Sick fixations

Sometimes it’s good to let go.

Unfortunately it’s easier said than done. Once you get stuck on something, it can be very difficult to focus on something else. Actually, you might not even notice that you’re stuck, even though you think about the same thing over and over.

When you’re at school it certainly doesn’t matter. The more you ponder on something, the better solutions you come up with. Likewise with exams: the more thinking, the better answers… hopefully.

However, when school is over and you’re spending time with your friends, having a nice fika while eating carrot cake, you realize that the school issues don’t disappear. So instead of focusing on that exciting story about your friend getting a new apartment, your mind travels somewhere completely else.

I understood I had problems when I started dreaming about code. I dreamed that my body was a function. My head and my feet consisted of curly braces, while the rest of me was some code in courier new. Another time I had a dream I was an tuple. A long empty row in a database. How creative.

At a point like that you might consider separating studies from leisure.

I would like to end with a wonderful quote by Edgar Hubbart:

Don’t take your life too seriously. You won’t get out of it alive, anyway

The programming fuels

Some students at the IT-University never seem to run out of energy. They’re fully charged from early morning to late at night and work like there was no tomorrow. You imagine that most of them are busy chatting, as you notice the sound of high-speed typing fingers. They can’t be working… seriously. And it’s not that astonishing to stay alert while communicating with friends and loved ones over the Internet! So, you sneak behind their backs to get at glimpse over the numbers of messenger windows that are up on their screens, but what you actually see is lines and lines of code… Not really what you had expected! You start to feel slightly nervous and to ease your worries you inconspicuously search for the battery hatch on their bodies. But there are none to be found! The peculiar students ARE humans. Not robots or cyborgs or anything else.

So what in the world keeps them going?

Well, one qualified guess is the fuel they get from the coffee machines. IT-students can fill their cups with anything from the list below for free:

• Kaffe
• Mocka
• Choklad
• Cacao Crème
• Chocoffee
• Wiener Melange
• Cappuccino
• Café Au Lait
• Caffé Latte
• Macchiato
• Tevatten

One or more beverages in the list seem to increase your programming efforts. I don’t know which one yet. Do you?