setting; overnighters

By now you've probably been wondering as to where I am. I am a student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in historic Troy, New York. Never heard of it? Well, if it was up to our dear ol' President Shirley it'd be in your face daily. For those not in the know, it's an engineering school++ where the classes are tough, but the possibilities are many (if you work hard enough). You may think, "so what? it's not MIT." We at RPI say to that: screw MIT. It's only good for grad school; besides, we're basically MIT students who were too lazy to get in anyway.

I'm currently a sophomore biochemistry major, and neck-deep in more organic chemistry than most people would like to even have nightmares about. My taking five classes (technically seven, but I won't go there) this semester (all of which have absolutely NOTHING to do with each other) doesn't help things, either. All's I know is that I am soooooooo glad that o-chem lecture is over. I still have the lab to go through, but it's a necessary evil, I presume. Hopefully next semester will be less suicidal, but for now, it's mere wishful thinking.

It's now 5am on a Monday morning. I have somehow managed to stay up all night again, with the initial intentions of sending some e-mails related to pledge requirements and doing homework due the next day. Of course, this plan inevitably never saw itself to fruition. I wish I could stop these unnecessary all-nighters, saving them, for example, tonight, when I actually need to work all night doing o-chem labs or endless amounts of hand-cramping Chinese written homework. Then again, I really shouldn't rely on all-nighters: they allow for way more diurnal procrastination than is desirable: the "I have all night to do this" mentality keeps you from working during a daytime lull, which could have otherwise been productive (at least in theory). But what does get happen at night: read e-mail. get some coffee. take a nap. go on facebook for a while. check gocrosscampus before midnight. open the book. put some tunes on. all set for work, when suddenly a procrastination attack paralyzes you, preventing further progress towards the dream of completing homework, only to wake up and find that it's already morning and that class is in ten minutes on the other side of campus.

speaking of which, I really should get to sleep. zaijian for now.
~约翰