This too has passed

This is not good. I’m spending what may very well be my third night out of the last four in the lab. Air conditioned or not, I really should be sleeping. I have to do some work – two large chunks of work actually – before tomorrow morning and it’s not as if I couldn’t have avoided this last minute scram. I just procrastinated beyond the point of any sense at all. A couple of nights spent finishing what should have been done earlier is comic and indulgent, but I really do want to sleep tonight and absolutely the last thing I want to do is to read about bloody timed automata. The weird part of all this is that about 10, or at most 12, hours later I will never again in my life have to read, write or communicate about timed automata. Timed automata will be wiped out from my life for ever and if I forget every little scrap of information I have not been able to stop despite my sincerest efforts from going into my reluctant mind and if I burn all the printouts I’ve taken this semester and if entire folders and assignments get deleted and if tomorrow timed automata were to be suddenly outlawed from the world, none of it would make a paisa-worth of difference to me. And yet, there’s nothing I can do but try my best to understand as much as possible of timed automata. It’s all really rather futile.
Sometimes I think that the only subjects that are of any real use to me are some parts of mathematics and the humanities courses that I did at IIT. The rest were there to fill my time. I could have used those courses to sharpen my mental faculties or I could have worked hard at them to keep from losing momentum. But to think that the course content itself was of any importance is to delude oneself. At least I have the satisfaction of knowing I’m leaving a stream of study I have no interest and little aptitude for. I wonder what people who are good at their engineering subjects, and worse, actually like their stuff, feel when they leave them to do MBAs or something similar. I don’t subscribe to the selling-your-soul-for-money nonsense or the theory that so much money is spent on us to make us into engineers and hence we are under some sort of obligation to humanity to engineer all our lives. But I don’t know how people who leave what they love for what they don’t feel. Perhaps most of them can love just about anything after finding beauty in subjects I find exceedingly dull. Perhaps they adjust easily to new subjects. Then, do those of us who have trouble finding things interesting find nothing interesting at all? I will, of course, be in a better position to answer this say, a year later but it’s a question that’s been troubling me in recent days, especially since I’ve been getting time to think at these totally avoidable ‘night-outs’ of mine.
Obviously, the time that I devote to writing a post eats into the time I should be spending studying or working. However, it is the part I enjoy most about the night-outs, so here goes another.

Some hours later:
It’s amazing. I have nothing to do here except study – three songs I’m in no mood to hear, no movies, books or music videos, no LAN, no one’s online and nothing’s happening on the Net. I have read all the blogs I normally read and have checked for new emails too many times already (there aren’t any). I am actually studying because there’s nothing else to do. I mean, this actually works – remove distractions from your life and you study/work by default. I always thought it was individual will and motivation that decided whether people studied or not. I had no idea removal of temptations worked this well. Try this at home.
Meanwhile, I’m getting rather pissed at myself because I need sleep and I can’t get any because I must work. What’s worse, since I’ll only finish by about 5 or 6 am, if at all, there’ll really be no point in sleeping because if I did I wouldn’t be able to get up in time for my work to serve any useful purpose.
I’ve been writing limericks of a slightly personal nature that may not see the light of the day but are pretty decent nevertheless. They’re certainly a change from all that I’ve written in the past months, mainly non starters.

For however much you opine
(And you’re quite generous with this line)
That I don’t, can’t, feel anything deep
And all I care for is my sleep
So often I’ve been far from fine

and others on similar lines. I think it’s especially apt because of the sleep line. Maybe all this is preparation for the future - which, frankly, terrifies me – but the point really is, what’s the purpose of a life in which I have to go through pain and discomfort and lack of sleep and it’s all a good thing because I’ll get used to an experience I’ll repeat in future? I mean, so I didn’t work when I should have. Big deal. I must have done something I enjoyed, like watching a movie or chatting someone up or writing a post. Why should enjoying life, living life, make me feel guilty? Why do we attach such a premium on hard work? And why the corresponding guilt attached with laziness?

Does work really set us free
Or is it all a giant Nazi conspiracy?

PS: It's 6 am now. Officially 3 out of 4.