Midnight Message

So I do revert back to blogging at midnight. Today I woke at about 11:11 am, despite sleeping at about 10:30 pm last night. Tonight I’m going to sleep before 1 am, so I might even be so early as to wake for breakfast. My final this Friday is at 2 pm. I’m studying for it now. Even so, I don’t feel like I know how to study for these liberal arts finals. It’s as if the work I do doesn’t necessarily translate into doing any better on the final. In engineering and calculus, it’s easy to see that if I don’t know it, I won’t get it. But in English, you can fudge it with the concepts you know. And the facts are just so much harder for me to memorize.

I went to lunch at EVK, and then went to the USC Surplus Store with John Shook. It was a nice trip off campus past the Galen Center under construction and under the freeway. The Surplus Store has tons of photocopiers, monitors, computers, desks, chairs, and general trash. One interesting thing was a DV Tape drive, with composite and S-Video outputs (along with DV). Never seen one of those before. It was being priced at $100. Could be useful with a DV camera, but then, with Firewire there’s really not much point.

We didn’t buy anything. John S. was looking for a USB joystick for a game called Freespace, but they apparently didn’t have one. He says he’ll buy one when he gets home. Less than a week left! My last final will be next Wednesday, the 14th. That will end my first semester at USC. I still have over $100 dining dollars, so I’ve got to eat, eat, eat. Next semester will be different: I’ll buy a case of Powerade and a case of water near the beginning of the semester, to last me through. I’m not sure why I felt like conserving dining dollars so much this semester. It’s just nice to know I won’t easily run out. I’m always the type of person to save up, especially when it comes to money. Perhaps I should learn to live more for the moment.

Sam Park and I went to Doheny Library for studying. We stayed there nearly two hours, in a corner on the second floor of the book stacks. Very quiet, empty space surrounded by books. Cool stuff. I typed up eight pages of Core 102 notes. After that we went directly to Cafe 84 again, as we did yesterday. But this time we went to Wok Crazy. Guess who we ran into? Michael Stalcup, J-Lo, Christie Swanson, and Shelby! They were excited to see us. Apparently they had looked for us before heading out to Cafe 84. Quite excellent timing that we all ended up there together.

I got the Sesame Meso Sauce, and Sam the Lobster Sauce. Both were less than flavorful. I think the Wok Crazy sauce is probably the best. I’ll get that next time. I had about half left over, so I brought it back and it’s in the fridge now. Perhaps I’ll have it for lunch tomorrow; it won’t last long. But I can’t microwave styrofoam, can I?

After dinner Jon suggested we go to the engineering building for dessert (Tutor Cafe). It’s not exactly on the way :) but we went anyway. We ran into Marie from InterVarsity there. The trip back was just insane (I won’t go into it here). Jon was too full for dessert himself, but he paid for slices of cake for anyone else who wanted them. Then he took bites of them. When we got back to the dorm, we tried mixing red and blue Powerade, but it didn’t succeed in creating purple as expected. Still, we have an experiment running.