Initial Conditions

By Jae-An Wang

I woke up this morning at 8 from a terrible night’s sleep, featuring a nightmare in which a neomorph (think eyeless albino humanoid with spidery limbs and terrifyingly sharp teeth) from the Alien film franchise jump-scared me and bit off my arm over and over again in quite a painful manner. Also, for reasons unknown I was a young boy with no legs. My dreams sure are weird.

After reassuring myself that I was not in fact a young boy with no legs who kept on having his arm bitten off, I got up, stumbled around in the dark for a bit, and then left to go to try out the gym for the first time, only to find that all the gyms had special hours today that hadn’t been updated on their website. Rats.

Stuff+dad at move-in

I guess the reason I start with these rather negative events is that these are really the only “bad” things that have happened to me so far (other than the whole room key thing). I’ve had a surprisingly easy time settling in, partially due to my super chill roommates Jonathan and Kyle (pics will come eventually?):

• Jonathan is from around Chicago, although he’s studied in 4 countries total (I think China and Korea are two of them). He’s also super tall and is a business/econ major, I do believe.
• Kyle is from San Francisco but originally from China. He’s a civil engineering major, and he reminds me a lot of Jeff Feng back from ECHS for some reason. It’s like they could almost be brothers or something. It’s weird.

Classes! I had my first class, MAE82 or Engineering Math (basically differential equations) on Thursday, and on Friday I went to the linear algebra class I’m going to be auditing, my chemistry lecture, and the MAE82 dkscussion. Hmm…I feel like the teachers are definitely further away in a sense, probably because of all the people in these classes and the resulting lack of room for questions, but I’m not really too worried about it yet. For better or for worse, I’ve always been the type to talk less to teachers and seldom ask questions anyway, and later try to figure it out on my own.

If you look past the faceless yellow people you will see 

the mighty hordes of aggressive club recruiters and 

people trying not to make eye contact with said recruiters

Also the tall dude on the right is Jonathan I think

As for clubs, the Enormous Activities Fair was last Tuesday! It was quite aptly named, as there must have been hundreds of club booths; it was almost too crowded to move around. I tried to realistically gauge the amount of time I would have to actually participate in non-class activities. Of course, I still ended up signing up for too many, including the juggling club, Rocket Project, Design/Build/Fly, the club badminton team, the club archery team, Bruin Film Society, and the competitive Smash club. I don’t know. We’ll see how things go and then decide what stays.

Random Stuff: My bed is in front of the air conditioning vent so sometimes it gets really cold at night. Also, my bed is really comfortable, but it's very small. Having a large backrest pillow up there doesn't help, but what can you do... Also the food here is really good. I don't I'll get sick of it. Ever. Unless the "sick" in question happens to be diabetes. Ummmm also I tried doing laundry for the first time in a while today. I forgot to put my towel in, spent ten minutes reading all the tags and trying without success to figure out what all the symbols meant, and later forgot to put fabric softener sheets in the dryer load. Nothing turned pink, though, so I count that as a success. Also, I tried coming up with something funny for the title of this blog thing, but this math joke thingy was the best I could do. Ack.

I can’t really think of anything to talk about anymore, so here’s the first question of 36 from “The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness,” a research article by Arthur Aron as well as my answer:

Q1: Given the choice of anyone in the world, who would you want as a dinner guest?

Jae-An’s thoughts: This is kind of a random one. Uhhhhm let’s see…I think they mean like someone you would want to eat dinner with? *Thinking hard* I think it would probably have to be someone I know already, since I don’t really enjoy eating with strangers or people I don’t know too well yet. Maybe Leon or Alec? I think Junior Domination would be fine too. Who would you guys invite to din-din?

Speaking of dinner, I probably should eat some soon.

My dad was literally staring at this
for about five minutes
Also apparently these signs
are everywhere in LA and
I think La La Land made a joke
about this at some point?
This caption is really long.

They were giving away free Pocky.
Not gonna lie, I stopped by several times.

The buildings sure are pretty
 to look at on sunny days

I practiced for the first time in months today!
It was fun even though the piano was kinda meh.