So I'm a moron and I've fiddled with this HTML code for like 7 minutes and I can't get it to show up. So you'll have to highlight it. In other news about how Zanzibar is an idiot, I will tell you about the lovely tale of when Zanzibar was making herself some macaroni and she was draining the noodles and she was holding the collander with her thumb on the rim and her palm along the bowl for stability, because she didn't want to put it down in the sink. So then she pours the boiling water into the collander, only to come to the realization that it's a fucking sieve and she's basically pouring boiling water straight onto her hand! Boohoo, moron!

Freak- INFJ 26% Extraversion, 60% Intuition, 40% Thinking, 60% Judging

Well, well, well. How did someone like you end up with the least common personality type of them all? In a group of 100 Americans, only 0.5 others would be just like you. You really are one of a kind... In fact, I do believe that that's one of the definitions for the word "FREAK." Freak's not such a bad word to describe you actually. You are deep, complex, secretive and extremely difficult to understand. If that doesn't scream "Freak!" I don't know what does. No-one actually knows the REAL you, do they? You probably have deep interests in creative expression as well as issues of spirituality and human development. You've probably even been called a "psychic" before, because of your uncanny knack to understand and "read" people without quite knowing how you do it. Don't fret. You're not actually psychic. That would make you special and you'll never accomplish that. You're also quite possible the most emotional of them all, so don't take this all too hard. Nevertheless you most definitely have the strangest personality type and that's not necessarily a good thing. *****************

My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 99% on Extraversion You scored higher than 99% on Intuition You scored higher than 99% on Thinking You scored higher than 99% on Judging

Link: The Brutally Honest Personality Test written by UltimateMaster on OkCupid, home of the The Dating Persona Test

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Today I went to the library all day to do secret activities. You know how they always say, "Welcome to college. Sleep, a social life, good grades: choose two."

In college I definitely chose a social life and good grades. Seems like in graduate school I've been choosing good grades and sleep. Towards the end of the semester, sleep goes, too. Maybe in graduate school you only get to pick one and half.

I've also been surfing Amazon to see if they have the books I need. Man, books are so expensive. I wonder how much my CFD books cost.... I was spoiled by last semester when I only had to buy one paperback.

I should have gone to Notre Dame where they would have given me four grand for whatever the hell I desired. But then the winter would have been overpowering, I think. When I think of Notre Dame I think of aging buildings, icy wind, and the whole campus overshadowed by the great bronze statue of Christopher Columbus, WATCHING US. And I also think of boxing leperchauns, of course.

ANYWAY, on the way home from the library I was driving along and I spied with my good eye a band of emo kids crossing the street ahead. Ok, so these weren't the stylish, adorable mopey Cali emo kids who form emotionally-charged suburban garage bands and are a danger to themselves but not others. These were the dirty, punky, bad-smelling, slightly-gothically dressed emo-haired kids of the greater Northeast that I'm still trying to figure out. They had decided upon this jaywalking escapade in front of my car because they had seen that on the other side of the street someone had dropped a large number of bagels on the sidewalk. I don't know exactly what had happened because many of the bagels were completely smashed into crumbs and some of them looked perfect, untouched tori of bagelerific perfection. But that was only in shape: all of them looked very dirty. They were spread across the sidewalk like someone had shot them at it with a bagel cannon from a third floor window.
("had shot them at it", I bet that would be a difficult construction for a non-english speaker)
The punk kids ran over and started grabbing the bagels wildly off the sidewalk. They examined each one feverishly, stacking them up in their arms, casting away one when they found a better looking replacement... the cast away bagel would immediately be snatched by another person..... until almost all the bagels were taken and the emo kids started to run away with their bounty.


Ok. So last I heard, the emo kids of the Noreast are not starving. Last I heard, punk kids still had shelter and probably parents and enough money to buy hair dye. SO WHY THE LOOTING OF THE FALLEN BREAD???? I mean, I know Seth's hippie roommates periodically go through the dumpster out the back of the bakery and eat rolls and muffins that they just threw out.... that's pretty disgusting and those rolls were just in a case waiting to be sold and are still wrapped in plastic. And those girls are hippies, you expect them to do things like that! I did not expect that from the punk kids. Do they have a gigantic squirrel they're trying to keep alive in their garage? That is the only thing I can think of that would warrant such behavior.

CRAZY PUNKS! GET OFF MY LAWN!!

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My shower seems to have absolutely no powers of temperature regulation. I never know whether its drastic oscillations in temperature are due to some intrinsic shower failure, or if it is due to my roommates turning on and off the sink and the showers and toilets in other parts of the house.

So whenever I'm in the shower and the temperature changes I always imagine my roommate, hunched over the sink tap, laughing maniacally as he switches off and on the knobs at will. If were to draw a graph showing the magnitude of temperature change as a function of time in the shower, this would be kind of what it would look like, only not quite so regular in time step:

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Another lazy Saturday. I've decided to organize my room and finances today. In addition to doing all my homework for the entire upcoming week. No point in doing work on weekdays. That would take away from my surfing Nutang and Deviant Art time. Nobody wants that.

I've determined that I've been gaining weight. Or at least, I gained some over Christmas and I haven't lost any of it. This is all according to the bathroom scale. I used to be the same height and weight as my favorite NBA player Earl Boykins, but alas, no more. I mean, come on!! What is the point of not gaining weight if it's the middle of winter and I'm cold and I need warm and tasty food and I can't go outside and I wear a parka every day!! Besides, some things about gaining weight ain't so bad. ("We're going to turn those mosquito bites into juicy juicy mangoes!")

Me, at the weight of Earl Boykins:


Earl himself, who holds the NBA record for most points scored in OT:


Aight, better get back down to Earl Boykins' weight soon. I like to call it my "fighting weight". This is where the running track and the playing mad DDR would usually come in, but presently I can do neither. :(

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I was going to write about how FREAKING COLD IT IS HERE. O.M.G. I was also kind of thinking about writing about my first computational fluid dynamics class today, or, as my prof calls it "CFD" which he says stands for either "Colorful Fluid Dynamics" or "Currently False Data", to describe what other fluids guys think of CFDers and their fancy graphs and simulations.

But mostly about how it is SO COLD. This isn't any ordinary cold, like one might get in the perfect state of Colorado, where the sun is actually hot. It's been around 9 degrees all day... it's still 9 degrees. With wind chill, it's -8. I've been living in LA for the past four years, for crying out loud. Even when you are inside and warm, this cold still sits in your core, in your gut where you feel emotions like fear. Maybe that's why they call it "cold fear".

But instead of writing about either of these things...

I'm going to lie on my bed dramatically and listen to enya. Cause it's Friday, babayyy, and I do what I want!

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Dans ce coin du monde il n'y a pas du bruit. Seulement des plantes et des briques et un cas de verre. Il y a plusieurs pierres d'une ancienne epoque la dedans.

Dans ce coin du monde il n'y a rien que mes pensées, mes mémoires, et mon imagination, qui regarde ce qui se passe dehors, du filon-couche de fenêtre au bord de l'univers.


In other news, should I learn to speak Gaelic, Arabic, or Spanish?

In news written by famous people whom I admire:

"Facile credo, plures esse Naturas invisbiles quam visibles in rerum universitate."

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I awoke in the early hours of the morning (around 4am) to the smell and sound of my roommate cooking eggs. I shuffled out in order to make him gasp with concerned astonishment that he had awakened me by his 0-dark-thirty egg-filled breakfast. He went to NYC today to shadow a plastic surgeon. He's thinking about getting into plastic surgery. I don't know though, that might take up the time he would otherwise spend teaching o-chem, teaching physics ("which is a little boring to teach because it's soooo easy!"), finishing med-school, writing his neuroscience dissertation, doing his normal residency, doing some carpentry (on the side), speculating in real estate, considering funding online dating start-ups, and fixing the washing machine. Meanwhile his mother is a librarian who used to be a classical pianist and both his father and brother were golf pros. Now his brother lives in San Francisco and sometimes France, where he has a house on the french riviera and he is involved with high stakes investment banking.
Back when he was in college (after he graduated from an alternative "hippy" magnet school that only the two smartest kids from each regular school were allowed to attend, where he was a class or two behind Matt Damon, and lived on the same block as the New Kids on the Block), he was in a rocker band and enjoyed some popularity as a bassist. Now that he's getting a little older, he'd like to settle down and have some kids. He's also shifted his attention to becoming incredibly buff, which involves constantly pumping iron at gold's gym as well as eating protein shakes for breakfast which are a mix of juice, ice cream, ice, protein powder, fruit, and broccoli. It is usually a brownish-green color and the blender is on the other side of my wall. Then he makes fun of me for eating baloney and peanuts and eats another ten eggs.


But the point of this story is that this morning when I awoke, my first thought was of course of boolean operators, because I'd been trying to cram Matlab into my head for the entire day previous. But my SECOND thought was that I should spend this semester cultivating a secret life. I mean, the internet is a good place to start, and some may say that I have a secret life online (yes, it goes even further than nutang, my online secret life), but I think in addition I will cultivate a real-life secret life. What will my secret life entail, you may ask? Why I cannot tell you, it is a secret. But I will tell you that while last semester the main thrusts of my constant battle of self-improvement were learning how to cook food and learning how to be graceful (AND TURN MY FEET OUT!!!), and the thrust of the winter term was to get into touch with my creative side (i.e. start drawing, writing, and taking photographs again) the thrust of this semester will be centered on improvement of the brain.

I intend to learn everything there is to learn. EVERYthing. I will learn all of it. And memorize most of it.
Of course this focus on the brain is sometimes a mistake, because it ignores the body and an idle body can wreck havoc on the concentration that the mind is trying to achieve, so if I can throw a random break-dancing class in there, I will, but I'm mostly going to try to get to bed early and wake up early and memorize things and read outside materials (not all of it has to be related to class, of course) and become one of those mofos that seems to know every damn thing. In the past the mistake I have made with these types of semesters is that I aim to "do well in my classes". I can't really control that. I can only *KNOW. EVERYTHING.* and the evaluation methods that my professor chooses will be up to him. But I will not be hemmed in by the subject material presented in my classes.

All of this will be more achievable if my aims are mostly secret, and my sessions of scholarly enhancements clandestine. No more will be said of this. Forget all you know.....

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Besides the word "pet peeve" another pet peeve of mine is when people say, "There is wayy too much testosterone/estrogen in this room."

Man, that is so annoying. Nobody likes to be diminished to the sum of their biological/chemical parts. That is SO annoying. In fact, I want to invent a word describing how it feels when someone does this to you. Maybe "biolittlement"? "biominish"?

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