import java.util.Scanner;

public class Matt_Test {

    public static void main(String[] args) {

        Scanner answerScanner = new Scanner(System.in);
        string answer;
        System.out.println(“Can you understand this program? Answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’:”);
        answer = in.nextLine();
        if (answer == “yes” || “Yes”) {
            System .out.println(“Yay! You’ve joined the club!”);
            }
        else if (answer == “no” || “No”) {
            System.out.println(Don’t worry. You’ll get there soon enough.”);
            }
        else {
            System.out.println(You didn’t type a vaild answer. Either you’re stupid or you’re trying to break the program, in which case you’re a douch.”);
            }
        }
    }

I have been wasting so much time on StumpleUpon now. It is nothing short of an ADD procrastinator’s dream come true. Sorry, did I say dream? I meant nightmare. This god-forsaken website literally kept me up all night cause it was so frikken interesting and entertaining.

So it seems a bit ironic that it Stumbled a website called High Existence, which contained the solution to the problem of pulling an all-nighter and needing to be awake to school.
This website is basically the collected knowledge and ideas of a college student who dropped out in favor of traveling the world and educating himself. If he has a particularly interesting idea, or comes across a useful or fun fact, he will do some snooping around and write an actual well-researched article. Thus is his website.
Subjects he’s covered include parkour, eye movements, universal languages, deja vu, lucid dreaming, why marijuana is illegal, and 10 things that will be amazing about the near future.

Yes, I just gave you a bunch of articles to read. Yes, some of them are, uhh…liberal in nature. Yes, there are other articles on the site worth reading. Really, all of them are.
And even if you disagree with the guy, just read the comments posted on his articles. He always responds to legitimate debaters with an accepting attitude and good points, as well as accepting good points made by others.
For example, although some of his articles talk about the illegitimacy of Christianity, he admits that he is not very open-minded about it because of his upbringing, which he states is something he is trying to work out, and also admits that the Bible can be used (and is used) as a vast source of good principles.

Anyways, there was an article I thought was not only interesting, but possibly something I could implement in my daily life: Polyphasic Sleep Cycles.
Yeah. If you ignored all those other links, at least breeze over this one, cause then I don’t need to re-explain everything over here.
Now, if you know me at all, you know my sleeping habits are off-the-wall bonkers. I’ll pull all-nighters and be perky and cheerful the entire rest of the next day, and then pass out that evening for 16 straight hours. I’m also keen on taking random 2+ hour naps at random times during the day (like through dinner time), and sleeping past 1 (or sometimes 3) in the afternoon during the summer.
Here’s the gist for me: I read up on the Dymaxion variation of polyphasic sleeping, which is basically 4 hour-long (or 2) naps throughout the day. This is really the only one I can do during school, cause next quarter I have all of my classes in a big block from 10:00 till 2:00, and I don’t have time to nap between them. So I’ll be sleeping from after classes at 3-ish till dinner at 5-ish, then again at 11-ish till 1-ish, and finally from 5-ish till 8-ish in the morning.
Sound crazy enough? Don’t worry, I’ve basically been sleeping like this anyways the last few weeks. And research shows there’s no detriments to health when the cycle’s implemented correctly.
There is a period of about 2 weeks or so when the body adjusts to sleeping shorter times, and starts REM sleep (the part of sleep that is actually important for avoiding sleep deprivation) much sooner after falling asleep, but I feel like my crazy sleep schedules from before will shorten this time frame to less then a week instead of 2.
Also, just in case, I’m starting the schedule (or something almost like it) during the upcoming month-long holiday break, so if I feel terrible and sleepy all of Christmas and New Years, I’ll know to ditch the cycle for school.

tl,dr:
www.highexistence.com. Check it out.
I’m gonna start taking naps throughout the day instead of sleeping.

Wish me luck!

So here are some of the words I found and/or thought of that describe me and my life right now that begin with Under & Over. I was going to leave them free-standing, but some really needed an explanation, and obviously I couldn’t just explain some of them.
Anyways, enjoy:

Understanding: This is the most applicable one out of all of these, I think. Not only am I understanding new things because I’m in college and taking classes that are teaching me things I didn’t know, but also because I am understanding all of my new friends here at WWU.
Most importantly, though, I’m understanding (or rather, trying to understand) myself. Sometimes I want things one way and sometimes I want them another way. Sometimes I’m ok with something, sometimes it makes me angry or upset. Sometimes a subject is interesting, sometimes it’s boring as hell. Sometimes I’m really organized and clean, sometimes I couldn’t care less. And I have no idea why this happens, whether it’s normal, what to do about it, or what I really want.

Undertaking: I’m undertaking a lot of new things in my life right now. I’m living without adult supervision. I’m living in a city I’ve hardly ever been to before. I’m taking college-level classes full time. I’m creating a whole new circle of friends. And so on and so forth.

Underacheiving: This one is a little depressing, but I’m sort of failing at some of the previously mentioned undertakings, namely the school-related ones.
Underpaied: This one is weird cause I don’t really have a job right now. Really what it means is I have job experience and talents that I could be using right now to get me money, but I’m not.

Undergrad: This one’s pretty self-explanatory. I’m an undergrad.

Underfocused: I want to say I have Attention Deficit Disorder (I have been officially diagnosed), but when it comes down to how my brain really works, more often it seems less like a deficit of attention and more like a surplus of ideas. Like my brain is stuck on fast-forward and I can only watch helplessly as ideas come and then are gone in a flash, lost forever to time.

Underrated: This one is a bit self-indulgent, but I know I can do a lot of things better than a significant amount of people, or at least I could if I put more effort into it. But since I have no proof of that, people don’t think I can.

Misunderstood: Huh boy. This is the story of my life in a lot of ways. This ties back to Understanding myself in a way, because I don’t know what I want, and so I accidently come across as a certain kind of person to a lot of people, even though underneath (omg another Under word!) I am not that person at all.
So here’s the deal. Basically, deep down, I am a listener, a helper, and a comforter. Whether it’s helping someone understand their math homework, comforting someone when they suffer a loss in the family, listening when someone needs to let off steam after a bad day at school, or helping someone push-start their car, I will do it.
I do it for a few reasons, one being that it just makes me happy to know I helped someone feel better or get out of a tight spot. It also makes me happy to know I can be that one friend everyone can rely on when they need help, and I never judge them, no matter what they ask me to do.
I also automatically empathize with people pretty heavily, so that helps me to understand and help them when they are trying to explain why they feel a certain way about something.
And finally, I do it because even though I have my own problems that I am sometimes dealing with, I feel that I am blessed with a relatively easy life, and on top of that, I am a very emotionally stable person. Because of this, I feel obligated to be available to people who have big problems in their life or are emotionally all over the place, or both.
Now this is where things go wrong. See, I’m fairly certain that, despite all of my other nuances, this is who I really am. But those nuances are sort of in turmoil right now for me, and I don’t really know how to portray myself as the person I really am through all of them. And on top of that, there are other characteristics I want people to associate with me, but I can’t figure out exactly how to portray them correctly. In particular, I want people to know that I am a nice person most of the time, but when I am serious about something I want them to listen to what I have to say and take it to heart, because when I am serious about something it’s because it’s a big deal for me.
The problem is that my voice is really deep, and when my face is relaxed, it kind of looks like I’m frowning. This results in my default expression and tone of voice when I am talking to people coming across as somewhat threatening or annoyed, when really I am almost certainly neither of those things. I’ve been able to lighten the blow by having a pretty well-developed sense of humor, so I can crack some pretty funny jokes if the mood needs lightening.
Unfortunately, it’s one step forward and two steps back, because when a conversation is going on in a group of people, I generally don’t say anything unless I think it’s of particular significance. What ends up happening, though, is that I say almost nothing for a while, and then when I finally try to interject, people are surprised, because they thought I was being anti-social and just not paying attention. Basically people think I’m anti-social when really I’m just overanalytical.
I dunno. I’ve started ranting, and that’s not what I intended to do. Let’s move on to the Overs!

Overprivileged: So this has two meanings. It means what it usually does, in that my parents are pretty well off and, despite what I might sometimes tell myself, I got a lot of good things as a kid. On top of that, I’m one of the few people I know with a really intact family tree. Nobody in my extended family has had a divorce, all of them are still alive, including all of my grandparents, and we are all on good terms with each other. My mom was born in Brazil, and all of the family on her side is still there, so we visit pretty frequently, which is another thing I have to remind myself I am very lucky to have.
And finally, since before I was even born my parents have been going to a really nice church on Mercer Island. It has a great kids program, everyone there is really nice, we’ve had very few problems with pastors, and until recently, we’ve never had trouble with people tithing enough, so we’ve always been able to organize things like church trips. The only trouble is, growing up in such a healthy, stable, supporting environment, I wasn’t ever really aware of how rare that is in the world, and I am usually not nearly as grateful to my parents, or just in general, as I should be.
But overprivileged means something else for me, too. Now it’s no secret that among my friends, I am usually considered the smart one. The only trouble with me being as smart as I am is that it’s caused two somewhat related things. One, it caused my ADD to go basically undetected by others until very recently, because I was doing so well in school that nobody suspected I was having trouble concentrating.
But number two, it cause me to develop really bad scholarly habits. Because I could figure things out so easily, I never had to focus on them long enough to realize I had ADD. And also, because I could figure things out so easily, it caused me to adopt a general habit of not taking school seriously, because if there was ever homework, I could do it really fast, and if there was a long-term project, I could do it all at the last minute.
Unfortunately, when I got into Junior, and then Senior year in high school, the homework actually started getting hard, and the projects started getting really long term. Long story short, my last two years of high school were an academic disaster. So yeah.

Overwhelmed: I think it’s safe to say that this ridiculously long brain dump is proof enough that I am overwhelmed by reality at the moment.
Overanalytical: So like I said before, a lot of times people think I’m being anti-social because I often seem like I’m ignoring a conversation being carried out right next to me, when really I’m just listening to what the people are saying and internalizing it.
Also, just in general, I overcomplicate and overthink things (that TWO holy crap), and it often frustrates people that are associating with me.

Overassertive: For one reason or another, sometimes I will ask someone to do something, but it accidentally comes across as a demand instead of a request because I will forget to say please, and I say it in a tone of voice that sounds demanding.
Really, though, the tone you’re hearing is just a matter-of-fact one, and I forget to say please because I’m not asking you to do it so much as I am pointing out that it needs to get done, and it would be nice if you did it cause I’m probably busy with something and that’s why I’m not doing it myself. And I know that sounds really passive aggressive, but really, I’m just asking you to do me a favor.

Overidealizing: This one is hard to explain. To give you an idea, I was going to have a separate entry on Overconfident, but I realized I’d basically be saying the same thing twice. Basically, whenever I imagine myself doing something, I always exaggerate how well I’d do at it and how much I’d enjoy it. Ok, maybe it wasn’t so hard to explain, it’s just a weird concept. I dunno.

Overheated: For some reason, I am basically ALWAYS too warm. And I’m not exaggerating. I mean that quite literally. It was snowing here a few days ago, and a couple of people were being crazy and running around without shirts on, so I decided to join them. I was out there for 10 minutes, and the only reason I went back inside was because everyone else had. I was actually sweating from running around while people threw snowballs at my bare chest.
And if that isn’t proof enough, as I am writing this I am sitting in my bed with just my underwear on and a summer blanket, and the window is open.
It’s about 28 degrees outside right now.
I also consistently go skiing in nothing much more than my snow pants and a t-shirt, and I love swimming in alpine lakes that still have chunks of ice in them. See, I told I wasn’t exaggerating.


Wow! That ended up being a lot more introspective than I was expecting. Hope it wasn’t too horribly boring, or long.

tl, dr:
Deep down, I’m just a nice person, but because I don’t fully understand myself, I come across as…well…not that.

Hey everyone.
Although I guess nobody really reads this, so:
Hey, nobody.
Ok, that’s too depressing. Hey everyone!

I changed the name of my blog from The Life and Times of an Up-&-Coming Know-It-All to Sub Superque Me and I figured I’d explain my really scattered but ultimately reasonable (for me) and connected train of thought as to how I came up with this and what it means.

It started out with a few things.
Number one, I wanted to change the name of the blog, for reasons I think should be pretty obvious.
Ok, fine: It was drawn out, uncreative, self-indulgent, and not very catchy. There, I said it.

And number two, I came to an idea about a lot of the words that start with “under” that describe me and my life at the moment.

So for a second, I was going to name my blog Understanding, Undertaking, Underachieving.
That’s when I started trying to come up with a domain name, but everything obvious was taken. On top of that, I was looking at other words that started with “under” (I had done a Google search) and was thinking I would add two other “under” words, which would make my blog Quintuple-U.
This is significant because it’s my nickname for Western Washington University, where I go to college, because it’s WWU, so double-U plus double-U plus one U makes 5 Us.
(Yes, it’s funny…l don’t care what you say…Shut up)

And so, finally, I decided that Understanding, Undertaking, Underachieving was too long, a little depressing, and what little image it did convey was appealing to people who probably wouldn’t like my blog.

I also started realizing that there were words that described me and my life that started with “over”, and so I tossed around the idea of calling my blog Under & Over. Again, I was in the process of finding a domain name when I realized that not only was this another apparently overused blog name, but it suffered a similar problem as before of not really conveying the right image.


Now the next step I took seems obvious to me, but to all of you who don’t know, one of the classes I am taking this first fall quarter is Latin, and I’m taking quite a liking to it. I’ve been reading passages of the Bible in Latin at this website, and I’ve been posting status updates on Facebook in Latin, much to the delight of my elders and frustration of my peers. In general, I’ve just been having fun reading and writing Latin.

So it made perfect sense to translate Under & Over into Latin. Unfortunately, because “under” and “over” are prepositions, they require a subject in Latin for the phrase to make any sense, so I just made myself the subject. Thus, the phrase Sub Superque Me, which translates to Under Over(and) Me, was concocted.


Well, there you go. My blog. SSQM. If you are wondering what sorts of words beginning with “under” and “over” I came up with during and after this whole thing, check out my other blog post.


tl,dr:
I changed my blog name.
It means “under and over me” in Latin.
I’m really ADD.

Hey to everyone who is reading this!

I just wanted to say that if you’ve been wondering how I’ve been doing during my first days at college, I’m sorry I haven’t given you guys an update until now. The internet here crashed from the huge influx of people moving and setting up routers and laptops and Xbox 360s and stuff. It’s finally up and stable now, so I’ll give you all the scoop:

Everyone in my suite is all moved in. There’s Jeremy, Jon (aka Pittard, his last name) , John, and Thomas. They’re all very friendly and mostly extroverted, so our door is usually open. That, and Jeremy, Pittard, and Tom are crazy good guitar players and singers. Between that and my sound system, which is either playing music or spewing Halo: Reach from John’s Xbox, and people are often coming in. We even have a sign outside that says “If the door is open, come in! We’re friendly!” Suffice to say, I’ve been meeting plenty of very nice folks, both from our floor and others, including Rebecca, who in charge of our floor (and who’s name I probably spelled wrong. It would seems our suite is making a name for itself as a cool place to be, and even I know that is always good.

I won’t go into detail about who brought what, but the suite has nearly everything we need and more, thanks to contributions to food, kitchen stuff, and other gizmos in the dorm by all the suite mates (or their parents). Jeremy and John also have cars, and Jeremy even has a Costco membership, so anything we don’t have, we soon we will!

I’m gonna check out the rec center, which I’m really gonna need to use, cause the food here is absolutely delicious and it’s served all-you-can-eat buffet-style. Yum! I’m also gonna look into textbooks for classes, which start on Wednesday, and look into jobs in the area. Everything’s going great, and it’s looking like the next few months are gonna be pretty exciting.

tl,dr:
I moved to college.
My room mates are awesome,
along with everyone else (so far).
The rec center had better be as good as the food.
Classes start Wednesday, and I need textbooks.