Remember this? Yeah, that’s going out the window.

That entire plan was predicated on the idea that I would be able to get into UCLA classes through a process known as “concurrent enrollment” – basically, a loophole that allows non-UCLA students who are willing to be last in line and willing to pay for it to take UCLA classes.

The problem with this plan is that it was doable two years ago, before the entire University of California system underwent several draconian rounds of budget cuts, and class sizes were compressed to the point that they’re having trouble even getting all their undergrads through the classes they need in the first year.

The budget cuts are going all the way down to the community college level – this article is just one indication of how bad it’s gotten.

Which of course makes reading articles about the asshat head of UC having the system rent him a $13,000/month house when they already own a fucking mansion for the express purpose of housing him a little more galling than usual.

Anyway, after talking to some people and getting answers ranging from “It is literally impossible” to “It is technically possible, but you will basically need to get permission from the dean of the school of Engineering every time you want to wipe your nose,” I had to step back for a minute.

What was my goal in going back to school? Was it just to get an MS? Or was it mostly to get in and out of school with as much knowledge as possible as quickly as possible?

Frankly, while I still want and will probably need an MS in the long term, it was the latter. So I’ve switched tracks a little bit.

Now, instead of a fairly brutal all-academia learning method, I’ve chosen a still fairly brutal, but much more practical schedule. Instead of “Calculus of Several Variables” I will be taking things like “Fundamentals of Programming Using Java: Hands-On”.

Basically, the idea behind this is to get myself back out into the workforce for a couple years to gain the professional experience equivalent of a bachelor’s in comp sci, and then go back and apply for MS programs.

There’s a lot of good and a lot of bad with this, but I think in the end, the good outweighs the bad. The best part is that one of my first classes is going to be iPhone/iPad programming, something that I really want to learn and have a lot of ideas for.

Also, it gives me an excuse to buy an iPad. Hooray, rationalization!

There’s going to be some pretty compressed learning though – I basically will have a week after my summer classes finish to learn C, and then I’ll be learning several languages at once each quarter for the rest of the year. I can do it, but it’s going to be pretty nuts.

The other thing that’s going to be a little weird is the schedule: Instead of having a normal school schedule, I’ll basically be attending night school.

This program is done through UCLA’s Extension program (for those that went to NU, basically their equivalent of the School of Continuing Education), and it’s mostly geared towards professionals, so all the classes are around 6:30-9:30 pm, one night a week each.

This will be good later in the year when I try to go for an internship, but for now it’s going to be pretty weird.

I think the thing that gives me the most confidence is the across the board reassurance I got that a) I’m not the only person going through this right now and b) professional experience will probably make my grad school application stand out more than just more academic experience.

The other good thing is that this summer hasn’t been as useless as I’d initially thought when I first started contemplating this switch. Part of my reluctance to switch tracks was the thought “Well, I’ve just wasted three months of extremely hard work and a large sum of money.”

I’ve done extremely well in all of my classes, and since these are basically the only serious science and math courses I’ve taken at the collegiate level, they’ll be something for me to point to on admissions applications and say “See, when I’m not a 19 year old fucking around, I can actually excel at high level science and math classes!”

So anyway, we’ll see where this all leads me. I feel like given my options right now, this is definitely the best one, and I think it could lead to some really, really interesting opportunities for me in both the short and long-term.

Sunday afternoon, I finished all my homework early. I wanted to have a nice long workout, and I debated going for a bike ride or going for a swim. It was a really nice day, so I decided to go for a bike ride.

I should have gone for a swim.

About 32 miles into my ride, I was coming back towards the Marina near LAX, when a pair of tourists decided that they should cross the bike path in order to get down to the beach.

Bikers have the right of way on this path, but it’s not terribly well-marked so you get a lot of idiots meandering across it and causing all sorts of problems.

I saw them going at a speed that would cause me to run into them, so I rang my bell at them and then shouted when that didn’t seem to budge them. They sped up imperceptibly, causing me to have to swerve around them.

I swerved right onto what turned out to be more sand than I thought, and I lost traction completely. I was probably going about 15-16 miles an hour, and I ate it hard right onto the concrete bike path.

I was down for a few seconds after it happened, and several bystanders rushed over to ask if I was all right. I was definitely a little dazed, but I also definitely noticed that the idiot/asshole tourists just kept on walking towards the beach, not even caring that they made me crash.

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it now with significantly more vehemence: Fucking tourists.

I was very, very glad I was wearing a helmet – my brain would have been splattered on the concrete if I hadn’t been. All in all, I’m pretty lucky – I could have done much more serious damage to my head and could have really fucked up my shoulder if I’d landed a little differently.

I’m still pretty banged up. Almost all my weight came down on my left arm and my left leg, causing some really awesome road rash on the former and since I carry my phone in my left front pocket, shattering my phone and leaving the biggest, nastiest bruise I’ve ever had (more on that later).

I wasn’t anywhere near a place where someone could come pick me up easily, and my bike was too jacked up to ride, so I started walking with the bike towards the Marina.

As I did, I figured out that although the screen was shattered and the LCD was shot, I could make phone calls using the voice command feature on my phone, and about 1/10 of the time manage to swipe frantically enough at the shattered glass to answer incoming calls.

After lots and lots of phone calls and about three miles of walking, I walked into an ER in Marina del Rey, where I was promptly informed there was a 6-8 hour wait.

Luckily, my friend Jessica, who is my new hero, called me back right then and after I was miraculously able to answer the phone, she offered to come rescue me and my bike, which was pretty much the best timing ever.

We took my bike home, making a pit stop at Carl’s Jr. on the way since I was ravenously hungry. I’d basically biked off about 2500 calories before I crashed, then walked for an hour after the crash.

We then went to UCLA medical center, where the wait was only 2.5 hours, which seemed so much more civilized. Gotta love the ER theory of relativity.

The ER docs determined that since I didn’t have a headache and that eating a Western Bacon Cheeseburger made me feel better and not worse, I didn’t need a CAT scan, and gave me a metric ton of antibiotic ointment for all my road rash.

Jessica dropped me off around 11:30, and I noticed just before I went to bed that where my phone had hit, the bruise hadn’t formed yet, but there was a big swollen lump about the size of a baseball. “That’s going to get ugly,” I thought.

It’s now a bruise the size of an appetizer plate, and about 15 different shades of purple. I do not bruise easily – a spot on my right leg where it’d hit the pedal hard enough to leave an outline of where it hit is barely discolored – so for me to have a bruise this gnarly is something of an accomplishment.

The bruise is still warm to the touch, which I suspect means it’s still not done forming. I put the over/under on how long it’s going to take to dissipate at 2 months, and so far, anyone who’s seen it in person has taken the over.

I managed to get the phone fixed for about $150 and was back up and running on Monday. If you’re in LA and you bust your iPhone, the guy at LAiPhoneRepair.com is the man.

The bike’s still at the shop – I was due for a warranty tune-up so that will probably take at least some of the sting out of it, but they’re going to have to clean about four tons of sand out of the chain, gears, and brakes, not to mention all the damage done to same by the actual crash. I’ll be stunned if I get out of that for under $200.

Plus my $100 ER copay plus whatever else UCLAMC decides to ding me for (I’m sure that big pile of what’s essentially Neosporin will wind up costing me about $45), plus having to buy a new helmet because they’re really only designed for one good hit, and the total cost of crashing my bike will come in somewhere between $300-500, probably.

I’m extremely glad this was more of a fiscal misadventure than a medical one, but still: Fucking tourists.

—–

Addendum: This is apparently Bad Bike week for everyone I know. I had two friends have bikes stolen (one off a second floor balcony, apparently by Spider-Man), I crashed, Lindsay crashed – Seriously, if you know me, lock your bike up tight and then stay the hell away from it.

Been meaning to post this xkcd somewhere because it rings so true, but hadn’t gotten around to it because I’m so damn tired.

Between Chaplin being doped up on painkillers for a kidney issue and me being massively sleep-deprived, I’m not sure which one of us is going to become convinced he can talk first.

I’m a little fried.

This calc class I’m taking is significantly more difficult than the last one (mostly due to the professor, for reasons which I’m saving for what will be a rather caustic evaluation), and the physics class, which I knew was going to be hard, is pretty damn hard.

I’m basically taking the equivalent of an 18 credit quarter right now (normal courseload at UCLA is recommended to be 16 credits), and I think I will be doing that for much of the next year.

I’m also extremely rusty at much of the algebra and have always been terrible at trigonometry, and physics and calc are full of both, so it’s taking me significantly longer than the professors claim it will to do all the homework.

So yeah, been nice knowing all of you, I’ll be here in my room doing homework until approximately June.

That’s almost the worst thing about all this: My roommate is out of the country for ten days and I have spent a total of about two hours in the living room, most of it doing calc homework. The rest of the time is in my bedroom, on the computer or doing calc/physics homework.

Also, I’d like to note that whoever came up with trig integrals can go fuck themselves. The formulas are so complicated I can’t even type them (the last four here are good examples of what I’m dealing with), and they make me want to beat my head against the wall until I see gray matter.

I’m hoping that this will get a little bit easier in the fall when I’m at least interested in SOME of the classes I’m taking and will see a longer-term purpose than “I just have to get as high a grade as possible in this stupid class” to what I’ll be doing.

In the meantime, I’ll be studying, working out, eating, and sleeping, in that order of priority, chanting over and over again, “It’s just a year. It’s just a year. It’s just a year.”

Those of you who’ve known me for a while know that I’ve lost a lot of weight – at my lowest point, I’d lost 86 pounds. I am literally a different person than I was when this all started President’s day weekend of 2007.

But in the last couple of months since school started, I’ve gained about ten pounds back, and that realization has been extremely frustrating.

I can tell you exactly why: I’ve eaten like crap. Being back in school, exercising a lot, and bike commuting have made me feel like I had a license to eat whatever the hell I want.

The problem is, eating whatever the hell *I* want means eating about 30-50% more than I actually should eat. I’ve always been terrible at portion control unless I’m really, really concentrating on how much I’m eating.

And if you’re eating that much, unless you’re Michael Phelps swimming 10,000+ meters a day, you’re not going to burn all that shit off.

I always felt when I was working and trying to lose the weight that I would treat the weight loss as my second job. I think I need to get back to that mentality, because I’d slipped away from it for the last 3-4 months and that’s when things started to fall apart.

The thing that’s probably going to help me the most in getting back into physical shape is the fact that I am a complete tightwad: Most of the additional calories I’ve been taking in have been purchased in restaurants or off Twittering food trucks and not in grocery stores, and are thus expensive in both cash money and fat-assery.

So I’m getting back on the Public Declarations of Nutritional Intent bandwagon with a few resolutions to get this shit back under control, because I can already tell if I don’t it’s going bad, bad places which will require much larger pants:

- I will no longer count my bike commute as part of my exercise for the day. Either I actually work out or I have to really watch what I eat – I must choose one. It’s only about 2 miles each way anyway, and it’ll be a lot less strenuous in the uphill direction once I buy a bike that’s not a completely rusted out piece of shit (more to come on that in a couple weeks, hopefully).

- For larger platters, I need to stop stop eating halfway through, wait 15 minutes, and then decide if I am actually hungry for more or just wanting to finish it for the sake of finishing it. I have always been the “I must finish everything on my plate” type, often to my detriment. I need to be a lot better about stopping when I’m physically full.

- I will order healthier stuff when eating out. I will, in fact, have the salad. I will stop ordering the freakishly enormous chicken burrito from every Korean/Mexican Fusion food truck that pulls up to the quad. The healthier stuff, unsurprisingly, is usually cheaper because it’s just physically less food.

Proofreading this post, I realize I sound like I’ve become a little unhealthily fixated on food, but the problem is that if I’m not, I become flat-out unhealthy.

The good news is, I think I’ve identified the problem before I allowed it to get completely out of hand. We’ll see how it goes undoing the damage I’ve already done.

This week’s rerun of This American Life has a story that really explains a lot in a short period of time about how completely fucking ridiculous working in showbiz is.

The episode is called “Pro Se” – it’s available for free download this week and free streaming going forth here. The name of the story is “Underling Gets an Underling”, it starts at about the 51 minute mark and is about seven minutes long.

It’s about a Production Assistant who hires an intern to be her Production Assistant, and it goes down the rabbit hole from there. Well worth the listen if you’ve got time.

Do not try to move, relearn trigonometry, and begin to learn calculus in the space of two weeks (not necessarily in that order).

You are just asking for trouble.

A small set of photos from driving Nate’s car cross-country. He, his wife, their two cats, and their two month old son moved from LA to Chicago, and I offered to drive their car since I was scheduled to have nothing better to do and I LOVE roadtrips.

This is a mix of stuff shot with my good camera and with my phone, since the weather was such that the one day I had for wandering around Chicago, the weather sucked.

Speaking of the weather sucking, you can see how bad the snow was up on Vail Pass when I came through, but there was a stretch of I-70 on the way to Green River, Utah that was much, much worse.

Thunder, lighting, snow, hail, sleet, freezing rain, and at one point I was driving through a solid inch of unplowed snow. It was insane, and I’m lucky that car has damn good traction or I would have been in a ditch.

If I hadn’t been staying with step-relatives in Denver and Omaha for two of the three nights I was on the road, I might have looked at the weather and taken I-40 through Albuquerque instead, though that would have put me right in the middle of a bunch of tornadoes on I-44 the next day anyway.

Anyway, all in all it was a great trip, I got to get my roadtrip on without putting more miles on my car, and I got to hang with my friends in Chicago and stuff myself silly for a couple days when I got in. Good times.

Clearly, I’m ready to start school  next week with the goal of getting a Masters’ in Computer Science when I failed so hard at researching my new monitor/TV combo for the bedroom that I ordered one that can’t be controlled by a goddamn remote.

I took one guy’s statement in a review about being able to control the volume with the remote to mean it was the volume on the monitor, but after trying and failing to get my remote set up, I went back and realized he was controlling the volume through his Home Theater PC, not his actual monitor. The monitor doesn’t even have an IR receiver. Oops.

I’m super, super excited to pay the return shipping and restocking fees that dumbass move earned. I’m still debating if I want to order a different one online or break down and rejoin Costco for their far more generous return policy.

At least I had two better pieces of technology news today, which helped mitigate my expensive stupidity:

1) I got my iPhone replaced for free after the lock button finally died completely, 10 days before the warranty ran out. I won’t go into the details because it got a bit complicated, but hey, brand refurbished phone!

2) I got my new dual-network setup up and running with a minimum of issues, so now I have my regular network and my N-Only network ,which is SUPER fast and means I can transfer files about three times faster than I could before. Basically, I can transfer an SD episode of Futurama in its entirety in 2 minutes. Win!

I’m sorry I got on a plane (aka Germ Transportation Module) at 7am and flew across the country while you were battling some throat/sinus crud.

I’m sorry I enjoyed some booze and generally had a life on vacation while the throat/sinus crud got worse.

I’m sorry I somehow managed to get pinkeye on top of the throat/sinus crud.

I’m sorry I then got back on another plane, again at 7am, again transcontinentally, this time with throat/sinus crud and pinkeye.

But seriously, I’ve been home doing nothing but sleeping and using the cat as a heating pad for two and a half days.

Can we please do something to actually get the throat/sinus crud and pinkeye out? I know you must be just as tired of them as I am. Please let me know ASAP.

Love,
Me.