More later; I was supposed to be asleep two hours ago.

Sometimes I can satisfy it by cooking food for my entry (brownies or cookies are the usual suspects), or giving away belongings (I once gave half of my plates, bowls, and silverware to a friend because she’d been using paper and utensils for a month), or digging through the trashcan for non-recycled recyclables. Or holding the door open for people a ways behind me.

Other times I very much wish I had a cause I could volunteer with and dedicate time towards in order to give something to the world.

I’ve already decided my life’s goal is to be involved in education in some way from here on out – I am driven to better others’ lives by teaching, whether in a classroom or planetarium. I already made a point of including in my mother’s obituary the request that “in lieu of flowers” people make memorial donations to the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, a cause I wholeheartedly support, advocate, and advertise readily. I already spent eleven years as a Girl Scout, not because I wanted to put the Silver Award on my resume but because I genuinely enjoyed the culture of service and activism, and to this day I recite the Girl Scout Law in my mind when I have doubts about what to do with my life: “I will do my best to be honest and faithful, friendly and kind, considerate and caring, courageous and strong, and responsible for what I say and do, and to respect myself and others, respect authority, use resources wisely, make the world a better place, and be a sister to every Girl Scout” – though I tend to extend offers of sisterhood beyond Scouts I believe in the fundamentals established therein.

I guess I missed election season, the prime time to “volunteer”, though I still have doubts that political activism qualifies as more than pseudo-altruism (after all, do we not choose our candidates primarily out of self-interest – “who gives me the best tax breaks?” “who takes the same stance as I do on social and moral values and causes?”). It is certainly a good way to gain exposure to the atmosphere of dedicating time to something larger than oneself, and if through political activism people are drawn to activism for more worldwide causes, I can’t complain.

Living on a college campus in a very large city makes it difficult to find an outlet for these altruistic tendencies for several reasons.

In a town in New Hampshire where you’re separated by one degree from pretty much everyone, it’s easy to find someone who knows someone who does whatever it is you want to do. But in the city, while there are more people to know there’s also some aspect of keeping more to oneself – though at first glance it seems like city folk should have more friends than country folk simply because there are more people, the fact is that city folk think they have more to do and tend to be in a hurry more often than country folk and thus don’t end up making friends, even with colleagues and coworkers. This can be jarring to new city residents, but that’s probably a story for another time.

Plus… there are more causes in the city than the town. This seems outwardly like a good thing because it means more varied choices of volunteer work (we don’t really have soup kitchens and homeless shelters in Merrimack, New Hampshire), but it also leads to less overall organization or structure. At home, there are pretty much four ways people give back to the community: school sports, rec sports, Scouts, and church. If you have time but no money, you join Scouts or coach rec sports. If you have money but no time, you give to school sports and church events. Things just aren’t so straightforward in Boston.

Additionally, on a college campus, surrounded by people whose primary priorities are schoolwork, grades, and resume-building, it’s nearly impossible to find anyone who doesn’t look at you like you’re crazy when you say you want to donate your time for the joy of it. (Usually the response is something like “Where did you get that much free time?” followed shortly by “What good does it do you?”.)

Anyway, the point of this whole discussion was originally going to be that I end up spending almost all my time these days playing Free Rice because it sort of satisfies my altruistic drive. In the greatly-less-than-satisfying way that a tunafish sandwich would my pre-Thanksgiving hunger… but at least it’s food, right?

I guess it takes the edge off.

Three times. In half an hour.

The first two times it was pretty normal – you know, as kernel panics go: suddenly the grey box of doom pops up, I get upset, I try to circumvent the grey box of doom to no avail, I give up all hope of recovering my work-in-progress and press the power button.

The third time, something had had enough inside the computer, and it vomited all over my video memory.

computer vomit. all over my wikipedia page!

You know it’s bad when a room full of MIT Course VIers go “ho-ly…!” when they see your computer.

Apparently one of my RAM slots failed. Again. I guess this is maybe a known problem with PowerBooks. It’s happened before, and the not-quite-a-genius at the Genius Bar told me that I’d need the entire logic board replaced to change out a RAM slot, but since I only had the one stick of RAM that came with the laptop (waaaaay back in 2005, when 512 MB was still a lot) I figured I’d just keep it in the working slot and not worry too much about it. Then along comes May 2008 when I realized my 3-year AppleCare plan was expiring in a week or two, and I promptly shipped it out for a logic board replacement and on its return treated its second RAM slot to a yummy new 1 GB stick!

Well, things were all shiny for quite a while thereafter, until last night. The slot with the 1 GB stick failed (in my case, the lower slot – it was the upper slot that failed on the previous logic board!), so I’m back down to 512 MB until at least the end of finals week when I can go home and take advantage of my dad’s collection of variously-sized high-precision Phillips-head screwdrivers.

In the meantime, I’m left with a computer too slow to even show the “hang ON, I’m thinking, PLEASE stop clicking on stuff” beachball… and the memory of amazing a roomful of computer geeks with an inexplicable kernel panic log video memory dump.

Surely this is one of the very very few things capable of amazing with “dump” in the name.