12/1/16: The Happenin' is on a Roll

1. 12/1/16
1. Sleep in until 11:30 (!)
2. Get moving quickly on Entre executive summary. Follow up with some restaurants on the Ave, get a delicious cheap gyro at Samir’s, one of the places interested in our services.
3. Scarf down the gyro at the SPS Lounge before leading one of the SPS lab tours. Get to see Wiggins’ (a biophysicist) lab but don’t get much detail.
4. Go to CSE for a quick study abroad advising appointment.
5. Meet Creating a Company ppls in class. Do some work, run to Wells Fargo to set up our bank account, to nobody’s great surprise they can’t do it until tomorrow. Return to Paccar, a bit more work.
6. Glee rehearsal! It only lasts 30 minutes since Meg and Jeff have to run off to a Chorale concert, which I consider going to but…
7. Go to the second SIG Saloon event! Johan is getting everyone pumped to spread the gospel of the SIGs (Special Interest Groups in CSE). Talk more with Ryan Benmalek about his AI SIG, plus meet this math/CS guy who’s interested in doing a Math SIG with me. However we can’t reach common ground as to the format.
8. Run to McMahon, get a slice of pizza which I joyfully consume on the way over to Film Club.
9. Watch a tremendous movie called Sing Street about a high schooler at a tough school in Dublin, a delightfully confident con man, who forms a band in order to woo a girl with a mysterious past.
10. Strangely inspired by the kid, I go into total confident-social-game-player mode, and surprise myself both with the effectiveness of my strategies and the joy I derive from the conversation--my new social anxieties resulting from nuanced awareness of social gamesmanship slip away immediately. I begin to realize the sense in which my esteemed father reaps such delight from everyday conversation; something I had realized in the past, but such a counterintuitive result for me that it takes many passes to sink in.
11. Meet new people with surprising charm and ease on the way over to EJ’s; where, strangely, Alex and Fielder await the Film Club crowd; apparently they both independently couldn’t make Film Club and decided to meet us afterwards. In my strange state, I somehow end up having the best conversation with Alex (and Fielder) I’ve had in months. The confidence and aloofness and detachment from the content of the conversation are a facade, but the merriment is real :) One particularly hilarious sequence:
1. Bring Alex a glass of water.
2. She says “for realsies, or are you just putting this over here to drink later.”
3. (ten minutes later) me, after (I thought) Alex drank the water: “Where’s my extra water?!”
4. Alex: “You just drank it!”
5. /me looks down at my hand;
6. /table explodes in laughter
7. /me slaps the banister and runs down to get Alex another water
12. Also listen in on Jamie and Greg’s political conversation.
13. Go to Odegaard, work more on the summary. Edit and organize the work of the others (this seems to be the badge of my tribe after the Alpha internship: others hack away, then I come in and try to make sense of their hackery.) But it’s fun!
14. Return to 2104 (on the way back running into Jasdeep who recognizes my singing voice in the quad) write this log, and crash.