L's birthday

Yay! What a fun Friday night, where there was just the right amount of people, food, alcohol, movies, and general happiness:) Congrats to L on her birthday...it was fun and special and probably one of the last celebrations before graduating from college.

I learned many invaluable lessons, like how to cook a wonderful swordfish in tomato sauce (complicated), and how to cook an absolutely scrumptious appetizer of mushrooms rolled in bacon (easy)... and took my first tequila shot (liked the salt, hated the tequila, liked the lemon). Something else including ~three glasses of wine, one rum and coke, and a Smirnoff's.

Along with all that, it was just plain fun having a good night with four absolutely wonderful girls whom I've known and admired and loved for four packed years. Cheers!

the meat market

It's strange how young Americans have fun nowadays...going clubbing. Granted, once young people begin working, it's difficult to meet people that aren't your co-workers. But clubbing exists solely to get ass. Any guy who tries to have a meaningful conversation in a club is beyond creepy and should be avoided at all costs. Clubbing is just an orgy of gratuitious groping and grinding. It's basically like making out with random strangers while standing up.

We went to the Avalon in Fenway, which is the largest club in Boston. There were lines and lines of people flooding out of the door. The dance floor is a crowded, sweaty pit with fake mist everywhere (not sure how the mist helps). Some people really did go to dance and danced pretty damn well. Some guys just migrate from girl group to group, trying to dance as many people as possible. Others stood in a ring on the edge of the floor, picked out specific girls in the crowd that they wanted to dance with, and went after them. Honestly, it's like prostitution except that everyone pays the cover fee.

As one of my friends mentioned, it's brutal but honest because there's no pretense. Just by being there, a girl's going to get treated like a piece of property and get hit on. It's understood. The strange thing is that it doesn't feel uncomfortable at the time but sure as hell feels wrong later. At a club, you can just leave your brain at home and just go with the flow...

stupid stupid people

It really annoys me when people drill outside of my room at 4AM in the morning and turn on bright searchlights. It's ok up to 2AM, but not ok at 4-5AM. I was really pissed off because I had an exam today and I slept 3 hours because people on my hall were procrastinating and building the stuff for the prefrosh today.

If I had moved to my dorm as a freshman, it would've been fine. I would build things and stay up 'till odd hours of the morning and socialize. Now, I don't think that way anymore and I wouldn't do many of the things that I would have four years ago.
Each hall has a different mentality and a different feel about it. My floor is fairly normal, no cats, few druggies, but a bent towards operating chainsaws and sledgehammers. 4W is the druggie floor, 3E and 5E are the scary floors with black and red tape over all of their lights. 2E and 5W are fairly normal, 4E and 3W are fairly normal, quiet, and dorky. I don't know anything about 1E and 1W but assume that they're not terribly weird.

When I moved onto the hall last year, I really wanted to live in a place where everyone on the hall talked to each other and had this bond. It never materialized. I have three really good friends on the hall, and two other friends that I talk to. Everyone else is nice, but I've never sat down with one of them and started talking. It's like I have nothing in common with them. People in this dorm are fairly open and original, but sometimes they're irresponsible and childish. It's something I wouldn't even have noticed freshman year. I don't think I'm the most responsible person in the world and I sure as hell make crappy decisions sometimes, but I try. Sometimes, that's all that matters.

classroom squabbles

Whenever I deal with Complex Variables, I always feel like there's a war going on. An insidious guerilla war. Here's the scoop: Prof. B is an extremely young professor (Early 30s) who's lecturing this class for the second time, and Prof. T is a not so young professor (Early 70s-80s) who teaches recitation and had previously been the lecturer for many semesters before B took over.

In the first recitation, T taught various little methods that B covered in his next lecture...and B was probably surprised as to why everyone looked bored...T is a master of the sly, teaching everything his own way and making occaisonal subtle remarks such as "This problem on the problem set was actually mine." B is not unaware and comments, "I had intended T to cover this in recitation, but I guess I'll go over it again." There's a not-so-subtle power struggle going on.

One problem is that neither one lectures particularly well. B has problems teaching such a low-level class, and has a tendency to mumble at the end of his sentences. He also apologizes incessantly and has frequent sign errors (not uncommon among math professors). It's this apparent lack of self-confidence on the outside that bothers me. Since he's a professor here, I fail to see on what grounds he could possibly lack self-confidence. Clearly, B is quite brilliant, but he's nervous and just not fun to listen to.

T speaks and gesticulates loudly, although he also has the tendency to speak too quickly. He is fond of doing arithematic on the board, and dumbing concepts down. He does get a point, because I don't fall asleep quite as often in his recitation as I do in lecture.

For young professors, they always feel like there's something to prove. Case in point: writing a retarded problem set that is pretty impossible to do. Older professors are sometimes too complacent, too sure of themselves, too stuck in their own way. Everything's a struggle. Between you and someone else. Between you and the problem set.