| 2003 - jan - feb - mar - apr - may - jun - jul - aug - sep - oct - nov - dec - 2005 |
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Jan 31.04 Went to the library and picked up lots of books. Polished of Dead Famous in one day. Plot was a bit weak but the auther did a bang-up job mauling pop culture's 'reality' lifestyle. Ed.: Notes say "bruise", but I can't remember when I got this bruise or where it was. It was probably one of those mystery injuries that you just discover one day and wonder where it came from. --------------- Jan 30.04 blank. --------------- Jan 29.04 Got blasted full of gamma rays from a radioactive cesium elemental source today in the physics lab. In addition, smeared elemental lead and indium all over my hands and clothes and stuff. Gotta love physics. Woke up on the bus on the way home and didn't know where I was. Jumped off at the next stop to find myself in a residential neighbourhood, which was a bit alarming. I headed in the direction I thought would take me home. Thankfully some lady was getting out of her car so I asked her if I was going the right way. I was. It took some half hour to walk home but it was definitely an interesting experience. --------------- Jan 28.04 Today was Prof. Agrawal's last day as our biology lecturer. He put up a good show until the end, as always. His ability to keep us all awake will be dearly missed. --------------- Jan 27.04 Saw a mysterious looking circle around a tree during the walk through Queen's Park. Upon closer inspection, it turned out to be a ring of pidgeons. Not sure what they were doing exactly. Apparently there was a power out back at home, but I missed it so all's well. --------------- Jan 26.04 Started to get some "lake effect" snow. Not bad. Prof. Browning from organic chem returned to take over from Farrar, and we were none too happy to see him again. Today was the first lab class of physical chemistry -- my actual one, this time. Yishan was still there, unfortunately. On the bright side, if there's one good thing about having a lab demonstrator who can't speak English if his life depended on it, it's that it brings the students together. A sort of desparate rallying, unifying, effect. Somehow I ended up with yet *another* Trinity student for my lab partner. His odour is reminiscent of a half-eaten Burger King burger left out from the previous night. Did some research on giving blood. Who wants it? --------------- Jan 25.04 Logged on for the first time since the new year. --------------- Jan 24.04 Took out the old telescope to play around a little more with astrophotography. It was mercilessly freezing outside, and my toes and fingers went numb pretty quickly. I did manage to get some nice shots of the moon, and even one fuzzy but undeniable picture of Saturn. When I was finished, it took almost an hour for feeling to return to my hands and feet, which was kind of scary, but worth it. --------------- Jan 23.04 Got to handle a humongous American bullfrog in the biology lab. Kind of felt sorry for it, wondering what it was doing there and what was going to happen to it. When we let it run around, it hopped madly into a corner where it proceeded to smash its head into the wall, so we put it back in it's tank, which consisted of a wet paper towel and a tupperware sandwhich box of water. Above the tank there was a sheet of paper with information about the frog, including information about its preferred habitat: completely immersed in water or in swamp conditions. There was water trapped in between window panes on the bus. It rolled back and forth with every start and stop and vibrated and hummed in the ambience. Quite hypnotic. The term voluntary quarantine was coined for my self-imposed situation today. I'll keep it. --------------- Jan 22.04 Chinese New Year On the way to class, got lodged in traffic around the Buddhist temple, presumably because it 's Chinese New Year. However, the real prize of the day was not having chemistry, for whatever reason (I can't remember). Unfortunately, I had to do physics work on my non-physics lab week. I got to see Trinity college, to which I had been denied admission. It wasn't that nice. And the quad sucked compared to the UC Eden which I was faithful to. Of note in my lab partner's residence room: lots of hockey and LOTR paraphenalia; so much evidence of his girlfriend's existence screaming from post-its and pictures and notes on the walls that it felt like she was in the room; and the handcuffs next to the condoms and empty liquor bottles on the windowsill, which I noticed while sitting on the bed. Ahem. Went to Evelyn's old friend's house for Chinese New Year dinner with their family, which was a lot of fun. And interesting, since her father is Chinese and her mother isn't -- yet she seemed so much more so than us. Dinner was good, we got red pockets, I had a psychic connection and as usual, dominated the pathetic inferior intellect of all of the contestants on Smart Ask!, which we were watching downstairs. Later we played Blackjack for pennies, which I lost graciously. It was nice to see everyone again, though, and a fun way to spend the new year. And now I finally know how certain people really are. --------------- Jan 21.04 Had a rather embarassingly located spill in the bathroom, which I had to endure for most of the afternoon, and through my first physical chemistry tutorial. The TA, Jeff, mumbles low and fast, and doesn't give notes, so I say, a big step down from our first semester TA. So far nothing about physical chem is better than organic chem. And got a new hero. --------------- Jan 20.04 Began another McDonald's coupon race to the expiry date. I feel like I'm getting something out of this, but of course the house always wins. Made an 8x10 inch print from one of my digicam pictures, just so that I could say I did it. Turned out reasonably nice-looking. --------------- Jan 19.04 Meeted and greeted a friend today in class, for a brief and awkward couple of minutes. Went to my first physical chemistry lab. Watched the same long, boring safety video from last semester. Battled the urge to throttle our new TA, who has been in Canada for all of six months and was just nearly incomprehensible (I will set the record for having been taught by the entire Taiwanese Wong family, I swear). Later it turned out that I was in the wrong lab cycle, and that my actual lab day was next week, but not to worry, my TA would be the same. Joy. Ate a whole medium pizza. --------------- Jan 18.04 Did the Chinese New Year party downtown. For the record, my red pocket harvest never compares to Christmas or birthday pickings, but any supplement was nice. My hair looked hacked and raw after the previous night's endeavours. --------------- Jan 17.04 Did a haircut. Got Stephen Chow movies. Ed.: Apparently there was a 'houseparty' on this day, though I have no recollection of having done anything of the sort. --------------- Jan 16.04 While continuing cleaning up my closet, I found tons of scattered drawings. Decided I'd like to keep them, but that they should be organized in some tidy way, so I had to date all of my drawings in time and pile them up. It was like museum work, using the evolutionary clues from my drawings over the years to catalogue and date them. --------------- Jan 15.04 Got my eyes blasted out with laser beams today in the always dangerous physics lab. Did you know the intensity from looking straight into the coherent beam of a laser is approximately equal to the intensity of light from sunlight? And I learned that from the textbook, not from the lab guide. --------------- Jan 14.04 Snowed all day today. Finished the Harry Potter series for the second time, having started at the beginning of the new year. --------------- Jan 13.04 This morning was 'blizzard-like'. Ed.: I'm trying to remember something about this day but I can't. Most of this month is like this anyway. Really what you're getting now as I update this in chunks is my thoughts on 'now' from months later. Maybe it sort of makes up for the fact that I there aren't many personal thoughts on this journal ... only an account of the significant events of the day. And apparently 'today' wasn't as remarkable as I thought it should be at the time. Actually, come to think of it, I do remember what was special about this morning. Walking to the bus stop in all the snow, I felt kind of happy. --------------- Jan 12.04 Woke up early to find lots of snow, which I had been warned about the previous night. The purpose of dragging myself out of bed at even even more ungodly time than it normally is was to beat the traffic in the snow. It turned out that I was so early that I ended up being the sixth person in the entire lecture hall. In the end, it turned out to be a warm day anyway. Got my psychology mark, which I was elated about. My mark meant that I had murdered the 3-hour exam and that I was, indeed, the king of psychology. Unfortunate that I couldn't take the second half of course and make it count for one full credit. Started cleaning up the old closet. --------------- Jan 11.04 Went to the library and got lots of books and camera. And spent the entire night going to every Sam's Club to buy bookshelves for my room. This was particularily troubling for me. What exactly was going on, I didn't know. What were they playing at, really, and why was I playing along. So now it looks like things are seeping under the floorboards again. And I'm not doing anything to stop it. --------------- Jan 10.04 Ashley and Calyssa's family came over. Played DVD/board games without the rules, and ate take out Chinese food for dinner. --------------- Jan 09.04 More cold. --------------- Jan 08.04 Watched the Made in Canada series finale, which was a bit disappointing but a good wrap. Enjoyed a free TTC ride, since there was a token lying on the slot for some reason. --------------- Jan 07.04 Today was even colder than the last. Temperature's dropping maliciously, and with no snow. I enjoy a good snowstorm, but not freezing winds alone. Had a staring contest with some lady on the subway. But eventually she was too intimidating so I surrendered. Got lots of coupons in the mail, and I have to use them all but the end of next month, so it looks like I'll be eating lots of fast food over the next little while. --------------- Jan 06.04 Nothing remarkable about today except for the arctic blasts of cold air in the morning. I felt like my face would just rip off. --------------- Jan 05.04 First day back at school. On the way there, saw lots of chickens clucking around the Buddha farm and kind of wished I could be one of them. I wonder if they get eaten though. Today was our firsy day of physical chemistry with Farrar. Turns out physical chemistry is just a fancy way of saying "physics and math". Not liking all the history of physicists either. Prof. Agrawal was our new biology lecturer. He was energetic and interesting and a good speaker, so he gets my thumbs up. We all hailed the new Prof. Trischuk as the next saviour after two tiring units of physics. He looks like Mrs.Parker, the secretary from Bayview, and he mumbles, but he's alright so far. Spent much of the day at Robarts, my new base of operations. --------------- Jan 04.04 Same as the previous day. My mom needed to print a receipt for the digicam and offered me her seat at the computer to do it. I felt I couldn't go near it so I just ordered her step by step from a distance. My family went to sushi buffet again at Nagoya so I stayed home and took the opportunity to sneak around the house taking stuff that I didn't want to be seen taking (not anything like money that wasn't truly my own). A very sad state of affairs, indeed. I also stockpiled some more food that wouldn't be missed, and took an unfortunate bite of turkey from only a week ago. I don't think heating it up would have made a difference -- just remembering the taste of it makes me want to wretch. I read Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets again and played some more piano. For lunch I ate processed cheese with some crackers, a banana, and some weird cereal bars. However, I was actually invited to dinner so I accepted, and stuffed myself to normal fatness again. At this point it would appear that the extreme about-to-snap piano string tension had eased a bit, but I really don't know, hence the anxiety. --------------- Jan 03.04 Again with the self-imposed isolation and starvation. I stayed up in my room for the whole day reading Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, How to be a Villain, and starting Mr. Horner's Life and Times of Albert Einstein. I did come downstairs to play piano, and sneak a bowl of chips in the afternoon for break-fast ... I can't believe I lasted 24 hours without food. Oh, that I should mention. I was shockingly skinny from just one day without eating. It was impressive, but I was too disturbed by the sudden loss of mass to be happy about it. Later in the night, I took a box of Oatmeal Raisin Crisp from the cold storage room and immediately ate a margarinetubful. Which surprisingly, made me full. It felt like stealing. --------------- Jan 02.04 Ed.: What follows is a brief history of just about the longest three days of my life, selected from a slightly longer but hardly more in depth account. If it feels like there is something missing, then there is. I was supposed to be out today, but there was totally unprecedented confrontation in the morning, followed by self-imposed isolation and starvation for the day. Slept a lot, and read a little bit. Had to listen to the phone ringing, which was a bit painful, though again, I regret deeply that all this had to happen on that night. Was caught by surprise by a visit, as apparent by my scary "I've given up on life" unkempt appearance. Then at night, the final frontier, big decision time. --------------- Jan 01.04 (new year's day) Discussed the marvellous paradoxes of time travel. Also, Went to karaoke at Twister on Yonge and Finch, by a three car caravan. The place was actually a lot nicer than I'd expected, given the grimy backdoor entry. There, we sang lots of oldies (and I smiled and nodded my head during the Chinese songs) and generally made merry. --------------- |