3/8/16

1. Short entry for today, since Xin is trying to sleep :D
1. Circuits midterm! Shot 10min of hoops beforehand to wake myself up. Think I killed it.
2. Classes, SPS meeting was fun.
3. Ate lunch with Hira. Still a bit awkward, but enjoyable nonetheless.
4. Last linux class.
5. Made lunchbox flyers for the last lunchbox.
6. Went to Music and practiced for the concert.
7. Dressed up and went to University Christian Church! Turns out I had misheard the call time, was 30minutes early. Imposed on a friendly bassoon player to show me his instrument, hung out with some other early arrivals.
8. The pre-concert rehearsal was terrible. We sounded bad.
9. Did homework (memory allocator assignment is so weird! They basically write everything for you, then want you to debug the result of stitching together their code) Hung out with Wesley.
10. Concert! We did much better than the pre-concert rehearsal.
11. Met with family, went to the Burger Hut, chatted for a while. Secret was happy to see me :)
12. Went back to Haggett, hung out with Ahrif and Sierra for 10min, worked some more on the allocator, and hit the hay.

3/6/16

1. 3/6/16
1. Another quick update! This weekend:
2. Friday night I traveled to Eastside Stomp in Redmond for a swing dance with Eleonore and her friend Nicholas. It was amazing. I danced for like 3 hours, my technique slowly improving. By the end I had danced with practically everyone there. And afterwards Eleonore, Nicholas, and some other shmids from Swing--the organizer Holly, the extremely friendly, mildly awkward CS student Ryan, and a physics! grad student whose name I can’t remember--went to this place called Beth’s Cafe and ate a world-class breakfast at like 2am.
3. Saturday I went to a picnic with floormates in the quad, went to this cool, clever-social-justice-parable movie called Zootopia with Holly and Eleonore (and Frankie, who’s been teaching intro swing lessons). Then went to the Ritmo Latino dance with Ahrif, Ricardo and Miriam from the floor. What a contrast to swing! Everyone was doing their own thing. The Salsa Club didn’t know how to prepare us in the intro lesson--they did like 10min of bachata, 10min salsa, and 10min merengue. The music was so loud that when I left my ears were ringing--and the beat was complex, subtle, multifaceted, impossible for my naive signal analysis protocols to process. At one point, a (very helpful dude who tried to teach me how I should be moving my hips, what instruments I should be listening to to discern the beat) asked me, “How did you end up here?”
4. I walked outta there like 11, brain reeling, had dinner, and flopped.
5. Crazy stuff happened in the middle of the night that I cannot discuss here, but I will record a pointer to my memories in this sentence so I don’t forget, and in my old age, I can be frustrated guessing what shenanigans occurred.
6. Today was super nice. It started with ennui--I woke up this morning and had no motivation to do anything homework related. This quarter I’d been fighting to network, to plan events, lunches, dances, meetups every day--it really has been more my focus than academics. (You must understand, I don’t mean it hasn’t been fun--in the same way that when I say I’ve been fighting to comprehend abstruse academic topics, I don’t mean it hasn’t been a great joy. I just mean I’ve been deliberately and intensely working on it.) So this day the 6th of March I declared a ceasefire--today was to be a Homework day, I would not think about doing anything cool, social, whatever. And it was awesome. I parked myself in the Music Library for a good 3 hours, ate a late lunch at Som Tam Thai while reviewing circuits, got back and did more work. (I did play a bit of Super Smash Flash with Xin and Brandon, but hey, focus != exclusion).
7. Wrote the SPS newsletter, wrote this log, and returned my consciousness to oblivion, in preparation for La Semana de Los Muertos. Good night all, sit pax tecum!

3/4/16

1. 3/4/16
1. Really quick update for today!
2. What have I done this week? Went to the monday swing dance, which was super fun. Talked to this girl Eleonore from France about grad school decisions, etc, for a while; she invited me to the Friday dance, which is exciting.
3. Went to lots of talks! Multiple lunchboxes, an AI talk, neural engineering stuff…
4. Auditioned for Hamlet. Fun experience--skyped with Grace while practicing, she gave me lots of good tips, including identifying this pattern in the meter of my chosen monologue that yielded clues as to how it should be performed.
5. Interviewed with this company Docusign. Good interview--hard question about locks and concurrency. Interviewer was a CS and Physics major.
6. Those are the highlights, and I still have math hw to do so I’m calling it good!