Do I want to be rich or do I want to be happy?
It’s only possible to have one.

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SNSD – Gee

I’m sitting at my desk working on differential equations, watching my roommate and his dad pack up all of his belongings in preparation to going home. Looking back to the events of the past year, a few thoughts occurred to me…

Isn’t it amazing how we are accustomed to living in a house covering thousands of square feet, but for this year in college two people of completely different backgrounds managed to pack their lives into a room no bigger than each of their rooms back home?
We buy lavish homes to keep all of our stuff, and constantly look for bigger homes to store more stuff, never thinking about how much of it we really need. The university seeks to open our eyes to the necessities (alright, I admit their true goal is to pack as many people into a building as cheaply as possible, but bear with me): a mini fridge and microwave for food, a desk for work, and a bed for rest. The storage space is minimal, but it teaches us how to organize our possessions and evaluate how much of it we really need.
I feel that I have especially made improvements in this area: because my roommate litters his belongings all over the floor, I have been forced to reduce my footprint in the room as much as possible. In doing so, I’ve developed new organizational habits which are sure to benefit me in the future.

Thanks, Charlie.

This is a tale of my experiences on a college campus: every college freshman has many things he has to try, and here is one of them:

Oh how the internet always misleads me. “Toast your Pop Tart,” it tells me, “Pop Tarts are delicious when hot!”

Being a college student, I’m not allowed to bring a toaster into the dorm room. Being a college student, I also think I’m forty times smarter than the average scientist. “Microwaves are just as good as a toaster,” my inner genius told me. I decide to try it. The first few times I microwaved it for about a minute. The pop tart came out slightly warm, but parts of it were still ice cold. They tasted decent. Not wanting to miss out on an awesome experience, I proceed to “nuke” my pop tart. 3:00 should give it enough juice to reproduce chernobyl, right?

Heck yes. I was in between games of Warcraft 3 when I was trying this little experiment. We were just about to start when I heard a loud POP from behind me. It took me a few seconds to realize what had happened, and by the time I noticed, smoke was already coming out from the microwave. FML.

I panicked and sat back down to continue playing my game. I quickly got up, opened my door, and used my roommate’s miniature fan in a futile attempt to air out the room. I knew the dorm room’s smoke detectors were extremely sensitive and did not want to be responsible for paying all of the water damage fees that were sure to come with an activated smoke detector.

*BEEP BEEP BEEP* Blared the fire alarm. My heart dropped as I anticipated the sprinklers coming on and destroying thousands of dollars worth of electronics in my neighbor’s rooms. I stood motionless, waiting for the sewage water to pour out of the spouts in my roof and ruin my life. Thankfully, that never happened. Instead, the beeping stopped and I stepped outside to continue fanning.

At this moment, my roommate decides to walk into the hallway. My memory is hazy (no pun intended), but I’m pretty sure he mouthed something along the lines of “what the funk” (thinking back on it, his choice of vocabulary is interesting: I thought funk died with the soul music of the 1960’s. What’s more is that I know his musical tastes lie in classical rock. But I digress…).

As if through instinct, he rushes into the room and starts grabbing all of his empty bottles and cans of alcohol and throwing them away as fast as possible, not wanting to give the resident assistants something else to reprimand us for. Once the drinks were out of the way, it was clear to get some of the authorities into the room to sort out the mess and figure out what to do.

*Just as a side note, the alcohol is my roommate’s. I don’t drink, don’t get the wrong impression.

My RA walks over to my room in a daze (it’s pretty late in the night at this point), and I explain my idiocy. At this point I’m thinking about what the fire department, the dean of my college, my parents are going to due to me once they find out about my experiment.

As it turns out, my RA is a nice guy. He calls up his friend and they bring extra fans to my room to help me de-smoke my room and let me open a back door so the fumes don’t linger in my (already smelly) hallway.

I’m currently sitting at my desk writing this blog entry, inhaling ridiculous amounts of fumes despite the fans running at full blast. I don’t think I plan on sleeping tonight, since I have the top bunk and smoke tends to rise.

Thank god it’s a thursday.

Sitting in my dorm playing warcraft and instant messaging is great and all, but in the end nothing good comes of it (besides being really good at warcraft). Here are a few things I could do instead:

-Learn another language (in fact, learning FIVE more languages would be pretty cool, too).

-Learn another instrument (piano or guitar, whichever one I manage to get first)

-Do that “project” I’ve been meaning to do for a while…

-Internet shopping (Mom probably won’t be too happy with this)

-Learn to code (or just find a few more uses of the “includes” function)

I probably won’t get around to any of these, but they’ll be here to remind me.

Ever since Spring break ended (actually, I’m pretty sure this started way before spring break), the atmosphere in classrooms has gotten pretty dull. Noone really wants to pay attention even though the next tests are worth just as much as prevous ones. I’m pretty sure this is a consequence of high school, since students had the same courses for the entire year, instead of in semesters: teachers were usually done with their material by the time spring break rolled around.

The year is almost over, a little over one month of school left.

In unrelated news, I’ve made plans to attend AAPG Denver 2009. Hopefully I can get some networking done there and hand out a couple of resume’s.

Until next time.