Life is full of weird coincidences, to put it lightly.  One such coincidence this evening was when my classical music stream decided to play Nearer, My God, to Thee - the very hymn that was allegedly played as the Titanic was sinking - this evening, as I was getting past the fact that my Digital Forensics midterm was a lot harder than anyone could’ve predicted.  It’s just one exam, just 15% of the grade in a class that’s ultimately an elective for me, but it’s a shock to say the least.  Learning to process things like this the right way is another aspect of the “new me” that perhaps doesn’t get as much time on my mind as it probably should.  There’ll be another shot in a few weeks, after all, and I’ve never gotten a zero on a test.  At least, not that I can remember.

Things will be fine.  And not just in that comic strip of a dog sipping coffee while the room burns up around him meaning either.

https://i.imgur.com/c4jt321.png

In times like this in the past, I’ve usually turned right to escapism, which of course meant games.  It’s a tough habit to break out of to be sure, but if anything I made it harder on myself today.  I noticed I was falling into the trap of mindless browsing once again taking the role of games as a time waster.  As informative as Reddit might be (and however many dank memes it might contain), isn’t the rush for karma on that site just the same as chasing that same feeling of stimulation that games provided?  A lesser form of it, to be sure, but nonetheless it’s kind of the same thing - racking up points that are ultimately useless except as a yardstick to compare yourself to others.

My primary laptop that I use for everything when I’m on campus is now set to block everything that I possibly waste time on on a given day.  I’ll only have ten minutes total out of the entire day to go on anything like Reddit, HN, Facebook, the various sites I use for fantasy football, etc.  Not ten minutes per site, ten total.  I have no idea how I’m going to do it.  I really don’t.  What do y’all do to fill the time?  Especially those dead moments at work when there literally is nothing else to do?  On paper I should write or program, but there’s got to be something else out there I’m missing, right?

This “filling my time productively” thing is harder than it sounded.