Re:Creation

wow…it’s been 6 days since i’ve touched my blog, or read anyone else’s. haven’t had a spare minute. let’s make a list of some things i’ve done in the last week:

1. i ran a lot
2. i did schoolwork occasionally
3. i worked at my job
4. i went climbing some
5. dan and i had a great night of conversation with our friend shannon
6. i did no work this last weekend
7. i went to santa cruz with dan and marie to watch our ultimate teams kick butt…such a sweet game.
8. i watched romeo must die on friday and vanilla sky yesterday at flicks.
9. i’ve been doing my devotions in spanish, to change things up a little
10. i made a resume so i can apply for jobs here this summer
11. i wrote a song
12. i played lots of computer games and helped dan play computer games
13. i decided to form an underground rebellion against the dining hall. we’re going to bomb the place.

and that’s what i can remember. don’t worry, i won’t go into any boring details. lunch time!

i’ve done a lot of stuff in the last 5 days. i don’t remember exactly what now, but it’s cool. here are some highlights:

this last weekend was admit weekend, and oddly enough, i got an e-mail from my second cousin (my grandma’s sister’s daughter), who was at stanford with her husband and daughter, who’s been accepted here. i met them and ate dinner and told them my thoughts on stanford. they seem like a nice family, and i hope she goes here–it’d be cool to have a relative on campus, even a distant relative.

i’ve been running quite a bit. i did 4 miles saturday, i think i ran on sunday, 3 miles monday, and this morning i got up at 7am and ran 8 miles. the farthest i’ve ever run before is 5, so 8 is an accomplishment. the only downside is that i ran it really slow…averaging a 9-minute mile. normally that wouldn’t be cause for disappointment, but everyone at this school is so freaking athletic…even an 8-mile run is weak at 9:00/mi. whatever. the best part is that about 5-6 miles, i totally felt like i was just floating along…my breathing steadied out and i felt like i could run forever.

the most annoying thing for me right now is writing vocals. i have 4 or 5 songs that i have music for, and i think they’re great songs…but i can’t think up any good vocal lines. i can think of tons of vocal lines–don’t get me wrong–but none that really draw me in. and i hate boring/sucky vocal lines. this is always my curse.

school is going well. i have two big projects due at the end of next week, and that’s about it, apart from the tri-weekly intensely hard greek reading homework, and the negligible readings for spanish.

yesterday i felt myself slipping into mediocrity and blandness, so i took a walk to the quad and laid in a quiet mosaic of shade and sun in front of mem chu, watching the leaves above me rustle in the breeze. it was the most beautiful day of the quarter thus far, with the perfect combination of temperature, sky-blueness, breeze, and lazy ambient noise. i closed my eyes and prayed that i wouldn’t slip into old boring patterns of laziness, indifference, running from god, and having meaningless thoughts.

then i took off my sandals and walked around, savoring my few minutes of meditation and hoping they had effected some change.

in other news, i have been accepted to the co-term program in philosophy, so i’ll be here for two more years! i’m excited about the opportunity, even though it might mean i will have to take more units. some more thoughts about the recent future: i’m probably going to be at stanford over the summer, working. don’t know exactly what yet, or where i’ll stay, but i just wanted to stay out here and get a good job if i could. i’m also now planning on applying to go overseas next spring to oxford, if i can manage the classes.

i’ve been hanging out with people a lot more this quarter than i have historically. dan and i decided that we should put more time into hanging out with people and doing stuff that has more lasting value than problem sets. so if you ever want to hang out, just give me a call.

listening to: “affectionately yours,” | jonathan lipps

the last few days have seen a few changes in my life.

tuesday dan and i decided that our room sucked and that we needed a futon to sit on. to do homework on….to let other people sit on when they visit us, etc… so i fired up su.market and lo and behold, someone was selling a futon for $65. dan and i drove to roble, checked the thing out, offered the guy $55 for it, he met us halfway at $60 and it was a deal.

it took dan’s engineering skills to fit the futon in his civic, but fit it we did, doing our best to keep the mattress getting too wet in the semi-pouring rain. it took my interior decorating skills to rearrange the room to make sufficient space for a new object. for those of you who have never visited my room….it’s hard to explain how much stuff we have…appliances, giant mackie speakers, guitars, sound equipment, beds, desks, wardrobes, boxes of food and drink, trash cans, boxes of old clothes….it took a lot of work to fit a 15sq. foot futon in amidst all the clutter. but fit it we did, with some rearranging.

it’s also hard to explain what a difference a futon makes. it’s absolutely beautiful to be able to sit somewhere besides a hard wooden desk chair. and my bed is lofted so high sitting on my bed is out of the question.

wednesday was also an interesting day…i made it to all my classes with a far amount of work done for each. then, i got word that i was invited to dinner at 4:30 at il fornaio’s, a nice italian restaurant in palo alto. see, i was on a team with campus crusade that put together a lecture by dr. henry schaefer (scheduled for last night). i personally did stuff like design the flyer, and give general wise advice (this last task was self-appointed, obviously). so, the whole team was invited to dinner with the doctor before the lecture. it was pretty cool to eat with a world-renowned chemical physicist. i asked him questions about stuff, like, what the heck is quantum chemistry.

he learned that i was a philosophy major, and because of that i later got mention in his lecture….(“now here’s some philosophy, which may be a little strange in this talk, but i’m sure a young fellow i ate dinner with this evening is very glad we’re talking about some philosophy..”) that sort of thing.

the talk was good–he had wonderful presentation. my only disappointment was that he seemed to not track with some of the questions that people asked. i know that he knew the answers, but more often than not he answered a question that wasn’t precisely what had been asked. oh well. you know those smart science nerd types…

i just pray that it will generate discussion about god and spiritual things!

after the talk i went back to my room to work on modal logic, and then realized that i didn’t know how to do any of the problems in the problem set. so i sat back and did some metaclass thinking, and came to the conclusion that my foundation for logic, which was only barely there in 160a (due to skipping 159), was too weak to sustain me with anything more than a b- in modal logic. i figured that there was no outstanding reason why i’d want to punish myself in this way, and decided that i should drop the class.

i’ll take 159 in the fall, and then get back to modal logic next year sometime, hopefully. if not, it doesn’t even matter…i mean, it could be that i’m just not as interested in logic as i thought i was.

in any case i now have only 12 units–the bare minimum–and three of them are pass/fail. which means that my quarter should be significantly easier, and allow more time for lots of fun and productive activities.

in celebration of this i slept until lunch today, and i’m now at work reading lysias. life is good!

minidisc on spin: control | pedro the lion

i spent yesterday and half of today losing focus, vision, and clarity. tonight i spent hours cleaning and rearranging my room, and i’ve regained my sight.

yesterday i went to church, tried to think about god and not all the pretty girls (which was successful, in my opinion), then ate lunch. i lazed around thinking that i should do work for awhile, but didn’t have the heart. so i put on my running shoes and went out for a run around campus drive, to see if i could beat my previous record. at first i thought i wouldn’t be able to, because there was a very strong wind (we’re talking 20-30mph fairly sustained). but, i just ran faster…about 3.5 miles in, i started to flag. at that point i thought to myself, you know, you’re such a wuss, you always stop if it hurts to much. remember that 5k you did last year? you had to walk for a few seconds…and that’s weak. keep running…what’s the worst that could happen? it’s all mental…so i kept saying these things and i finished. not strong, i don’t think, but i finished, and i ended up beating my previous record by exactly a minute. which is 15 seconds per mile for 4 miles faster…not horrible.

then i went to santa cruz with alex polk, ryan moore, and chris haughey. i thought it would be as hot at the beach as at stanford (felt like about 200 degrees while i was running), but boy was i wrong. as soon as we crossed the mountains, there was continuous cloud cover, gale-force winds, and sub-60 degree temperatures. i had to borrow one of ryan’s shirts so i wouldn’t die. i snapped some pretty cool photos of the shoreline cliffs, though, so it was worth it. we also went to this little bakery in an old town and got fresh, hot artichoke french bread. mmmm. then we went to another beach, where there was a supposed ’secret cove’. we started walking along the cliffs to where there was this supposed ‘rope’ that we could climb down the cliffs with to the cove.

on the way we looked down to the beach, and there was a naked man. he was walking around the beach…now standing by the water, now walking back and forth. he didn’t seemed ashamed of the fact that he was naked, even with other people and families on the beach.

walking along the cliffline in the gusty wind was a little scary but fun, and soon we came to the rope, which we climbed down, and got to a rocky cove where the water came in with crashes and whirlpools. we jumped from rock to rock and stood on ancient ground jutting out…barely part of the continent. still, it was cold, and after exploring around, we made the long trek back to the car. we drove 15 or 20 minutes into santa cruz and got a bite to eat before going to santa cruz bible church for a sunday evening college service. the worship there was excellent, and i found myself singing freely as it’s so hard to do sometimes…but i confess that the talk annoyed me. i don’t even remember what it was now…i think i put it out of my mind.

sadly, it was 10 before we even left the church, and i’d put off all my work since the previous thursday. it hung like an oppressive pall of mirk over my soul…i had so much to do by today there was no way i’d ever get it done, after the hour drive back. i was becoming fragmented and blurred…simultaneously distressed and ambivalent….distressed enough to worry and fret, but ambivalent enough to procrastinate. and that’s what i did. eventually i got a little bit of my greek done–maybe 15% of the work required for today. i didn’t do any of my spanish or philosophy. i was just too pathetically unmotivated. still, i did something until 2am, but it wasn’t work.

today was pretty bad…i was completely unprepared for my greek, had a rotten and unhealthy lunch doing a spanish essay that wasn’t even due (and of course something else was that i hadn’t done), and finally i fell completely asleep in the back row of phil 102. then i went home and slept some more, until 5, when i was supposed to have section for modal logic. i got on my bike and went to west campus, and realized i didn’t even know where the building was that i was trying to find. who has section at CSLI anyway…so i rode around, remembering that i’d seen it on my run yesterday. i ended up passing it without knowing it, riding for about 15 minutes, then actually finding it half an hour after section started. i was so fed up with the whole business (and the strong winds which made it a herculean task to bicycle around), i went home.

bible study was at 6:45 and i wasn’t excited about it at all. i felt like i’d had a pathetic day and gotten nothing done, and the last thing i needed to do was spend more time being ‘unproductive’. of course, i knew that going to bible study was, especially considering my feelings, the most productive thing i could do…i just didn’t want to admit it. but i went and decided that i really hadn’t been letting the spirit into my life at all recently…and i needed to give up my plans and my control (which i could see, based on today, were ultra-sucky). i came back at 9pm encouraged.

i spent the rest of the night cleaning and reorganizing my room. it was really a mess–the floor was horribly covered with popcorn kernels, jelly beans, crushed chex mix, bottles, weights, guitars, overflowing trash cans, backpacks, climbing gear, sound equipment, and whatever else…i felt suffocated. but the suffocation was worse than that–the insides of my desk were also dirty…each drawer sloppy and disarrayed.

i think that i am closely tied to the state of my room, because, after spending a few hours cleaning out my desk i felt as if it were my soul that had just received a good scrubbing. and i felt that, when i rigged up a cardboard platform suspended by strips of leather cut from an old belt upon which i placed a set of 4 speakers to make more room on my desk, it was my spirits that were lifted. finally, i carted the full load of dirty clothes off to the laundry, and while they were churning happily i vacuumed the room. immediately afterwards i felt such a sense of peace i knew everything would be ok. the day may have sucked, school may be going down the drain, but at least my room is clean and my soul is in order!

now it’s 2:30 am and dan is asleep. i’m waiting for my clothes to finish their cycle in the dryer so that i can put them away and go to bed. i didn’t actually do any work today either, and i know it will catch up to me soon. but i feel more prepared to deal with it now.

listening to: my long-windedness

the rest of the week went quite well, even considering all the work i had to do (on an EE or CS scale, this isn’t much, but for me it is) in greek, philosophy, spanish, etc…

so let’s get the dumb obligatory i’m-in-college school news out of the way: i did my first modal logic problem set, and it was a much different experience than predicate logic…lots more little drawings and figures, which i tend to like better. class on thursday taxed me seriously, though–we’re talking about the complexity of a given task in the modal language, measured in P, NP, PSPACE, NPSPACE, EXP, etc… it’s all very weird and i think the next homework might kick my butt unless i do the whole take it by the horns and jump on it and hit its butt thing again.

what else have i done in the past few days? wednesday was crusade, then i studied at the copo until late, and cv was there a while. thursday i worked and went climbing and started on my paper, “the enaselvai language”. see, today i went to a “conference” (in quotes) for people who make constructed languages (conlangs). i thought on thursday, if i’m going to go to this conference, i’d better have something written down about enaselvai, or it won’t be very interesting and we might just sit around wondering what to talk about. so i spent a lot of time thursday writing the history of the language, and even some preliminary grammar.

friday i spent a lot of time on it…much more than i meant to. only half-way through the project did i realize what a daunting task it actually was to set down all the grammatical / syntactical / phonological / morphological features of even an extremely basic, invented language. but, i’d already started it, and i didn’t want to not finish it by saturday, so i stayed up until 3am working on it. i took a break for a few hours to go watch life is beautiful at the history corner with a bunch of cornerstone people. i hadn’t ever seen the movie before, and i thought it was great! intelligent writing, humorous yet sympathetic, pretty yet not shallow, and saddening and thought-provoking. i usually don’t like movies in its general genre, but i was very happy that i saw it!

today is/was saturday. i woke up at 10 and printed out a few copies of my paper to take to the conference, and then i hopped on my bike to catch the 11:30 caltrain to san francisco.

may i just say that the trains sucked today. i rode like the fashion police was after me (my trendy nalgene bottle dangling from my backpack only barely keeping them from devouring me), because i thought i was going to be late. i pulled into the station just in time, and waited….and waited…and waited. the freaking train was half an hour late. these kinds of delays are not good, because i had to switch to two completely different train systems to get to berkeley, and i was supposed to be there at 1:30.

my original plan was to leave palo alto caltrain at 11:30, putting me into sf at 12:30. i figured 30 minutes to take the MUNI to the BART at embarcadero, and then another 30 from there to berkeley. that made it right at 1:30, not to mention however long it took me to walk after that.

the caltrain being late put me into sf at 1:10. i got on a MUNI right away, but in the course of our journey we stopped and our driver had lunch (he said we were ‘early’). maybe he was early but i sure wasn’t. i didn’t even get on a train to berkeley until after 1:30. the short of it is that i was an hour and a half late. stupid trains.

it turned out there were only two other people there–the guy hosting it and his friend (who, oddly enough, i had met on the internet in junior high / early high school, and not talked to since then. and here he shows up in person). so we walked to an outdoors cafe and sat and baked in the sun and talked about invented languages. the guys were pretty cool–not nearly as dorky as i thought they would be, and both big radiohead fans. we went through enaselvai, and they seemed impressed by the presentation, if not the language itself. they’re both linguistics majors, so i learned a lot of new terminology and concepts. lastly, we went to a classroom and used the chalkboard to make up a new language together. we made up a phonology, case system (involving a new invention of mine–the “attitude” system), verb tenses, etc… it was a VOS ergative-absolutive language, and it was the weirdest thing any of us had ever created. but it was fun.

i left berkeley at 6:30, and due to more train stupidity, arrived back at stanford at 9:30. more out of habit than hope, i went to the mailbox to check for control, the new pedro the lion album that i have been looking for in the mail [extremely impatiently] for a week now. you have to understand, there is absolutely nothing like a new pedro album. i don’t think i’ve ever looked forward to an album this much, period. so i let out a whoop of joy and utter delight when i saw, crammed unassumingly in my mailbox, a manilla package from jadetree.com.

i held it over my head and said the incantation: “GENTLEMEN, I HAVE ACHIEVED CONTROL. YOU MAY PROCEED WITH THE PLAN.” well, not really, but i thought about saying it.

back in the room dan and i invited serena and shannon over again and we hung out for a while and watched a bit of monty python. then the girls left so we shut off the movie and dan and i had a control listening party (dan bought the cd too). i layed on the floor and let the album soak in, playing it nonstop from beginning to end. it’s amazing. you can’t hold pedro back–he just goes to the edge (and sometimes over it in terms of what is socially acceptable…but i love it because it’s done so well).

now i need to sleep so i can go to church tomorrow, and then down to santa cruz for some beach time. somewhere i’ll have to fit in some homework.

virtual disc on spin: ok computer | radiohead

sunday night, we’re all sitting around during the seder dinner. dan and justin are to my right, and 3 or 4 pretty girls to the left. we’re all having a great time, great conversation, and of course dan and justin and i are competing to be the coolest so that the girls will like us. during a lull in conversation, when nobody around is really talking, dan turns to me and says, loudly, “jon, how would you describe what we did last night?”

verbatim. so everyone turns to me expectantly, and more than a bit curiously. dan of course is referring to hanging out with serena, but no one else knows that. i try to forestall visions of illicit goings-on, but it’s too late.

at least it was funny.

i went to all of my classes yesterday, and actually enjoyed it. i enjoyed the feeling of not wondering if i was behind or missing something important. i also enjoyed the feeling of doing work in my room, and knowing that i was making some sort of progress on a definable scale. i haven’t felt that in a long time (mostly because of the not doing work thing).

i was part of a psychology study for .5 hrs yesterday, for $7. i do them every once in a while, because it’s easy quick money and i get a kick out of trying to outsmart the study and screw with the results.

on top of school and all that, i had a small victory at the wall last night–i finally conquered the 6 i’ve been working on for a month or so…the first 6 i’ve done! it was great to feel strong, and to feel like i’d improved. now for the next plateau…

in other news, i’ve decided to kick modal logic’s butt. i let first-order logic rule me, but no more of that pacifist crap–i’m taking this class by the horns and…what, then, i don’t know…maybe doing that cowboy trick of flipping over the horns and landing backwards on the beast then slapping its butt to make it go. first problem set due thursday, so i’d better start on it.

to continue with school updates, we’ve started reading lysias’ orationes III in greek. in the class, and the language, i mean. ancient greek is really hard, i realized, after going back to taking a conversational spanish class. spanish is so easy–you can many times translate word-for-word and have it make sense. translating greek is like finding pieces of a puzzle all over a paragraph, linking up different words that are in no spatial relation to each other, using different obscure rules and constructions to equate these to dramatically different constructions in english, then trying to make sense of each phrase with respect to the others around it.

now to read 40 more pages of objections and replies to descartes’ mediations on first philosophy. if you’ve never read it, you really should. the mediations themselves can’t be more than 40-50 pages, and they more or less defined the problems in philosophy that we’re still thinking about today.

virtual disc on spin: when the world sings | fine china

the trick is not to appear like you enjoy your own joke too much. even though you know it’s freakin hilarious. that’s just a little wisdom from on high via the oracle of anne lamott.

it was a long week, but good. i’m going to end up taking all the classes i signed up for.

on friday i played at stanford’s art affair. it was quite a big production this year: two big stages, one open-air and one in a tent. every artist only had 15 minutes to play, there were so many performers. i played in the tent stage at 4:25, after hanging around and listening to friends and other random people play their sets.

maybe this is bad, but i’ll be honest: i don’t like most of the music we have at stanford. i love the fact that we have music, and i’m always supportive of people playing at art affair, or the coho, or whatever. but i don’t like the music. there are exceptions–i have some friends that play occasionally, and i think they have talent and potential (i include myself in this group since i’m the arbiter of my own opinions). but anyway, that’s my opinion.

i felt my show went well–i played solitary spaces (with a cool new surprise intro simply because the song is my most repetitive and overplayed), a pixelated life, and my new song rainfall: monologue. as i was playing some people came in from outside the tent to listen to me, and that made me feel pretty cool. more importantly, tons of my friends came out to see me, and gave support, which always makes me feel like a rockstar.

i hung around art affair for the rest of the evening (after an interesting time where i was locked out of my room) and soaked in the atmosphere, which was very … joyful… and a little reminiscent of a music fest. i sat around and talked to friends and just hung out, which i haven’t really been in the habit of doing at stanford. it was a nice change, and i plan on hanging out with friends much more often.

i stayed up late playing empire earth with eric, kicking some assyrian ass (that’s a joke). empire earth’s a computer game where you control lots of little fighting guys and make buildings and walls and stuff, and try to destroy the bad guy. and we destroyed him with elephants and archers and catapults and lots of horseys.

saturday dan and i woke up about midday, ate, and then drove up to castle rock. it’s about an hour drive. we spent the entire day climbing rock routes in a place known as the underworld in castle rock state park. first we set up an anchor on a slopey 5.8 route. climbing routes are rated 5.1-5.14c, i think. dan’s a climbing master, so he did it really fast, and i followed a little slower. then we met up with some other climbers who were working on a rock called ‘the gods’. there i cranked out my first 5.10a and 5.10b. it felt really good to know that i’d improved since the last time i was out there.

if you only go to climbing gyms or fake walls, you never really get the feel of real rock underneath your hands. it’s completely different. at first i thought i would never like it. i thought i would prefer the certainty of the wall–easily defined holds on a rational grid of bolt holes. but i found that i really liked the feel of the rock, the various holds you could get in a few square inches, and the way the shoes can stick to virtually anything.

on our way back from castle rock we passed REI, so we stopped and i succumbed to the trend and bought one of those indestructible nalgene water bottles. i will now fit in if i ever go up to an oregon college campus.

dan and i thought it would be a good idea to hang out with some girls saturday night, since we’d never really done that here. sadly, we were at a complete loss of who we could even hang out with (we’re pretty new at it, you see). eventually we called serena and shannon, friends from cornerstone. shannon was gone but serena came over and we hung out in our room and talked and played guitar and spilled popcorn over the floor and made fun of www.getsigned.com. and we didn’t watch a movie — a rarity among college students, i’m sure. all in all, a fun if at-times-weird night.

today i slept through church due to the time change and tiredness, then spent all afternoon recording pedro the lion covers. i’m working on a 5-song pedro the lion cover cd. i recorded and mixed and mastered three of the songs today, which was quite phenomenal, since it’s a lot of work. i’ll put the mp3s up here sooner or later for download.

now i’m on my way to a passover seder that cornerstone is having….if you’re paying attention you’ll notice that this will be my second one of the year. strange, yes, but free food is good, and there’s no reason i can’t take some more time to think about the meaning of passover and all that.

i just hope the upcoming week doesn’t suck! i forgot to do all my homework this weekend. uh oh.

virtual disc on spin: when we were small | rosie thomas

i’m back. spring quarter, watch yourself.

one day of classes is done. a billion more to go. i think i’ll like them–the classes–they seem fun. especially my conversational spanish class. i can’t wait to regain some lost skills in that area.

i’m a little too lazy to give the play-by-play for the day, so we’ll just say that it was a day of errands. running here and there, buying this, paying off that bill, going to this class, etc…crusade was switched to wednesday, so we had that tonight, followed by root beer floats and beav’s apartment. now i’m sitting at with my desk, wondering what to do for the rest of the night. here are the options:

1) try and do some make up work for my class tomorrow (i missed the first day yesterday)
2) play empire earth with eric
3) start reading ‘a brief history of time’ which i got tonight.
4) sleep

(1) & (4) are probably the wisest, but i don’t even know how to do (1), and (4) is wussy. i know what i’ll do–all of them. no reason i can’t.

take a look at my dates list–it’s pretty full! didn’t realize spring quarter would be so busy.

also take a look at my CD wishlist. you can feel free to get me those CDs at any time.

virtual disc on spin: relocation | plankeye

spring break part V: 3.31.2002 – 4.1.2002

THE LAST AND FINAL EPISODE.

(the continuation of part IV)

though it was painful, i did get up in time for church on sunday. my grandma was in town, as you know, and my aunt linda (my dad’s sister) and her new fiance had driven up from west palm the day before. so with the three of them my family went to the 9:30am service. the message was fantastic–it was the first time i’d heard a pastor attempt an apologetic approach to an easter sermon that a) made any sense and b) didn’t leave my philosophical nature unsatisfied or questioning or accusing. my level of respect for my pastor rose accordingly.

then the traditions: half an hour (read: an eternity) of trying to take family pictures in our nice clothes. in florida, this just means pants other than jeans and a shirt with some kind of buttons on it. after pictures, lunch: the toast to the pre-newlyweds, the toast to our grandmother, the toast to family, and the toast to god for uncountably many blessings. then the roast beast, marvelously prepared, with the appropriate side entrees, followed by key lime pie. we had a good lunch, and a long lunch, since it was family time and nobody was rushing anywhere.

after the meal and the talking, we went our separate ways for the evening. i dubbed lord of the rings from divx to vhs for my family. i cleaned pine needles out of the gutter. i got a call from emily. it was shortly after the extended family had left for home in west palm, and shortly before the pine needles. talking to her was both good and bad–or should i say, both good and unpleasant. good because i know it’s good to keep communication open and in place. unpleasant because it’s the first time we’ve really talked since breaking up a few days ago, and she’s still hurt by my decision, and i’m not sensitive or wise enough to know what to say or how to act. a recipe for tension and awkwardness, certainly. but a step in the direction of keeping a friendship, more importantly.

i went running with david again. this time we did 2.5 miles in about 16.5 minutes. that’s averaging about a 6:50 mile–and for me, running even one mile under 7:00 is great! i’m just hoping that i’ll keep up running two or three times a week at school. i can see it being really good for me in both the short and long runs.

i ended the evening watching ‘the saint’, the one with val kilmer, with my family. it’s a pretty good movie.

i fell out of bed before noon today, which was quite nice. i did some work on the computer, took a shower, and ate breakfast before going to pick up my sister from school at 2:10. they start school at 7:45 and get out at 2:10. can you believe that? i remember high school as being from 7:50-2:50. they have 35 minutes less per day than i did! if you go to school 180 days out of the year, that’s 6300 minutes!! equals 105 hours equals 4.4 days! it’s like an extra spring break. no fair. anyway i took rach to panera to hang out for a bit, since i didn’t get to see her too much when i was home. mark was working and he hooked us up with some extra free food, cool right. so rachel and i talked a bit, then went to target to take back my luggage, which had broken on the trip to england. they wouldn’t let me, but i reasoned with the manager and finally they let me just take a new set home.

i got home between 4 and 5 and started working on a poster design for the dr. henry schaefer lecture that campus crusade at stanford is sponsoring. he’s a world-renowned quantum chemist sort of guy, apparently very famous and even a nobel prize nominee. he will talk about stephen hawking and the big bang and god: sciency stuff. i’m definitely looking forward to it. i drafted up a couple of poster designs and sent them off to be reviewed. i also worked on the blog design a bit, and did a little javascript programming to produce a random image which appears to the right. i got 45 pictures taken mostly by myself, and a few friends, to form a pool from which one is randomly selected every time someone views the page. it was fun to figure out, and i was proud of myself for actually making the script on my own instead of just copying someone else’s (the idea of course isn’t novel). hopefully it’ll make it a bit more interesting to visit, as well!

then dave and i got mark from his apartment and he drove us to aiguille, the climbing gym. we were there from about 7-10pm again. the second time around was slightly better than the first–i was able to re-nail all the routes i’d gotten previously, and even finish a few more difficult ones. i noticed that the style of routes that they tended to set up was quite different from the ones that they have at the stanford gym. can’t quite put my finger on a reason, but they felt different. the design of the holds themselves was not the same, for one thing.

on the way back, about 10:20pm, mark got word from his roommates via my brother’s cell that some girl friends of theirs had played a prank on them and stuck oreo cookies to their doors, along with large men’s underwear and powdered sugar which they leaf-blowed under doors and into rooms (incidentally, this set off the fire alarm). needless to say, mark and his roommates were suitably pissed. he vowed that he would get them back, and so asked me if i could help plan something.

i would rarely play a prank on someone, but if i am tricked or toilet papered or my property is messed up in any way, i’m more than willing to hit back harder. i felt this vicariously through mark, so i was happy to help. the girls were still at the apartment hanging out (thinking that they’d had the last trick, and one of them was mark’s roommate’s girlfriend). knowing this, we came up with the idea of going to the visitor parking lot, jacking up the girls’ cars, and taking one tire from each and hiding them. then we’d make them clean up the oreo/sugar mess they’d made before getting their tires back. as a little whipped cream, we’d get those big round pool floaty things and put them as mock tires in the place of the old ones.

so we stopped at publix and winn dixie to look for the necessary gear. publix was closed and winn dixie didn’t have pool flotation devices. oh well, so we wouldn’t have fake tires–the plan would still work. we went to the apartment complex and found their cars in the visitor lot. using a jack we lifted one car up a bit, and tried to take off the hubcap. and the stupid thing wouldn’t come off–no matter how hard we pulled and no matter what we hit, it didn’t come off. it was a very weird hubcap. no matter, we thought, there’s still one car left. so we moved to the next vehicle, and, lo and behold, mark’s tire wrench was the wrong size for the lugnuts. two strikes and we were out.

until i came up with another idea–the girls were still in the apartment, right? like girls, they would never keep keys or change or anything in pockets, close at hand. no, things like keys would be in purses or bags, which would be lying around the apartment, or on the table or something. i figured we could palm their keys as long as their attention was sufficiently diverted. then dave and i would say we had to go, and mark would come out with us to say goodbye. we’d bid the ladies and mark’s roommates adieu, and be off to the visitor lot and the girls’ cars. we could move them to some other obscure place in the lot where the girls would never look, and, to be extra crafty, pop open the hoods and take one of the battery leads off. if you didn’t guess, this would render the cars safely (and easily fixably) inoperable and unstartable.

so, the girls would come out, have half a heart attack when they saw that their cars were missing, run frantically around until they spotted a glimmer of a blue shine from the other end of the lot, and exult in the discovery of their ’stolen’ vehicles! wondering why/how they were moved, but thankful that they were found at least, they would take their keys (which mark upon returning would have reinserted stealthily into their purses) and try to start the cars. but no, they would only hear a sputter and maybe a whine as nothing happened. and then (at least this is one way we envisioned it) mark et al would tell them the price for fixing the cars–cleaning up the mess they’d made of their apartment! the girls would have no choice but to bow before the superiority of the guys’ april fools’ counter-prank. muhahaha.

a grand scheme, and everything went according to plan, though diverting their attention and sorting through purses quietly and invisibly while the girls were in the same room proved to be a challenge. one which we overcame, and so out to the parking lot. we moved the cars easily enough, lifted the hood, and…crap. the leads are connected with nuts, and all we have are our bare hands. how could we possibly get the battery unhooked? i came up with the idea of calling dave, one of mark’s roommates, and giving him the following story: our car was having trouble and could he possibly bring out a toolbox so that we could bang around a bit and maybe get it started? dave was in on it, obviously, but the story worked great for explaining to the girls why he was walking out the door at 12am with a toolbox. with the required tools, we unhooked the batteries, tested to see that the cars really didn’t work, shut the hoods, and gave the keys to mark. dave and i dropped dave and mark back off at the apartment for the last part of the mission, and wished them good luck.

at this point i can only speculate as to how exactly the whole thing turned out, and if it worked exactly as planned. i’m at home now and it’s been an hour and a half. the fireworks, if there were any, have already happened.

anyway, it was a fun little diversion, and an interesting capstone to the break. in a little over 12 hours (most of which will be sleep, of course) i’ll be going to the airport for the flight to LAX, and then a quick hop up to SJC. hopefully someone will be able to pick me up. if you’d like to volunteer, feel free to e-mail me and let me know!

i don’t know if i’m looking forward to school, but ready or not, it’s starting again, so i’d better get prepared. thank you god for a week off, even if it was more interesting than i really wanted it to be, and maybe a little bit less relaxing. and i pray this next quarter will be better than the last!