my shadow's the only one that walks beside me

Yeah, so.
I abandoned this again.
I claim the business and stress of an overloaded semester as an excuse.

Come on, it's plausible enough, isn't it? I haven't really done any writing at all for the past five months (outside of things like lab reports and thesis proposals) because of it, which was a thought that made me take out the Snow King again the other day in repentance. No composition was done, but the creative juices gave a little fizz just to let me know they're still good. That's half the trouble with that particular story, is that it could very easily turn into a swollen epic with all the stuff I want to cram in there. Once one has begun to create a whole new world, along with its attendant languages, geography, cultures, mythology, etc. it's extremely difficult to stop adding details. I think I have an inkling of how Tolkien must have felt. And look how long it took him to produce his masterpiece.

In other news I'm a slave to the corporate empire for the summer, though I do have the satisfaction of knowing that not only am I doing something worthwhile and hands-on, but that something will actually be done with it once I'm gone as well. This is ten times better than the middle school form of "research" that I was doing last summer, which involved reading and then condensing and rewriting what a bunch of other people said about the subject. Now I'm doing stuff no one has ever done before, and I feel comfortable calling it engineering rather than research. It's a good feeling. Even though my brain is in overdrive assimilating all the new things it has to learn every day; I'm getting probably a semester's worth of knowledge about photolithography and various software packages in just a few days. It was brought home to me just how much I've learned when I took two hours and explained it all to my English-History sister. The trick is to actually think enough not to fall into the sea of acronyms that drop so easily from everyone else's lips.

I could recreate that conversation here, but having written that much once I don't want to revisit it. So I will merely recap a few key points: one, that IBM does not believe in either signs or reasonable architecture, two, I firmly believe that my particular building is simply a massive psychological experiment along the lines of rats in a maze, and three, that young, highly educated, entry-level people should never be allowed to make their own schedule, because they will work 24-7 if they aren't smacked back into reality by one means or another. Hopefully having a co-op trailing behind will accomplish that for my mentor.