Crimson { Nara }

Once again my good intentions to come back to using this blog completely failed. Has it really been since November? A lot has been happening in my life, and it feels weird not having written about it, but I guess everything has just been happening so fast that blogging wasn't really on my mind. I've also moved on from the self-important phase of my life where I thought that people out there want to read about all the mundane details about my life, so I found myself with increasingly less motivation to blog.

However, my internship project (which I can't show since we're not quite ready to unveil it yet) deals with blogs, and so I recently found myself wanting to start blogging again, and this time really blogging, about things like trends in web design and cooking and self-improvement and current events. You know, like all the "trendy" bloggers do. I've never particularly cared about being trendy, and I instinctively shy away from anything I perceive to be a hype, but let's just say I've found a bit of a niche, and I want to stake my claim on that spot before somebody else takes it.

No, I'm not aspiring to be one of the blogosphere's celebrities. I'll be happy if I get even 10 loyal readers. But working with blogs have helped me realize that I've been stifling my own voice, partly because I don't want to be part of a hype and partly because I feel like no one will care about my thoughts and ideas. Ultimately, however, blogging, to me, has never been about the audience, only about the message, and yes, the hope that that message will reach an audience, but also the feeling of personal contentment of just having put it into words even if it doesn't.

But what does this even mean?

I know this probably all sounds fairly vague. My point is this. In the coming months, assuming that I can actually manage to keep myself motivated enough to regularly write in this blog, expect to see fewer entries about all the mundane details of my life. I'll still talk about my life, but I'll be interspersing it with discussions about design and technology, tales about culinary misadventures and recipes I've concocted, posting photos and talking about my experiences with my brand new Nikon D5000, and sharing thoughts and tips related to self-improvement.

This past year, I developed some bad habits. Good ones, too, but the problem was that I tended too far toward the extremes—I did too much of the good and too much of the bad, too. Everything I did was too much of either; there was no balance. It was no surprise that everything kind of crashed at the beginning of the summer, and I realized it was now or never—I needed to do something to improve my lifestyle now while I'm not in school, or the situation will just get worse and worse when classes start in the fall.

I made a plan and set goals for myself, which have been progressing fairly well, but I also looked for blogs and other resources that might have tips and ideas. I found very few; most were geared toward one specific aspect of lifestyle improvement, such as diet or money management. Many were also written by "experts" with the express purpose of teaching their ideas to their audience, rather than real people writing about their personal attempts at improving their lives and sharing their experiences (good and bad) with their readers. That's what I'm looking for. I'm sure those bloggers are out there, but I haven't found them, and they haven't found me.

So that's why I decided to attempt to establish a connection. I'm not convinced that I can help anybody else, but I realized that in this community of ideas that is the blogosphere, if you can't find what you're looking for, sometimes you need to start the discussion yourself, and hopefully people will respond, and new thoughts and ideas can be cultivated.

A Visual Redesign

If you're reading this from the site rather than from a feed reader, you've probably noticed that the revival of the blog was accompanied by a complete visual overhaul. The last layout was never supposed to have been more than temporary, much less last a whole year. Now that I finally had time (and with the skills and experiences I've gained at my web design internship), I took care of this long-overdue layout redesign. It isn't revolutionary, but it's much more expressive, and still maintains the clean and rather minimalist preference I've acquired. I won't bore you with a long explanation of how this layout came to be; there's a little bit about it here if you're interested.

Just as an FYI, this layout should look fine in all major modern browsers such as Firefox 3, Google Chrome, Safari, and MSIE 8.0. There are minor issues in browsers implementing an older version of Gecko (SeaMonkey, Navigator, and Firefox 2 & below) which I can hopefully iron out within the next couple of days. Linux users might also encounter some problems since the sIFR installation doesn't seem to work on Linux, and I'll try my best to find an adequate work-around for them. If you're using MSIE version 6 or below, you're probably screwed. I'll see what I can do to try to get it to a point where not everything's broken, but you may be a lost cause.

You may have also noticed that there's a few new features on the site. Last summer, I completely redid the back-end of the site. I'd rather not talk in detail about the implementation, but basically, I'd had multiple problems over the years with my installations of WordPress getting hacked or exploited by comment spammers, and last summer I finally decided, no more. I hacked together my own back-end and am proud to say that it should be completely safe. On the downside, I lost certain features such as comment functionality. I didn't want to host any comments on-site anymore, since that's what caused all the problems in the first place. Thanks to JS-Kit.com, commenting has now been added to the site. At some point in the future I'll hopefully get around to customizing how the widget looks (I tried so hard to avoid rounded corners on my site! *tear*) but for now this skin isn't so bad. There's not many alternatives when it comes to blog comments plugins/widgets, so let me know how you like it; I'm willing to try something else if people really dislike the JS-Kit implementation. (It did break my otherwise totally valid XHTML. *sigh*)

Life Redux

I know that I have a habit of writing a pages-long "digest" version of recent events in my life anytime I disappear for a long time and then suddenly come back. I don't plan on doing so this time because not everything is important, and not everything that is is appropriate for the public forum, so instead I plan to catch up in pieces by working short snippets of my life happenings into posts in the coming weeks. For now, though, here's what you should know before I get started:

I successfully completed my third year at Carnegie Mellon. I ended up staying in Pittsburgh again for the summer, where I'm currently working as a web design intern on a Ph.D research project in CMU's Machine Learning department. Instead of living on campus like I did two summers ago, I'm subletting an apartment close by. In our student government elections this past spring, I ran for Student Body Vice President for Finance, one of two elected positions in the executive branch (the other being the Student Body President, who appoints a running mate who becomes the Student Body Vice President), and won, which also means I have certain duties and obligations over the summer. And, it's my birthday tomorrow.

More details will come in future posts. And yes, I really do intend to make sure there are follow-ups and that I don't just drop off the face of the planet again. But, I suppose we'll see how it goes.

So I said I'd be back in August, and now it's November. I have been back in the United States, of course, but I just haven't written. I don't know why. I definitely intended to start using this actively again, but for some reason I just haven't been able to bring myself to do it.

Strangely enough, it has nothing to do with a lack of reflection. In fact, I feel like I've been more reflective this year than in the past couple of years, especially since this summer. I don't know what it was about turning 20, but I went through a bit of existential crisis for a while, most accurately reflected by the following comic:



I also reflected on my life a lot while I was in Japan, especially my lack of a sense of "home" or understanding of where, culturally and geographically, I belong. I can't say my experiences were life-changing, because I'd already been in a life-long long-distance love affair with Japan and the East, so the trip was just an affirmation of something I'd already suspected all my life: that I would love Japan and feel at home there.

Coming back was tough, and yet in the end I suppose it wasn't as bad as I initially expected it would be. I won't lie; part of the reason why I've worked so hard is to have opportunities to go abroad and maybe even to stay there. Once I got used to daily life in Japan, I had no idea how I would ever go back to living in America, where I've never felt particularly at home anyway, and I almost immediately started making plans for going back to Japan—by way of study abroad or a summer internship.

Three months later, however, I'm actually not sure how likely I am to be going back to Japan in the near future. Coming back to America, I did realize one thing: how nice it is to be wanted, to be able to surround myself with people who mean a lot to me, and to have the opportunity to make those people happier. The one unsatisfying part of my stay in Japan was my social life and the lack of close relationships with others. I realized that nobody needed or wanted me to be in Japan, and I've never been very good at doing things for purely selfish reasons. I miss Japan a lot, and I want to go back, but I do admit I enjoy being around people I care about. It instills my life with a sense of meaningfulness that I otherwise lack.

I am making it a point this year, though, to be better to myself and more true to my own needs and desires. This ended up taking my life in an unexpected direction: another relationship, only half a year after the last one ended so miserably. It wasn't entirely unexpected—I did, to some extent, anticipate it even before summer started, and alluded to it when I wrote earlier this year,

I won't go into too much detail except to say that I had spent weeks asking, "Don't I have good karma points stored up? When is it my turn to have something good happen to me?" Well, it finally did.

However, it's ironic because I tend to find relationships (especially of the kind that us teenagers and young twenty-somethings tend to have) overrated; I've never believed in dating for the sake of dating or wanted a boyfriend just to say I do. When Felix broke my heart last year, the last thing I wanted to do was date again. But then, I suppose my relationship with the new boy (Austin, his name is) has nothing to do with dating and everything to do with falling head over heels for someone who is not only intelligent, funny, and charming, but values my happiness as much as he does his own, a luxury which I've never allowed myself before.

Consequently, I'd be lying if I didn't say it's been a very good semester, though the relationship isn't the only reason for that. Life in general worked out better; as a whole, I've enjoyed the courses I've been taking, had to spend a little less time in-class and therefore have had more time to devote to other activities, and have still managed to balance all this with a fairly active and satisfying social life. The fact that thing shave been working out so well is part of the reason why I gave up on trying to go back to Japan next semester.

The unfortunate side of this is the fact that how soon, or whether, my path in life will take me back to Japan is becoming increasingly less clear. My first priority for the summer should be to find an internship—if that could be in Japan, that would be perfect, but I don't know how realistic of a goal that is. There will be far more opportunities to go back post-graduation, but that raises even more uncertainties and question marks I don't even feel capable to begin to address yet.

The biggest change I underwent while I was in Japan was that prior to my study abroad experience, I couldn't believe I was halfway done with college, and I couldn't imagine wanting to ever be done with university life. After coming back, though in all other respects I mostly slipped right back into my former lifestyle, I all of a sudden can't wait to graduate, despite all the uncertainties the future holds. I've somehow become jaded with regard to undergrad life, and I grow antsy in anticipation of moving on toward bigger and better things.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy my major. I enjoy what I do both within it and in my other non-design activities. But I'm growing fed up with this life of deadlines and constant stress and 24/7 worrying about the next thing I need to do and always feeling like I'm 10 steps behind where I need to be and living with the mindset that there's never enough time/energy for everything so I always have to sacrifice something to accomplish something else. I feel like my energy would be better spent if I could devote it to a couple of (very different) projects, preferably of my own choosing or at least with lots of room for my own development, rather than constantly feeling like I have to split what little energy I have remaining between 20 different things. And although things are already great as they are, I can't help imagining how much better our relationship would be if Austin and I weren't always so exhausted.

I'm burned out. That's the short of it. I've been burning out all semester, but lately it's becoming almost unbearable. I might evade it for a few days, and find the drive to go on, but eventually it always comes back. And I don't know how to make it go away.

Part of it is Fall semester, too, and the distinctive lack of substantial breaks. I've been arguing since college started that Thanksgiving Break should be abolished and replaced by a week-long Fall Break in the middle of the semester, similar to Spring Break. I realized a few days ago that what I really need is a week to get away from CMU, to not think about classes and college life, and to then come back refreshed and ready to face the other half of the semester. Of course, I don't actually have that option, one because Thanksgiving Break still exists (with particularly unfortunate timing this year because it is immediately followed by the last week of class and then finals), and two because I don't get to go home for Thanksgiving.

I suppose that's one reason to be excited for Spring semester.

At any rate, I should wrap up here, as it is late and I have three classes tomorrow. I'll be back another time to write about courses and what I've been up to this semester in more specific detail. For now, however, this rather abstracted view of my life will have to suffice.

So, I'm leaving for the airport in about 4 hours. Despite the presence of my suitcases, it still feels vaguely surreal. It's really hard to wrap my mind around the fact that I'm finally going to get to see the country I've been longing to visit for 10 years now. That's half my life.

I'm also glad to be leaving and actually doing something. I've enjoyed Texas more this summer than I generally ever do, mainly because it's kind of like the "anti-school"; I've been spending my time doing things I never have time for during the school year, such as web design and video games. I've also had a lot more time to think and reflect on the events of the past year, which has helped me to mend some of the wounds and move on. But, in the end, I still have this sense of everything becoming stagnant here. Being in this place for too long always gives me this sickening sense that I'm never going to go anywhere or do anything significant with my life, and I'm glad to be escaping that.

Aside from that, I think I just generally need a change of scenery and a change of pace. I've been incredibly restless the past week or so, having difficulty concentrating on anything and staring up at the sky a lot. For some reason, I've been craving thunderstorms—big, violent storms where the sky turns completely black and water comes down in torrents. It finally stormed here today, but it was quite a letdown; the sky was still very light despite the thunder, and the rain was no more than a light sprinkling. Houston usually experiences bouts of intense rain fairly frequently, but we've been having a bit of a drought all summer. Rainstorms are few and far between and often last a mere 10 minutes. Maybe Japan will bless me with more rain and thunder.

At any rate, I do plan to keep a blog of my adventures, though it won't be here. It'll be at xiehan.vox.com, and this time, the entries won't syndicate to here. I know it's perhaps not very convenient for others, but I have my own reasons for wanting to keep the two separate.

I don't know how frequently I'll update my Vox blog. I won't have Internet at my dorm, so I'll probably only be able to get online from school, unless there's a wi-fi hotspot nearby. I don't think I'll update here while I'm in Japan, though I guess you never know. If not, I'll see everyone in August!

Summer continues, and I confess I still haven't been up to too much. Last week consisted mainly of continuing my goal to do something about all my websites this summer. I am actually (mostly) succeeding, if only because my answer for a lot of them has been to simply close them. As far as b-s.ORG goes, there have been only minor changes since my last post. All entries now have permalinks, and I cleaned up the archive a bit. I am still not happy with the way it's formatted, but it seems pointless to take the time format it more cleanly until I have an idea of exactly how frequently I manage to motivate myself to post. If I only end up posting about once or twice a month, chances are, it's not worth the effort.

I also wrote a script for the about me page that calculates my current age in years, so that I can be lazy and not worry about manually updating the page every time I have a birthday. We will have to wait until July 13th (8:12 AM Netherlands time, to be exact!) to see if it's correct.

At any rate, the project continues this week. I have only a couple of sites left to deal with, but I also need to work on the template I'm designing for the Student Senate website. That should probably be finished by the end of the week, so that I have all of next week to get ready for Tokyo.

I've set up a little "workshop" of sorts for myself for these projects in our guest room. I now own both a PC and a laptop, but since I do not have a desk in my bedroom and there was no more space for it in the study, I had to set the PC up in the guest room, which has kind of become the spillover of my room because I ran out of shelf space and place to put all my penguins, so part of my collection has migrated to this room. It doesn't really matter, because we rarely have guests anyway, and when we do, mom often lets them have my room because my futon is nicer than this bed.

I found an old LCD monitor in the closet that my sister had left behind when she moved in with dad, and since my new graphics card was designed for a dual-monitor set-up, I decided to use both screens. However, I still found my workspace cluttered with far too many open programs and windows, which is why I set up my laptop on a stack of boxes. I now use the laptop for things like Facebook and IM, while the PC is reserved exclusively for my web design endeavors.

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Aside from that, my summer has, somewhat surprisingly, been marked with a lot of sports-watching. My family has never been 'into' sports at all, but there are two exceptions: EuroCup/World Cup soccer, and major league baseball.

My mother fairly religiously follows the Astros' progress, and when I have nothing else to do, I often find myself watching the games on TV with her. On Saturday, we went to see them play our rival team, the Cardinals, at Minute Maid Park, which was a fun and exciting game, despite the 'stros spending the entire game behind after Chacon allowed a whopping 7 runs in the second inning. Despite the boys doing their best to catch up, they didn't manage, and lost the game. However, they put up an admirable fight, including homeruns by hometown favorites Miguel "Miggy" Tejada and the rising star Hunter Pence. I also enjoyed the between-inning entertainment, especially "Kaz's Classroom", where Kazuo "Kaz" Matsui attempts to teach the audience a Japanese phrase (in our case, it was 「テキサスのこころ」, a rough translation of "deep in the heart of Texas") and they go around asking fans to try to pronounce it.

As far as soccer goes, Euro 2008 started a couple of days ago. Results so far have been fairly predictable. The Netherlands is unfortunately stuck in the toughest starting group, with both Italy and France, the most recent World Cup finalists. The Dutch team has almost always managed to make it at least as far as the semis in the EuroCup, but I fear for us this time. There is some hope, now that Romania managed to keep France to a scoreless tie, but the Netherlands will probably need to secure at least one win against either Italy or France in order to advance. We go up against Italy in about half an hour. It's going to be rough, because viciously offensive teams like the azurri are the ones we usually have trouble with. (If anybody else is interested in watching and is having trouble with ESPN360.com, the best free live feed I've been able to find so far is here.)

Aside from that, not too much has been going on. A good friend visited me yesterday. We had lunch, hung out, and cooked delicious 三杯鸡 for dinner. Sadly, I completely forgot to take pictures of our cooking endeavors, as I should have.

That's about all that's new on my end. I'm gonna' go shower, put on my jersey, and get settled in for the game. GO ORANGE!

If you've been to this site before and chanced upon it again today, you were probably in for quite a shock. All I can say is: It was time. Actually, it was probably time two years ago, but, well, that happens when you get busy and real life takes over and such things as blogs and web design stop being one of your major concerns.

But I do admit I miss it, writing tidbits about my life and more easily being able to keep people halfway across the world updated about my goings-on. Not that I'm pretentious enough to think that my life is really all that interesting, or that I am that great of a writer, but there are a couple of people out there who care, and I enjoy writing, and that to me seems to be enough of a reason to revive this place.

It has been on my to-do list for a while, but I decided it couldn't be done unless it was accompanied by an overhaul of the site in general. I've gone from angsty blacks and dark reds and grays to this cleaner, simpler, much more minimalist look. I'm not convinced that I like it yet, but it does seem to embody what I'm trying to do here: starting over. A fresh start.

In order to do so, I also decided it was time to cut some of my ties with the past. Except for the entries I posted last summer about my solo adventures in Pittsburgh, all the old content is gone. I do realize that I didn't always show my best side in this blog, and I wanted to put that somewhat immature phase of my life behind me. From now on, I plan to be thoughtful and reflective, but also hopefully mostly emotionally neutral. This is really supposed to be a place for me to write about what I'm doing or what has happened to me, not a place to angst and whine.

At any rate, before I begin on this new journey, I suppose I should give a little bit of background, both for any new readers and for those few who have been with me for a while and who have no idea what I've been up to of late. Aside from the month or so when I blogged last summer, the last time I wrote here was more than two years ago, in 2006, shortly before my high school graduation. ( Collapse )

I've been home (in Houston) since the second week of May, mostly relaxing and finally enjoying a substantial break from school. I've been watching a lot of baseball, playing some video games, and occasionally work part-time at a catering company. In a couple of weeks, I leave for Tokyo for an 8-week study abroad program. I'm definitely excited. After my struggles over the past few months, I think what I really need is a change of scenery and an entirely new experience, so I can hardly wait.

Well, that about brings you up to speed. It's a little crazy that I hadn't really written since before high school graduation, and now I'm halfway done with college. Time flies, even when you're not always having fun. But I know I can't complain. I do adore the college life, and I'm already pretty excited to go back. But first, Japan. And another two weeks at home before that.

Sorry for the last two posts. I was frustrated and upset and needed to vent. This was never really intended to be a 'ranting journal', but I suppose it can't be helped that it may sometimes end up that way anyway.

I'd like to say I'm doing fine. For the most part, things have definitely looked up. I knew that life would be much better once I just made it to July, and it looks like I was right. However, in some sense, I've been more miserable this week than I have been all summer. But I suppose we'll start with the good news first, and then if you can stomach my wallowing in self-pity, by all means, keep reading.

All's Well That Ends Well

The most obvious place to start would be to talk about how things with finals and grades turned out. In my last post, I mentioned finding out that I got a 53 on the C exam. Well, Saturday morning, Hoffman e-mailed us to tell us that he thought that a class average of a 70 was rather low, so he'd decided to raise the mean to an 80 by giving everybody 10 extra points. This gave me a 63 for the exam, and a 79 average. Just 1 point away from a B. So I still needed to do the optional extra-credit assignment. The problem was, the instructions only about half made sense to me. I started around 10:30 Saturday morning and it took me literally until about 11 PM to finish, with only two breaks in between, one to shower and one to eat dinner. All for that 1 extra point I needed for a B. I suppose it was worth it, though. Not just for the sake of the grade, but because by struggling through that program, I think I learned a lot more about C than I did from a lot of the in-class lectures. Memorizing the theory isn't enough; in the end, you need to learn by doing.

The bad part was that that basically killed what little weekend I had; Sunday, I had to work, as usual, and Monday, my new classes started already (but we'll get to that in a minute). Monday afternoon were when overall grades were posted online, and to my surprise, I ended up with two A's and a B -- A's in Matrix and Concepts, and a B for C Programming. The Matrix and Programming grades were not unexpected, but the Concepts grade was. I really, really thought I'd completely botched that final. There must've been an intense curve or something. Unfortunately, I'll never know -- Grossberg isn't one of those teachers who communicates with us about grades through e-mail, so the only way for me to find out what I made on the exam would be to see him personally (and I don't care about it THAT much). My final QPA for the first session was a 3.67, and my cumulative QPA became a 3.72, only .01 down from the spring semester. And here, I'd been so worried that I'd killed my good grades by taking these summer classes! But all's well that ends well, I suppose.

A New Month, A New Start

As mentioned, the second summer session already started on Monday, July 2nd; we didn't get any kind of break at all in between. This session, I'm only taking two classes: Calculus in 3 Dimensions (21-259) and Advanced Programming in Java (15-111). Two classes is the recommended courseload per summer sessions, although technically there is no limit to the amount you can take (other than the limit of your finances, of course). My taking three classes last session was something that is generally advised against, and I would not ever do it again, nor would I recommend it to anyone else.

Not only do I have fewer classes, but they should also be considerably easier. Programming in Java should be a cakewalk after dealing with C, and I've never really heard about anyone having too much trouble with 3D Calc. A lot of 3D Calc seems to overlap with Matrix as well; when I read over the course content on the syllabus, almost all of the terms were already familiar to me. Of course, in Calculus, we deal with functions and derivatives and integrals while in Matrix we dealt with matrices, but I'm assuming the theory behind it is all the same, which is quite reassuring. Apparently the main difference is that the Calculus is concrete enough that we can actually picture it. When the teacher kept emphasizing how important it is that we can clearly visualize the concepts in our head, I almost wanted to hug him, because if there's anything I hated about Matrix, it's how quickly it would become so abstract that you couldn't ever plot it on a graph in order to more fully understand the concept. If I've learned anything about my own learning style this summer, it's that very theoretical/abstract things don't sit well with me, especially in courses like math. I like graphs. I like being able to have a clear picture in my head of what's going on. So I have a feeling I am going to enjoy this class.

As far as the teachers go, they're both pretty cool. Siorpaes, my 3D Calc teacher, is actually a Ph.D student. I'm not sure where he's from... definitely European but I don't know the origins of the name Siorpaes and I can't quite place the accent. Adamchik, my Java teacher, is Russian and also has a very thick accent. I think it's amusing how Hoffman was my only teacher this whole summer who spoke perfect, accentless English (although he does have that Pittsburgh twang). Anyway, Adamchik actually opted not to start classes until after July 4th, but I still had Calc on the 2nd and 3rd, as well as work, so it's not like I really got much more of a break.

An Independent Independence Day

I did have the 4th of July off, of course. Since it was my first substantial break in a while, I decided that I needed to go out. I ended up going to the Waterfront to see Surf's Up, by myself, since the only friends I'd had in town were only here for the first session and therefore all left for home last weekend. I enjoyed the move, despite it having a rather silly plot (...surfing penguins...), but it was one of those movies that probably would have been a lot more amusing if you saw it with a group of people and everyone was laughing together. There was a very small audience (everyone else was seeing Transformers. I still don't get what all the hype is all about, honestly), most of them little kids, so a lot of the humor got lost. Not that it was necessarily clever humor, but it wasn't just slap-and-tickle fun like Madagascar. It was very random, and odd, but not unenjoyable, despite the rather predictable plot and slightly clichéd characters.

I also went shopping. I'd decided that, as an early birthday present to myself, I wanted to buy a dress. I don't wear dresses often and don't enjoy it too much most of the time, but I'd been seeing all these girls wearing colorful summer dresses and had decided that I wanted one, too. I gave myself a $20-$25 budget and headed to Wet Seal, which just happened to be having a 50% Off sale on select merchandise, including a good selection of dresses. I ended up buying a green-and-black-and-white number (picture to follow later, after I pull out my sewing machine and fix up the halter, which is a little too long), which was only about $13 on sale, so I also bought shoes, a hairband, and matching earrings, all of them on sale. Grand total: $23. I am le bargain shopper extraordinaire.

I ate a late lunch/early dinner at Steak & Shake, which satisfied my craving for diner-style dining. Lately I find myself missing late nights at Denny's. Maybe not the food as much as the people, but I did feel happier after I ate there.

The Rest of the Week

...proceeded in a fairly calm and not unordinary fashion, other than the fact that I found myself having unprecedented amounts of free time. I only had one homework assignment all week, due Friday, for 3D Calc, which only took me an hour. After I finished, I was filled with a sudden rush of happiness; I could not remember the last time a homework assignment had only taken me an hour. (By comparison, Matrix homework, on average, took me at least 3-4 hours usually.)

Also, I did not mention this earlier, but Curt, my supervisor, and Chrissy, the girl I work with, were both on vacation all week, so I was the only one from our office who was there. Now that it's July, I'm also working 30 hours for Curt instead of 20, but this week, he hadn't actually left me with much to do. I felt kind of guilty that I was getting paid to basically sit around and play Spider Solitaire, but it wasn't my fault that he hadn't really given me many assignments to take care of in his absence.

I suppose this is where we get into the "emo" part of the post, wherein I explain why I still feel miserable despite things for the most part taking a turn for the better. The thing is that, even last week, when I was in tears almost every day from stress and worry about exams and grades, I was too busy to take note of my loneliness. Now that I have much more free time, however, I have become acutely aware of how alone I am. While I had somewhat looked forward to Curt and Chrissy's absence (if only so I could have the office to myself and blast my music all I wanted), I realized that when they aren't around, there isn't even anyone to ask me, "How are you?" or "How has your day been?" I usually lie and say everything's fine even when it's not, but the point is that there's someone who cares enough to ask the question. But this week, there was no one here to ask me that. I didn't have a single conversation that wasn't related to work, and I was so very, very, very alone. It didn't help that my jackass boyfriend was too busy playing Harvest Moon to remember to call. Or to remember that finals were last week. I'd been aching to hear his voice ever since my first breakdown during exam week, but when he finally called this past Friday and asked, "So, are finals coming up?" I was tempted to just hang up the phone.

I think it's safe to say I'm a bit depressed. Today, I didn't really do much of anything. I'd been looking forward to the weekend, because I don't have any homework due until Tuesday, and with my lighter courseload, I'm not nearly as worn out as I was last session, so I was looking forward to getting some sewing done or going exploring or something. But I didn't end up doing much of anything. Finished a book, played PS2 a bit, stared out the window a good while, and beat Spider Solitaire 3 times on Hard mode before realizing that playing computer card games all day is a pathetic way of wasting away my life. I keep craving food, especially junk food. The fattier and more chocolatey, the better. Even when I'm not hungry at all, I just want to eat and eat and eat.

I really want to stop sitting here and just feeling sorry for myself, but at the same time, it's like, "Well, if I don't sympathize with myself, then who will?" There's no one else around to give a shit.

I'm also unexpectedly homesick for Europe. Last weekend, I went grocery shopping, on the bus, I ended up sitting behind an Indonesian couple. Before I even noticed the way they dressed and spoke, I could tell they were Indonesian by the way they smelled. I can't even even describe the scent, just that I was overwhelmed by the familiarity of it. The desire to travel is making my bones ache. I keep having dreams about the North Sea. I feel like I won't find any peace until I smell the salty sea air again.

Friday the 13th

I suppose part of the trouble is that my birthday is in less than a week and I'm not exactly enthusiastic about the prospects of spending it alone. There aren't enough people I know well in town to organize some kind of shindig, though. There are things I plan to do, of course -- I'm not just going to sit and stare out the window -- but, well, in the end it's not the same.

I was hoping to make it out to a concert in Cleveland on July 12th. The band, Fujiya & Miyagi, is one of my recent favorites. Genre-wise, I suppose you'd classify them as indie rock -- which, if you know me, yes, is kind of a big deal, as I generally really, really dislike indie rock. As my dad put it, I can't really find myself treating it as much more than "elevator music". Because it generally has almost no bass, it just fades completely into the background. But Fujiya & Miyagi -- I suppose they're the one exception. I can't really explain it, but it's not just elevator music to me.

I got their album, Transparent Things, ages ago. It actually came up in a search I did for new electronica, so I got it, thinking that (by the band's name) they were a Japanese electronica band. They're actually not Japanese at all -- they're British -- and they're far more rock than electronica. However, after giving the album a listen, I was pleasantly surprised, and decided to keep it around, almost forgetting about it. When the summer started and I got tired of my old playlist and wanted to add some new tracks, I came across the album again and began to listen to it more frequently. Imagine my surprise when, a few days later, I ran into one of their music videos on Yahoo! Launchcast. Apparently the album has gotten really good reviews from critics worldwide, and now they're performing at a few small-venue shows in the U.S., and they'll be in Cleveland, OH on July 12th.

Cleveland is only a couple of hours' drive from Pittsburgh, so I looked into what it would take to get me there, since I don't have a car. My options were renting a car (too expensive) or taking the Greyhound bus. The bus trip actually seemed doable and affordable, except that I don't know Cleveland, nor how to get myself to the concert venue from the bus station. I wasn't about to go wandering around some strange city by myself, so it looks like this one's out, unfortunately.

So, instead, I'm thinking of going to the National Aviary on Saturday. This past year, I have discovered I have an affinity for birds -- penguins, of course, but also birds in general. So I figured that a visit to the aviary is in order. I'm also definitely going out to eat -- either dim sum, sushi, or (good) Thai. I don't know if I'll do that on Friday (since I have to work until around 6 PM) or on Saturday. I plan on wearing my new dress.

They May Not Equal 1,000 Words, But...

I don't really have much else to write, so I guess I'll end with some pictures.

The weather lately has been less than stellar -- alternating between just overcast and pouring rain. Then, early Friday evening, I was hit by this shocking sight: The sun burst forth for just one golden moment right before sunset. I thought the colors were just beautiful.

Also, here's two older pictures from a couple of weekends ago:

I've been making it a point to go out to eat a little more often, so two Saturdays ago, I went to Gullifty's, one of my favorite restaurants. They had live jazz music, and I decided to treat myself to not only dinner but dessert as well. Gullifty's is home to some of the best pies and cheesecakes in Pittsburgh, and I've been a regular patron since Pre-College.

Quote of the Day

"So, you see, main() is our god. Everything starts from main(). There is no evolution, only creation." (Victor Adamchik, during 15-111 lecture.)

I don't really understand anything anymore.

The Matrix final this morning was so easy, I was completely floored. I really could not believe it. Nothing about complex vectors or any of the stuff in the past two chapters that I'd been having so much trouble with. Given that he always curves the grades, this should be a guaranteed A, and I only needed to make above an 80 to get an A in the course overall.

When I got back to my room afterwards, I got my grade back for the C final. A 53. Well, I suppose it beats a 35. This gives me a 75 for the course overall. He's offered an extra credit assignment due Sunday night for 5 points total. The last thing I want to do right now is spend my entire weekend programming, but if it can make the difference between getting a B or C... I really need to try it.

But then, the Concepts final just now...

...What the fuck. Seriously, what! The! Fuck! We had a choice of 10 theorems and an hour and a half to prove 5 of them, and I barely got through 4. Hardly any of them were ones we'd done in class before, and the few that were were among the hardest ones we'd done. After how easy the previous exams in this class were, I think everyone was floored by this one, and not in the good sense. I think only one person finished before he called time, which is good in the sense that at least I wasn't the only one who struggled, but I don't think Grossberg ever curves grades, so that doesn't necessarily help me. And this is the class where the final is 40% of our overall grade.

Concepts should've been an easy A. But since I only did 4 out of 5 of the proofs, that means I'm looking at an 80% on the final, and that's only IF I got all the other proofs 100% correct, which I doubt. There's always some tiny nitpicky detail that he catches me on. If I don't get an A in Concepts and I stay stuck with a C in C Programming... I don't even know what I'm going to do. What the Hell.

I so wish I could cry right now but I can't even do that much. I'm just going completely numb. I can't stop my hands and legs from shaking and I think I'm going to throw up. Shit.

All those sayings that hard work pays off and things of that nature are bullshit.

I think it's fair to say that, with the exception of my Design studio classes this past year, I've worked harder for C Programming than I have for any other course in my life. After failing program #2, I worked my ass off to nail the other assignments, to prove to Hoffman that I'm not a complete idiot, to prove to myself that I do get it and that I can do this and that I'm going to be able to survive 15-213. And I managed. I made A's on every single program after that. I knew I was by no means a C wiz, but I thought I was finally getting it.

But then the exam this morning... There are no words. I don't even know how to describe it. There was just so much randomly obscure shit on it that I wouldn't even have thought to study. A good portion of it had to do with binary, hexadecimal, and bit ops. We spent all of a day on bit ops and didn't really go into much depth, and we didn't deal much with binary and hexadecimal at all. There was one whole section about converting from binary to decimal, binary to hex, and hex to decimal. Binary to decimal I could've done had I had more time, but no one had ever bothered to teach me how to do hexadecimal conversions. I asked several people afterwards if they knew how and they all did, so I guess that just makes me a big fucking idiot for not knowing, but we hadn't ever covered it in class, so how was I expected to know how to do it? I'm no CS major. I don't do this kind of stuff on a daily basis.

I came out of the test ready to cry. I'm betting on somewhere around a 35, which would barely give me a C for the course overall. Despite failing that program and not doing too great on the midterm, I'd worked hard enough that just getting a 66 would've given me a B for the course (a 100 would've given me an A but I knew that was not going to happen), but now, I don't even want to be THAT optimistic. It's not going to happen, unless Hoffman decides to curve the grades, and I don't get the impression he generally does that. Still, in order for the curve to be substantially beneficial, it would mean that the rest of the class would've had to have done pretty badly, too. I think almost everyone was surprised by how hard the exam was, but I doubt they did quite as badly as me. Several of them are CS majors and many are geeks who get off on the kind of obscure bullshit that was on that test. More than likely, I'm not even within one standard deviation from the mean.

The good news is that no matter how badly I did, I shouldn't be in danger of failing the class. I worked hard enough that even getting a 0 on the final should net me a passing grade, so it's not like we spent $2,500 for me to take this course for nothing. But I'm not happy with a C or D. Not after working so damn hard to bring myself back into the A or B range. It really just isn't fair.

Some days I wonder why I didn't just go to community college. I'd be getting 4.0's and still be the smartest person in all my classes. Sure, I'd probably be eternally dissatisfied, but still. There are days when I wonder if this whole attending-a-top-US-university business is worth the constant blows to my self-esteem. I'm tired of feeling like a fucking idiot. I'd give anything to actually feel smart again.

 

Picture? No picture. There ain't no photo of the day here today, folks. Plz to be moving right along.

Yes, I am posting again. Even though it's only been 4 days since my last post. Oh my God, the world is coming to an end.

...But not really. I just figured I should post while I am still alive things aren't completely crazy yet. Next week's schedule is likely going to be insane, and I'll be lucky to survive it. So my goal for this week is to try to work ahead as much as possible. Kind of sucks because I'm tired and I wish I could take advantage of the fact that I don't have too much due this week, but if I know that if I don't work ahead while I can, I'll really regret it next week.

The Week of Hell Squared

Let's go over what next week looks like day by day:

Monday: Matrix homework due. C program due at night.

Tuesday: Concepts homework due(?). Concepts exam.

Wednesday: C final exam. C program due at night.

Thursday: No C class. Concepts homework due(?).

Friday: No C class. Matrix final exam. Matrix homework due. Concepts final exam.

...So basically, I won't be sleeping. Even if I work ahead, the only things I can for sure get done this week are the Matrix homework and the C program that are both due on Monday. I'm not sure what the situation with Concepts homework is; normally it's due every Tuesday and Thursday, but I don't know if he'll change that next week, what with us having two exams in one week. Either way, it's hard to work ahead in Concepts because he only posts the homework assignment a day or so before it's due. If, by some not-so-small miracle, assembler makes sense to me, then MAYBE I can get that second program done by the end of this weekend. But the way things have been going for me in that class, I kind of doubt it.

So even if I work ahead, I'm still kind of fucked. But if I don't work ahead at all, I'll be even MORE fucked, so. I still have to try it.

Turning Around

I'd better shift the focus before I get too stressed out, thinking about what next week's gonna be like. So let's go over the past few days. They haven't been too bad. Friday, I (miraculously) managed to finish in class a C program that was not due until Monday (today). Then, later, I got out of work an hour early. I was too tired to worry about making myself dinner, so I headed into Squirrel Hill. I couldn't find the restaurant I was looking for, so I ended up at Boston Market. Not the greatest food, but at least I got a well-balanced meal with meat AND veggies AND carbs. That hasn't happened too often lately. On my way back, I swung by Ben & Jerry's. Sadly, the créme brûleé ice cream was gone, so I got the espresso & chocolate chunk kind instead. They were also out of waffle cones, so I had to get it on a regular sugar cone (since I'm just not an ice-cream-out-of-a-cup person). That was a little disappointing. The good thing was that the coffee ice cream wasn't nearly as sweet as the caramel ice cream, so while I don't like the taste quite as much as that of caramel, at least I didn't have to deal with being overloaded with more sugar than I can handle. Which is also kind of nice. So all in all, Friday was a pretty good day.

Saturday, I could've gone out, and I'd thought about it. But I was worn out and a little grumpy after a long week of exam Hell, so I decided I didn't feel like dealing with other people or crowded buses or anything of that sort, and just stayed in and played video games all day. It felt vaguely unproductive, but at least I relaxed, which really doesn't happen often enough. So it worked out.

Sunday, I went and worked for Jeanne in the morning. People have told me I'm crazy for voluntarily working on Sundays, but honestly, I rather enjoy it. Nobody else uses the CEE undergraduate cluster on the weekends, so I hook up my iPAQ to this really nice speaker in there that has fantastic bass boost, and blast my music as loud as I want to. I take breaks and dance around barefoot and sing at the top of my lungs and nobody cares, because nobody's there. It's nice. I enjoy it. I even look forward to it, in a way, because it's one of the only times during the week when I can truly say I'm free. I know that's a little odd, because you don't normally associate work/jobs with freedom, but it just works out that way for me.

I intended to take a lot of pictures to try and give a sort of virtual tour of my workplace, but A) the lighting was bad, and B) toward the afternoon, there were some people around who were giving me weird looks when I was trying to take pictures of their offices. So I only wound up with the following:

...but that'll give you a bit of an idea of what the CEE department's like (as far as the physical environment goes).

That afternoon, I finished up my Matrix homework (which I'd already half-finished in preparation for last Friday's exam), put the finishing touches on my C lab, and then spent the evening relaxing, which rarely happens on Sundays. So that was nice, too.

Today... and By That I Don't Mean Tuesday

Today (because as far as I'm concerned it's still Monday) was all right. We started talking about Perl in C class today, which was cool because I've done a bit of Perl in conjunction with web designing, and being able to relate to the material is always nice. However, Hoffman asked everybody who's done Perl before to raise their hands. Figuring I wasn't going to be the only one, I raised my hand. Well, it turned out that I was the only one. So Hoffman wanted to know in detail what kind of experience I had, and so when I told him I'd really only done web stuff, he was like, "Cool! Why don't you give the lecture on web Perl, then?" I was like, "...Um, what?!" Hoffman tried to bribe me to do it by offering to give me some extra credit points, which admittedly I honestly could've used. Sure, I can write myself a decent, functional Perl script, but in the end I definitely don't have enough experience with it to trust myself to teach anybody else about it, so I declined. I didn't like the fact that Hoffman put me on the spot like that, in front of the entire class, although I guess it's nice that now maybe he doesn't think I'm a complete dumbass. I definitely think he labelled me as an idiot after I royally fucked up on the dictionary program two weeks ago. But apparently by knowing a bit about Perl, I've redeemed myself a little.

The rest of the day was pretty normal. Because I'd already finished the C program due tonight, all I really had to worry about in terms of homework was the Concepts homework. However, despite only being 4 problems long, it still wound up taking me a good 3 hours, which was frustrating because that messed up my plans of trying to get ahead tonight. Oh, well. I don't have anything due Wednesday, so hopefully tomorrow night I can get some serious work done.

 

I guess I'll leave it at that for now. It's past midnight already, so I need to start getting ready for bed. Some days I hate myself for having allowed myself to get used to getting this much sleep (because yes, 6-7 hours a night is a LOT of sleep for me), but in the end I guess it's nice to feel decently rested in the mornings. So off to bed it is for me.

So it's been... almost a good two weeks since I last posted. Whoops. It wasn't intentional, I just seriously haven't had the time. Or the few times I did have some spare time, I just didn't have the energy. But I realized today that a post was way overdue, so... here goes!

To Sew or Not To Sew

When I last left off, I hadn't quite decided whether to spend my Saturday (two weekends ago) sewing or playing video games. I actually did end up doing both -- although the latter only for about an hour or two, as Wild Arms 3 didn't prove to be too exciting, and I was tired. But I did sew a lot that day, and got quite a bit done. Without further ado, here are some pictures:

There was one more T-shirt that I did, but the pictures didn't come out very clear. That T-shirt was rather unique, anyway, so I should probably just take a picture of me wearing it sometime; otherwise you might not understand exactly how it works.

So that was that Saturday. Sunday, I went to work, crammed for a Matrix exam, briefly went to Luo's office hours, and then came back and worked hardcore on my C program. Thus concluded the weekend and began the...

Week of Woe

Just to reiterate: This was last week, and not this past week. Not that this past week has been stellar either, but last week was definitely horrible. Sunday night, I ended up not being able to sleep. I dozed off for an hour or two and then woke up Monday morning with a massive headache. This couldn't have happened at a more inconvenient time, as I had a quiz in C, an exam in Matrix, and a very difficult C program due that night. None of them ended up going particularly well. At midnight, my C program was still segfaulting every time I tried to run it, even though I'd worked on it for days and had been staring at it for the past five hours trying to make it work. I submitted what I had anyway, hoping for some, "Well, it doesn't work, but hey -- you tried!" points.

Tuesday ended up becoming an extension of my bad day on Monday because A) I still didn't sleep well, and B) I got all my grades back. Most notably, I wound up getting a 0 on my C lab. They didn't seem to care that I'd tried it. A program that segfaults at runtime is an instant 0. The TA who graded it e-mailed me saying, "If you're having trouble, you're supposed to come to office hours!" But that doesn't work for me, because office hours are always either during my other classes or during my work hours.

So, Wednesday morning I went to talk to Hoffman and explained my situation. He said he would give me the chance to get my points back on this lab, and he would personally come up to the cluster at night to help me figure out where things were going wrong. So, after sitting through classes and dealing with work, I went straight to the cluster and had Hoffman help me with some of it. He didn't help me find all of the problems, though, so I worked until the cluster closed for the night, and then came back to my dorm and worked on the program some more. Around midnight, it still wasn't working perfectly, but I submitted it anyway. I wasn't sure how long they were giving me to win my points back, but either way, I didn't really have time to worry about it anymore; I had another program due Thursday night and could not afford to get behind.

Thursday was the first day that week when things were finally going okay. Classes were still not too stellar. Because I'd been working so hardcore on my C labs, I hadn't really had enough time to do the Concepts homework, so I knew I couldn't expect a very good grade on that. However, work really cheered me up that day. Curt, my supervisor, had decided that we should get T-shirts -- "we" being Curt, me, Chrissy (the other girl who works for him), and Ellen (who I believe is the girl I replaced, and who now works for another staff member in CEE). LONG story short, we decided that we should have nicknames to put on the fronts of our shirts, and we spent the entire afternoon brainstorming while we worked on boxing offices and moving furniture. We wanted names that made us sound strong, powerful, and/or intimidating, so some ideas were natural disasters, infectious diseases, handyman names, and power tools. We ended up settling for mafia names. Ellen found a mob name generator online, which we used to decide on: Curt "Enforcer" Y., Chrissy "No Thumbs" L., Ellen "Mouthpiece" H., and Nara "Fancy Pants" K. Jim (the big boss) and Donna (CEE's financial officer) later got added on as "Big Cheese" and "Bookie", respectively. Needless to say, it was an afternoon full of laughter.

Then I came back to my room and worked on my 3rd lab almost all night. As soon as I submitted that, I started working on... you guessed it, another C program! Because, yes, we had yet another lab due Friday night. I didn't get too far before I almost literally fell asleep at my desk, though.

Friday was another okay day. The notable thing about Fridays is that neither Curt nor Chrissy work (Curt because he has enough vacation days saved up that he's off every Friday this summer, and Chrissy because she works enough hours the rest of the week that she doesn't come on Fridays), so I'm on my own. Not that I dislike working with either of them (and Chrissy and I do get along a lot better now), but it's kind of nice to work unsupervised. Especially on Fridays, when I'm usually exhausted anyway. I enjoy the peace and quiet.

After work, I went straight over to the Habermann cluster to work on my C program. Hoffman came in and helped me a little bit -- which turned out to be unnecessary because the whole reason I was confused was not because I didn't understand the concepts, but because I thought he'd told us not to use arrays. *facepalm* So after he told me I could, the program took me all of 10 minutes to finish.

I ended up getting into a conversation with another guy in my class for almost a solid hour. Then I walked back to Donner, relaxed a bit, and passed out by around 11 PM. Possibly the most unusual thing about my summer experience is that I'm in bed so early compared to the rest of the year. But then, with 8 AM-7 PM work/school days, it's not too surprising that I'm exhausted all the time.

Weekend Again

Saturday, I was really too tired to do much of anything. However, I was much overdue for a trip to the grocery store, so around 2 PM, I took the bus over to Target at the Waterfront and stocked up on food. Every time I go to Giant Eagle, I end up being angry at myself because I usually wind up at Target a few days later, only to find out that I could've gotten everything much, much cheaper. The downside to shopping at Target is that the Waterfront busride takes forever, as there is (STILL!!) construction on Homestead Bridge, and it gets especially bad on weekends and around rush hour. Anyway, this time, I endured it, and it paid off. I ended up getting enough food that I don't have to worry about buying anything for breakfast or lunch for the next several weeks. Dinner, I'll probably still have to shop for every week, but at least the other two meals are taken care of.

I also ended up buying myself a cheap Chefmate set with two saucepans, a Dutch oven, and a skillet. The Donner kitchen isn't very well-supplied, and half the time people don't clean up their shit, so I'd gotten tired of doing other people's dishes before being able to cook food of my own. For $18, I don't expect it to last forever, but whatever. I just needed something simple to get me through the summer, and then if needed, I can expand my cookware collection in the fall.

Getting my shitload of groceries and my cooking set (and myself) back to Donner was a bit of a challenge, but I managed. By the time I got back, it was around 6 PM or so, so I made myself dinner. Then I headed back into Squirrel Hill, because I'd promised myself a treat. Because I'd worked so hard all week and managed to get a 100 on my 3rd C program, I treated myself to a cupcake from Dozen:

Mmm, mmm, good! Part of me had qualms about spending $2.50 on a single cupcake, but! Dozen cupcakes are worth it, and it had been a rough week. And it was delicious.

Sunday, I worked for Jeanne in the morning, and then in the afternoon, I did Matrix homework and studied hardcore for my C midterm. And that brings us to...

The Infinite Exam Week

...Okay, so they were not quite infinite. But it almost felt that way. I've had three exams so far this week and one more tomorrow -- that's four total. Today was the only day I didn't have an exam. Monday, I had the written part of my C midterm. Tuesday, I had the programming part of my C midterm. Yesterday, I had my Concepts midterm. And tomorrow, I have another Matrix exam. I didn't even find out about the Matrix exam until yesterday morning -- and it made me really cranky because up until then, I'd thought that after I made it through the Concepts test, the rest of the week would be OK. But now I have to do Concepts homework tonight (because he didn't post the assignment until today) AND study for Matrix. I'm probably not going to get around to my C program until Sunday. Which is kind of bad, considering it's due Monday night. But there's really no helping it.

The other exams have been pretty okay, though. The programming part of the C midterm took me all of 15 minutes, and the Concepts exam took me only a little over a half hour. And it was nice to make A's after suffering through some bad grades last week. Not that that's any excuse to slack off, because things will probably get worse before they get better, but at least now I don't feel like a total dumbass like I did last week.

The Daily Doings of Donner, and a Not-So-Narrow Escape from Death

Donner has kind of been pissing me off lately. Other than the kitchen being a mess (which has resulted in our housefellow repeatedly warning us that if the problems persist, we are not going to be allowed to use it anymore, which sucks because I don't have anywhere else to cook and I can't afford to eat out every night), doing laundry is Hell because eSuds isn't activated during the summer. Not only does this mean that we now have to pay for laundry in quarters, but nobody is really keeping track of when their laundry is done, so you're lucky to be able to find an empty washer. Also, the showers have a tendency to not have hot water, which is really frustrating.

My dissatisfaction hit its peak on Monday night/Tuesday morning, though. I went to bed around 1 AM, after spending the entire evening working on Concepts homework and studying for my C midterm. After cramming my brain full of math and programming, I had a hard enough time falling asleep. I had finally managed to doze off probably sometime around 2 AM, when the fire alarm went off.

I was so disoriented that it took me forever to even figure out what the sound was. When I finally managed to place it, my first thought was, "...Damnit, which idiot burnt their popcorn?!" But the alarm continued. When I got out of bed and looked outside, Andrea pointed out that there didn't seem to be anyone out there. There didn't seem to be any commotion, so neither of us felt compelled to leave. I crawled back into bed and hoped the alarm would shut off soon. But, it persisted. Not too long after, Andrea suddenly said, "Nara -- There's a fire truck outside." I got back out of bed and looked, and sure enough, there it was. Seconds later, Jonas, our RA, came and knocked on all the doors and told us to get out. "There's smoke!" he yelled, and sure enough, as soon as we got further down the hall, I could smell it.

We went outside and waited while policemen went inside the building. Then everybody was let back inside. They didn't really bother explaining what happened, but in the morning, the housefellow e-mailed us saying somebody had left a pot of boiling water on the stove to burn (and once again threatened to take the kitchen away). It was a bit anti-climactic, but also made me more pissed. I didn't appreciate being woken up at 2 AM by the fire alarm when I was in the middle of exam Hell.

 

Other than that, there's not much to say. Work has been okay. Homework still takes up the entire rest of my night. I live for the weekend. I don't plan on doing anything on Saturday. I'm too tired and exammed out.

The good news is, tomorrow is payday! Which means... ICE CREAM! Yes, I've been looking forward to it all week. Even if there's free Rita's in Donner tonight. Italian ice is yummy, but in the end, I like real ice cream better. And payday is a day to celebrate.