May 2003

-Yesterday I spent maybe an hour in the morning shooting hoops (and sucking at it) at the RSF, after which I returned to the apartment contemplating what the heck to do... TV was the answer for most of the time, outside of preparing food to eat. One notable highlight was the Mavs' comeback victory over the Spurs. Dallas was down by 17 late in the third only to come back brilliantly in the fourth to win by 13. If it only causes a delay in the Spurs' series victory oh well...
-Today the boredom simply continues... I woke up to the sounds of hammers pounding away at the outer wall of the apartment building. Apparently the south wall of the building was poorly constructed and leaked rainwater during last winter's storms. Management decided the best thing to do was to repair the wall by demolishing the outer stucco and replacing it. This is supposed to be on-going until August 20th. Yay... something exciting i guess... After waking up, the TV went on almost instantly and, after much channel-surfing, it came to rest on PBS. So I spent an hour watching about how to properly punctuate English sentences, which, oddly enough, is something that I never learned in high school. Another interesting tidbit about my deficient (at least in English) high school education is that I never had formal teaching in English grammar until 12th grade. Yes, twelfth grade, in AP English Literature no less. Ah... and so after an hour of the show I now know: that there is a difference between and dash and a hyphen, that periods and commas always come before ending quotation marks, that colons and semicolons always come after ending quotation marks, and that question marks and exclamation points can be before or after the ending quotation marks depending on context. How useful will this knowledge be to me in the future? I'll probably forget by tomorrow.
-Today President Bush signed a $300 billion tax cut with the hopes that it will be able to stimulate the economy. DREAM ON... Heck, President Reagan demonstrated that tax cutting to stimulate the economy simply doesn't work. All this tax cut will do will be to increase the ever increasing budget deficit. Democrats aren't putting up much of a fight and next year's election looks like a rout for Bush and the Republicans.

May 25, 2003 COE Graduation and Journey to OAK
-BORING!!!!!!!! Waiting to start research has been pretty painful. I've been pretty desparate to do anything outside of watching TV in my apartment. Yesterday was pretty cool, as I watched the College of Engineering's Class of 2003 graduate. The whole time I was thinking, hmmmm this will be me in a year, how scary!!!... After the ceremony I helped pour champaigne and sparkling apple cider at the Department of Bioengineering reception, only to return home to yet more boredom. Today I accompanied my roommate to the airport. Unfortunately it only killed two hours, although I managed to have a rather interesting conversation with an 82 year-old man on the way back to Berkeley. After I got home ate some lunch and thenI watched 3 hours worth of Food Network watching the same cook cook 6 different things. Now I await dinner, wondering how boring Memorial Day will be.