#hhnp

Prologue 2

    ‘Two AM again…’ I looked at the clock in the corner of my laptop screen. ‘And still nowhere near done.’ I let out a deep sigh and slumped on my desk, my face landing on the mechanical keyboard and sending an endless string of “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA” into the search bar of the browser I’d been playing YouTube videos from.     ‘How many times have I seen 2 AM this week? Three? Five? Gotta be less than seven, at least there’s that.’ I sat up, mostly to make sure I wasn’t bending my glasses in my melodrama, and glanced over at my coffee. ‘Empty.’ The thermos I kept reserve coffee in was too.     I looked over at the screen. The engineering software I was running had been spinning it’s little “processing” courser for what felt like hours, and was only just barely halfway through its progress bar that appeared in the bottom of the window. ‘This is suffering. And if I pull up a game it’ll just split the GPU’s focus and it’ll take even longer.’ It wasn’t that I really wanted to play a game - its not like anyone but maybe the couple of overseas members of my guild would be on anyway, and I didn’t feel up for doing the raid level content those members enjoyed - but I just needed something to keep me awake. I’d been going for most of the week straight, with a few meals and the kind of catnaps you get in the eight seconds between when your eyes fall shut and you start falling over, interspersed. I was a PhD student. A PhD student that jumped from BS to PhD, without a founding masters between it. A PhD student who had enough drive and shear guts to teach myself anything - and had, so surely taking a PhD in a field I took one undergrad class in was a good idea, right?     And don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I didn’t get absurdly excited about electrons. No one loves and enjoys yelling at those fidgety little bastards as much as I do! But that didn’t change how hard it was to keep up. Electrical Engineering isn’t easy, and sure nothing is. But Electrical is 100% in your head. You can’t push an electron and watch how it moves the three bar linkage to prove to yourself how the forces interact. You can’t tape a laser pointer to the top of an electron and stand on it to prove normal force exists. You can’t put debugging statements into your electron and run it to diagnose what is going wrong. In Electrical, everything’s made up and the diagrams don’t matter. You just have to take on faith these funky little fells are what we say they are and do what we say they do. On top of that, there are a lot of things that we can’t even visualize. Sure we can draw wires and pretend electrons “move” through it to make current; but let me ask you, where is the electron actually? Fact is we don’t know, and we use probability to guess good. But what is a probability wave? What is an infinitesimally small, one-dimensional space? What does an energy band look like in a material? None of these things are real, except for what scientists shake hands and agree on imagining in order to get work done.     At the best of times, it was that esoteric challenge to “see" and figure out how it worked that kept me interested; but at the worst of times? I was massively sleep deprived, hadn’t spoken to friends or family in weeks, only standing long enough to go make a new pot of coffee or to pee. Not exactly a healthy life. Sometimes it was hard to convince myself it was wroth it to keep going; but it’s not like it was worth it to stop either. I just reminding myself what it felt like to be in the thick of it, learning interesting things, and getting excited for the potential for the future, and just tried to muddle through the rough patches until I could get back to the good stuff.     But this semester had been one long death-march. Between professors who refused to use the normal tools and methods of communication our school provided on account of the small class size, to university events I was duty-bound to participate in, to me making up for my own lack of foundational knowledge and dealing with my nonexistent time-management skills, I had no time for anything but education. The only boon was that my classes were remote, so at least I didn’t have to factor in a two-hour commute to school or the energy to actually function in neurotypical, extroverted human society.

    I’d been staring blankly at the progress bar of my engineering software for twenty minutes before I realized something had popped up while I was on mental hiatus. My eyes focused and it took a couple of seconds to process, and then my heart sank into my stomach.

[“An Error Has Occurred”]

    I was dumbstruck. Days of work, hours of processing, and for what? “An Error Has Occurred.” I should have been angry, but I just wasn’t. The phrase struck me like the programmer must have been a kind person. It could have said “Critical Failure” or something dramatic like that; but they chose “An Error Has Occurred”, like a buddy putting a hand on your shoulder to break bad news as gently as they can without dancing around it. I was grateful to that programmer in that moment; I’m not sure I could have taken “Critical Failure” and retained my will to live.     I laid my head down beside my keyboard, leaving my hands between my thighs for comfort, and looking up at the dialog box as I just processed. ‘I’m not making the deadline, so I’ll have to email the professor. Wonder if he’ll even notice that I sent the email a 2:48 in the morning? But if a gaming laptop can’t run this thing, I’m not even sure I can finish. It’ll be a hassle if I have to try on a different machine. I don’t think I have access to a better machine. I wonder if any of this really matters.’ My brain just flooded one thought after another, the levee that had been holding back all my doubts and my fears broke; but I was so tired, I didn’t even feel it. I just stayed there, disconnected from everything. In waking hours, I would have started crying by then - a nice short little sob between me and the computer screen that functioned like letting out the foam on a soda bottle before bottling it up tight again and being able to actually get what you need out of it. But there was a spell about the 2:00 AM hour that I’d noticed this semester. A calm that was both embracing and disconcerting. A liminal space, where nothing else really existed except what was in my mind and what I was doing. True focus without intrusive thoughts or every little think I needed to be doing sitting at the edge of perception. Emotions fell to the wayside. Normal priorities fell to the wayside. I just existed in a consuming stillness that prickled my skin. I’d finally understood what Pink Floyd meant by “Comfortably Numb.”