week 1: TEXAS

Okay, I'm happier than I was when I wrote my last "post" (if you can even call it that), so now I can expound upon what has happened here.

Here's a summary of the past week:

Characters:
Becky: roommate
Daniel: friend from home
Gracie: friend of Daniel's that I met in Columbia last summer.

I got here last Saturday night around 8 moved my crap in and unpacked. My dorm room has so much storage space, it's ridiculous. Too bad I only brought a suitcase of stuff with me. I think Becky and I wandered around that night to find food since nothing on campus is open.

Sunday: I'm pretty sure I did nothing. I think I finished reading Kite Runner though.

Monday: opening session. Met with my professor to figure out what we're doing.
Tuesday: library to attempt to get semi-relevant books on subject matter. I ran into Daniel in Blocker when headed to the computer lab. A semi-impressive feat considering the size of this campus and the number of people here.

Tuesday through Friday is basically a blur of me trying to figure out what in the world we're supposed to be doing for research. I know we'll be building robots, most likely using FPGAs (Field-programmable gate arrays). The other REU guy working with me seems to be really excited about this. Clearly, he has never had a robot as a class project before...

Thursday night I played racquetball with Daniel and his (now-former) roommate Robert. I had never played racquetball before. It was fun. I'm still sore. The rec center here is ginormous.

Up until Thursday night I was generally in a very pessimistic mood about this whole summer research thing. Mostly because I was bored out of my mind. Every night generally consisted of me reading books or something similar to what I was doing during the day. Not cool. I'm still not really optimistic about the research part of the summer, but perhaps I will survive the summer anyway.

Saturday, our REU group went to dinner and then to see the Omen at the theatre. I definitely saw previews for that movie and thought, "I'll never see that." It wasn't as bad as I was expecting, but I'd never choose to see it if the group hadn't picked it.

Yesterday, I went to church with Daniel and was afterwards introduced to Fritella's (Italian food) and 42 (game with dominos). All in all quite fun. Last night, I went to Houston to go swing dancing with Gracie and another guys from the A&M swing dance club. I'm pretty sure I really like swing dancing now. It's a lot o' fun.

It was kind of interesting at the group dinner on Saturday night someone asked (when no profs were present) how many people were actually working 40 hours a week. Not very many people seemed to be. It seems that people's work loads are entirely dependent on the prof they are working with. And that probably stems from how much those professors work themselves. Interesting thing to keep in mind when looking at advisors for grad school...

Anyhow, that was my week. Now it's back to the grind of figuring out what I'm supposed to be doing here.

*edit*
Just had to mention that I find it amusing that the majority of the people I know who dance fall into one of three categories: a) physics major, b) engineering major, or c) drummer. (or some combination of those). I don't think that's just the case with the people I know either.
Most amusing t-shirts seen last night while dancing: 1 NASA shirt, 1 Matlab/Simulink shirt.

One last thing. Yesterday, I was disappointed to find out that we Sooners are not as original as I thought: http://bigevent.tamu.edu/. I don't know if A&M created the BIG event, but now I know we didn't...

college station: part 1

so, in case you were wondering, i made it to college station and i'm still alive...however, that's all i'm going to say right now, because i'm sleep deprived and exhausted. we'll just say i'm "adjusting" for now.

update

The past few days have included more bumming. The power went out around 5:30 Monday night. It was kind of dark outside, but we managed for a couple hours. I laid around for awhile and then went to bed around 9:30. Around 11:15, Seth came into my room and we started talking since neither of us could sleep. Around 11:45, after repeatedly talking about it, we decided to go to Waffle House since we were pretty much bored out of our minds. As we're getting ready to go, I take a flashlight upstairs with me to grab something. I come back downstairs and hear Seth in the basement. I look down the stairs and see light. A decent amount of it. And it's flourescent. Yeah, the power turned back on right as we were about to leave. Almost lamer than its turning off in the first place.

Yesterday I turned 20. Weird. Today, after 3 hours at the Sprint store, 4 of us walked away with new cell phones. I am soooo up to date with technology now.

Oh yeah, and at some point Nickel Creek decided that it would be cool to play in Columbia right after I leave. Yeah, they're going to be here June 4. Grrr. Anger.

camera

ha, i have a new toy to play with now.



maybe you guys will actually get to see some pictures from college station...

"cleaning"

i'm pretty sure that whenever i come home from college, cleaning my room consists of rearranging all my crap more efficiently so i can fit more crap in the same smallish space. grr...

grades

indeed, this was the semester of B

mr. richens was the last person to give me a B. ap bio. 8th grade.

that in-between time...

so, i am home. i've been working for my mom for the past week. this is mostly to keep myself from being a bum and not doing anything. unfortunately, i am not used to getting up at 7 every morning, or more accurately, i am not used to doing it consistently and getting enough sleep to make myself a pleasant person to be around. therefore, i have been kind of bratty this past week...which basically means my mom is the one that gets to deal with that, since i haven't hung out with anybody that's not family at all.

wow, run-on paragraph...

so, we leave tomorrow to go to lawrence. seth is graduating. yay. everyone is happy about this.

i am bored. i am glad that seth is coming home. it will be his exclusive job to entertain me, because i said so. excellent. (it's okay. i'll be gone in two weeks. it's a temp job...)

i was looking at job stuff and grad school stuff today. i think that i would like to work for texas instruments, mayhaps. i also think that grad school at stanford would be pretty sweet. good thing my brain is usually full of many such brilliant ideas. actually, there is a prof at stanford that does research in organic semiconductors. pretty cool stuff.

blah. folks, my life is boring. i have nothing interesting to talk about because nothing interesting is happening. i'll try again later.

summary

a summary of the past few days (or so...):

i made it home.

finals week was...interesting. i was not a very good student this semester.

i am the proud owner of three new tie-dye shirts. (i should have been an art major).

it appears that i am living in the dorms again next year. that will make four years in university housing for each of the weisbrook children.

my room currently looks like it got hit by a tornado. only better.

i have too many books. especially too many that do not actually belong to me. everyone will get their books back eventually. i promise.

i found out what kind of research i will be doing at a&m. i will be working on the development of nonlinear dynamical computer systems. however, i am not sure what that means yet.

i start work for my mom tomorrow. i think i will be the official errand girl/jack of all trades.

i am currently listening to bon jovi. sweet.

now i am going to bed, because 7:30 am is early.

the home stretch

i am tired of awakening at 6am to study. other than that, no complaints.

the thunder and lightning tonight was lovely. i'm very glad that the windows in nielsen open. probably the only place on campus besides cate where that is an option.

satisfy me

the next two weeks seem to be looming. my final report for lab 3 is due wednesday, i have a signals test thursday night, a couple of homeworks due somewhere in between and i'm not feeling so great right now.

i spent most of yesterday either in bed or throwing up. it was pretty great, let me tell you. i think it was either food poisoning or some sort of stomach virus like andrea had a couple of weeks ago. i feel a lot better now though. just pretty tired and achey.

that's about all in current news actually. this weekend was really nice. got to hang out with people and relax. it would have been nice to get more work done, but sunday's "adventures" weren't exactly in the plan.

new

ha! i updated my template. it's probably not finished because i didn't work that hard on it, but hey, at least it looks different.

happy easter everyone.

complicated

in case anyone didn't know, i'm going to be in norman all next year. there will be no study abroad in england. sad, i know. actually, i'm thrilled. odd, but true.

marvelous light

well, i realized this week that i am slacking even more than usual. folks, this is bad. i'm just not really caring about school all that much this semester. classes aren't exactly thrilling...to say the least, i'd much rather talk to people.

so, spring break was a couple of weeks ago. i went to glorieta. it was wonderful. just what i needed spiritually and emotionally. i came back extremely rested. amazingly.

in the past four days i have found out a lot that will dictate the next year of my life. sunday, i found out that i was accepted to the reu at texas a&m. i emailed fermi that night, just to make sure that i did indeed get rejected. not to worry, an email in my inbox the next morning assured me that i did. yesterday, i accepted the position. today, i got an email from the reu at the university of california - santa cruz. they accepted me too. it's a really good thing i already accepted the position at a&m, otherwise i'd probably have accepted the one in cali. for goodness sake, santa cruz is right on the ocean...but, i think that a&m is the best for helping me figure out grad school.

i also got an email from study abroad today. it would seem that i was "accepted" to reading, however, in my degree program, i can only go for a year. that's out of the question, as i do have an agenda of how i want my schooling here to go. i don't want to put off graduation a semester, since i only decided on study abroad because i could still make it out in four. i'm going to go by the study abroad office tomorrow and see what my options are. in all honesty, i wouldn't be heart-broken if i couldn't go abroad. i love norman, i love ou, and i love my friends here. i'm not sure uprooting a semester before i graduate is really a great idea anyway. even though i'll be here for year 5 anyway. my mom tells me that grad school is a lot different and that i'll stop hanging out with my lowely undergrad friends. sad thought.

housing

dear housing,

can i please trade the free cable in my room next year for a telephone in my room. that would be spectacular.

sincerely,
emily

come thou fount

Well, I obviously didn't get around to changing my blog's appearance. I did contemplate changing it to one of the sample ones (the bright pink one actually) just for spite, but decided it would probably be awhile until I changed it again and I didn't want to look at pink for that long.

That's all, but this hymn is absolutely amazing.

Oh, to grace how great a debtor,
Daily I'm constrained to be!
Let Thy goodness, like a fetter,
Bind my wand'ring heart to Thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
Prone to leave the God I love;
Here's my heart, Oh, take and seal it,
Seal it for Thy courts above.
-Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing

p b & j

who wants to give up homework for lent with me?

i had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for dinner tonight. mental note: eat these more often. they are tasty.

reu's are all mailed in and applied to. sweet. texas a&m, university of california - santa cruz, and fermilab. texas, california, or illinois...why do i get the feeling i won't be spending the summer in cali?

went to hillary's pirate birthday party on friday night. as we were walking/running along elm street some dumb person leaned out of his suv window and threw a mcdonald's cup of water at me. i was a bit confused at first, especially since i thought it was a water balloon. i was just thankful that it was water and not beer or soda or something fun like that. odd thing was though, i was the only person not dressed pirate-like. karma perhaps?

agh!

well folks, it looks like i'm well on my way to pulling an all-nighter in honor of going to houston...

i'm procrastinating

surprising, no?

i have a lab report, a matlab assignment, a lab quiz, and part of a project proposal to finish before i leave norman tomorrow. slacker extraordinaire.

a couple comments on valentine's day. this year's was lovely. not that v-day has been bad in the past, but this one seemed especially nice. the weather was absolutely gorgeous for one. it was all-around just a good day, although, i can't really remember what i did for the life of me. aside from dinner with the evans 4 guys +jon and david and talking to katie on the south oval, i can't remember much else that was non-school related.

i do have a complaint about valentine's before i finish, though. can people please stop complaining about or calling attention to the fact that they are single on this fine day? news flash: singleness is not the end of the world. really. i promise.

okay, rant finished.

De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da

so, i've been listening to the police for the past few days. like, a lot. that's pretty cool. i'm gaining an appreciation for 80s music. that's good, since i missed it the first time around.

lab iii is taking over my life. i suppose this is to be expected, but still, it seems its the only class i ever think about or do homework for during the week. that really needs to change. i also really need to start doing stuff for my honors research.

i got profs to write my letters of recommendation for REUs etc. the first one is due next week. neat. and i wrote my essay for study abroad. at least i'm kind of feeling on top of things there.

i was sick for a lot of this week. being sick is no fun. i skipped my one class on monday and spent the majority of the day sleeping. i think that was probably helpful in getting me better sooner.

that's pretty much it. this weekend will be spent doing massive quantities of homework since i will be in houston for the second half of next week. that's right, i will be visiting texas for the first time since being at ou. neat.

:)

*contented sigh* i needed that.

thesis

i checked out my first thesis from the library on tuesday. it appears my life is all downhill from here.

i've been moody...

i've been in a complaining mood lately. shame on me and sorry about that guys. i'll try to work on that. a couple of bad days is not even roughly equal to the the end of the world.

birthday

we celebrated my dad's birthday tonight, meaning family dinner and cake etc.

instead of putting the correct "number" of candles on the cake, we improvised. we used some of the big number candles that we had laying around. 33 +1 lone candle. it works in hex...

see, you really can't blame my weirdness on me. how could i come from a family like this and still be normal?

---

cool thing that happened today: my dad gave me another power adaptor for my laptop since he had a couple just lying around. ah, the benefits of having an ibm employee in-house.

books!

today's reading dilemma:
which "textbook" should i read?
physics of the body or the world is flat

or...maybe both?

in other news: i will not be arriving in norman until monday night

2006

happy new year everyone!

sheesh, 2005 was a long year.

went to see narnia the other day. i liked that they played the dictionary game. although, they got a cool word like gastrovascular out of the deal. the only word i got out of it the last time i played was dejecta. how useful is that in everyday conversation? oh, wait...

i finished the drafts for my reu/lab internship applications today. now i need to proof them and then all that's left is my study abroad application. writing an essay on "why i feel qualified to study abroad". blah, blah, blah.

okay, it's 4:30 in the morning. i'm going to bed now.

5th semester in review

I admit, I wrote this a couple of days ago, I just haven't gotten around to posting until now.

Fifth Semester in Review

• I completed 4 more ECE and 2 more CS classes. I only need 29 more hours to graduate.
• For the first semester that I can remember, I had no mental/emotional breakdowns. I'm going to attribute this largely to that fact that:
• I had my first voluntary, self-selected roommate. this semester taught me that I am not one of those persons designed to live alone.
• Nickel Creek--who Danny unwittingly introduced me to--was my favorite band this semester.
  
• I spent the majority of my semester hanging out with the freshman boys of Evans 4. only mildly strange.
• I spent another large chunk of time programming in S18 in the sub-basement of Carson.
  
• I was mistaken for being home schooled quite frequently. (Naomi felt the need to inform me/clarify that this is not a complement)
• I realized that I am in the perfect major for myself, partially due to the classes that I enjoyed (ECE classes) and the classes that I enjoyed less (CS).
• I built my first robot where I actually felt like I knew what I was doing
• Andrea joined OU Crew (this may seem irrelevant to my semester, but trust me, it wasn't)
• By some miracle, I kept my 4.0
  
• I spent ridiculous amounts of time checking my email, facebook, and reading other people's blogs (i.e. stalking people)
• I decided to study abroad
• I had my first job/internship interview (and got to wear my first suit. ugh.)
• I saw my first opening-night movie. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
• I started doing the boggle and the jumble in the paper on a regular basis.

This was also the first semester where I had to seriously deal with most of my friends living off-campus. It was an interesting experience. I lost touch with many of them simply because I am bad at staying in touch and it was inconvenient. Knowing people with kitchens did, however, allow me to cook every so often. Each cooking experience was, of course, accompanied by a phone call to Mom for instructions.

This was also the first semester where I largely stopped going to RUF. A lot of this was due to being busy and lacking energy and motivation. The fact that it met at Lloyd Noble made me a lot less inclined to go. I am trying to figure out where my priorities lie so I don't screw up with this again next semester.

Yup, guys, those are the milestones.

This is probably the first semester where I am unable to say of it that it wasn't better than all of the previous ones. It wasn't a bad semester by any means, but for one thing, if Andrea hadn't been my roommate I would most likely have driven myself crazy and had a dozen mental breakdowns and bouts of loneliness. It was a bit hard dealing with not having most of my good friends living near me and having to meet a bunch of new people and finding a new group of people to hang out with. All in all, though, a good semester. I enjoyed it and I'm looking forward to the next.

mail

today was a good mail day. 2 word smart books and my prospectus from Reading. soon my vocabulary will be educated, powerful, and erudite.

christmas

i suppose it's not technically christmas day anymore, but hey, i haven't gone to sleep yet, so it still counts.

christmas was really nice this year. very relaxing.

on christmas eve, our family (all 5 of us) watched kids during the first christmas eve service. (part of the obligatory family bonding time). we then went to the christmas eve service. when we got home, we kind of decided to open gifts. my parents pretty much decided that since the older we get, the more picky we are to shop for and the more frustrating it is...they would just give us a few gifts that we actually wanted and then cash.

so, here's the (as andrea terms it) "loot" that i got for christmas:

• 2 nickel creek cds
• 2 word smart books (still in the mail)
• a few dvds
• an itunes gift card
• a book of su doku puzzles (i'm completely addicted after a day and a half)
• a che shirt from china
• a scarf/shawl thing from china that i will have to figure out how to wear
  
• a jane austin action figurine
• cash

we went over to the delwoods tonight. sat around, ate, talked, played apples to apples. it only took daniel 7.5 hours of intermittent asking in order to get us over to their house. i like the delwoods, they're neat people. i still don't quite understand how we lived in columbia for 13 years before meeting them though...

still attempting to learn vocabulary. considering trying to take the gre at mizzou while home over break. we'll see what happens. also a potential trip to colorado. we'll see what the siblings decided about it.

i was looking back on my christmas post from last year and all the books i got and said i would read. i think i read about 2 out of the 15 or so during the course of the year. failure. again.

coming tomorrow: emily's semester review

stuff

first off: andrea, your comments are worthless, but unfortunately i'm giving in to their powers of persuasion.

i'm home. i've actually been home since saturday. neat. naomi and seth got home today (wednesday)

i love getting mail at home. i got a credit card application and something from the army today. also neat.

i'm trying to figure out where to apply next summer. current top options:

• fermilab in chicago
• reu at texas a&m
• reu at the university of alaska
• reu at university of california, santa cruz

we'll see what happens. i suppose what i end up doing will depend on where i get accepted and whether i want to do more comp sci stuff or ee stuff. gosh, i wish i wasn't so horrible at decisions.

in other news, vocabulary learning hasn't really started yet for the break. i am a complete bum. i am getting a lot of personal satisfaction from redesigning the study abroad website though.

that's all. off to saint louis tomorrow to visit the relatives. should be fun.

andrea and kyle owe me some pictures. i expect those soon.

merry christmas everyone.

finals

4 finals down. 4 teachers i shouldn't have to see again. most likely ever. 2 finals left. apathy is closing in strong.

i've got an operating systems book that's begging to be burned...

loud hour

in the words of andrea:

"They think this is loud hour? They have no idea."

*sigh* sometimes i really miss last year...

balderdash

so, apparently banine is not a word. rubbish.

a certain somebody would probably be really good at balderdash...

stealing second

dang, that nutella stuff is good.

why am i still procrastinating going to bed?

robot

things i forgot to add to my christmas break to-do list:

• spend time with my wonderful sister who's coming home especially to see me


• study abroad application


• other cool and useful stuff
  

so, i had to build this robot for class and i was taking pictures tonight. andrea was kind enough to help me out. we're a sorry lot, trying to keep from going insane this late in the semester.

these pictures are mostly to entertain naomi. everyone else has current firsthand knowledge of just how weird we are.

the robot looks like this:


andrea appears to like the robot:


they have coffee together often:


andrea appears to really like the robot:


underside/being weird?


andrea appears to be cheating on the robot with...a stapler? weak.


your advice for today:
when building a robot near the end of the fall semester, do not build it out of metal as it makes carrying the thing around a very cold process.

homeskool

andrea's question of the day:

"emily, does it bother you more that you only hang out with homeschoolers or that people think you were homeschooled."

thoughts? discuss.

code!

do you know how many emails i have sent with that title recently? that and "old micro-p tests", although the latter is mainly due to replying to old emails out of laziness.

i decided to update my blog instead of wasting even more time on facebook. i feel this is slightly more productive. maybe.

to summarize my life for the past few days:

• i spent the majority of wednesday studying for my micro-p test. i feel a heck of a lot better about this one then the last one. i imagine i'll still get a 'B' in this class, but oh well, i still enjoyed the class a lot.


• wednesday and thursday i programmed for operating systems and we turned in our last two projects. cool


• also found out wednesdayish that our ewb project in honduras where were going to be designing and installing a water system is scrapped because someone else just kind of installed one. sigh.


• went to bed last night at 9:30. it was amazing. got up at 6 and took a shower with intent to program. went back to bed for another hour. proved my patheticness once again.


• worked on robot this afternoon for about 5 hours. it actually kind of worked. i think mechanicals may not think we are incompetant any longer. sweet.


• tried to get saferide to take us to barnes and noble tonight. i think the girl on duty thought we were crazy. totally lame.


• pancake breakfast at jaime and laura's tomorrow. yay. then on to another day full of programming: database and maybe micro-p. at least the two are entirely different.

i'm totally ready to be home again.

plans/things to get done over break:

• vocabulary: for my own personal benefit and as gre prep


• scholarship applications


• reu applications


• google application


• application for outstanding junior (because that obviously applies to me...)

i'm sure i'll come up with lots of other ideas that are lovely but also won't happen.

that's all for today. i need to go program more.

doubting thomas

Can I be used to help others find truth
When I'm scared I'll find proof that it's a lie
Can I be led down a trail dropping bread crumbs
That prove I'm not ready to die
-Doubting Thomas, Nickel Creek

thanksgiving

well, i'm home. and actually have been for a few days now. i love being home.

there's no electricity in my room right now. only my room though. and my closet light actually works. it's weird. so i have an extension cord running to my room from the bathroom so i can have a lamp in my room. hopefully this will be fixed by the time christmas break rolls around.

as usual, there is more furnature in my house now than the last time i was. good thing i wasn't disappointed in that arena.

i had really great plans to do a lot of homework over break. in that respect, i'm basically a failure. but i have gotten to relax a lot, which might actually be better for me. and there's still another day of work left to be had.

i have managed to play lord of the rings risk and scrabble. i really like scrabble. a lot. today's new words learned from scrabble:

• ravel -
  1. To separate the fibers or threads of (cloth, for example); unravel.
  2. To clarify by separating the aspects of.
  3. To tangle or complicate.
• jinn -
  plural of jinni; in muslim legend, a spirit often capable of assuming human or animal form and exercising supernatural influence over people.

seth likes to make up words when we play scrabble. a lot. so it's always a bit of a vocabulary/bluffing test to know whether the words are real or not.

i also don't think it's fair when a word means it's opposite as well. (see ravel above)

in other random thoughts: professors are really nice. i talked with a couple professors here that my mom knows to get help with projects. they don't even know me and they're still really nice and helpful.

that's all.

currently listening - why should the fire die?, nickel creek
currently reading - something about sql/jdbc

failure

i came to the brilliant realization today that i am deathly afraid of failure. the same goes for dissappointing people. no wonder i'm frustrated with life right now.

bath

i gave my chacos a bath today (today being thursday). that's kind of weird. they're clean now though.

it goes like this, the fourth, the fifth

i want to go camping.

chessboxing

it seems as though the majority of my friends have decided to quit blogging. that's not a huge problem i suppose, seing as i have the awesome professors at mit who blog and let me know about relevant recent events like chessboxing. pretty sweet, eh?

i just got back from going to see la traviata with mike. it was interesting. opera is not my favorite medium and i admit that i do prefer it in english. i can still appreciate it in italian though.

i got virtually nothing done today. tried to write my program for micro-p, but haven't finished yet. i'll work on that tomorrow i suppose. i also get to go into the lab tomorrow and try to figure out how our robot circuit should be put together. neat.

dang. jimmy john's is good. especially when it's free. i can't believe i didn't discover that joint until the summer before college.

i think i'm off to go do some sort of studying. adios.

jobs

this whole looking for work thing stinks. the whole email/interview/thank you cycle is vicious. i think i should just stick with being a professional student.

smooth jazz hour

so, um, tomorrow is going to be a rediculously long day that involves wearing a suit. drat. class, speak at question/answer panel for high schoolers, eat lunch with same, interview with ibm, finish tuesdays lab, help someone learn micro-p, ewb meeting, finish operating systems project. sheesh.

i went to a "diversity dinner" tonight for ibm. it was nice, actually, and i got a chance to talk to some people. i'm betting they'd probably give me some sort of job if i want one, seeing as i'm female and all (aka "diverse"). so i'm interviewing with them tomorrow. someone from the office in new york. that would be pretty cool. i've never been to new england at all.

let's see, what else. got advised this week. i'm taking a colloqium class, despite the fact i had decided not to do honors. that was mostly because i didn't want to take a dumb colloqium class. i'm actually interested in dr. porter's, however, so that changed things up a bit. it also sounds like study abroad is very feasible. most excellent. current choice: reading university, approx. 30 minutes outside london. very awesome. apparently it's a quality engineering school as well, so credits would transfer and i might be able to swing honors and a history minor.

hmm...this post was all about school. oh wait, school is my life. lame. i need a hobby that doesn't involve a computer. or eating.

canadian, eh?

hmm...thus far, it's been a good week. yesterday, for unknown reasons, and despite being a monday, was most excellent. i discovered, whilst returning from class yesterday that i actually do like my major. it seems that i go through this crisis every semester. apparently, it's not my major i hate, just the first 6 or 7 weeks of the semester. bummer for me, i suppose.

i also decided, partially based on my dismal practice gre scores, that i need to expand my vocabulary. i think the word smart book may be returning with me after thanksgiving. it probably wouldn't hurt to review some latin vocab either.

played bocce ball for the first time today. i'm pretty bad, but that's not too much of a problem. maybe i'll get better.

built a digital logic circuit in lab today. makes me wish that my section of digital design had had a lab with it. i pretty much dominated that circuit. w00t.

ibm is having some sort of jank in the union tomorrow, so i suppose i should get a bit dressed up and go. drat. i hate dressing up. there will be no suit involved either. the suit thing at the career fair was complete rubbish, but it is a nice suit.

i leave you with a funny link. check out this article.

dr. pepper

does anyone else find it ironic that they gave me a dr. pepper cup at crossroads tonight?

unless this a sign of changes to come...

2 + 2 = 5

x = tuesday night, andrea and emily swear off desserts and sugar (after one last cookie)
y = wednesday at the cafeteria, they have hot chocolate cobbler for the first time all semester (i've been waiting for it...)

x + y = irony

persians

50 billion persians can't be wrong.

your advice of the day: when you get invited to join honor societies and they offer free food at the informational meeting, don't join the first year. they'll invite you back and you can get free food again the next. free food at college must always be top priority.

it's come to the point where i have to remind myself to take showers. i think that is probably a bad sign. actually, anytime you can't remember when the last shower you took was is a bad time. oh well, at least i'm doing my homework. one must always have priorities.

my first test of the semester is tomorrow. i suspect the next ones will follow shortly thereafter. lucky me.

i need sleep. therefore i am going to bed. goodnight.

this entry only took me three minutes to write. yay.

a regatta saturday

andrea has requested an update, which is rather dumb, seeing as she lives with me. oh, well.

life is somewhat better now. at least in the academic realm i think i am finally at the point where i am starting to understand stuff. at least i hope i am understanding it since i have to explain it to other people sometimes. oddly enough, i think i like my microprocessor class, which is assembly language apparently. it's neat stuff. actually, i'm starting to like most of my classes, seeing as everything is becoming more interesting/more work. why do those two have to go together?

i think that every dorm room needs a plant. however, once you acquire yours, do not feed it powerade. it makes the plant sticky and may kill it if it is not a hardy plant. my mom still claims that plants like diet coke though. i don't happen to have any diet coke lying around however, and i'm not about to go find some just to prove her theory/kill my plant for real this time.

hmm...my train of thought just switched from writing this blog to something else, so i think i'll end here. back to go work on electronics and operating systems. i am so cool.

life

it's a friday night and i am sitting alone in my dorm room doing homework. how things have changed from last year. i'm not going to lie. right now, i really miss last year. i miss having tons of people around that i knew. i miss wandering up to the fourth floor to see what people were doing and just hanging out in people's rooms. things are so different this year. i've mostly resigned myself to the fact that housing makes poor decisions, but i really wasn't expecting their decision to not allow upperclassmen in the dorms to affect me so much. sure, the freshmen wouldn't have the same built-in structure and community when they moved into the dorms, but i never dreamed that i would be missing that so much. it's a bit like living in the upperclassmen dorms last year, minus having the refuge of the honors dorm.

it's left me kind of lonely and with the feeling that i'm drifting. there's no group of people that i'm always around, no close group of friends. i'm in a funk and it's about to drive me crazy. i hate people and yet i want to cling to people at the same time, yet withdraw myself. i don't understand myself and i get frustrated. there's so much stuff that i need to deal with and yet i have no motivation and no energy.

i suppose that once again i will have to learn how to meet people. it's something i always forget how to do. i suppose i have to do it every year, but it's never seemed to intimidating.

oh well, life goes on. and i've never had a semester that wasn't better than the last. God is good.

visitation

i got kicked out of evans 4 past visitation hours tonight. the semester has now officially begun.

facebook

facebook is great for many reasons. today, however, i got a message that just made the entire thing worthwhile. i have a facebook account at mizzou too, for no apparent reason, just felt like it. all the information on it is wrong, though. so the other day i got a message. it read like this: "who is this, and why do you have that you live in Tri Delt in room 18?" yup folks, my secret life is finally catching up with me. apparently she is actually the one living in tri delt room 18. bummer.

in other news: i ate my cheerios with chopsticks last night. they were good.

i think i am more on top of my electronics class than i was. yay for office hours. i, however, know nothing about real-world applications. unfortunate since we have to build a robot for that class.

met some boys in evans4 last night. i had kind of already met them before, but it was still pretty cool. i think the stairwell might become my study room again soon. while andrea and i were up there, we saw the paint cans from what used to be evans4 and andrea suggested that we salvage them. so now we have 5 partially-full paint cans in our room. i need to stop listening to andrea.

that's all. need to finish up some homework in matlab...

sabrina

andrea made me row a 5k today and i pretty much hurt all over. yesterday's theory is proven again.

sarala

i finished mere christianity today. i consider this week a success now. i suppose it really only took me three months from when i last started it to finish, which sounds a lot better than the year it took me from starting it the first time and finishing it.

i've been listening to share the well (caedmon's call) and why should the fire die? (nickel creek) albums over itunes. they are both absolutely amazing. i think i'm going to have to purchase them soon. my ipod wants new music.

this week was actually fairly blah. i seem to be the only one who thought this. everyone else seemed to have a lot of homework/just general bad weekishness.

i was talking to andrea about crew tonight and she was really making me want to do it. that girl has probably more influence on me than is good for me, or perhaps it's just that everthing sounds interesting to me. anyhow, i remembered that i don't know how to swim. just sunk that boat (sorry for the pun). i should probably figure out how to swim pretty soon. i'm still mildly bitter at my parents. i'm pretty sure naomi and seth got swimming lessons. my poor future potential children. i think they're going to start swim lessons when they're two...

currently reading: blue like jazz, donald miller
currently listening: when in rome, nickel creek

my favorite things...

so, i think today is one of my favorite days of the semester. it's the day the spring schedule comes out on enroll. i know, i am pathetic.

in other news, engineers without borders is now an official ou student organization and has made it on the national webpage. neat.

love is harder than a word

do you ever feel like a worst version of yourself. as though you knew if you could see yourself from someone else's perspective, you would hate yourself even more than you do right now. that you're screwing everything up and you just can't seem to stop yourself. that you do things you don't want to, but you don't want to do the things that you should.

i feel like a hateful, selfish, grumpy, mean, lazy, unmotivated, unloving jerk right now. i feel disappointed with myself and fearful that i won't be able to get myself out of this rut. but that's just it. i can't. there's no way i can. only God can. only by His blood. only through His saving grace. there is nothing i can do, nothing that i will ever be able to do that can make things better. only once i turn to God and admit my weeknesses to Him will i have the strength to become the person i want to be, the person he wants me to be.

As obedient children, do not conform to the evil desires you had when you lived in ignorance. But just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do; for it is written: "Be holy, because I am holy."
-I Peter 1:14-16

How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him.
-I John 3:1

away from the sun again

i was thinking about engineers without borders today and looking at stuff on their website. it kind of got me thinking about the peace corps and what i want to do with my life. my education right now is preparing me for the rest of my life and my future career. i'm not actually sure i've ever thought of it that way. in the past, i've always thought, "well, i'm going to be a professor, so i'll teach, advise students, and do research if i have to." but, i started thinking today, how would i feel if the help and support i could give to people in other countries was limited by the fact that i was just sliding by in school. obviously, i'm not literally just sliding by in school. i have a good gpa, i learn the material. usually though, i do a lot of learning the material just for the test. i remember very little of what i learned last semester. granted, i've had a whole summer full of other stuff to help me forget, but i still find my recollection levels unacceptably low.

it's so much more inspiring to want to learn material so i will have the necessary skills to help other countries develop, than to want those skills so it will land me a good job with a good company. my main goal in life is not earning money. i want to have a job that i enjoy and where i feel like i am helping people. i can't exactly see myself designing chips for a living for the rest of my life. it's easier to see myself writing code, but i definitely know human interaction is important to my sanity though.

i really do want to go abroad though. i want to visit third world countries, i want to experience life as they do. and when i leave, i want it to leave a lasting impression of what is really important. in the grand scheme of things, i feel that the degree i'm going for is really quite worthless. it's a degree aimed at convenience more than necessities. i know that's not really true, because the implications of some of the current research going on makes other more "worthwhile" pursuits possible.

i really don't know what this post was about. it may be incoherent when i read it in the morning. we'll see.

t-shirt

our "i'd rather be surfing" shirts just made their debut at the huff. i wish you guys could have been there to see it. they were topped only by the girl wearing very large teal dangling disk earings.

melancholy mix

an update for all my adoring fans.

week 1 is over. whew, it was long. i am taking 17 hours or strictly cs and ece classes. w00t...or not.

andrea and i have not killed each other yet. that is good. nor do i think we will be desiring that at any point in the near future. we definitely went "walmarting" friday on the bus. just a little taste of china all over again. it took three hours. i think norman needs better public transportation. perhaps buses that run more frequently than once every hour.

we had a meeting for engineers without borders. it was good. i'm feeling a lot better about it. especially since there are deadlines involved. deadlines work well for me usually.

i was looking at my degree sheet for my major the other day and i came to the brilliant conclusion that i need only 29 more hours to graduation. that's 2 semesters folks. but i don't think it'll happen that soon because of a little thing called study abroad. i went by their office friday and picked up a flier for ireland. w00t! i could be here next fall. that would be amazing.

i got back from the RUF shindig and asked andrea "do you know what i really feel like doing right now?" to which she replied "walkies?" only we didn't actually do much walking. but that's okay, we had a good tete a tete even though it didn't involved walmart or fountains.

went to the huff this afternoon with -a and we did the rowing machines. about midway through some guy starts trying to use the rowing machine next to us and is asking us about it and generally making small talk while we were rowing. he started rowing and when andrea and i left she asked me if i knew him and i answered in the negative. she had been pretty certain he was a friend of mine, but he wasn't. yay for friendly guys at the huff.

incidentally, andrea and i are going to be completely buff by the end of the semester. everyone prepare to be amazed.

so, andrea just informed me that her professor was quoted in her religion and foreign policy book. i think it'd be pretty cool if one of my professors was quoted in her religion and foreign policy book. i think i'm going to make it one of my lifetime goals to get quoted in a book completely unrelated to my field of study. i'm already making a great start. i got quoted in the oudaily (see last paragraph) saying that i was a football fan. oh, the irony. what has college done to my values...

in case you haven't noticed, andrea was mentioned in this post a lot. that's because we spend a lot of time together and i expect this will be the case for quite awhile. i hope you can deal with that.

at this point i'm majorly procrastinating doing my homework for electronics lab that's due tomorrow. i don't understand diodes and i've completely forgotten everything from last semester. grrr.

on that note, hope everyone had a better first week than i did. peace.

keep on the sunny side of life

i had six classes today starting at 9:30 and ending at 6:50. i am not a huge fan of this schedule. it left me exhausted and grumpy, so if i was unpleasant to any of you today (or more so than usual...), i apologise. today was not great. today left me slightly wary of the rest of the semester. i kind of feel like there are a whole lot of unknowns material-wise this semester. it's not really the classes i'm scared of. i'm more scared of all the programming languages etc i'm supposed to learn. so far they include oracle, sql, c, a review of java, matlab, labview and one other one for my ee lab that i can't remember. then my teacher in micro p (2nd to last class) decided to give us a talk on how important your upper division classes are and how some people do badly on them even after doing well on there general engr class. prof: this is not helpful.

i'm considering dropping my discrete class. kind of strange because of all my classes this semester, this was the one i was really looking forward to. i like the material, the prof is supposed to be really great. but when i got into class this morning, all of a sudden, i had no desire to go through this material again. very strange. so i am going to go to operating systems tomorrow and see if i can get in to that even though i'm taking one of the prerequisites right now. then i'll have to check if it will work as a professional elective. we'll see. i'd probably take it even if it didn't count because i think it'd be interesting.

yeah...

met some guys on the fourth floor tonight. old habits die hard i suppose. someone also referred to me as the "social butterfly of the honors dorm". never really thought of it that way. the strange thing is, i'm only this way around the dorms. i'm fairly anti-social at home. weird.

ok, i'm exhausted and it's time for sleep.

free stuff week 2005

alex is my free stuff guru. no one else even comes close.

my count is at 2 free shirts (one from the andrea) and two ethernet cords. i don't really aspire too high...

and alex played guitar tonight. it was sweet. i have missed his playing in the hall.

going to bed, have to be rested for more free stuff tomorrow.

i'm back

okay. very quick update because i am absolutely exhausted. i got into norman circa 11:30 tonight and promtly drug all of my stuff upstairs, unscrewed the shelf from the wall, made sure everything was vaguely together, and said goodbye to my dad. i then talked to heather for probably an hour and then half unpacked my room.

this wasn't exactly the plan, but as i've said quite a bit recently, it seems almost a moot point to even plan how i will return to norman, especially when it involves my brother and sister.

the reason my dad brought me down to norman instead of naomi and seth is that my sister was in a car wreck this morning as she was driving to church. our mini van was totalled. the damage was pretty bad, including a wheel in the back, which completely fell off. there was very little physical damage done to the actual people in the wreck, thankfully. because of that, my parents thought it best to have my sister stick around columbia to talk to the police and to make sure no medical problems arise later. probably a good idea since she's flying back to china on wednesday.
our time with three vans was quite shortlived. it's kind of freaky that we have never actually sold a mini van; our past three mini vans have been totalled in accidents. hopefully our new one will be an exception.

so yeah, i'm back in honors again. there's been a few, shall we say updates to the dorm. heather's room is now the size of two, since they connected her room and office. everything has been painted white, including the hallways.

here's to evans 4 and the star hallway, you will be missed:



that's all. contact me if you're bored, because i most likely will be.

phone: 487-2618

oh wait, one more thing. please get on facebook and join the "housing was dropped on its head as a child group". support a good cause.

housing was dropped on its head as a child

i got an email from andrea yesterday with the subject line seen above. apparently andrea, who according to a letter sent out in may was my roommate, is not technically my roommate. my mom told me that i had gotten a letter from housing with no roommate listed and had asked me if i was sure andrea was coming back next year. i was pretty sure that she was or at least that she would have informed of information of that magnitude, so i didn't bother to check, especially since the andrea was in europe and i had very limited email access while on vacation. however, apparently andrea is rooming with someone else in honors. what weird is that i'm currently assigned to her old room, instead of her. i really didn't expect housing to screw up our housing assignments after having them correct only a few months previous, but you know, housing has many unseen talents.

i called housing about five or six times in the past two days to figure out if i could move in early. after talking to about five or six people, it was decided that i do indeed have permission to move in early. this is a very good thing considering my other option was to store my crap in heather's room and bum places to stay off of my friends until upperclassmen move in on wednesday. i will be arriving sunday night (hopefully before 11 so we can get snowcones) and will be moving in on monday morning. i will then procede to be bored out of my mind for the next few days until the rest of the student population moves into the dorms or my friends take pity on me and rescue me from the dorms. good news though folks, i have a phone in my dorm room ;).

i thought i would be able to take less stuff with me to college this year. i am a failure. not having a couch or second computer though will help a lot. it appears as though it is my lot in life to transfer copious amounts of crap between columbia and norman for the next couple years.

that's all. back to packing.

i am certain now that i am vindicated

so, apparently it is time to update.

i got back on tuesday afternoon from my week-long family vacation. stops included national parks and monuments mostly, including: the petrified forest, bryce canyon, zion national park, the grand canyon, mese verde, and the four corners monument. we camped. our tent isn't entirely waterproof apparently, so on most nights at least one person was sleeping in our van. this non-waterproofed-ness was especially convenient considering that we apparently hit the area at approximately monsoon season, which basically means it rains every afternoon. that also made it kind of cold. we were all wearing pants and jackets. kind of different from the sweltering weather of oklahoma and missouri, and well received from my end, not so much from everyone else.

it was a pretty good trip. the scenery out there is fantastic. it was a bit hard going from no family time to all the time is family time. overall it was fun thought. we went to mesa verde in 1991 and camped, so that part was a bit for nostalgia's sake. since i was 5 at the time though, i have virtually no memories of the place. it's pretty cool. indian ruins built up on the cliffs. almost a thousand years old. it was also kind of weird to compare what was happening with the indians here at the time to what was happening in china at the time (give me a break, i just spent four weeks reading about it) and the difference in "sophistication" is pretty big. the situations were so different though.

so as not to have to relate the whole trip to you, i now present highlights:

• white water rafting on the last day and naomi falling out after our guide told us to turn completely around in the boat.
• driving around to different hotels in an attempt to find wi-fi/email access that wasn't password protected (at least i had a good excuse for having my laptop with me).
• the family pow-wow to discuss seth's future and not actually deciding anything
• the free hot showers at the last campground we stayed at
• all the foreigners with rented RVs at the national parks we were at
• playing "guess the nationality" of the aforementioned foreigners
• arriving at four corners at 1 am and sleeping by the side of the road until it opened in the morning.
• seeing my mom get freaked out by heights and refusing to move anywhere near the edge of a cliff.
• knowing that there was a 20-minute orientation video waiting for us at every national park and knowing that we were going to watch it.

that's all i can think of right now. may not sound too interesting, but family vacations always are.

on our way back, we picked up our new van in kansas city. so we now have three vans and no cars. pretty great.

most of the rest of my time at home has been spent being a bum. i'm trying to motivate myself to pack, but it's not working too well. i think i'm heading back to school sunday afternoon. we'll see. my plans don't seem to follow through very well these days. the plan at this point is: naomi is driving me back to school and we're picking up seth in lawrence on the way so naomi doesn't have to drive back by herself. i'm not sure why naomi seemed to want to drive me back, but i think snowcones may have been the deciding factor. if anyone would really like to meet them during the day they're in norman, let me know and we could arrange a showing.

my bottom retainer broke a couple of weeks ago, so i had to get a mold made for a new one when i went to the dentist today. i forgot how much that process calls up the gag reflex. having not the best nose in the world due to my being allergic to anything i can breathe in, it's kind of freaky to not have the option of breathing through your mouth.

i think that's about it. i'm terribly excited about getting back to norman. and i called heather's room tonight to find out something about moving in to the dorms and she answered the phone...meaning that heather is once again my RA after my one-year technical sabbatical. w00t-ness. so long to my 4 semesters/5 RAs.

adios folks. i'm exhausted.

introversion

quote for the week:
"remember, someone you know, respect, and interact with every day is an introvert, and you are probably driving this person nuts."
-jonathan rauch, caring for your introvert

i'm leaving norman in about an hour. it's been a fun month and i am now 6 credits richer (or poorer, depending on your perspective). to everyone who gave me rides and put up with the fact that i have no phone and still wanted to hang out with me: thanks, you guys are the best.

i'm off to colorado with the fam. see you in a few weeks.

i'm the only one to blame

first and foremost, i would like to say that brownies should not be made in 8 by 8 pans, they should always be made in 9 by 13 pans. so for those of you who think that you can get away with a square baking pan, don't do it. it's just not right.

okay, moving on.

today was pretty much perfect. the weather was absolutely beautiful. i was actually kind of chilly on the way to class, which is a first. i skipped the second half of stats class and my china class was cancelled after he returned our tests (i did a lot better than i was expecting). studying some, and then went to see the perfect man at the dollar theatre. i'm sorry, there weren't a whole lot of choices, and heather and nicole didn't want to see hitchhiker's guide. it was really corny at times, but when you're tired, anything can seem funny. i laughed a lot.

the only thing today was missing was some frisbee throwing on the south oval. i was conveniently missing a frisbee and person #2. bum deal.

that's about all. hopefully i will get many pages of my china paper written tonight so i can study my butt off tomorrow for the final. i asked yesterday if the final was cumulative. dr. atkinson's response: "heck, no. who gives comprehensive finals anymore?" w00t. i like that answer.

p.s. if anyone in norman wants some brownies, stop by and i'll hook you up. otherwise i'll end up eating the entire pan before i leave on monday. that can't be good...

*edit*
one last thing. i ate lunch in the courtyard at the honors dorm today, and they sure are doing a bit of remodeling in the lounges. they're pretty much gutting the kitchen, so the nook-table is gone. it'll be interesting to see what they're doing...

allegro

so, i should be writing my paper right now...i have 1.33333 (repeating) pages written and it has to be 8 to 10 pages. i haven't written a paper that long in my life. and i'm not kidding.

i was talking to my mom online tonight (lame, huh? i really need a phone) and apparently we are getting a new car. we sold our '88 beauty last month, but that still left us with 2 cars for the two people normally living at home. i'm not sure why we need a third one but aparently we do. i've learned not to question my dad. it doesn't usually get me answers. anyhow, my mom told me they were going to get a honda element (aka, world's ugliest car). they're actually getting yet another dodge minivan (this is the fourth one since i was born) although, seth told me that yesterday it was the element. scary.

i made an interesting discovery "baking" today. you know the biscuits that come in the pressurized containers? yeah, there's a reason they come pressurized. i wanted some biscuits last night, but not all of them. so instead of cooking them all at once, brilliant me decided that i would put some of them back in the fridge so i could have them fresh the next day. yeah, so apparently the baking soda requires that you bake immediately or else they won't be quite so fluffy anymore. but i am now much wiser than before at least.

have any of you guys noticed the buildings they're demolishing on campus? right over by price hall or whatever the new business building is called. apparently we're getting a student academic service center or something. yippee! i can't wait. plus, i can't deny it, i loooove construction on campus....

i bet you didn't know that tea is second only to water in world beverages. i bet you also didn't know that all tea is green. black tea, white tea, etc. are merely caused by the processing. cool huh? not.

i think that's all i'm going to make you read tonight. peace.

Journey Church

It's a good thing I have this thing for myself and not for my friends, otherwise the lack of response would be kind of depressing...

That having been said, I am actually going to make a serious post before this blog goes to rot.

I went to Journey Church on Sunday with my roommate. The following is my account of what happened and my reaction to it. I'm not trying to offend anyone, I'm just trying to figure out my thoughts.

It was overwhelming when I walked in, I had to shake the hands of four greeter-people on my way in. The church meets in an old supermarket, so when you walk in it's just this large open space with concrete floors and high ceilings, not surprisingly, much like a supermarket. Dozens of people are meandering around and there's an amazing amount of food sitting out, waiting to be eaten as well as big tubs of ice with soda and water in them, much like you might find on the Walker-Adams Mall the first couple of days after move-in. I'm not usually a fan of big groups, especially when I don't really know anyone. Strike one for Journey church. We went into the sanctuary and were immediately assaulted by loud music while we found seats. There were a lot of families there, more than I was expecting. Since most of the students are gone for the summer, it wasn't nearly as packed as it normally would have been. I enjoyed the worship mostly, but the lights swirling around and flashing in my face really didn't make it easy to concentrate. And the sermon being punctuated often by the phrase "the sweet spot of success" and being "in the zone" in reference to God didn't exactly resonate with me too well. All in all, I felt myself judging a lot. The pastor essentially talked about being successful in God and among other things, said that God wants to bless us financially and implied that if that's not the case then we might not be where we should be. I guess I never really associate financial "success" as something that I am promised as a Christian. There was a lot of stuff that I found myself really cringing at. Some of that I think was justified in disagreeing with, but I know that some of it was not. I tend to be a prideful and a judgmental person, coupled with some stubbornness. I like to think that I'm am right, and that being the case, I have the right to look down on other people who disagree with me. That's not true, and I shouldn't be doing it. In addition, there is not always a strictly "right" or "wrong" answer with some issues in Christianity. Being an engineer and used to working with empirical data, that's what I like to rely on. Problem is, that's rarely available when you're talking about faith. That frustrates me a lot sometimes, because evaluating subjective information and making decisions based on that information is not my strong point. As a result, I tend to just pick a side that seems right and stake that out as my viewpoint without always searching the scriptures for truth. It's easier to read a book and have someone tell me what they think is right that to try to determine it for myself. It's one of the things that frusterates me most about myself.

So, I find myself wondering, "why did I react so badly to Journey?" Part of me reacted against the fact that it was not an intellectual church, as I've become accustomed to over the past three and a half years. Another similar problem I had with it was in its seeming desire to make church exciting and attractive. I'm not saying we should try to make church boring on purpose, but I also think that we have more mental capacity than a 20 minute, 3 point, fill-in-the-blank sermon with flashing lights in the background. I honestly think a lot of this is just my pride, my "holier than thou" attitude if you will, but there were some things that were said that I wasn't sure how scriptural they were. I don't know.

All that being said, I almost want to go back. Sometimes I think that we should all be going to churches that we would never expect to go to and never thought we would fit in at, just to challenge our beliefs and make us think. I'd like to go back to Journey simply for the fact that it raised questions in my mind. I couldn't just sit back and agree with what was being said. I reacted against it, but it made me think. My mind said, "no, that's wrong." It made me want to search the scriptures to find the truth. Anything that can do that for me is a good thing.

land of my sojourn

i'm quite happy to say i survived my midterms. they weren't actually as bad as i was expecting although i do remember thinking as i took my stats one, "i didn't think you could make statistics questions this hard." still wasn't too bad.

i took like three naps today. it was wonderful. i fell asleep in my statistics class for about the first twenty minutes. che told me i was snoring. said he thought it was funny, but the prof didn't seem to appreciate it. good thing engineering classes aren't graded subjectively...i went home after the break in the middle of class. i was tired and wasn't paying attention anyway, so i took a nap when i got home. took another one after dinner because i didn't think i'd be able to concentrate on reading if i didn't. couldn't really concentrate on reading for class anyway, but hey, i got another nap out of the deal.

i wish they could take statistics on people's productivity over the past weekend, because it seems like the entire country has been reading harry potter. and now that the first wave of people has read it, they've passed it on to the second group who wants to read it, thereby increasing the unproductiveness. it's wonderful. at least people are reading and not watching tv, or drinking, or smoking or something. at least this unproductiveness involves thinking.

highlights of my week so far: being done with my midterms; my mom telling me i should get a cell phone one night and then telling me my dad says i don't need one the next day; geoff and alex being gangsta while we played streef ball; kyle reading me the vacuum cleaner user's manual; wow, this week has been great, i could go on and on and on.........

i'm going to go back to my reading now, then sleep, so i don't snooze in stats tomorrow.

currently reading: harry potter and the half-blood prince
currently listening: land of my sojourn, rich mullins

soon shall pass thy pilgrim days

so tired right now. i need to go to sleep early tonight.

did laundry last night. all my clothes smell good.

i want to play frisbee. anyone in norman want to play frisbee too? if the answer is "yes", then we should. this weekend. please get me out of my house. please.

i have two midterms on monday and a paper that needs to be started soon. this weekend is going to be fun. especially since people aren't going to be around to distract me. i may be chillin' at bizzell a lot. or nielson (please everyone note the "i" before "e", it applies here too). for some reason nielson is my new favorite study place. find a massive classroom (our physics one, perhaps) dump out all your books and get to work.

grrrrr....

guess who was in my traditional china class today and on friday? shades! guess who asked questions like he knew what he was talking about? shades! guess who is not actually enrolled in the class but is trying it out to see if he wants to in the fall? you guessed it, shades! grrr... on one hand, it's frusterating that he's just sitting in on the class, but on the other hand, there is hope. maybe he'll stop coming soon. it's so frusterating to spend half of class cringing.

for those of you who are unacquainted with this fellow, there really is no adequate description, so i'm not even going to try.

blah, blah, blah...

in other news, we got our research paper assignments in class today and i went straight to the library after class (after a small detour to nielson hall to see if any of my aquaintances were around. i didn't see any, but fyi there's a huge pendulum in the atrium there now) and checked out books for my paper. i, emily weisbrook, actually went to the library to check out books for a paper. that's pretty much the first time. i didn't even do that for perspectives. in a few weeks time, there will be an 8 to 10 page paper about...........tea. how fun is that...

more blah, blah, blah

my lawn needs to get mowed, my statistics class needs to die, and i need to go run at the huff.


*edit*
i just mowed my lawn. it's been years since i've used a lawnmower. my father would be proud.

email

ok, china email of doom is written. very glad that is over and done with. good riddance.

if you are reading this and you didn't get the email, i'm sorry, you must be a stalker, because i think i sent this to every one my known readers. if you want a copy, let me know, but you'll be divulging your anonymity. sweet.

going to bed. i have class tomorrow...that is...today.

made in the U.S. of A.

ha, i discovered that i own a piece of clothing that proudly displays "Made in U.S.A." on its tag. nike gym shorts. i was pretty surprised. especially that it was nike. i thought only new balance still made stuff here...

mental exercises

please to picture this. ^^ please note the attached shower head. now imaging trying to take a shower while straddling seen squatty potty.

ok, mental exercises are done for the day.

random quote: radio

quote from the radio today: "if you don't get drunk at some point this weekend, then the terrorists have already won."

i hope you all did your best to fight terrorism this weekend.

styles

i changed the style of my blog again. paris just wasn't working for me. but i know it'll work for andrea...

oh yeah, happy independence day to all my chums in the uk, i'm sure you're not going to hear that over there. i imagine they're not big fans of the holiday.

norman

ha, i'm updating. shocker.

just so you all know, i have arrived back in norman. by plane no less. much better than the driving or bus ideas. it was really weird coming back on I-35 at night (like it always is when i return) but realizing that i hadn't driven the other 500 miles to get to that point.

like i said, i wasn't exactly planning on flying back to school. but my sister got a flight into st. louis yesterday at 1:30 so i decided to just fly back now instead of taking the bus on sunday since it was about the same price anyway. when seth and i got to the airport i parked in the 5 minute parking and seth went in to find naomi. well, the car wouldn't start and i started freaking out (for future reference, i am completely incapable of dealing with cars that don't work if i'm in any sort of traffic situation. it's just not a good thing) so after a while of freaking out, i just decided to let seth deal with it.he's much calmer in those kind of situations. actually, he's calmerin pretty much all situations.

so, i'm back in norman. due to poor communication, i'm not in my house yet. hopefully that will happen soon, but we'll see what happens. in the meantime, i'm at geoff's place. look for me there...

hmm...just realized i failed to transition into the "i'm back in the states" phase. seth and i got back last saturday. and i spent the majority of the time between then and now just bumming around the house. for my china summary: china was good. i liked it. i had fun. the mythical "china email" has actually been started (i didn't have anything better to do when my plane was delayed an hour) and should hopefully be finished and sent before classes start.

songpan

ok, hopefully this works. most of the buttons are chinese characters, so i'm going with my former memories of how this works.

it's been brought to my attention by andrea's blog that i should be updating. my apologies. i have started the travelling part of my trip to china and internet is not as easy to come by here as it was in naomi's apartment.

i am currently residing (at least until tomorrow morning) in songpan, sichuan province, china. we arrived here on wednesday afternoon after a 10 hour busride from chengdu. it is absolutely beautiful up here. we spent the past 3 days riding horses over the mountains and camping. not exactly what i was expecting, but then again, most things rarely are. for one, it was raining and wet most of the time. that kind of puts a different spin on things. the mountain path was really slippery and it freaked me out a lot. i thought i was going to fall off a cliff and die many times.

tomorrow we leave to go to some really famous and scenic spot about a 4 hour busride away. after that we're not really sure. we might take a cruise on the yangtze, stopping in fuling (for any of you who have read river town) as one of the stops...or we might go to beijing. naomi's not really too excited about that one since she's been there before. i'm not sure if it's worth it to take a 12 hour train ride to go see all the tourist sights so i can say i've been there. anyhow, that's all for now. i'm going to let someone else use the internet now. 4 yuan an hour (~50 cents). pretty steep...

(btw, andrea, you better comment since i posted just for you)

cry me a river

edit: your chinglish word of the day is: succeedism. in america, this is best termed 'success'. from the infinitive 'to succeed'.

alright folks, i'm going to try to do this without failing. so if you read this, i have not failed.

i am in china now. this is how i got there:

• leave st. louis for detroit at 9:45 am (1 hour flight)
• 4 hour layover
• detroit to tokyo (12 hour flight)
• 15 minute walkthrough of tokyo airport to next flight
• tokyo to shanghai (3.5 hour flight)
• arrive 8:45 pm. find naomi (breathe huge sigh of relief), 30 minute bus ride to shanghai hotel
• spend the night
• shanghai for jiangsing (3.5 hour train ride)

china is very interesting. what can i say. i only saw one other non-asian person the whole time we were in shanghai and that was at mcdonalds. (naomi and seth said they saw three, however) granted, we weren't there very long, but with the shear number of people around you'd think we'd see at least a couple more. i'm not even talking americans here, i'm just talking non-chinese. it's really interesting the way the chinese culture meshes with the american. so many t-shirts sport english phrases etc. while we eating dinner tonight in a little eating joint (highly unsanitary by US standards, but if i don't get sick, i don't particularily care one bit because the food was great) anyhow, we're sitting there eating and suddenly i hear justin timberlake singing to me in english. how can one not feel at home when one has the catchy melodies of "cry me a river" or "rock your body" drifting into ones ear. on the train i also heard the tune of simon and garfunkel's 'el condor pasa' carefully worked into an asian melody. i thought at first that s&g had ripped off of chinese music because the style of music in theirs was very similar, but naomi informed me that it was probably quite the opposite since that's a fairly common thing in chinese music.

thursday and friday we're supposed to guest lecture for naomi's classes. i'm not sure what we're supposed to talk about, but we are fluent in english, so i'm sure we're pretty qualified.

i think i'm going to stop now, because i'm pretty tired. it's midnight here. i'm actually pretty on-track for sleeping here. i think jet lag is a myth if you're a college student. it's just like pulling an almost all-nighter. stay up for a long time. get a couple hours of sleep. stay up some more. arrive. sleep from exhaustion. i suppose this only works if you arrive at your destination at approximately sleeping time, though.

goodnight all.

HumanForSale.com

I am worth $1,531,240 on HumanForSale.com

nifty

thoughts? ideas? discuss...

thoughts on the new layout? it's not quite finished, and i'm not actually sure if i like it, but i thought it was time for something different.

if you have any suggestions, or you would like to tell me how much you hate it, i'm open to either. or ideas on what i should have done. yeah, you get the point...

p.s. i really like finding money. i just found $50 in my drawer from christmas. w00t!

she woke me up with a bang bang

i know you guys have all been hoping that i would post soon about my super-riveting life, so i'll indulge you...

life is nice right now. not too boring, not too busy. i've been hanging out a lot, watching a ridiculous amount of movies, etc. fairly typical summertime activities.

in the past few days it has become quite blatant to me that i am a nerd. i have actually always known this, but believe it or not, the syndrome is much more pronounced when i am at home. in all actually, the combined forces of my family members (with slight input from the delwoods) make the rest of my friends at school look rather tame. in particular, there are a couple of incidents that made this stand out to me. for one, i've spent the past week trying to install mysql, apache, and php on my computer so i can learn database and web programming stuff. (props to anyone who has any idea what i'm talking about) then i was talking to one of my friends from high school and i had to admit that i switched majors from what he termed my 'nerdy major' of industrial engineering to what is an undeniably nerdier major of computer engineering. the last thing is, my brother arrived home on friday night sporting a lovely shirt sporting equations and diagrams all over it. i started looking at the shirt and slowly realized that it was an ieee (institute of electrical and electronics engineers) shirt. then i started looking at all the equations and diagrams and realized that i knew what most of them meant and their significance. i got irrationally excited about it. to the extent that my mom and brother commented on it. that's ok though, at least i enjoy what i'm doing.

my time in columbia is quickly drawing to a close. seth and i leave on sunday morning to fly to shanghai. i will be spending my 19th birthday in a foreign country. i think it's a pretty good deal considering 19 is kind of the birthday that gets shafted in the late teens/early twenties age span. i'm pretty excited about the trip, but probably more excited about leaving the country than i am about going to china in particular. however, it will be me, naomi, and seth; we're going to take the country by storm and dazzle them with our extreme heights.

anyhow, i've got to go try to finish installing php. i sure hope this is worth the four or five hours i've spent trying to install this slew of software...

eisenstein should just relax

went to st. louis yesterday with my mom for some work thing, but i got to chill with my grandma. in case you were wondering folks, i'm an expert pinochle player. try me sometime.

stopped at the outlet mall on the way home to get jeans. somehow came home with three shirts instead. funny how that happens. one of them is a lovely polka-dot tank top that i can only describe as something andrea would wear on laundry day. that should give at least some of you an adequate description. i think i am also fully prepared to participate in button-up (button-down?) shirt day next year as well, provided i decide to use an iron.

seth gets home friday. should be neat. maybe by then my room will have cleaned itself up.

triskaidekaphobia?

dictionary.com word of the day (for last friday):
triskaidekaphobia \tris-ky-dek-uh-FOH-bee-uh\, noun: A morbid fear of the number 13 or the date Friday the 13th.

Triskaidekaphobia is a fairly new word (first found in print in 1911) formed from Greek treiskaideka, triskaideka, "thirteen" (treis, "three" + kai, "and" + deka, "ten") + phobos, "fear." The adjective form is triskaidekaphobic. One who fears the number 13 is a triskaidekaphobe or triskaidekaphobic.

There are many theories about the origin of triskaidekaphobia. In medieval Christian countries the number 13 came to be considered unlucky because there were 13 persons at the Last Supper of Christ. Fridays are also unlucky, because the crucifixion was on a Friday. Hence a Friday falling on the thirteenth day would be regarded as especially unlucky.

weird.

in other news, they let me into the "I joined my Sorority for the T-Shirt" club on facebook. obviously they're not too selective. why bother even making people request to join if you're going to let just anybody in. i mean freels here, there's no way i'd be in a sorority.

i'm smiling right now

i really don't think i could ever express just how much i love my family:

a pocketful of mumbles

i think my page layout should be fixed now. sorry to all of you who use internet explorer, it was looking pretty messed up to you guys for awhile.

i just got done with my e-science test. it went ok. somehow our teacher always manages to write tests that throw me for a loop and aren't what i expect at all. i just don't take his tests very well. but i felt like i actually knew my stuff this time, so hopefully i did well. i was able to at least pretend that i knew what i was doing on all the problems...

school is winding down (in theory). the problem with dead week for me is not that everything is due, it's that i've got a couple extra things to do, but still the regular homework load. i only have one class where the regular homework isn't due. that leaves three assignments, each taking around 3 to 4 hours to do, if i'm focused. that's where all my time goes, and i'm not sure where i'm going to magically produce more time to do projects and study for my finals this week, but i'm sure it will happen. it always does somehow.

summer begins in about 13 days. so far, it's looking like:
may: home
june: china
july: norman, taking classes or maybe working, depending on if i can find a second class to take
august: 2 weeks in colorado/grand canyon with the fam, then home for a bit, then back to norman

crazy how when you break it into sections like that, it seems so short.



one last thing. i know i'm a nerd, but i found this really funny. especially the fact that they actually tried to submit some of the papers to a conference. i think MIT people are a lot more interesting than i've ever given them credit for...

The ink is black, the page is white

"If you are conscious to yourself that you possess more knowledge upon some subjects than others of your standing, reflect that you have had greater opportunities of seeing the world and obtaining knowledge of mankind than any of your contemporaries. That you have never wanted a book, but it has been supplied to you. That your whole time has been spent in the company of men of literature and science. How unpardonable would it have been in you to have turned out a blockhead."
-Abigail Adams to her son John Quincy

three posts!!

ok, ok. i know three posts in one day is absolutely ridiculous, even if there was a night of sleep in between them, but i just had to share something i just figured out.

i just found out that i have access to the entire ou web directory on the server, including, but not limited to, the ou study abroad page which i hate with a passion. i was supposed to have access to one directory, but when i went up a directory and voila, everything was there and most of them weren't separately password protected. i think that this means there is a minor flaw in the system and i'm not sure who should be taking care of that. anyhow, this means that i have amazing capacity for vandalism here. i'm way too responsible for that and, among other things, it would most likely get me fired. that's a bummer, because there are some pretty bad web pages out there for this university...

fire alarms

grr...fire alarms at 2:30 in the morning really not cool. i think i am skipping e-science in the morning.

He is calling you "DUDE!"

since i hate making up titles for my posts i think i'm just going to use song lyrics that strike my fancy when i can't think of an appropriate title. it will be left as an optional exercise for the reader to figure out which song it is...

i have to say, right now, i feel great. i really do, i didn't just throw that in there for the link. had three tests last week and a project due last night (sunday) at midnight. it just feels so good to have that done. plus i've been doing "fun" reading a lot recently. i need to keep making time for that in my schedule. it just relaxes me so much, reminds me that the real world is not made up of circuits, and-or gates or exception handling. thank goodness. it's kind of strange, because all the fun reading i did in high school was all fiction. and not generally great fiction at that. it wasn't trashy or anything, just not classic i suppose. all of a sudden these days i'm just much more interested in reading non-fiction. maybe i feel like it's more applicable to real life, which would imply that i actually care about real-life application now...that's cool.

played basketball at the huff tonight. it was a lot of fun. i should do that more often. should also learn how to shoot a basketball while i'm at it. that would be really cool.

went to the meeting for rhodes/marshall scholarship stuff today. i kind of have mixed feelings about it. obviously to get one of those scholarships would be absolutely amazing, but a lot of me says it's just not worth all the work for something i probably wouldn't win. because in all honesty, i'm really not that spectacular of a candidate. i have good grades and i'm a minority in my major, but that's about it. i don't really have any lofty career goals, and i'm definitely not pursuing the connections i'd need to get some sort of nifty job like that. i'm not really involved on campus because most of my time is spent either doing homework or hanging out with my friends so i can remain sane enough to do more homework. i know that i need to be more involved on campus, but at this point it seems like a major reason would be resume-building, which i really detest the concept of. on the other hand though, i think pursuing some of those type things would make me a better person in the end. there's a reason being involved in things is viewed a good thing. plus, i think the amount of thought i'd have to put into writing a personal statement would be good for me. i think it would really help me to think through what i really want to get out of my college experience and what i want to do with my life. to have to justify that to someone else would definitely demand good reasons for what i'm doing. is it worth it just for that experience. to be able to say i did it? maybe i will, after all, i did miss out on all the "i got accepted to harvard (yale, princeton, stanford etc.)" hype in high school. i was just waiting for the, "hey, ou let me apply for the rhodes scholarship" in college.

by the way, that last paragraph was essentially irrelevant at this point considering you don't apply for those scholarships until your senior year, which at this point is at least a year and a half away and at this point is looking more and more like it will be 2 and a half years. "do it in 5" take that, honors college. good night everone.

umm....

okay, while i'm actually thinking about something...

tonight, i was trying to sit down and study and i was just having a really tough time of it. i couldn't just sit down and focus. i sat down in a room all by myself and all of a sudden i wanted, even needed people around. i tried sitting in the library where there were a couple of people that i knew, but not really friends exactly...still couldn't study and i found myself getting kind of emotional, for reasons i cannot explain. so i went and sat in the hall and tried to calm myself down and get ready to focus. instead i ended up crying for a little bit. not like sobbing or anything, but just kind of tears of frustration, i guess, probably a little bit of self-pity mixed in there. i tried to pray about it, my again i was having problems focusing and i'll admit at the time it probably didn't feel like God could help. at the moment all i really wanted was a big hug and somebody to tell me it was all right. once i finally did get around some people and some conversation etc. i was fine. i don't get it. sometimes i have a hard time balancing the idea that God can, and should be everything for us and having real emotional and relational needs that sometimes it feels like can only be met by people around us.

i keep finding that i really need people. i need them for my mental and emotional stability. i need them to hang out with, to laugh with, to listen to, to make me feel significant on this earth. but should i? is that me not being fully dependent on God? or is that me being a very human human being? Jesus was tempted in every way that we were...He had close friends...but did He need them? could He have "made it" without them? were they just there to be there, or were they actually necessary for His life here on earth?

warning: completely random

i think my blog deserves a post at this point. it's been what? eight whole days. shame on me.

ok, my thoughts, in no particular order:

• i think i'm really liking school right now, i can't quite explain it, but i guess i just kind of feel like i'm in the right major and such. it feels like i finally almost have a handle on classes
• learning stuff makes me feel dumb. the more i learn, the more i hate that i just don't have the time, or unfortunately in many cases, the inclination to pursue all the things that interest me
• i have little to no critical thinking skills outside of concrete thinking. even then it's sometimes pretty bad
• i filled out/sent in my passport application this week. i think that will make it more likely that i actually do end up in china this summer
• i will be living in the dorms next year. in honors. with andrea. it's official
• the weather today was beautiful. every time i got out of class it was warmer than when i entered class. i feel like we're on the verge of spring and that just makes me very happy right now
• sometimes i just feel like planning in my life is futile. nothing ever turns out as i expect, and i wonder why i feel compelled to plan
• the more i talk to my sister these days, the more i realize i'm a lot more like her than i thought. the way we think and the issues we've had to deal with are amazingly similar. i just wish that i'd figured this out a long time ago...
• i think i've walked at least 11 miles this week and somewhere in there i think i managed to hurt my foot somehow. it feels like the top of it is bruised. i wonder what happened. i wish i knew more about how the body works, but i fear that will always be an unknown for me
• c.s. lewis has amazing insight into human thought (i'm reading the screwtape letters right now)
• i have been to the mont three times this year for 21st birthdays. apparently turning 21 is the cool thing to do this year.

i'm actually very sorry if you made it to the bottom of this post...it had no real point i admit, but maybe someday i'll be curious about what i was thinking at 1:20 am on march 25, 2005. who knows...

current listening: she don't want nobody near, counting crows
current reading: electrical circuits, nillson

hotel rwanda

i went to see hotel rwanda today with cassidy. i think the best adjective i have for what i felt after watching it was petty. not the movie, but myself. i started thinking about all the things i worry about in my life, mostly about school and relationships...not exactly life and death issues. my life is consumed with little worries, almost always having to do with myself.

what if i honestly just stopped worrying about myself, about my issues, and started concerning myself with other people. there are so many people and countries that have much bigger needs than i can ever dream of having. the thought of having to deal with a war or fighting on my country's own soil has never crossed my mind as even being possible. what if i had to deal with the moral issue of genocide and i had to put my life at risk to do the right thing? what would i do? would i have the courage to stand up for what is right? i guess that's kind of a hard "what if...?" question to answer, but if my actions now are any indicator, i'd probably have to say "no", i wouldn't. i fail day after day to make the right decisions. i choose a path of selfishness without even thinking about it. i do what seems best for me.

how do i change that? how do i take my own little spotlight off of me and move it anyone else...you'd think with the ratio of everyone else to me being so extremely large it would be easier, but it isn't.

words or pictures?

i was taking some sort of quiz thing online the other day that was supposed to determine left brained-/right brained-ness or what have you and one of the questions was something along the lines of "when you think, do you think in words or pictures?"

this was a new idea for me. i definitely think in words. in fact, i generally have a constant stream of words/sentences running through my head, with one only remaining until the next one comes to replace it. so now i'm curious, do you guys think in words or pictures? if it is pictures, are they kind of quick flashes, like photographs, or are they more like short film clips?

along those lines, for people who speak multiple languages, how does that play into their thinking? i assume that the two languages mix. if one thinks in pictures or images, doesn't that seem more universal, that you don't have to mess with words when you think?

random quote: third meditation

"When I turn my mind's eye upon myself, I understand that I am a thing which is incomplete and dependent on another and which aspires without limit to ever greater and better things; but I also understand at the same thime that he on whom I depend has within him all those greater things, not just indefinitely and potentially but actually and infinitely, and hence that he is God."
-Descartes, Third Meditation: The Existence of God

v-day

so...i witnessed a marriage proposal on the south oval this afternoon. happy valentine's day everyone...

update

quick update on life:

highlights/lowlights (?) of last week:

• 1 test (psychology, i still don't have the book)
• 1 program due (data structures, still don't really know how to program in c++)
• the usual gazillion homework assignments due

i went to an intramural basketball game, not-a-dated, watched the godfather, did some painting etc, lost my notebook that had three classes worth of notes in it, had a partial mental breakdown...the usual

still haven't skipped class yet this semester, although i have slept through one while in class

current listening: wicked soundtrack
current reading: muddling my way through descartes meditations