My Security Diary

“Look,” he said as he rolled his eyes. I cradled the vape pen in my hand. “I don’t want to talk about memes with you." I raised my left eyebrow. He had taken the time to install blacklight bulbs in the ceiling. He had also increased the volume on some sensual drum and bass music. I was in love. “Memes are puerile trite,”   he said, narrowing his eyes. I bit my tongue. “I mean, I’m not the average Reddit user,” he said as he snorted a line of ketamine. "I'm afraid I just can't relate to their humour." I curled my toes. “You should go on /pol/ sometime,” he whispered. I cooked him dinner that night.

“So, what’s your number?” he asked me with innocent eyes, contemplating a number low enough to render me virtuous but high enough to guarantee some skill. In other words, n - 1.  I sighed and looked at ceiling. The scene was all too familiar. This time however, I wasn’t with a graduate student. Or an engineer. I was with a DJ.  “One time, I wrote a C program to remove the voice from a sound file,” I said shyly as he leaned in and grazed my earlobe.  Suddenly, he pulled back with disappointment.  “I’m really sorry, but I have to go to my show,” he said as he stuffed his headphones into his backpack. “I’ll see you later.”  The door slammed in the distance. I sighed and hung my head in shame. For I was embarking on the same destructive behavior, watching helplessly as my actions iterated miserably in a never-ending loop. Like recursion, a new romance temps with the promise of a memory address, such as the $user = “girlfriend” string as...

One night I dreamed a dream. I had started early on the networking assignment with my partner. Across the dark VM terminal flashed commits from my fork. For each fork, I noticed two sets of commits in the repo, One belonging to me and one to my partner. After the last commit of my life flashed before me, I feel into a very deep chemically induced sleep. After being released from the hospital two weeks later, I looked back at the commits in the repo. I noticed that there was only one set of commits. I walked in a daze to the computer lab to find my partner finishing up his machine learning assignment. Suddenly, he looked up at me and blinked. A tear came to my eye. “My precious partner,” he said as he put his pencil down. "You are my group member and I would never leave you, even during our most difficult ARP tests.” My jaw dropped. “…Did you really code an entire router by yourself!?” I exclaimed. He smiled. “No, you were with me. F...