In October, life was all about enjoying the autumnal chill, but come November, and it’s as though deadlines and exams have conspired to bury me alive.
This sudden onslaught of academic responsibilities reminds me of a joke a professor quipped during lunch. The problem he posed was that why people often feel they’ve waited longer for the bus than they should have, even when buses are supposed to arrive every ten minutes on the dot and passenger arrivals are spread out uniformly. Hmm, interesting?
It’s kind of like my life right now. I’d compare my assignment schedule to a Poisson process— they theoretically come at a constant rate, but in reality, I’m either in a drought or a flood of work. Just this week, I’m juggling a high-frequency trading contest, a mid-term in the most intense data analysis class known to humankind, and a presentation for my machine learning class. That’s not even the half of it. My advisor hasn’t heard from me in weeks (sorry…), and my social life is registering more dormant than a volcano.
But, hey, I’m keeping my cool. Panicking is about as useful as a chocolate teapot. I’m skating on thin ice with deadlines, sure, but I’m not falling through just yet. In the spirit of Dua Lipa’s song from the Barbie movie:
Lately, I been movin’ close to the edge
Still be lookin’ my best
I stay on the beat, you can count on me
I ain’t missin’ no steps
when my heart break, when my world shake… it’s like same chaotic and absurdity but more control
Coolness. Btw, regarding that bus scenario, turns out, it’s not just bad luck in terms of statistic theories. Thanks to the quirks of probability, when buses don’t run like clockwork, expected wait time will indeed be longer than the mean of interval. So it goes with the bus, so it goes with life. There are peaks, there are valleys, and sometimes you’re just stuck at the bus stop a bit longer.