A few months ago, a good friend asked me how I was. The prompt answer was, “Frustrated.” His analysis of the situation was that I was a year or two away from graduation. The fact that I was religiously sticking to the PhD mood swing was reassuring in a perverse way. As a rule, my attitude towards life tends towards the darker side, to say the least. The past week witnessed me plunging towards new depths. A transition between projects started the decline. In order to acquaint myself with the assigned task, an exhaustive literature search had to be undertaken. The sudden exposure to material hitherto unknown or lodged in deep recesses of the memory is always overwhelming. Coupled to this was a rather hazy description of the problem statement; in other words, I didn’t get off to the best of starts. The icing on the cake of disaster was provided by the ever present disgust of moving to Boston from idyllic Urbana. God knows how much I miss the laid back, distraction-free life that was mine just over 3 months ago.
Anyway, depression has a constant companion, which also happens to be a harmless yet effective outlet for pent-up angst: heavy metal. That was when I (re)discovered Ruckus.com, which allows college students with a legitimate university email address to download music legally (?) for a fixed period of time. Excellent timing!
