one day (if i make it there) my skin will be translucent and wrinkled and my hair will be wild every day. i will wear jogging pants and ugly cardigans and will sit in the mall food court doing logic puzzles and mumbling to myself in a happy, contented, and slightly befuddled manner. i will wear comfortable brown dress socks and grey running shoes that have velcro instead of laces and no one will smirk at them when they walk by, because i will be old. and i won't have to wear ear plugs to block out the world because i will be so deaf that even if the kids listening to metallica on their headphones real real loud sit down right beside me i will not notice. and i will never ever think about parallel processors or scalable architectures or interconnect networks or shared memory systems, because after my exam tomorrow i am going to forget them so well that they will never enter my mind again. and if (perchance) sometime someone says to me "hey dan, what do you think about those new vector processors with their fantastic multiple instruction multiple data bus system?" i will give them a bewildered look and a slight shrug.

tomorrow takes so long to get here some days.

actually, that is not what i want to do when i become old (i was going to say 'old and wise' but i am not sure that i will get to that point. i think i have a better shot at old). i once read (or heard once) someone write that when they get to be old they want to have a goodbye party with their family, buy a plane ticket with their remaining, cash and fly to a poor country and just live at an orphanage until they die - loving children who need it. that sounds a lot better than logic puzzles in the mall. i guess we'll see. hopefully i will get the velcro shoes either way.