We're moving so fast ...

So, I haven't picture blogged in a bit, and for some reason all the posts I don't have pictures in tend to end up more serious than I intended. Whatever, we'll see how this one goes.

Mid-semester break was 2 weeks ago. Thanksgiving is in 3 weeks. Winter break is in 7 weeks. Is it just me, or was that really fast? Maybe it's the whole "all your classes end after a semester and then you get a month off" deal that comes with college, but the year always seemed much longer going to high school.

But although the times have been flying by, they haven't been going too fast to stop and take note of what's beautiful, laugh heartily at random things no one else finds hilarious, and burn time in the most random and absurd ways I've ever imagined.

I already covered the first category last post, so let's move on to the last two.

An updated picture of my desk. As messy as ever. On the left you'll notice the answers to the Concepts of Math homework, in the middle we see the Nature of Language textbook. Psh, schoolwork. I forgot I used my desk for that. More importantly, we notice the free pen I got (well, that I stole from Ben) for showing up to this random company advertisement thing. He got 3 free shirts out of the deal. I think this is CMU's way of making up for the tuition we dropped to come here. Free shirts! Ben is at 6 this semester, I think. Unfortunately, that might not quite cover all his expenses. Close enough.

This is a picture of the space located just to the left of my desk. The shoes are the ones I succeeded in destroying in about a month of owning them (yes, black shoes! They were on sale). The giant pile of clothes that is overflowing from the tiny laundry hamper is my dirty clothes pile. The nice white hamper contains clean clothes, as does the giant blue bag. I haven't quite gotten in the habit of folding my clothes. Sometimes it makes getting dressed in the dark a pain. I have, on several occasions, tried to hop into sweatshirts thinking they were sweatpants, tried to stuff sweatpants over my head, and tried various other incorrect combinations of clothing. It never fails to remind me of Alexander's Awful, No Good, Terrible, Horrible, Very Bad Day, or whatever that book was called. I just took a guess at it by stuffing all the synonyms for the word "bad" in the title. I know it was something like that.

If we take a step just outside our room, we find the shoes. Only three of those are mine, thank you very much. Two of those belong to Kwon, who could probably be considered our third roommate. In fact, his sleeping bag is a new permanent fixture in our room. When he doesn't feel like going back he just crashes on the floor between Kee Young and me. Last week he was studying for a bio test, so that actually happened a lot.

And of course, there's Starcraft. I don't think I've mentioned it in a blog for a while, and I'm not entirely sure how. I play when I can (usually long, drawn out games with Yangbo). I've also been trying (read: succeeding) to get some of my friends into Starcraft. They're not very good yet, leading to unfortunate sights, such as this one:

This was Tanay's starting base, about 5 minutes into the game. For those who don't understand why this is bad, I strongly recommend you take up SC.

Playing pranks is always fun, too. Harmless, to be sure, but can be entertaining. I find that the most poorly planned are in fact the most hilarious ones. Last Sunday we set all the clocks in our room back 5 hours while Justin was sleeping so he would think he had woken up at 5 pm instead of Noon. Simple enough, right? Well, we sort of missed an important clock - his cell phone. Which, incidentally, had his alarm on it. He woke up at the correct time, and it took him less than 2 seconds to figure out what we had done. Oops.

That wasn't the least successful prank, though. I'd have to say that the clear winner goes to Tanay, who hijacked Justin's computer while he was downstairs for a second, and put this up on his screen:

I think it will probably be hard to read that. What it says is "C:\Users\Justin>YOU WERE HACKED. THIS COMMAND PROMPT WINDOW MEANS IT'S LEGIT."

Anyway, back to the present. In most recent events, it was Halloween. Or so they tell me. I didn't see any particularly interesting costumes. This guy at foosball club was going to dress up as Waldo, obviously wearing a white and red striped shirt. He was campaigning hard for some people to follow him around all night dressed as "ambiance" so he would be less noticeable. He didn't have very many takers.

My Halloween was ... interesting, and familiar. I ended up at T3 Thriller, also known as the party hosted by TSA. It was a dance party. Cue the awkward standing around! Thanks to years of practice (thank you Eric) I most expertly stood around awkwardly and avoided getting shoved into the center of dance circles. In related news, an extraordinary number of guys dressed up as girls. There were some very good imitations. There were also some terrible ones. I will not elaborate on these costumes.

I have to say, one of the more refreshing events of the night was the transportation. They stuffed us onto school buses! Haven't ridden one of those in a while. It was a real school bus, complete with the "Your driver's name is Mr. Paul" printed up front. It's one of those things that I never realized I wouldn't do again. Apparently I'll never escape those school buses though >_>

On Sunday, before I started my work, I got to play another soccer game with TSA. Last time, one of our players showed up half way through, but wasn't allowed to play because didn't write his name down on the roster. This time we made certain to write down the name of everyone who could possibly come. We even invented a character: "Jim Bob Choe." Whoever was not playing at the time was responsible for soliciting help from random bystanders. Unfortunately, no one was interested in pretending to be Jim Bob, so we got destroyed. We'll just blame Jim Bob.

So, that's it for now. Strange stuff happens when you keep your eyes open. And I suppose, infrequently, take a few risks. Yes, I am quite the daredevil.

But until the next epic risk I take, I'll wrap this up.

Cheers,

Ved