A Weary Weekend
So, I'm glad to say that - although this is by no means complete - about 90% of the keys on my Averatec 7100 Series laptop's keyboard are now completely or almost completely free. This is a great relief! I don't have to send this laptop to the company to have it get a new keyboard now. It would have cost me two weeks and who knows how much money to get that done. Of course, nothing's perfect - I have to live with the problems the laptop still has. For example, the left Alt key on my laptop no longer responds to the "Alt-F4" shutdown command for windows. I can still use the shortcut, but I have to do it with the right side Alt key. The "repeated letter" response where, say, if I hold down backspace, it doesn't stop deleting until I lift the key, or if I hold down a letter, it keeps typing that letter until I lift the key, is still faulty, and the Scroll Lock is now erratic - it'll randomly come on and off, and the key doesn't seem to operate it anymore. But these problems, I guess, I can live with. The numeric keypad's standard function is the function governed by Scroll Lock, and Num Lock still works - and it overrides Scroll Lock anyways - so, I guess, that I can live without. And the repeated letter response... well, I can deal with that, I just have to keep hitting the key instead of holding my finger down. But, again, I'm glad I managed to escape this. It's yet another of my near escapes from trouble, which I seem to have very often - such as going into my math exams barely able to do 30 to 40 percent of the exam and getting away with a passing grade or B/S'ing my first Asian Studies essay, not relying on books for source material (I used the lecture notes instead - to be honest, the books we had were useless for the prompt I was writing about because I was writing about modern life in Asia and the books we have are all history books) and getting a strong A anyway. Maybe I shouldn't be agnostic. I keep thinking that all these near escapes mean that someone must be vouching for me up there.
I just came up with a very scary thought - at least to all Star Trek: The Next Generation fans. What if the Judeo-Christian God/Islamic Allah was nothing more than the infamous, impish omnipotent being Q (played by John De Lancie in ST:TNG, DS9, VGR) playing around with us foolish mortals? The world would come to an end. Well, at least organized religion would come to an end and personally, I do NOT think that it's a bad thing. I know it's impossible to completely separate politics and religion, but sometimes I feel that religion has just gotten too political and it's starting to grow less and less about individual faith and morality. And too many people can't separate dogma and mythology from what I call religion. The Earth wasn't made in six days, people. Get over it. (My own excuse for that: God doesn't live on the same dimensional plane that we do. I'll bet He controls time as well as everything else. Therefore, it's very likely that a day in Heaven is more like a couple of million years on Earth.)
I'm also glad that my second Asian Studies 10A essay is finally finished. It was an annoying assignment to finish, far more annoying than the first essay, in which I asserted that traditional Asian culture still exerts influence on the lives of modern Asians. Pretty easy when the Professor gave us a lot of evidence in his lectures - evidence that I'll bet not many people in class paid attention to, because it wasn't going to show up on the exam! (An example: Cambodian refugees from the violence in their country displaced from Cambodia emigrate to the USA, where they rebuild their community around the reconstruction of their Buddhist temple.) The assignment wasn't that difficult; I had already developed arguments when I decided to undertake that prompt, I had gotten a draft done by the Monday night of the week it was due (I have discussion sections on Thursdays) that my GSI liked, more or less, and so I got a strong A on what was probably my least effort in the whole of my college essay writing. This time, I was trying to talk about the continuing influence of Confucianism on various aspects of Chinese life. I thought I also had some ideas available when I picked the prompt. I mean, think about it. I'm Chinese. I am a first-generation immigrant, so although I wasn't completely cloistered in my culture, in many ways, I was raised Chinese, and Confucianism has touched every portion of my life whether my parents and I are aware of it or not (I only became aware of it thanks to my Chinese history course and this course). So I should be qualified to talk about it, right? I guess that didn't quite cut it, because, as my GSI told me, personal experiences don't make very good points when you're trying to create an academic work. There's no way to back it up, no way for your evidence to be accepted on the assumption that you speak for your entire people. So, I had to go back to the drawing board, borrow a lump of books from Moffitt Library, and spend five hours the night before the essay was due (I couldn't do it earlier because I had my Math 1B examination to prepare for) completely rebuilding my essay from the ground up. It was agony - I thought I was going to be sick the next morning when I got up at seven and almost ditched my 8AM-9:30AM math class. So, I hope I at least get a decent grade for it - despite the fact that I still don't think I wrote anything more than a bunch of B/S about a point I thought was obvious but had no idea how to conclusively prove.
And about that Math 1B midterm? I don't know if I had mentioned this earlier. I think I did, but my memory isn't very good. If I hadn't berated myself for not transferring into Professor Olson's class before, I am really berating myself now. That midterm was just as agonizing as it seemed. I got a 39/100, and thanks to the curve - which was, embarrassingly, slightly higher than the one for our first midterm - the grade turned out to be a C-. My only comforts were that I had passed the exam, at least, and that I really did know what I was doing when it came to the material we had been covering. I could have scored six more points, even, if I had been a little luckier or if I had just had a little more time; maybe that would have given me a C. I personally did about evenly with my performance on the first exam; off by just one point. Now, we're getting into second-order, homogeneous and nonhomogeneous differential equations, and it looks like I'm going to be tearing my hair out by the time the semester is over. How I want to pass this course, so that I'll never have to take math again! And I can't even sell my textbook - which has become much more useful to me this semester, more useful that it ever has before in 3 semesters of everyday, intensive use - at the end of the semester, because it's gotten so damaged that I don't think anybody would buy it. I hate myself for getting a paperback edition; the front and back cover have both fallen off. Fifty to sixty dollars down the drain, right when I really need it. And the only other books I can sell are one of my Music 20A books and the remaining Asian Studies 10A books. And those 4 AS10A books won't be worth more than 3 dollars each, simply because that class is only held in the fall and there isn't a demand for the books. And since the books were all used, I can't sell them to other stores that would otherwise pay more for them. Why does life have to be so complicated?
Thanksgiving break is coming up. I have no Bio 1B discussion or lab next Tuesday, and I'm very glad of it. That means that I get out of school at 9:30AM, and I can come home and put my time to some real use. It also means that I have no biology lab or biology lab quiz next week, which is very welcome because it takes up a bit of my weekend study time preparing the study guides for the quizzes (which, I guess, is a good thing because it keeps me up to speed with the class). I'm going to leave school Wednesday night to come home to Novato, where I am going to stay until Sunday afternooon, and I'll be spending Thanksgiving in Castro Valley with some family friends. But the trouble is, I don't *want* to leave. I know that sounds cold. I know that most of you are probably going to say that I'm taking the fact that i live so close to home (about 2 hours if the traffic is bad) for granted. And maybe I am. But I could think of much better uses for my time than spending some three and a half pathetic days in town with a basket of errands to run. Besides, my roommate is flying out at around 2PM on Wednesday, which means that when I get back from school, he'll already be gone. I'll be alone - which usually gives me more motivation to do my work on time - and I still have a lot of work to get done. My two remaining Biology 1B projects are the least of it.
Also, for most of my high school years I've always wondered why my friends seemed to complain so much about living in Novato. It was a pretty town, where I lived close to familiar, quality people, and to me, it was a bit of a paradise sheltered from all the bad things going on in the world. Well, that it is. It also is a boring little pit stop in the middle of nowhere with no resources whatsoever and nothing around to satisfy the kind of interests that an eccentric like me has. No anime stores. No decent model kit/hobby stores. Not even a public transport system that I can use for free. (Boy, do I love being at Berkeley; I get to use the Berkeley public transit system for free with my Class Pass - despite the fact that I nearly never take the bus to begin with.) It wasn't until I returned to Shanghai in July 2004 that I really understood how much I missed the city, despite its dangers, and now that I'm at Berkeley, I really don't want to go home. Funny; I'm reverting to my loner nature again. But I can't help it. I'm an only child who was isolated from my huge extended family and all of my old connections and family friends when I was only 3 years old, taken to a completely new country, moved to several different neighborhoods and then into a new town, whose parents have both worked for most of my life. I'm used to never being noticed. I'm used to being the stranger. I'm used to being alone, and guess what? I just happen to LIKE it. It's utterly pathetic that I turned out this way, and if I hadn't left China, maybe things would have been different. Maybe I would have turned out better. But until someone learns how to open a doorway into an alternate universe where, indeed, I'd never emigrated, I'll never know.
Signing off,
Michael D. Lu
11/18/2006
P.S.: Here's to 3 A's and a C... I hope.
I just came up with a very scary thought - at least to all Star Trek: The Next Generation fans. What if the Judeo-Christian God/Islamic Allah was nothing more than the infamous, impish omnipotent being Q (played by John De Lancie in ST:TNG, DS9, VGR) playing around with us foolish mortals? The world would come to an end. Well, at least organized religion would come to an end and personally, I do NOT think that it's a bad thing. I know it's impossible to completely separate politics and religion, but sometimes I feel that religion has just gotten too political and it's starting to grow less and less about individual faith and morality. And too many people can't separate dogma and mythology from what I call religion. The Earth wasn't made in six days, people. Get over it. (My own excuse for that: God doesn't live on the same dimensional plane that we do. I'll bet He controls time as well as everything else. Therefore, it's very likely that a day in Heaven is more like a couple of million years on Earth.)
I'm also glad that my second Asian Studies 10A essay is finally finished. It was an annoying assignment to finish, far more annoying than the first essay, in which I asserted that traditional Asian culture still exerts influence on the lives of modern Asians. Pretty easy when the Professor gave us a lot of evidence in his lectures - evidence that I'll bet not many people in class paid attention to, because it wasn't going to show up on the exam! (An example: Cambodian refugees from the violence in their country displaced from Cambodia emigrate to the USA, where they rebuild their community around the reconstruction of their Buddhist temple.) The assignment wasn't that difficult; I had already developed arguments when I decided to undertake that prompt, I had gotten a draft done by the Monday night of the week it was due (I have discussion sections on Thursdays) that my GSI liked, more or less, and so I got a strong A on what was probably my least effort in the whole of my college essay writing. This time, I was trying to talk about the continuing influence of Confucianism on various aspects of Chinese life. I thought I also had some ideas available when I picked the prompt. I mean, think about it. I'm Chinese. I am a first-generation immigrant, so although I wasn't completely cloistered in my culture, in many ways, I was raised Chinese, and Confucianism has touched every portion of my life whether my parents and I are aware of it or not (I only became aware of it thanks to my Chinese history course and this course). So I should be qualified to talk about it, right? I guess that didn't quite cut it, because, as my GSI told me, personal experiences don't make very good points when you're trying to create an academic work. There's no way to back it up, no way for your evidence to be accepted on the assumption that you speak for your entire people. So, I had to go back to the drawing board, borrow a lump of books from Moffitt Library, and spend five hours the night before the essay was due (I couldn't do it earlier because I had my Math 1B examination to prepare for) completely rebuilding my essay from the ground up. It was agony - I thought I was going to be sick the next morning when I got up at seven and almost ditched my 8AM-9:30AM math class. So, I hope I at least get a decent grade for it - despite the fact that I still don't think I wrote anything more than a bunch of B/S about a point I thought was obvious but had no idea how to conclusively prove.
And about that Math 1B midterm? I don't know if I had mentioned this earlier. I think I did, but my memory isn't very good. If I hadn't berated myself for not transferring into Professor Olson's class before, I am really berating myself now. That midterm was just as agonizing as it seemed. I got a 39/100, and thanks to the curve - which was, embarrassingly, slightly higher than the one for our first midterm - the grade turned out to be a C-. My only comforts were that I had passed the exam, at least, and that I really did know what I was doing when it came to the material we had been covering. I could have scored six more points, even, if I had been a little luckier or if I had just had a little more time; maybe that would have given me a C. I personally did about evenly with my performance on the first exam; off by just one point. Now, we're getting into second-order, homogeneous and nonhomogeneous differential equations, and it looks like I'm going to be tearing my hair out by the time the semester is over. How I want to pass this course, so that I'll never have to take math again! And I can't even sell my textbook - which has become much more useful to me this semester, more useful that it ever has before in 3 semesters of everyday, intensive use - at the end of the semester, because it's gotten so damaged that I don't think anybody would buy it. I hate myself for getting a paperback edition; the front and back cover have both fallen off. Fifty to sixty dollars down the drain, right when I really need it. And the only other books I can sell are one of my Music 20A books and the remaining Asian Studies 10A books. And those 4 AS10A books won't be worth more than 3 dollars each, simply because that class is only held in the fall and there isn't a demand for the books. And since the books were all used, I can't sell them to other stores that would otherwise pay more for them. Why does life have to be so complicated?
Thanksgiving break is coming up. I have no Bio 1B discussion or lab next Tuesday, and I'm very glad of it. That means that I get out of school at 9:30AM, and I can come home and put my time to some real use. It also means that I have no biology lab or biology lab quiz next week, which is very welcome because it takes up a bit of my weekend study time preparing the study guides for the quizzes (which, I guess, is a good thing because it keeps me up to speed with the class). I'm going to leave school Wednesday night to come home to Novato, where I am going to stay until Sunday afternooon, and I'll be spending Thanksgiving in Castro Valley with some family friends. But the trouble is, I don't *want* to leave. I know that sounds cold. I know that most of you are probably going to say that I'm taking the fact that i live so close to home (about 2 hours if the traffic is bad) for granted. And maybe I am. But I could think of much better uses for my time than spending some three and a half pathetic days in town with a basket of errands to run. Besides, my roommate is flying out at around 2PM on Wednesday, which means that when I get back from school, he'll already be gone. I'll be alone - which usually gives me more motivation to do my work on time - and I still have a lot of work to get done. My two remaining Biology 1B projects are the least of it.
Also, for most of my high school years I've always wondered why my friends seemed to complain so much about living in Novato. It was a pretty town, where I lived close to familiar, quality people, and to me, it was a bit of a paradise sheltered from all the bad things going on in the world. Well, that it is. It also is a boring little pit stop in the middle of nowhere with no resources whatsoever and nothing around to satisfy the kind of interests that an eccentric like me has. No anime stores. No decent model kit/hobby stores. Not even a public transport system that I can use for free. (Boy, do I love being at Berkeley; I get to use the Berkeley public transit system for free with my Class Pass - despite the fact that I nearly never take the bus to begin with.) It wasn't until I returned to Shanghai in July 2004 that I really understood how much I missed the city, despite its dangers, and now that I'm at Berkeley, I really don't want to go home. Funny; I'm reverting to my loner nature again. But I can't help it. I'm an only child who was isolated from my huge extended family and all of my old connections and family friends when I was only 3 years old, taken to a completely new country, moved to several different neighborhoods and then into a new town, whose parents have both worked for most of my life. I'm used to never being noticed. I'm used to being the stranger. I'm used to being alone, and guess what? I just happen to LIKE it. It's utterly pathetic that I turned out this way, and if I hadn't left China, maybe things would have been different. Maybe I would have turned out better. But until someone learns how to open a doorway into an alternate universe where, indeed, I'd never emigrated, I'll never know.
Signing off,
Michael D. Lu
11/18/2006
P.S.: Here's to 3 A's and a C... I hope.