipline or employment, really) would be a hilarious trap for otherwise clever people.  I think the students would have figured it out by now though, and if it weren't worth something at the end of running all those circles, we'd be smart enough to avoid all the pain and effort in the first place. 

Evidently, this is why I subject myself to a never-ending list of tasks to be completed.  And it's hard to keep up with life because life keeps updating itself.  Thanks, life.

Because my education-imposed list of tasks can often make it seem like so little is actually getting done, the small victories in doing something on my personal, "want-to-do list" bring a much greater sense of accomplishment.  Even though that list refreshes just as often.  But it's more refreshing when it does.

For example, look at that.  I made this blog post just now.  Aww yeee.  It feels refreshing just having accomplished it.

Of course, you have to work on both of these lists during your life--your to-do list and your want-to-do list.  The to-do list is important because it's normally relieving when a task is completed. And the want-to-do list is for when you need to be refreshed yourself in order to keep up with your ever-refreshing life.