What Kind of Place Is Your Mind?

This is a question that people bring up every now and then. They ask if your mind was a physical setting, what would it be like? Here's what my mind is like:

My mind is a city. There is a suburb area to the side of the downtown, and it's all encircled by a tall steel gate. The center of the city has three massive buildings: a library, a cathedral, and observatory.

You know the armory scene from "The Matrix," where endless rows of guns appear around Neo and Morpheus? The library's bookshelves are like that. You just think about the desired topic and the shelves will shift around you until the right book is in front of you. This represents my intellect.

By the entrance of the library, where the check-out desk is, you would find a round tables with eight chairs. This is a place where scientists, philosophers, and theologians come to contemplate and discourse. You would find Jesus and Nietzsche talking about the meaning of life; Richard Dawkins and John Lennox debating the existence of God; Leibniz unraveling the intricacies of calculus, and so on. This represents my tendency to think about things, a lot.

The library is on the east side. A cathedral is the second building of the trio, on the north. It's massive, particularly the sanctuary. Enormously tall ceiling with spires, stained glass windows, and imagery. It's a Lutheran cathedral where services are being held nearly all day. Morning services, evening services, mid-day services. Prayers constantly being delivered up, and mixes of ancient hymns and modern worship songs are being played. If you were to step in there any time of day you'd probably see a service being held. This represents my faith.

On the west is an observatory. The pinnacle is a huge telescope which peers into the depths of space. Yet astronomy isn't the only thing happening here. There are also labs for chemistry, physics experiments, research on plant and animal life, and so on. It's an all-around scientific facility. This represents my interest in science.

[TOU] Someone Make My Brain Work, Please...

This is the second post in a little post series I've come up with called "The Overworked Undergrad."

Holy moley, it's been a heck of a week for me. My brain feels exceptionally out of order, and I feel like I'm having trouble focusing on my schoolwork and sticking to deadlines. I really got a lot going on and I need to sort myself out, somehow. I'm really thinking of finding someone IRL who is good at handling this sort of stuff, and talking with them about it. There are a lot of facets with me right now that I need help with.

There is just so dang much work I have to do right now. I'm balancing five classes, five textbooks, and several assignments all thrown at me at once. I know I need to figure out some order to do them in. Usually it's find the ones which are the most urgent, and work on them first. Or if a particular assignment is due later than others but going to require a whole lot of time, do part of that one first. This is not difficult to comprehend, right? Well right now I'm a little rushed. I only yesterday bought the last of the textbooks I was going to need, and I also found out I needed it for an assignment due soon. Today I'm going to spend like another $60 dollars on chemistry lab equipment. Then I should finally be done with throwing money at the college mindlessly.

I don't feel like I'm using my time effectively. Ideally I would be the sort of person who wakes up, diddle around on the Internet for a bit, and then jump into action with my schoolwork. Unless my night's sleep wasn't very good, I tend to be able to focus and work well in the mornings. I want to be able to get started with something and focus solely on that. Then move to the next thing when I'm done with it, perhaps taking a short break in between. A half hour isn't a short break. That's goofing off, and it's detrimental for me. I know I have the ability to do that. It's been done before. I suppose what's stopping me is that I don't quite have the sense of urgency to get stuff done that I would have otherwise. Deadlines and due dates aren't feeling terribly concrete or immediate for me. I could probably push myself to persist despite that lack of urgency.

Oh yeah, I mentioned money earlier. This dude needs a job. The college had a part-time job fair a few days ago, and there were several interesting job positions open. And dangit, I need one of those. Part of me is really hesitant about going through with the process, because I've never worked while at university. When I went to community college I worked about 18 hours a week, and I still did exceptionally well in my classes. Then again, my classes were mostly online. So it doesn't seem like it should be bad if I'm working at most 15 hours a week, mainly weekends, to compensate with the much bigger school workload I have now. Still, now I gotta ask people to be references, find where half these places are and turn in stuff, and so on. I wanted to be on the web development team for the housing and dining, but I need to be available for at least 3 four-hour shifts during the weekdays, and my schedule would only allow for two. Technically I could do three, but that third slot is in a pretty nasty place until October.

And then there's the matter of my weight, and dieting. College food is not always the healthiest thing around. My weakness? It's really, really good. A lot of people talk crap about dining hall food but I think it's yummy. Therein lies my problem. I have a hard time deciding on the spot what stuff is going to be good for me, and what's not. Or how much of something I should eat. I also don't seem to have access to any scales for the purpose of weighing myself, so I don't have a clue what my weight is. I fear it might be going back up. The dorm has a weight room in the basement, but again finding time for that is a challenge.

On the topic of health, sleep and tiredness has been an issue. Don't get me wrong, I have an adequate amount of sleep. I typically get at least 7 hours of sleep a night. But for some reason it's not doing me very much good once I get into the afternoon. Maybe it's diet, or stress, or whatever, but I've been experiencing more fatigue than usual recently. It's basically one more hindrance stopping me from doing my best. Coffee helps, a little bit, but that could get expensive quickly.

You know what I think my problem really comes down to? I don't have a plan. I have a schedule, yes. You wouldn't believe how much I've planned out already. But I suppose I haven't taken the opportunity to really engage in it. I can do a lot of stuff this semester, but I need to get myself in gear. Maybe the best thing for me to do is start following my daily schedules - because believe me, I have the time to do what I need - but also have a sort of running to-do list, where I'm working on class stuff based upon how urgent it is to finish them. Having a schedule I followed more rigorously would let me be more on task, and would also go a way to helping me be less distracted by stuff.

My mind considers what it must have been like for university students and the other intellectuals of the Medieval Ages. They did not have access to knowledge and technology like I do today. On one hand, it made it easier a lot easier to be focused since, hey, they didn't have the Internet to have things more fun to do than schoolwork. If they did decide to slack off, it was usually with a book or other people. So I would wager they were inclined to be more productive than someone like myself. Plus university back in those days was crazy expensive. On the other hand, the less availability of information meant doing things took much longer. High level math, science, and philosophy must have been a real time sink. Yet you still end up with great thinkers like Aquinas, Augustine, Euclid, and so on. Why couldn't I have the kind of focus that they would have?