the last few days have seen a few changes in my life.
tuesday dan and i decided that our room sucked and that we needed a futon to sit on. to do homework on….to let other people sit on when they visit us, etc… so i fired up su.market and lo and behold, someone was selling a futon for $65. dan and i drove to roble, checked the thing out, offered the guy $55 for it, he met us halfway at $60 and it was a deal.
it took dan’s engineering skills to fit the futon in his civic, but fit it we did, doing our best to keep the mattress getting too wet in the semi-pouring rain. it took my interior decorating skills to rearrange the room to make sufficient space for a new object. for those of you who have never visited my room….it’s hard to explain how much stuff we have…appliances, giant mackie speakers, guitars, sound equipment, beds, desks, wardrobes, boxes of food and drink, trash cans, boxes of old clothes….it took a lot of work to fit a 15sq. foot futon in amidst all the clutter. but fit it we did, with some rearranging.
it’s also hard to explain what a difference a futon makes. it’s absolutely beautiful to be able to sit somewhere besides a hard wooden desk chair. and my bed is lofted so high sitting on my bed is out of the question.
wednesday was also an interesting day…i made it to all my classes with a far amount of work done for each. then, i got word that i was invited to dinner at 4:30 at il fornaio’s, a nice italian restaurant in palo alto. see, i was on a team with campus crusade that put together a lecture by dr. henry schaefer (scheduled for last night). i personally did stuff like design the flyer, and give general wise advice (this last task was self-appointed, obviously). so, the whole team was invited to dinner with the doctor before the lecture. it was pretty cool to eat with a world-renowned chemical physicist. i asked him questions about stuff, like, what the heck is quantum chemistry.
he learned that i was a philosophy major, and because of that i later got mention in his lecture….(“now here’s some philosophy, which may be a little strange in this talk, but i’m sure a young fellow i ate dinner with this evening is very glad we’re talking about some philosophy..”) that sort of thing.
the talk was good–he had wonderful presentation. my only disappointment was that he seemed to not track with some of the questions that people asked. i know that he knew the answers, but more often than not he answered a question that wasn’t precisely what had been asked. oh well. you know those smart science nerd types…
i just pray that it will generate discussion about god and spiritual things!
after the talk i went back to my room to work on modal logic, and then realized that i didn’t know how to do any of the problems in the problem set. so i sat back and did some metaclass thinking, and came to the conclusion that my foundation for logic, which was only barely there in 160a (due to skipping 159), was too weak to sustain me with anything more than a b- in modal logic. i figured that there was no outstanding reason why i’d want to punish myself in this way, and decided that i should drop the class.
i’ll take 159 in the fall, and then get back to modal logic next year sometime, hopefully. if not, it doesn’t even matter…i mean, it could be that i’m just not as interested in logic as i thought i was.
in any case i now have only 12 units–the bare minimum–and three of them are pass/fail. which means that my quarter should be significantly easier, and allow more time for lots of fun and productive activities.
in celebration of this i slept until lunch today, and i’m now at work reading lysias. life is good!
minidisc on spin: control | pedro the lion
