I know you know. But I’m going to tell you anyway. The story of my life for the last month and a half (except, of course, the beautiful respite of my 10-day winter break). This is what I’m going to tell you. It won’t take long. You wake up. You shower. You eat breakfast, and make 2 sandwiches. You take these up to “the lab,” which is really just an office but you call it the lab to differentiate it from the place where you got a salary and fringe benefits. See, it’s better! It’s THE LAB. It’s SCIENCE. So you settle in around 9am, knowing that there won’t be any company until early afternoon, because you’re only hardcore if you work in the lab from 2pm until 3am, the 9am to 11pm guys are weaklings.

You settle at your tiny desk (tiny because there are already 7 students in this office, but the alternative is to sit alone in a room with no windows), and you spend roughly the next 12-15 hours rearranging the magnetic fields on a hard drive. Change this one to a zero, this zero to a one, etc. Nothing fancy. Somewhere along the way eat your sandwiches or go out for fast food that isn’t any better for you because it’s Thai rather than Burger King–coconut milk is a bitch. Go home. Pretend you have time to do something before sleep, realize you don’t, sleep.

Now, fundamentally, this bitching is bogus. We both know it is. And yet, no matter how perfect the scenario, there is always something to bitch about. So I’m just going to bitch away here. The last 36 hours or so were excellent. Deadline: 2pm Wednesday. Go in on Monday, work your “normal” hours. Tuesday, after 8 beautiful hours of sleep, head in around 9am. Finish the crucial elements of the submission around 10pm. Decide to do another example. Spend the next 12 hours or so getting that working. Around 5am, decide to only allow changes to the paper text by 3-way consensus of the authors (language faculties slipping). Submit final paper around 7am. Order delirious co-authors to sleep as necessary, sleep none at all yourself until the last frame is rendered, roughly noon. Submit.

SUBMIT! Submit. submit.

And then, it’s over. The last few days have been a beautiful, chemically-induced haze. I think I may almost be ready to face normal life again.

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Comments

amy — 2006-01-30 19:09:00

welcome back to the real world!

Back from a great time in NYC. Leslie’s blog has a short run down of most of the trip, and I should be putting up the pictures as soon as I have a few minutes at home not spent showering or asleep. WE LOVE SIGGRAPH WOO.

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Comments

Susan — 2006-01-05 06:50:46

Hook ’em, Horns! Should we send you a T-shirt?

bryan — 2006-01-05 10:54:50

luckily i stocked up on UT gear when i was in austin for thanksgiving! Unfortunately I’m not sure I can wear my colors with pride since I can’t actually name any of our football players…

It’s amazing after having been away from Austin for 1.5 years until this thanksgiving that I should be back only a month later. We only had a day down there, leaving yesterday morning from Dallas and turning right back around today to head back. Still, the trip was worth it. We saw some of the development that’s been going on downtown (including a visit to the huge new Whole Foods on lamar, it’s like the IKEA of hippie food or something). We also had the chance to spend some quality time with my parents, who had us over for dinner on Friday (ham, yum). We also exchanged gifts, although Jeff wasn’t there (he’s in SoCal with Sophie and her family) it was still nice to get to sit around and talk a bit.

The most amazing thing happened last night–an old friend of mine got a bunch of other old friends from high school together in some random bar east of 35. It was quite a crowd… something that hadn’t coalesced at least since ‘99 (6 years ago? Really?). It was great to talk to people I hadn’t seen for so long, and I really hope that lines of communication that were reopened last night will survive.

Now it’s 24 Dec, and I’ve still got quite a bit of time (8 days!) away from SIGGRAPH to look forward to, including 4 bopping around NYC, which should be a blast. We’ve been using the new fancy camera we bought, so expect some pics on gallery soonish.

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Comments

Matt Owen — 2005-12-26 22:16:56

It was nice seeing you again, hope you have a Happy New Year. If you want to go grab a few drinks next time you’re in Austin let me know, I should be around until June or July.

Matt Owen — 2005-12-31 16:12:28

Last Message was for George Chamales, sorry.

bryan — 2006-01-04 19:41:10

I was a little confused :)

I’ll have spent about 60 hours this week working on my SIGGRAPH paper. Still 1.5 months to go. Ugh.

The semester is almost over. I’ve got two more meetings of my oh-so-painful math class, but I “finished” (or at least turned in) the last two homeworks so I can focus on the SIGGRAPH paper, which will basically be my life until 25 January at 5pm. Which is okay, really, considering how relaxed things are for the rest of the year. I do still have a week or so in late December for Texas and Christmas that I’m not being forced to give up, and I’m sort of mentally separating the remaing time before the deadline into two death marches, one from now until the 22nd, then from the 2nd until the 25th. Seems much more manageable that way.

Almost got to see the Trey Anastasio show on Friday, but after getting patted down we were bounced at the door since it turned out our tickets were for Saturday, not Friday. Oops. Transportation made it hard to get there yesterday so we ended up selling our tickets (or at least one, I gave the other away) on craigslist and staying in for the night, which was fun anyway since Doug and I were starting work on our FFVII reunion tour. Sephiroth, Cloud, the whole gang.

Now, back to work.