isogon

Young college students taking classes together. I guess we're not that diverse a demographic. But it's still surreal to be standing in a large, impromptu group in a school lounge where every single person responds, almost in unison, "You're locked in here with me."

If you're using Firefox, Thunderbird, or SeaMonkey, go update it ASAP. We're talking critical security flaws and lots of them, especially in Firefox. The kinds that can leak your personal info, run malicious code of your machine, and corrupt your memory.

That is all.

Note to self: Look at your stupid grades before you freak out about them, you moron.

I was feeling really unsure about my work in one particular class because we're using virtual machines so that we don't have to screw up our actual operating systems while we fiddle with the security features. I cannot tell you how much VMware did not want to run on my computer. The installs. The reinstalls. The tears and hard-to-find files. By the time I got the virtual machine going, I was feeling pretty discouraged about the assignment.

Grade: A. Comments: "Excellent!"

Yay!

Got an A- on the next one for not being aggressive enough about password policies. I can live with that, especially since it was an Ubuntu assignment. I like the idea of Linux, but in reality I kind of wish it would leave me alone.

In Computer Systems, we learned how to use Goto in C/C++. It's not hard, but I've never seen it demonstrated very well before, because it's frowned upon. Considered bad style. Watch how much I don't care. When you get down to the machine language level, guess what the computer is doing to move around in the code?

I've been behaving myself in C++, though. Nary a goto at all. My instructor is awesome and I don't wanna give him grief. I couldn't be happier that I'm taking these two classes simultaneously. I remember that I used to get stuck sometimes while writing code because there are often many different ways to solve a problem and I'd wonder which was the best. Was I about to do something that technically worked, but incurred a ton of overhead? I don't want to program adequately, I want to do it well. Now I have a much better idea of how to accomplish that. I've seen C made into assembly. I have an idea of some of the optimizations I don't need to worry about because the compiler will do them for me. I just feel a lot better about the whole thing.

My program compiled, too. The big scary midterm one. Even with the other midterm tests going on, I actually managed to find the time and energy to really go all out with that one. It doesn't just sort of run. It does not hobble or use questionable loop strategies. Even the commenting is thorough. I did end up forcing a type-cast in one place, but I commented on it. In my comment I promised to learn how to do it right after midterms are over with. I think my teacher will understand.

On to the next assignment, then. Japanese test. Then more Linux. :P

ETA: Yay, my grade is already posted for the C++ project! 100%!

Acoustic versions are usually on the list of things that make me sad about the world today. Then every once in a while someone does something redeeming, like Against Me!'s You Look Like I Need a Drink (acoustic). I actually heard the acoustic version first with that one. For a long time I didn't even know there was a different version. When I heard the original, it made me appreciate that they didn't just play the acoustic as if they'd accidentally forgotten to plug in their amps. They actually altered the performance to suit the instrumentation, which, come to think of it, may reveal the reason I so often dislike acoustic versions. This is one of those rare cases when I like the acoustic much better than the original.

Also, I don't know what's up with the little grey boxes all over youtube videos these days, but their use as a speech bubble to display lyrics really cracks me up.

*******

The weather is very pleasant. I walked to the book store with my coat open.

I think that the woman at the checkout counter was psychotic. I mean that sincerely. She responded to questions I hadn't asked. When she spoke to me I felt like I was missing something very important, like the left half of the world, without quite noticing except through some subtle cues in her body language.

"I'm straight," she said as she opened the cash register. I spent the next few minutes frowning at the counter, wondering what she had meant by that, whether she thought I was asking her out or implying she was dishonest with money or some other meaning of the word that I did not understand. I had asked if she would prefer exact change.

"Did you ask a question?" she said, handing me my change, and suddenly I understood that she had not been talking to me at all. There was no one else nearby. When she looked at me I squirmed in discomfort. In retrospect, probably her discomfort.

"It's not important," I said, and we smiled sheepishly at each other.

Okay, this is severely awesome. SeaMonkey just crashed. That in itself would not be especially awesome, but Windows did something really cool about it.

First, let me explain that SeaMonkey, for those who have not heard of it, is a browser. It's pretty much just Netscape, but updated, for those who like Mozilla but aren't big on the minimalism of Firefox. I personally use both browsers, usually at the same time. This allows me to keep better track of all my open windows and tabs. At one point recently I was forced to view a page with Internet Explorer, so I had three different browsers open. Also I was using another copy of Firefox under Ubuntu, which was running on a virtual machine. I was so very connected.

Anyway, I was talking about SeaMonkey crashing. It gave me a little "oh no crashing" message, and at the same time my firewall alerted me that Visual C++ was attempting to start up. (My firewall gives me alerts for almost everything unless I instruct in otherwise. Through it I am absolute dictator of my computer, and that's the way I like it.) So I gave it permission to start, and then Windows asked me if I would like to debug the program that had just crashed. I said sure, why not.

So then it decompiled Seamonkey for me. It gave me a Visual Studio window with the machine language and the symbolic assembly interpretation. "Hey, it's creating a stack here!" I said to Joe, with whom I happened to be talking on the phone at the time. "And it's pushing the stack pointer and the base pointer onto the stack! And down here it's popping the stack!" It's just like how they taught us in class, when the teacher opened by saying that she was going to teach us how to hack, and please to only use our powers for awesome and not be on the news next week going to jail for hacking Microsoft.

Happily, I believe SeaMonkey is open source so I don't think I would get in trouble for decompiling it and poking around. Even more happily, we won't have to worry about that right now because even if I did have the patience to wade through thousands of instructions and somehow managed, against all odds, to find the source of the crash, chances are good that I wouldn't know how to fix it. So I just took a quick look and closed it. But still, it was really cool to see.

In Japanese class we are learning about the first English teacher in Japan, an American who taught the samurai who would later interpret the negotiations with Perry. Unfortunately his name was Ranald MacDonald. In Japanese that is spelled and pronounced exactly the same as Ronald McDonald. The mental images are bizarre.

Anime I Have Watched, (yet another meme successfully ganked from brianl03) because I cannot resist memes with lists of media. X for things I've seen. I decided to grade easy so I gave myself credit if I've ever seen any of the series at all, even if it was just one episode. If I've only read the manga I put an M. If I disliked it I put a P. (Please don't be offended if one of those is your favorite series. I'm necessarily saying it was a bad show. It just wasn't to my taste.)

Okay. Now anyone who likes can feel free to berate me in a friendly manner about things I haven't watched, or things I have watched, or whatever.

( Read more... )

This is fairly amusing. You think of a person, real or fictional, and then play twenty questions. Don't try "your mom," it's wise to that.

It's snowing. Pretty. Better than last night, when it was just cold.

Some nights you go to sleep in your bed in the dark like a sensible person. Other nights you plug in the blue LED Christmas lights and make up your futon as if you had the proper bedding.

In Japan I learned it like this: everything out of the closet and onto the floor. The futon, then the big, heavy quilted thing that's thick enough to nearly be a mattress in its own right. On top of that is the thin mattress-cover looking thing, white and with that wavy cross-pattern of seams that only happens on bedding. There's elastic on each of the four corners to hold it in place. It goes on top of stuffed quilty thing and the elastic straps hook around the corners of the futon. Very efficient. Doesn't slide around too much, easy to put on and take off, and it doesn't get wrinkly in the middle. Good design.

So that's futon, supplementary mattress, mattress cover. On top of these you sleep. On top of you is a quilt in cold weather or a sheet very much like a large towel for the summer.

It was so, so hot. No central air conditioning and the windows left a crack in the middle when you slid them closed. Terrible insulation. Nevertheless I used the quilt at first, which was not as bad as it sounds once your temperature begins to drop for the night. Eventually I also got used to the towel-sheet.

Don't have one of those here. I did the best approximation I could manage with the bedding I had. I spread my quilt over my futon. No mattress cover, but oh well. I slept with a fleecy blanket over me. Very makeshift but the feeling was right.

Of course my pillow didn't make things easy. It's not filled with beans like the Japanese pillows, which is fine with me, but it's also far too large for the futon, causing the futon to seem too short. Worth it. Very good pillow.

Soon it will be too cold to sleep on the floor. The windows in my room block sound like a miracle- you barely notice the el at all. But the cold comes right through, right over my feet.

I've been keeping soda on the window ledge because it's like a fridge, but I think I might have to move it for fear it will freeze. The thermostat, it does nothing.

It's that time of the year when you heigh yourself off to the school bookstore to scour the aisles, driven by one burning purpose: you must read the introduction to the textbook before you get to class so that when the professor goes around the room asking everyone why they're taking the class you are not forced to turn to the person next to you and whisper, "Hey, what is discrete math, anyway?"

Unfortunately, the textbook... Well, here's a quote from the preface. "Discrete mathematics describes processes that consist of a sequence of individual steps." It does seem to elaborate from there, but this is the first day and I have the attention span of a panicky squirrel. Oddly enough, when I open the book to a random page and start reading, I invariably find it fascinating and have to pause every other sentence to think about the implications for a while. It makes for slow reading, but at least it's a happy kind of slow.

I also had C++ this afternoon. I was right to look forward to meeting other students taking programming classes. I walked in and everyone was talking about video games. At last, I am among my kind.

Not that I'll have a lot of time to talk to those students. Mostly because I just couldn't say no to Computer Systems 1. I mean, it's about how computers work. The textbook has sections like "Writing Cache-Friendly Code" and "A Detailed Look at Pipeline Operation".

Now I must brush my teeth and go to bed because I'm so tired that if I don't take action right now those two things are likely to happen concurrently.

I dreamt that my friend had a suitcase full of anime I didn't particularly want to own and, in many cases, had never heard of. But as he was selling it I felt I should look, at least to be polite. Even though DVDs sold out of a suitcase sounded kinda shady even in the dream.

Packed in there with the DVDs was a little rubber disk the size of a DVD. On one side it had a line drawing of two women. One was sitting at a computer, but she had turned towards the other with a troubled expression. The other woman was sitting next to her, as if assisting with the computer use, and she was obviously talking. The caption was written circularly around the picture. It said, "あっ、ごめんなさい。いいですよ。" Which means, "Oh, I'm sorry! It's perfectly fine." And then I turned the disk over and it had the preceding line of the conversation which was, in English, "I'm sorry, I don't understand Japanese."

I can no longer have visitors because I have built a fort out of my bed. I'm not having much luck coming off as a normal person as it is. One of my classmates pointed out to me before Japanese class that my shirt was on backwards. "I'm in computer science," I wanted to say, which is not 100% accurate but I think it conveys my point and every time I recite my entire major name people get this glazed look. So I think the bed fort would really push the perceived weirdo factor into shun-space.

Last night I had a lot of reading and some worksheets to finish. Obviously the only option was fort. I really wanted a cozy place to curl up while I studied. My bed is lofted, so all I had to do was hang some sheets, gather some stuffed animals, unfold the futon, and locate a nearby outlet so I could put the table lamp on the floor next to me. The lamp is key, and it must have an incandescent bulb. Their very inefficiency is the reason I love them- they're all warm. It's not wasted energy if you're using it.

And now I must sleep, but first, I have to mention this list that was on the blackboard when I walked into class this morning. It said "Philosophy [" and then had Plato and Aristotle in the bracket. Then it had "Theology [" with St. Augustine, if I remember correctly. The third item said "Literature [" and I can't remember the name, but it was another famous thinker type. And if I were good at forging handwriting and had had the time, I totally would have added "Leadership [ Harry S. Truman" to the bottom. Because confusing strangers is one of those small joys that take the stress right out of life.

I was having a conversation with my parents over dinner when my mom told me I'd graduated with high honors. I didn't know. I was so distracted getting everything done for financial aid and the college transfer and the Japan trip that I never bothered to read my own diploma.

In school I would hand advisers my transcript and sit back for the inevitable: the concerned frown through the first few pages. Comments on the number of withdrawals. But it gets better the further you go. I remember an older man telling me several times with understated excitement that it was a very good transcript. I thought he meant that it was acceptable. Better than expected, considering the way it started. Congratulations on turning things around.

I care a lot about grades and I work for them, and somehow I never stop being surprised when I get a good one. This feels like the sum total of all the surprise. And I'm so confused, because it was so hard, but not in the way that I expected to lead to success. I thought that happened to people who had it all together and worked hard to learn the material. I'm a person who's good with material and has to work with everything I have to do a bad impression of a person who has anything together at all. That's not how you're supposed to do it.

I was so happy when I learned that transferring meant I'd have a fresh GPA. New start and all, to do better this time. Now I'm faced with the idea that the last time wasn't so bad. I don't understand it at all, but I'm kind of edging toward some type of glee.

More about Japan is forthcoming, but in the meanwhile my sister's move and my own imminent transfer have required every bit of energy I have.

Recent events: mostly the online Japanese placement test for transfer students. I put it off because I was afraid of it. Then when I finally went to take it, it told me I already had and booted me off the system. So I had to email the people in charge and ask them to tell their software that I hadn't taken their stupid test. They responded promptly, apologized and gave me instructions.

There was listening, kanji-reading, grammar, story-reading, and big ugly technical paragraph-reading. The listening section was a major confidence boost. Easier than the listening practice we did during class in Japan. The technical reading almost killed me.

The test told me firmly that it had been instructed to pass my results to the instructor but not me. And right below that message it displayed my results. Go figure.

Listening: 8/8. Grammar: 74/76. Total of 82/84.

That's okay then.

So we got into Nagoya airport and took the Shinkansen (bullet train) to Kyoto. It's expensive but you get what you pay for with Japanese transportation. There's room enough that you can put your suitcase in front of your seat and still have space for your legs.

From the beginning you could already see where the trip was heading. Somewhere in the airport to Shinkansen to train bit, I'm still not sure exactly where, we lost a group member. There were about twenty of us in the class so it was bound to happen sooner or later, but we really outdid ourselves with both the sooner and the later. First we lost one group member, and then we lost a member of the search party. And yet somehow we all managed to get where we were going. I suspect divine intervention.

We took a the train from Kyoto-eki up to Enmachi-eki. Enmachi is written as 円町, literally "money city", which always amused me. Mostly because I could actually understand it, which increases the amusement factor of anything by at least five times due to sheer gratitude. Also, eki means station. I think I may have been unclear on that in the past.

Enmachi-eki is up on the northwest side of Kyoto near where our school was located, and thankfully the school staff came out with a van (though Japan really puts the mini- in minivan) to drive our luggage for us. I defy you to get on a Japanese bus with your suitcase. It cannot be done.

Ah, buses. There are seats, but like trains, it's often crowded enough to become standing room only. Unlike trains, which held pretty true to rumors of extreme punctuality, the busses would not necessarily come at the appointed time. Slaves to traffic. At most stops they came often enough that that wasn't an issue. We got English bus maps from Kyoto station and used them ever after to navigate the city. The bus goes everywhere. Especially the 203.

If you somehow managed to get your suitcase on the bus, you would mangle the elderly if you tried to get it off again. The entrance and exit are two different doors. The entrance is in the middle of the bus. The exit is at the front by the driver. Somehow you must navigate up through the crowd in the aisle to the front before the bus reaches your stop.

Most of the seats are forward-facing, and the greatest cluster of seating is in the back where the floor is elevated. There's a long seat across the very back row and then a couple rows of double-seaters. These are awkward unless you have an even number of friends. Japanese people didn't usually go out of their way to avoid sitting by us, but they certainly weren't clamoring for the privilege. When there's one or a few of you, you get absorbed into the mood of your surroundings. When there are twenty of you, you are obnoxious Americans. You can't help it.

The front of the bus usually has an aisle separating a row of forward-facing single seats from a row of inward-facing seats. The inward-facing ones are the priority seating and must be yielded to the old, injured, pregnant, or those with small children. Which is really just good manners anyway. Perhaps Japan's elderly are just especially likely to ride the bus, but watching the priority seating I often found myself thinking of the birth-rate problem. Too few children and an aging population. Those seats were never vacant for long.

I can't figure out if elderly people are frailer in Japan or if the frail elderly are more likely to get out and about. For a second summer I spent the trip entertaining theories of calcium deficiency. You see cartoons with old men and women stooped so low that their backs are down parallel to the ground. This is not an exaggeration. They clasp their hands together at the small of their backs as they walk to take the weight of their arms off their shoulders.

I rode the bus every morning on the same route we took that first afternoon, from Enmachi to school on the 203. Only the bus didn't stop in front of the school. It stopped in front of a shrine. Kitano Tenmangu-mae. The easiest way to get from the bus stop to the school was to walk through the shrine, under the giant stone tori gate and down the wide concrete path. A family of stray cats lived near the back gate. Usually you could find a kitten or two slinking about in the underbrush. If it rained the whole family would take shelter under the gate. They were wary if you got too close and indifferent if you didn't.

The school was three storeys tall. The rooms were individually air conditioned by wall units, which meant they were ovens for the first ten minutes every morning. We went over the classroom rules- no smoking in the building anymore, as of early this summer. My Japanese teacher once called America a no smoking country. It reads in popular culture like a new deadly sin, and I was constantly scandalized by people doing it everywhere, in public, with no shame. But not in the school building, except on the smoking balcony. Violators subject to fines of ¥1,000.

When speaking English we never said “one thousand yen”. It’s too confusing. We’d just pretend the exchange rate was one yen for one penny. It’s actually a bit better than that, which gives you a nice warm feeling every time you say a price and know you’re paying less. We’d say “ten dollars”. I’ve been on two trips and everyone has done this. It seems to happen spontaneously. Do other Americans do this or did we unconsciously learn it from each other?

The nice thing about paying for stuff in Japan is that by law, the prices with tax must be displayed. And there’s no tipping. I’ve heard various explanations for this, most of which ring false to me. Maybe it edges too close to the realm of gift-giving, which is mysterious and fraught with terror. You give someone an extra something and you have overstepped the bounds of the transaction, made it personal, and now the hapless salesperson is in your debt. Or maybe not. Things get complicated.

The not nice thing about paying for stuff in Japan is that a lot of the smaller shops, meaning anything that isn’t located in a department store, may very well not take plastic, which means you must carry huge wads of cash everywhere. All well and good, but cash quickly becomes change, which is heavy and noisy and hard to track. Savor the five dollar coins while they last. And by five dollars I mean five hundred yen.

Except for a lack of central air, school rooms in Japan were similar to school rooms in the U.S. You have your desks, your chairs, your whiteboards. (Your mean kids?) The windows have screens and can actually be opened. That’s refreshing, except that it was so hot outside we mostly kept them closed. One day we did leave them open and we heard the distinctive sound of music being played from a slowly moving vehicle. In America that’s an ice cream truck. In Kyoto it’s a garbage truck.

The classrooms were not inordinately bright but I remember them that way because the floors and walls and boards were white and the summer mornings gave everything the inescapable feeling of ambient light.

In the front hall after class, surrounded by cubbies full of brown slippers and hemmed in by luggage, my host mother came to take me home. I was terrified. It was the kind of fear that may show in the tightness of a gesture but mostly lurks deep under the surface, invisible, and drives people to move to Alabama and change their names to LeAnn Montgomery and work in a diner for thirty years.

We drove to Kameoka. She spoke quietly to me in broken English and I did my best to speak in broken Japanese. It rained, and we drove through the crowded streets lined with height-restricted Kyoto buildings and partially comprehensible neon signs into the dark gray mountains.

I got into Chicago late yesterday afternoon and man does it feel good to be sitting at my own computer typing on my own keyboard.

Let me tell you about my amazing adventures, starting from the beginning this time.

The beginning is the bit where the airline screwed up and sent us to China. I like this statement because it's misleading but technically true. They did screw up, and they did send us to China, but China was not the mistake. China was how they fixed the mistake.

My class met early in the morning at the departure gate. Everyone was present and accounted for, breakfast already eaten or purchased from the McDonald's across the hall, which was annoying to get to because of the moving walkway blocking the path. On the whole, things were going swimmingly, and then we got on the plane.

The engines started up, made that power-of-the-gods roar that's so comforting during takeoff, and then they powered down. And then we sat. Oh how we sat. They had accidentally given us a slightly broken plane. They were having trouble switching power to the hydraulics, they said, or something along those lines. They were sending for mechanics and customer service representatives.

The customer service reps spoke over the PA, and promised answers by a certain time, and apologized for how we were missing our connecting flights in San Francisco. The mechanics found the broken part and said a new one would have to be shipped. Eh!? From the other side of the airport, it turned out. If the airline could find another plane before the mechanics could fix ours, we'd take the other plane instead.

When the designated answer time arrived, the customer service reps had left, and the flight crew had make the timely announcement in the tone of people who have shown up to work only because they're too demoralized to quit. The mechanics say they'll have it fixed in half an hour, the woman on the PA said, but I have doubts.

Her doubts did indeed come to pass, but finally, after four hours in the plane in which the air conditioning was only occasionally switched on, the fix was made and we were ready for takeoff. And that was how we arrived in San Francisco far after our connection to Japan had left, as well as all other planes going to Japan that day.

Eventually, utilizing no less than five very confused desk employees who would frequently disappear into the back room for half an hour at a time, maybe to cry, everything was sorted out. They sent us over to another airline and booked on its flight to Shanghai that evening. We would spend the night in the Shanghai airport and then get a flight back to Nagoya in Japan.

The flight to China was fantastic. There were touchscreen tvs built into the back of every chair, which had games and a large selection of movies and tv shows in various languages from which to choose whenever the mood struck. I watched I Am Legend, The Golden Compass, and part of Sweeny Todd before deciding I'd rather get some sleep and pay to rent it later for enjoyment in the quiet of my own home.

China was exceedingly awkward. In Japan, having studied Japanese language and culture for a few years, at least I had some idea of what body language to use in order to convey various messages and avoid egregious offensiveness. Even though I obviously don't fit in, I don't feel uncomfortable. Everything seems a little bit smaller than in America, but I'm small for an American, so I fit.

In China I felt dwarfed. It's such an enormous country and the airport seemed designed to make you feel every square mile. It turned out the airline had sprung for airport hotel rooms to put us up for the night and so we walked from our terminal to the airport hotel down a never-ending hallway of considerable width. I swear it disappeared into the distance at the end. Everything was super high-tech, completely unintelligible, and being there felt exactly the way that everyone always said Japan would be like, but bigger.

I was very tired so I was in no state to analyze my actions, but whatever I was doing, I think it was wrong. People kept approaching me to offer me taxis and make sure I knew that I had to continue in the same direction I was going in order to reach the hotel. No one spoke more than a few words of English and I had a difficult time understanding it through a Chinese accent, so it was an interesting experience. I kind of wish I'd gotten a picture of the airport employee standing with his posse in the middle of the hallway smoking, but I didn't think that would help the situation.

After we checked into our hotel rooms, which were awesome- about $230 a night and one room to a person- we hunted down refreshments in the one 24 hour convenience store. It was the middle of the night and almost everything was closed. The store took American money and everything was ridiculously cheap. I bought a can and a bottle of Mountain Dew, like I do, and both of those together, as calculated by the women at the counter, cost me a dollar. Down the hall from the store was a very large, very modern-looking Burger King, but they didn't take American money.

I washed off in the futuristic hotel shower, napped in my extra-wide hotel bed, watched Chinese widescreen highdef tv, including a melodramatic show about soldiers that seemed to be on marathon as it was still playing the next morning while we ate a delicious complimentary breakfast, and generally relaxed for a few hours. One of my classmates had a laptop so we scoped out the Great Firewall of China for a bit. Weird experience. Livejournal is blocked.

The next morning we set out early to catch our plane. The airport was so big that they had to bus us from our gate to the plane, which was sitting in the middle of an empty, paved field with one of those ladders that presidents use to get in and out of planes.

From there we flew to Nagoya and actually finally set foot in Japan. You know you're there when you look out the airport window and see a Hello Kitty-themed plane.

And I'm going to leave off for now because I think this is a good stopping point. But man, I got to go to China. That's pretty cool. They stamped my passport and everything.

Language classes ended yesterday. Everyone toured the Phoenix Pavillion and then several of us went home to pack. We took the night bus into Tokyo. It arrived in Shinjuku-eki at 6:30 in the morning- just a little painfully early.

My classmate Jenny and I spent the day making a circuit of the Yamanote line. Our hotel's in Ikebukuro so we decided to go east and start with Electric Town in Akihabara. It was sparkly and full of computers, and every store seemed to be duty-free.

After that we headed down to the Tokyo-eki area for lunch, which was king crab and a buffet in a very nice and surprisingly reasonable restaurant. While we were in the area we tried to shop, but we failed. Everything was expensive and conservative, and we felt just a little awkward about asking the security guard in the DeBeers store whether he knew of a good department store.

Instead we headed around to Harajuku, which solved all our problems. You want creative socks? T-shirts with malformed English? More jeans than you know how to deal with? Antichrist Superstar over the in-store speakers? Harajuku is the place.

..and I'd better go now. Dinner and all. I'll be back in America late next week.

I leave on Thursday. I feel unsettled.

I don't remember feeling this way last year. Maybe it's the huge conceptual difference between two weeks and five weeks. But probably it's more that last time I was working frantically until the minute we left for the airport. I'd just finished finals for the semester and I had to write a number of pre-trip essays, which ended up taking so much time that I worked all night and my dad and I left for the airport about twenty minutes later than planned. Luckily our original plan had been formed in accordance with advice from my mom, who always leaves plenty of time for everything. We got there early.

The point is that last time I didn't have time to think, let alone dwell. This time the trip has been preceded by several weeks of nothing, not long enough to get involved in anything new, but more than long enough to get bored with relaxing.

Adding to this is the fact that last time I knew I was coming home to a summer of classes and another routine school year. In contrast, this fall I'll be transferring to another school and moving into a dorm in the city. I'm very excited, but it's a big change. (And for all that Chicago is awesome I'm continuously ever-so-slightly disappointed that it doesn't look more like a city in a movie.)

So, to rescue the train of thought from yet another tangent by bringing it to conclusion, this trip will be the first of a series of major, long-term changes for me. You could say Thursday is the first day of the rest of my life.

A bear can do everything faster given healthy incentive; just knowing life means nothing or perhaps questioning reality serves to undermine values while xeroxing your zipcode.

Old story: I was over at a friend's house. We were about to leave for the nearest IHOP so I decided to make use of the bathroom. As I locked the door I happened to glance over at the counter, where I saw three decorative seashells beside the soap dispenser. Oh no! I thought to myself. I don't know how to use the three seashells.

Should you worry if your doctor leaves a message asking you to call him at home if you can't reach him at the office? I had my vitamin D levels tested recently. Like so many residents of the midwest, I am deficient. Must be pretty darn deficient to warrant a call to the doctor at home on a weekend. I will take the supplements and try to get more sun.

Cory Doctorow's new novel Little Brother went on sale the other day, so it is now available for free download on his website. My dad had pulled it up on his laptop last night and so I began reading it. I could not put it down. I finished the whole thing in one sitting.

It's marketed as a young adult book, but I think that's a reflection of an audience he would like to reach out to, rather than a level of difficulty. It is not the kind of book that condescends.

I mentioned it before but it's worth repeating: Cory will be coming to Anderson's next Wednesday the 14th at 7:00 PM to do a signing. Get there early because dinnertime parking in downtown Naperville can take time. No tickets are necessary, though they are doing that thing where you can reserve your place in the booksigning line by purchasing a copy of the book ahead of time.

As a side note, each of the chapters in the book are dedicated to a different book store, and Anderson's in Naperville is chapter 10.