Revision situation isn’t looking too rosy; I don’t feel like I have very much more in my head for two weeks of about five hours a day. I guess I actually do, though. Also, five hours a day is pretty pathetic. Well, I’m about to go into the second half (tomorrow morning) which would seem like an appropriate time to ramp it up, if any. I am finding that something is hard and I spend half an hour basically just sitting there thinking about other things or looking out of the window, which is a really bad habit because it just destroys time. So I have a new thought which is that if I’m on one thing for 10 minutes and can’t seem to concentrate, I’ll switch over to something else, such as writing out some proofs, rather than, say, doing a computation—and vice-versa. Got to remember to actually do this though.

The big worry is that these second year maths exams will hold me back from graduate philosophy, which is a very real problem. And it all feels overwhelming. So past papers, past papers, and hope the same stuff comes up.

The approach of summer is bitter-sweet. On the one hand I am looking forward to settling down and sorting out a number of things. Most importantly there is the studying that I am to do, namely, doing the philosophy that’s been neglected all year because of impeding Maths exams. I shall be reading ahead for the third year too, trying to put some more pieces of the philosophical thought of humanity into place, which is what I seem to most want out of this degree. I’ve also decided what the rest of my degree is going to look like, by a process of elimination, in terms of what options I am going to do. Secondly there are the other projects I want to do. I am wavering over whether or not to learn LISP (the book most recommended to me would teach scheme, from which I could presumably learn the most useful variant to me, Emacs-Lisp) because it’s quite an undertaking and I’m not sure how interesting I will find it. Another big thing is gutting my software setup and rebuilding from the ground up with CRUX, documenting it, and thereby giving me the rock solid stability I desire for my system. It’ll be an interesting project in itself but it will also be good to have it out of the way so that I can spend a good amount of time checking everything still works, so this is probably what I’ll do first. Then comes reading. A-ha, well, this is the difficult one. The best I can come up with right now is that the only way to be good at reading again is to read, and read and read, so this is what I’ll try to do. Part of this I’ve already mentioned but there are many other things to read too. There are so many books on my shelf I’ve been given over the years that I haven’t read, and now is the time to read them.

The thought is that I want to be reading rather than (a) computer tweaking (b) computer gaming. Now, this imports a big thick bias that certain activities are worth more than others, and that I should be beating myself into some particular shape rather than doing what I enjoy. There’s more to it than this. I do not wish to throw away the mildly obsessive immersion into a particular tech project or game; this is also a social thing as when a bunch of us got excited by Braid or something. However I can’t help thinking that I would be better off if I became immersed in other things. The point is that these things are easy, and they’re about short term gratification: if I’ve written a script that automates something I used to spend five minutes typing commands to do, I’ve achieved something that wasn’t challenging at all, and similarly with game-immersion. Not so with other things. Can I have both this powerful immersion back for what I see as being more valuable? I hope so, but it’s not a balance one can immediately attain for oneself.

One might also say, why the demand for productivity? Well, my view is increasingly that I’m not going to be at this stage of life for long and I should make the best use of it I can. And that isn’t messing about on the Internet. Maybe saying things like this means I’ve moved into a different phase, though.

Another project is learning to touch-type properly; looking at the reflection of my fingers in the screen now shows how inefficiently I use my fingers.

Finally there are the habits I wish to embed deep into my psychology. For example let’s take getting up. I’m pretty decent at this, but I do fail maybe once or twice a fortnight and I will definitely fail if my alarm clock can be silenced without getting out of bed. I don’t know why I don’t have this willpower, but I do know that periods of life in which I have had a very fixed sleep pattern have been a lot better for that, than otherwise. There are other habits too. I am trying to decide to what extent I can ‘rise above’ certain family member’s ridiculosity. On the one hand it is one of my most important intellectual principles that one must always engage with another person because otherwise you assume your own infallibility. Further, the lack of regard for me and my belongings I get from particularly my mother seems like an injustice that it would be wrong to just ignore. That’s the thing: keeping silent for pragmatic purposes isn’t right to me, because we must do things with energy and passion and a full sense of self behind them; this includes the way we live with people. The only way for me to avoid this is to disengage and be dismissive of them all, which is not warranted and not much fun.

That was a lot more than I intended to write on that subject so now, the things that are bad about the summer. I’ll be leaving Oxford. I’ll have to return to motivating myself entirely rather than attempting to combine my own willpower with my tutors’, I’ll be away from many people I love to have around and to see from day-to-day and they’ll be the thought that ZOMG I’m halfway through my degree. And the thing is, I expect zero contact from people I know in Oxford aside from maybe, if I’m lucky, a few e-mails. I don’t actually consider that to be hugely problematic on a more detached level. Our relationships are weak and are 20% college loyalty and 50% dependent on seeing each other a lot through doing the same subject or whatever, but that doesn’t stop it from being pleasant to have them around.

Michaelmas term will be pretty epic I imagine. They’ll be freshers’ week to help run again, I’ll be living in college again, doing exciting new work, and exams will still be a way off. I wonder what the atmosphere will be like: my year will be the third year, but my year is even cliquier than most and probably less mature. People hanging around in the fourth year, working in the college offices etc. who I knew when I first arrived will be properly gone. The current freshers will be in houses and in Jowett and I’ll see far less of them. And of course they’ll be about a hundred newbies. Looking forward to it in any case. Second year goes really fast compared to first year and I don’t know why, and it wasn’t great for me anyway, so I’m looking forward to the next one. It’ll feel like less maths because there will be fewer courses to learn from, and they’ll be all that philosophy and my romanticisation of philosophy exams will come crashing down. Michaelmas’ll be good though. And I shall make good use of the summer, and come back ready to make more of things than I did this year.