A Brief Catharsis

So, not 20 minutes ago, I decided something. I was very confused, and probably didn’t make the best decision. Nothing life changing, mind you (in the way that you don’t expect significant life changes from the mundane), but importantly character revealing.

Have some background: I am still in SLO (San Luis Obispo), which is between LA and San Fran, which also means it is essentially in the middle of nowhere (comparatively: it’s still California after all). I’m doing a robotics internship at Cal Poly, and our professor suggested we check out some of the labs over at Stanford. Plans were made, and while a bunch of us research dudes were going to Yosemite after checking out Standford, a couple of us just wanted to get home after poking around San Fran and San Jose. Since I’ve been to Yosemite before, and know just how long the drive up there is, I wasn’t too keen on the idea of driving all the way up there and then climbing half dome, especially on a minimal amount of sleep. So, we plotted about how to get home from San Fran, since cars were in short supply among us. Coming home by bus seemed like the most attractive option, although it left San Jose at around 10PM.

So I wake up this morning, earlier than usual in order to get ready to go. I get out to the pick up point, and then I find that the rest of the guys skipping Yosemite had flaked out, effectively leaving me alone for the 2nd portion of the trip. That threw me into a slight panic as I tried to figure out what I should do, and I eventually decided to flake out, too. After I spent some time on top of a toilet contemplating what just happened, I finally figured that I should have gone. But then, my butt was parked on a toilet, and the caravan was already 10 minutes away.

So what’s the big deal? I missed out on a day trip to a larger city, so what? I’ll soon be parked in the middle of one of the largest cities in the world, for at least 2 years to boot. What I think is the big deal is that while I came up with the right answer to ‘What is my utility for going to Standford?’, I came up with it much too slowly (while sitting on the toilet no less). An event that I hadn’t considered (the rest of the non-Yosemite team flaking out) blindsided me and (I’m guessing) temporarily overwhelmed my utility function, causing me to make a decision that I didn’t want to make in retrospect.

It was also clear in retrospect that I should have seen it coming, and then pre-cached my thoughts about it (humans think relatively slowly, so we (probably) cache a whole lot of our thoughts to keep up our mental quickness. In this case, trying to come up with a 30-second utility evaluation wasn’t so stable). The guys I was going to be coming home with have had a history of flaking out, and the time/cost investment of the trip would only have raised the probability that they would flake out. In retrospect, it was so obvious that the probability was going to be high that I can’t figure out how I missed it entirely. And if I can’t catch obvious branches like that, then what else am i missing?

So maybe this episode wasn’t character revealing; oh well.

Now I have an entire day ahead of me. Wiped empty. Well, better get to filling it.