Normal

nor•mal (verb)
(physics & mathematics) pertaining to vectors, a vector or surface is said to be "normal to" another vector or surface if they intersect at an angle of 90 degrees (i.e. are perpendicular to one another)
Origin: Latin (normalis = conforming to the rules/a carpenter's square)

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Back from Reading Break. Clocked in ~50 hours of Pokémon. Didn't really do much else. Super tired to be back at school.

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Pertaining to Homestuck trolls: HOLY CRAP THAT'S COMPLICATED! (I read the linked article) But it seems amazingly awesome and very entertaining. I can see myself getting lost in it sometime in the future, for sure. I just need to find the time for it.

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I guess that's what I'm going to be talking about today. It's rather personal, I guess, but it's all that's really on my mind lately, and I don't have 3-4 hours it would take to try and cram all of my Pokémon obsessions (the only other topic on my mind atm) into one post today, so here goes.

Finding the time for stuff.

I dunno, but motivation and self discipline have always been huge problems for me; I'm (usually) hard pressed to do class work or really any work in general unless I feel like it. Sometimes everything seems like such a drag, completely dull, and wholly uninteresting. It really does have to do with my mood; if I'm in a good mood, I'm usually very productive and I find I learn more effectively, but if I'm in a bad mood or I'm upset, everything just disintegrates.

Lately, I've found that I'm not able to concentrate on anything like I used to be able to. I'm not very productive, I'm doing poorly in all my classes (I just got all my midterms back and all of them are B's or worse), and my hair is thinning (which is enormously alarming). I guess I'm just getting tired of living such a mundane life.

With all this fogginess, I haven't been able to find time for everything that I really want to do, because I feel guilty for not studying more because I'm not doing well in my studies, but I'm not doing well in school because I'm generally not very alert or motivated, which is generally because every day is just so depressing.

As I sit here, absently staring at the computer screen and keyboard in front of me, I wonder, am I really still here? Because how do I know that I'm really still living if I'm too numb to feel anything? To quote Hank Green's brilliant Anglerfish Song, "You simply do not feel what is always there/I ask my brain to entertain that pain is the same/that if I feel it all the time can I really call it pain?"

 I used to say that sometimes the greatest battle is to keep on living. Some people would agree, saying "well that totally makes sense: there are people living poverty who have to fight for every single meal; they have to work their entire lives, just to meet their basic needs," and it's true, for these people, the greatest battle is indeed to keep on living: to find the next meal, to find another place to sleep, to make sure that you're not left behind as life keeps moving forwards. But sometimes life is not physically difficult, but emotionally difficult. Sometimes the greatest battle is to keep on living a life that gives you little to no satisfaction, when the joy seems to be sucked right out of the very air you breathe.

Someone once famously said that happiness is found not in the seldom moments of immense glory and triumph, but in the little graces in every day life. In biochemistry, we learned that for many proteins, only a very small percentage of its size is dedicated to performing its function; the reason why it has to be so big is because a protein's stability is the sum of a large number of tiny forces. That is, over 95% of a protein enzyme's amino acids have nothing to do with its function and everything to do with making sure it doesn't fall apart. In other words, a protein is only stable because a very large number of tiny forces/weak interactions between its amino acids hold it together; if proteins were small and had just the amino acids involved in performing its function (i.e. their size reduced by over 95%), because the weak interactions are so much fewer in number, it would not be enough to hold the protein together, and everything would just fall apart.

~Tim~