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the irony of this morning is that it started off so well. i woke up five minutes before my alarm (9:55am) and shut it off so that it wouldn’t buzz and wake up dan. i’d gotten an easy 8 hours of relaxing sleep, lulled to that state by the tale of beren and luthien being read out of my speakers. after waking up, i laid in bed and read two chapters from 2 corinthians. feeling like i’d started the day off well i climbed down from my bunk and performed my morning ritual: turn on monitor, wipe eye-boogers away, check e-mail, and check IM messages accrued over the night. ...

hey, i think i’m the farthest ahead in my philosophy of knowledge class right now than i’ve ever been in any class whatsoever. if i want i don’t have to do any work until next tuesday morning. that’s phenomenal! bible study with the dudes was cool, but beav’s out of town so we just chilled in tresidder. and it didn’t last that long, so i went from there to the wall around 8:30. i climbed for about an hour and a half, but i think i’ve plateaued a bit, relatively speaking. speaking in relative terms, is what i mean. but only relatively so. still can’t get the 6 i’ve been working on. it’s too easy to lose my feet in the overhang and swing out to where it’s impossible to have a good hold. ah well. ...

i generally feel like each day is better than the previous one. why, then, do i long for the “good old times”? what are the good old times, anyway? i believe that in my mind, i distill away the day-to-day monotonies and evils of the past, leaving me with the feeling that everything before now was halcyon. especially with good book series. i look at the pendragon cycle sitting on my shelf and the memory of the wonderful journey that series took me on makes me want to be again in the time in which i read it. weird. same with awesome cds. ...

nothing quite emulates a yo-yo like a heart. which is why they are not to be trusted…but can they be ignored? i suppose the day was productive, and if Productive->Good, then it was a good day as well. all i did was work on greek, interspersed with various, random activities. one of the more interesting activities was practicing a long climbing route in the room. you see, most climbing ropes aren’t longer than, say, 150 feet or so. this means that if you want to attempt a climb which is longer than that, you have to use the leap-frog technique–climber x belays climber y, to an anchor near the point where the rope will no longer reach. he secures the anchor, then belays climber y as he comes up to climber x (this is done by use of a few simple knots and an extra carabiner). once climber y reaches the anchor, climber x continues to belay as climber y reaches the next bombproof anchoring point. then climber y locks off, and sets up a belay from his position. repeat until both parties reach the top. you might wonder how dan and i practiced this in our room. it was with his bed. ...

yesterday was an all-around good day. a rather important day for dan–he and i went out to palo alto, and he bought his first pipe. now, you have to understand: for avid c.s. lewis and j.r.r. tolkien fans, (lewis and tolkien were both pipe smokers) there is a special aura about the idea of pipe smoking that transcends the pleasant aroma itself. my pipe is actually from oxford itself, from a little shop on a street where no doubt tolkien and lewis strolled, speaking about the things we now consider them great for, leaving behind wistful trails of blue and grey. ...

i cannot write while listening to the flight of the noldor. so captivating and sorrowful. good night. disc on spin: J.R.R. Tolkien, read by Christopher Tolkien

mostly i just wish emily was here. it’s not right that i should be able to have a fun night of dining and dancing without her. or, what i mean is, that irrespective of our desires, the possibility of her being my date was blocked. this is no fun, because dances and such are that much more fun with someone you can be ‘romantic’ with. also, when people go to dances, i think they degrade themselves about 5 or 6 steps. i rarely see the naturalist’s assumption that humans are merely animals proven more handily than by going to a social dance and watching the whole floor get ‘freaky’. i just can’t believe that we even keep up the facade of a dance…it’s obviously not the dancing itself that most people enjoy, because if you turned on the lights, people would leave and flow to wherever it’s dark and start making out. your average dancegoer is so focused on their own carnality that the dance is merely an excuse to get some modicum of sexual gratification. how pitiful. ...

5 hours of solid, no-break work later, and i’ve finished part I and turned it in–i was right–i didn’t even have time to look at part II, so it went down the drain. down the drain to spain. i’ll take you down to chinatown. i need food.

i can’t put it off any longer…i have 4 hours to finish my problem set. it will probably take me at least that long to do part I. i guess part II is just going to go down the drain. oh well, hopefully it won’t affect things too much. my habit with school work is to be a few hours ahead in my mind, when i have whatever i’m working on done. so i tend to daydream about how nice it is that i have an end in sight, and that whether i finish the assignment or not, it will be over and done with. this tends to make me a little more lax about actually trying and getting really good grades, because i’m just so excited about not having to think about it anymore. ...

if xA* = xAT || xAF, show that x |= xA* and that’s only the first part of the problem–logic is, if i may say so–hard as crap. and i worked on it for the last three hours, bringing the clock to 12:30. now i have a choice: do greek or not do greek. i have to be up at 8:30, and my greek would probably take me a good 1.5-2 hrs to do completely. i suppose i’ll just go to bed. ...