On Friday I had a mandatory code review with a professor to talk about a project I had handed in a week previous. When I went into meet with him, he looked at my code and said, "Oh, you're the student that handed in the box of chocolates." He referred to my code as a box of chocolates. Is this a good thing?

I think that my biggest flaw is my inability to make a decision. Unless I'm contemplating something that I'm extremely passionate about, I generally have to put a huge amount of mental effort into even the simplest of decisions. This first dawned on me as I was talking to my roommate last night, but as I have analyzed it, I realize that there have been many signs of this in the past.

Last night I was talking to my roommate while he was listening to some music by Outkast. A song came on and he said that it was one of his favorite songs and then asked me if I liked it. I said that I was indifferent to it, and he replied that I am indifferent about too many things. I realized immediately that he was right. This indifference comes from my lack of ability to make decision about preferences. Now this song is not a song that I dislike. I remember it being really popular when I was in high school, and listening to it rather frequently. At that time I really liked the song, but since then my feelings towards the song have worn off (no doubt because of hearing it too much), and I can no longer decide if I actually like the song or if I'm fed up with it and don't want to hear it again. To a normal person, one of these feelings would overweight the other and they could easily answer about their preferences, but not me. There are many songs which I feel similar about. A lot of popular songs have catchy rhythms to them, but on the other hand, there lyrical content is nil, and this set of conflicting feelings towards the songs gives me a really hard time in deciding whether I like such songs. That being said, this isn't the case for all music. There are certain styles and musicians which I enjoy passionately, while there are some genres (i.e. country) whose music I detest, but nonetheless, there is a large amount of music which I do feel completely indifferent about.

This indecision is not only related to music, but rather it plagues my everyday life. A solid example is food. This past summer I lived with an aunt whose house was near the company that I interned for. I really enjoyed my stay, but could sense her annoyance at the fact that I could never make up a decision about what to eat for dinner. When we ate out, she would always ask where I wanted to go, and I would always reply with, "I don't know." When we ate in she would ask me what I wanted to eat, often even accompanied by a set of choices, and I would always reply with the same echoing, "I don't know." All of the food propositions seemed equally delicious so I found myself unable to choose one. Even as I sit here typing I am hungry but unable to make a decision about what to eat, so I will continue to sit here until my hunger is at such a level that I am compelled to make a decision about what to eat.

All this being said, some decisions are easy for me to make. For example, being that I'm majoring in computer science, I routinely have to make design choices about code that I'm working on. The big difference for this is that I don't have to make a commitment to a design choice, because I know that there is always a backspace key, if I make a bad decision I can always go back and change it or modify it. I guess, then, this indecision is really an inability to commit to something, even on the most micro scale, for fear of the consequences of the decision.

This is a message to all of you people who send email messages with little inspirational quotes after your signatures. I don't know where you got this idea from, or where you get your lame quotes, but they aren't appreciated - not by me, not by anybody. Please, for the sanity of the rest of the population, the next time you send an email, resist the urge to paste a quote into it.

On Wednesday I was headed out for school for my early morning class (at 10:30) and as per my regular routine, I got into my car. The day before I had helped Joe haul some foam board back to the apartment for a project and it didn't fit easily into my car, so I had moved both of the front seats as far forward as they could reach. Being that there was no longer a need to have the seats practically touching the dashboard, I moved them both back, and then started the car.

After a few seconds I noticed a hissing noise emanating from my car, so I turned it off in fear for its health, but the hissing noise continued. After a couple of seconds I noticed that the noise was coming from underneath the passenger seat, so I reached down to investigate. What I felt was an aerosol can, and I assumed that in moving the seat back I had hit the button on the can, but I was wrong.

I pulled the can out from under the seat to find that a can of Ozium™ air freshener had been punctured by the seat, and now "new car smell" was slowly escaping from it. Then, without warning, the can did what I can only explain as explode, and the complete contents of the can covered my car and myself. One wouldn't think it's a big deal, but Ozium™ is very concentrated, thus my car and my coat became infused with an extremely overpowering, to the point of making it difficult to breath, "new car smell." Currently I can't wear my jacket for fear of driving everyone away from me from its overpowering scent, and I can only sit in my car for a few minutes at a time without choking on the smell. Needless to say, as much as I would like a shiny new car, I never want to encounter that "new car smell" again.