Great thoughts of Fleeting substance

Man, when it rains, it pours.

Just when a stretch comes along when I get worried that I’m not getting out with other people enough, something like this weekend happens and reminds me of the fact that I do, in fact, have a huge bloody lot of friends out there. They’re just pretty busy, like me, most of the time.

Highlights, then. Last week I got to teach another MATLAB class. They didn’t promise a gift certificate or anything, but since I’ve taught the class two times already and wouldn’t have to do hardly any work to get everything together, and because I really like teaching, I said sure. The class took place last week, went off without a hitch. They even bought us all lunch, which was actually pretty impressive. I brought donuts anyway. I guess the story is that this project was going to start using MATLAB and wanted someone to come by and give a quick introductory primer to a bunch of people that had never used it before, really. My bread and butter :). So yeah, good times, there.

Friday was a busy day. Well, at least it was in the evening. After I got off work, I went out to Volleyball for a quick bit with some friends before heading home, taking a shower to wash off all the sand, and then meeting those same exact friends at an Italian restaurant to say goodbye to a girl, who, notably, I’d never met before, who was heading up to the bay area and wanted a chance to sing karaoke with us.

I’m a big fan of the Karaoke.

So anyway, we all met up, had some pretty great Italian food, and then packed up in cars and went up to a karaoke-room place in Santa Monica. (Not a bar, one of those places where they let you rent a room.) It wasn’t particularly lush by any stretch of the imagination, but they had a pretty decent selection of English karaoke tunes, which was certainly a step up from most of the karaoke-room places I’m used to. They also had Japanese and Chinese songs, and so we were even treated, by a few of our multi-lingual friends, to some pretty nicely-performed foreign music. Generally accompanied by some really, really bad music videos, reportedly not the ones that originally accompanied the music in its native land. Oh, and evidently the Chinese selection doesn’t go past 1998 in age. A little dated.

I, as is my norm, was mostly about the big, loud rock stuff, which they had plenty of. We also popped up a couple of songs by Popular Rap Artist ‘Fiddy Cent’. I knew he was a bad rapper, but you don’t really get the sense of how bad he really is until you read and then repeat all the words in his music. “50…uuh…Bentley…uuh…” was one of my favorite lines. I’d put down some more lyrics, but they’re mostly unprintable. Sufficient to say that 50 has big wheels on his cars, a lot of jewelry, is a big fan of the ladies, alcohol, and drugs, in that order, and that he feels the need to explain ALL OF THIS in EVERY ONE OF HIS SONGS. And to think, there are rappers out there struggling to make money that have…wassitcalled? Oh yeah, *talent*.

Saturday would have included a jaunt out to a housewarming/going away party for a fellow co-worker, but I spent pretty much all day doing homework. I got one of the problems done, at least, which makes two out of three done in total, and it’s due on Friday.

I’ve also discovered that I’ve contracted a hideous, horrible disease. One that I’ve been overdue for. Senioritis.

Senioritis is what, traditionally, happens to high school seniors when they’re about to graduate. It’s that feeling of lackadaisical passiveness and general weariness that generally accompanies the students realization that they’re already accepted to college, none of their classes matter for graduation, and no one is ever going to look at their high school GPA ever again. Right about then, scholarly effort takes a bit of a backslide.

I didn’t catch Senioritis back in high school, but I’ve caught it now.

I blame the previous semester. I used to be able to force myself to do stuff I didn’t want to do. Last semester, despite being under tremendous academic pressure and having little-to-no time to relax, I still was able to force myself to accomplish things. It was miserable, and I hated it, but I had that sort of academic willpower necessary to hunker down and get things done, regardless of what else I wanted to be doing. That superpower is fading.

I’m finding it more and more difficult to force myself to forgo enjoyment in favor of school. I’ll be honest, I really just don’t care as much. Course, some relativity needs to be observed: I did pretty well on my previous two assignments, I understand the course material pretty well, so I’m not worried about the final, and we’re really only talking about skipping a few sections from a few problems, so it’s not like I’ve completely backslid. It’s just becoming harder and harder to care about school, mostly because all I want at this point is to be done. I don’t care what my grade is, essentially, as long as it’s passing. That’s what I busted my hump for on previous semesters, and it’s paid off, I got a pretty good GPA. So I’m allowed a bit of leeway here. I’m not worried about it that much, but I can definitely feel that inevitable slide toward being done with school and being quite excited about it. I mean, I’ve been in school for 20 years. 20 years! I’m very ready to be done.

But I did manage to keep myself at home and working on homework as opposed to going to the housewarming party, so I can’t have too serious an infection.

Sunday I went out with a co-worker, code-named J, to a few neat things. There was a Origami festival down in CSULB (California State University, Long Beach) and J was going and wanted to know if I wanted to come along. I said sure, because I’m a big fan of the ancient Japanese art of paper (Ori) folding (Gami). She also said she’d be going to church down in Long Beach and being as I wanted to check this place out, I accepted her invitation to come along.

First time in a non-denominational church. One would expect, by their nature, for them to be pretty different from each other, but it was a pretty nice service. We read some bible, heard some historical context, had some bread and what I believe to have been grape juice and had some good vibes all around. J and I went out to a local place for a quick eating of food afterwards and then hit the festival.

The location bears some mentioning. It was held in the beautiful Japanese Garden on the CSULB campus, which is a pretty massive place, with some nice paths, pretty bridges, lots of Japanese-inspired garden architecture (and some bonsai) and a huge koi pond with some some huge koi. The big ones were probably around two feet long.

Now you should note, at this point, that you can buy Koi food for the Koi fish and give them a good feed, which probably has to do with how big they are. They’ll come right up, too, and the place is structured so that there’s a little ‘beach’ where you can go down and the Koi can come right up and poke their heads out of the water and eat food out of your hand. Koi don’t have teeth. They have a huge suction-cup mouth that they use to suck the pellets right off your hand. I don’t know if you’ve ever had your fingers gummed by a Koi fish, but it feels really, really strange. You could pet them too. They were slimy, but it was neat anyway. Also, there were so many of them that they would crowd around and shove each other further and further out of the water and up onto the beach, eventually pushing out fellow Koi fish onto the backs of their compatriots and out of the life giving water. The top Koi would thrash around awkwardly until his friends let him break the surface and get some water to…ah…breathe, but that was a pretty good way to get splashed by fish, as J and I discovered. But yeah, the Koi fish were pretty sweet.

And then, of course, there was the Origami. Mostly it was beginner-level stuff (I consider myself intermediate on a scale between n00b and origami black-belt) but it was a lot of fun, and there were a few intermediate-level folds to be done among the easy stuff. They also had some neat displays of what I can only describe as Origami Art-Boxes. A little glass-topped box with a piece of paper that’s just been folded up all ‘neat’ inside. I thought they were quite pretty.

Oh, and first prize for awesome? The Origami Yoda. That was a winner.

We stayed there for pretty much the entirety of the 4 hours the place was open and I had a great time. I folded a neat little modular origami (defn: fold something simple several times, then join them all together) piece and the guy who taught described a more complicated version you could do with twice as many folds. I went home, figured it out, and made one. I’ll post pictures in a bit.

So not a bad weekend, and I have some upcoming plans, too. J…a different J, though, is performing on the drums with a band of his on Friday, so that looks fun and I plan to go, and then a bit after that we’re going to have a graduation party for something like 5 or 6 different people who are all finishing up their masters degree this summer.

So much for being a Hermit.

I didn’t get to run this weekend, but I’ve been putting in my days. Mostly I’ve been sprinting, because I’m so much worse at sprinting than I am at the full 3-mile run. Way very much worse. Also, I’m going to try extending my long distance run just go get in some extra exercise. Something like 4 or 5 miles. I’ll have to get into my car and run the odometer first, though, before I can map out a route. But I’m thinking about running along Westchester Parkway. It’s incredibly picturesque. Lots of people run along there.

I’ve been playing Trackmania: Sunrise, recently. It’s a pretty fun toy, but also very hard. Not a bad buy, though, for how cheap it is. I’m still only thinking about picking up Battlefield 2, I haven’t done so yet.

Oh, and I missed my mothers birthday. Happy ‘Your Son is a Looser’, day Mom! I am the ultimate winner! And S’s is coming along too. Good grief. I’m so bad with dates. I blame school, just cause it’s an easy thing to do. Blaming school, I mean. It’s easy. USC doesn’t talk back.

Well, that's all I have to say, then, I suppose. Come back soon for more exciting installments!

-N