Refreshed

So now that I'm done messing around with the appearance of this thing, I felt bad after not updating for so long (and lying about updating Tuesday or Wednesday).

Updating

You might think that our room would sort of ... stay the same after a few weeks. Not the case, however. We welcome new items every day. Meet the newest member of our little family! Kee Young calls him Froggy and forbids anyone from touching him. Most likely because he wants exclusive rights.

Actually, I totally made up that part about him being called Froggy. However, the rest of my information is 100% fact.

We also have a new list of rules posted on our door. I don't have a picture of it because it is incredibly far away. Like, almost 4 feet. In addition, Kee Young's handwriting is so unbearably bad. He should, as always, learn from me. Anyway, the current rules are:

No Passing Gas

Do Not Touch the Frog

Dumb Questions will be ignored

Hand Sanitizer is to your left.

Max. Occupancy: 8 people.

Knock. Even if door is open.

SHOES OFF BEYOND THE BLUE ETHERNET CABLE.

Do not question the seemingly arbitrary capitalization, by the way. That falls under the category of "Dumb Questions" and will be ignored.

How is Kee Young doing? Well, since he refuses to update his blog and upload Beach Week pictures, I'll do little investigative reporting. Using various inside sources, I have come to the conclusion that this is Kee Young's life at the moment:

We call those "battle scars." Kee Young is in Introduction to Electrical and Computer Engineering, which is the weed-out class for his major (Electrical and Computer Engineering, if you hadn't guessed). The night before problem sets are due, ECE majors flood my room and work on these problems. I'll get back to these meetings later.

When he isn't doing ECE, he's doing Programming in C and Unix. His professor, known to everyone as Ghuna (everyone including himself, he actually refers to himself in the third person), loves to drop in little emails saying stuff like "Lulz. Here's a program due tomorrow. GLHF."* So as a result, Kee Young is often doing programming. So much, in fact, that he has forgotten that you can't apply Unix to every day life. Example:

(Apparently this is difficult to read. Transcription:

kyl: ls

kyl: clear

Note to Kee Young: this is Iccup, which is real life. Not the terminal.)

*Slight paraphrasing

But when he has time to kick back and relax, naturally he would join us in playing smash or pool or pingpong, right? Wrong! Instead we have:

If you can't see the screen well enough, those are Korean drams. Surprise! In fact, when I want to get Kee Young's attention while he's watching dramas, the best way is not to say "Hey, Kee Young." The best strategy is to IM him, because he dual screens and his dramas cannot fill both screens. I'm sure if he could figure out a way to do that, he would.

I'm just kidding about the not going out with us part though. We've been having a lot of fun. Actually, a friend of ours got a visit from his parents last weekend. We were sad that we didn't get to see him all weekend, but we were thrilled to see that his parents left him (and us, I guess) Korean food! So at midnight on Sunday night we all go down to Schlounge and have us a good old-fashioned cooking party! Just like old times. As per usual, I did absolutely no cooking. Instead I succeeded in playing pool, and getting stuck with clean-up duties.

After the cooking party, we decided that it was clearly a terrible idea to go to sleep. Then began the random games. We played it all - foosball, pool, pingpong, and of course Super Smash Brothers Melee. I ended up just taking a few more shots of our lounge from the corner. It's really grown on me. From the giant, smelly, air-conditioned room it was when I first moved in to the warm, slightly less foul-smelling, haven it is today.

I almost forgot the piano! It turns out we have several talented pianists among our ranks who can (sort of) play some pop songs. The selection is ... limited, but there's something oddly satisfying about singing along to a live piano with your friends. The current songs we're working on are Superman by Five for Fighting and What I've Done by Linkin Park. It's just so ... reminiscent of walking along the beach, attempting to sing along to Michelle Branch or whatever terrible artist David tried to make us listen. Good times are good times, I suppose.

There's also The Big Bang theory, which I discovered a week ago when my entire dorm gathered to watch the season premiere in Schlounge. I wondered what everyone was so excited about, and I quickly found out. That is one funny show. It probably had a negative impact on my sleep schedule, though. For a few days I stayed up until 5 trying to finish the series. It frequently led to scenes like this:

Notice the Nature of Language book lying unused. Notice the Chinese CD lying unused. Notice the visitor. He is not lying unused, but he wasn't really aiding my productivity. Oh well. I finished those up and I am now re-watching them with Eric and Arvind. Such a good show.

I guess it isn't all fun and games here though. Amazingly enough, we do have to do work. But as I've repeated over and over, the two are less different than you might think. Example: ECE problem sets. Maybe it's just me, because I'm not actually doing the problem sets, but the conversations that I have with some 6 or 7 other ECE majors in my room just make me laugh.

As it turns out, I actually went to sleep before them. Thanks to the 6-7 people in the room, it had gotten very hot. Thankfully, the guy in the striped shirt (some of you know him, that's Ben) offered to switch beds with me. His roommate must've been somewhat surprised when he woke up in the morning to find me snoring on his roommates bed. We left a note, but somehow I don't think that was sufficient.

I've also recently taken up talking to people on Omegle. It's a lot of fun, actually. Sure, you regularly come across people who have interests other than having a decent conversation. But it's incredibly interesting to talk to people from all walks of life, people you would never get a chance to talk to otherwise. I guess it's an extension of meeting people here - while they might not be your closest friends, people with different upbringings and different lifestyles are some of the most fascinating. And the other day, I think I made a friend. I've "wasted" a lot of time on it, but I can say with certainty that I get a lot out of talking to random strangers on Omegle.

Well, it's 5:30 AM. I could continue, and I most certainly will another time. But I do want to get some sleep (A few days ago I woke up at 10:30. I had a Computing exam that started at 10:30). And so I'll work on getting more pictures, finding more interesting things to talk about, and living life to the fullest (thanks to shield battery)

Don't worry if you didn't get that last comment. But until I can amass another decent collection pf pictures or something particularly exciting happens...

Cheers,

Ved