:) I got to see one of my most favoritest people in the whole wide world yesterday. :)

Need to learn time management, so as not to be up to some unreasonable hour doing an assignment and then being tired in class the next day and unproductive and generally blar-feeling. Blar is not the best feeling to have.

I can do this. Really, I can.

("This"=grad school)

So many classes, so little time. Eh, it's not that bad actually, but it is a lot of work. It=grad school

I so slept in the Gov Department building last night, and by last night I mean 5:45-7am. Good times.

So it's important to me that the girls I might date (and ultimately who I marry) be Christian of similar faith to me, but sometimes you (where by "you" I mean "I") find someone who isn't but is still very attractive in a number of ways, and though I still hold my principle strongly, it's hard to resist the temptation to make an exception or at least bend a lot. Well, I guess if it were easy it would not be as interesting.

Why do old habits die so hard?

Time to hit the books(yes, I know it's Saturday).

Wow. God is so amazing. A friend of mine just spent like 2 hours sharing all the things that He's done in her life in the last year, and it was truly amazing.

So I'm completely over my head when it comes to classes. Amd yet I continue...

Arg!

I got to see the president of Zambia yesterday! How cool is that (for those of you who don't know where Zambia is-southern Africa-it's still cool that I got to see the President of a country talk).

And apparently the professor I want to work with here is the leading Africanist in the country-sure, that title was bestowed upon him by one of his colleagues, but still, that's pretty cool as well.

"sometimes I feel like I don't have a partner..."





"It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him"-from Genesis 2:18

First day of classes. Will let you know how they went soon.

Is Sunday morning really all that easy? I guess maybe if you're not getting up early for church it might be. Still...

Sunday Afternoon on the other hand-so easy. I guess that wouldn't fit as well in a song though.

HRCF (Harvard-Radcliffe Christian Fellowship)is still great, upcoming classes are scary, seeing old/new friends is wonderful, waking up early even when I'm trying not to is not as fun, singleness is getting a bit old, having money is really cool, having bills is a bit less so, the responsibilities of sharing a house/apartment are manageable but a bit different than what I'm used to, roommates are cool, though I still need to get to know a couple of them better, long-distance friendships can work sometimes, trying to figure out if someone else likes you (platonically or otherwise) as much as you like them can be frustrating, getting signs that they do like you as much as you hoped they would feels good.

It seems to me that when bad things happen, people have a tendency of searching for someone or something to blame, at least in part, and that its cathartic to have someone to blame for what happened. I guess it helps to give some kind of meaning to what would otherwise seem to just be a random stroke of fate. I wonder if the government is playing that role following Hurricane Katrina. That isn't to say that anger at the response to Katrina isn't justified-they obviously messed up big time. But this crisis isn't like 9/11, where there was a clear and evil enemy to blame and rally against (al-Queda specifically, terrorism or Islamic fundamentalism more generally). The reaction to the governmental blunderings is of course not the same as the reaction to the terrorists, but i think it does still fill that "need" to blame someone in some way.

HRCF (Harvard Radcliffe Christian Fellowship) had an event for freshman Wednesday evening along with AACF (Asian American Christian Fellowship), and so I went to help out for a while. There were a lot of people from the two organizations there, so it was more hanging out and eating than work. It was really good to be back in that setting, seeing people I know who are still around as students or staff for HRCF. And a lot of freshmen showed up and seemed to have a lot of interest, so it went really well. God is good indeed.

I just got my first stipend check (with relocation bonus) and it's more than what I made all summer!-gotta love camp.

Trying to figure out classes, study habits, relationship (or lack thereof) concerns, and the usefulness of matrices ( besides providing titles to cool movies).

So we had an orientation today for grad students, which was kinda fun-since i went to college here already, but haven't seen it from the grad student perspective

I am getting a bit concerned about the upcoming semester, as I may be taking 2 math/economics heavy courses, and some of the people i thought would be with me may not take it.

I also ran into an old friend in Harvard Yard who is still an undergrad at the college. She had been out of the country for the last year and I didn't realize she was back yet until I saw her some yards away :)-God is good.

so a recent IM conversation reminded me that I am often funnier/wittier electronically than I am in real life. It's so much easier when you have a few seconds to think of what you want to say and see how it looks before saying it. Any way to do that in real life?

(Doing Probability in math camp today-it's so much fun compared to the computer stuff, which I'm not looking forward to having to do again the rest of the semester/year)

(and the freshman have moved in, so they're all over the place now-still trying to grasp the fact that the class of 09 actually exists-arg, getting old...)

So I've rediscovered that I don't like problem sets.

My computer came today! We did calculus on Saturday morning :(, but at least it wasn't the computer stuff we had been doing the previous two days :).

Also, I've been a bit annoyed that I'm starting to get blogger spam. I'll get a comment, often featuring some random news bit, then the "commenter" will say how he or she stumbled upon my blog and was gonna bookmark or remember it for later, but then they say I should check out their blog (and they provide a link), which is just advertising some product or something. Arg-spam emails I can live with, but spamming my blog-its like opening my diary and finding an advertisement (not that I keep a diary, but if i did...)

anyway

I've spent the morning battling the machines. And the machines are winning.

Round 4 starts at 1:30. So not looking forward to it.

So we had to do all this computer stuff today (thursday) for class; servers and LaTeX and that kind of stuff, and I'm not sure I can convey how lost I am with all of that. A good metaphor I thought of-it's like being asked to write a paper in a language you don't know. If you have a dictionary with you that translates, you can look up individual words and then type them, and you can get the grammar kinda right by constantly asking people who know the language, but you aren't really learning it. You might remember a few words after, but you cannot actually understand the language at all. Hopefully this stuff gets easier with practice.

Also, at lunch w/ several other grad students, the conversation turned to relationships. It was quite interesting. I've missed out on a lot of drama it seems-I have some catching up to do :)

So I'm excited about the idea of grad school, a little less so about some of the courses. I do want to take some of the substantive courses on topics i'm interested in, but there's also a lot of methods and whatnot (i.e. math and math related things) that I am not too into, though I know I need some of that stuff and want to learn it (even though I don't want to go through the process of learning it)

the math (p)refresher course went well the first day-they gave us the easy stuff like "what are real numbers", but I suspect its gonna get a lot more intense as time goes on. Got to see a lot of the other incoming Government grad students, which was cool, and we even have our own little clique going of people interested in similar activities. for some reason I'm the ony guy in said clique; go figure. Anywho, I should get going.

Sorry for the weekend break-I moved back up to the Boston/Cambridge area (Somerville to be exact) this weekend. Still need to figure out how to get my stuff up because I plan on having it mailed, but in my usual flash of brilliant planning, didn't take into account that I will have class most of the day and won't be around to accept deliveries. Alas, we'll figure something out, eh?

So Kanye West went off-script while appearing on a hurricane relief benefit last night. Visibly shaken because of the situation and struggling through his words, he, among other things, took the media to task for portraying blacks in New Orleans as "looting" when they took food from grocery stores but said that whites had "found" food at stores. Apparently there had been a story on Yahoo and other sites with two pictures, one of white people and the other of black people, that had captions which showed this bias-Yahoo took it down and apologized, as I understand it. Kanye also admitted his own slowness to react, saying he had gone shopping before donating, but now that he is aware of the severity of the situation he was getting on the phone with his manager to figure out the maximum he could donate. Standing next to commedian Mike Myers, who was obviously surprised by Kanye's remarks, he also lamented orders given to troops to shoot to kill if necessary, and made the statement that "George Bush doesn't care about black people"-after which NBC cut to another host, commedian Chris Tucker. NBC later released a statement saying Kanye's views in no way reflected those of the network and that it would be "most unfortunate" if efforts of millions of Americans to help were "overshadowed by one person's opinion"

To many, Kanye's remarks no doubt seemed inappropriate, and to many others, NBC's reaction to them were censorship. I am kinda glad that Kanye said what he said. I don't agree that Pres. Bush doesn't care about black people, but it has been obvious that the relief effort of the federal government has been quite flawed, and the questions raised about whether the race and socioeconomic status of the victims may have influenced the response, consciously or otherwise, are valid. Calling out the looting/surviving distinction and questioning the orders concerning the use of force against the hurricane victims was also warranted. Nevertheless, I also do not nec. think that what NBC did was wrong either. While Kanye's comments were (mostly) on point in my opinion, from the standpoint of the benefit organizers, it wasn't the time or place. Their purpose was to raise money and such potentially divisive comments, even if they were true or valid, might hurt that effort, which would be bad for the victims. I guess its a dilemma-I'm glad Kanye said most of what he said, but I don't think that the venue he used to say it was the right one, but I don't know where else he would have found such a proper venue to make those statements and have them heard as widely as they were last night. I guess Kanye and NBC were both doing the right thing, as they each saw it, though that caused them to cross purposes.

News report about the stranded people in New Orleans are calling them 'refugees'-makes you think...

And lots of people, including the mainstream news media, are being extremely critical of the relief effort, or lack thereof. I was talking with a friend of mine last night about how this is not like 9/11, where the emergency caused everyone to close ranks and rally together and mute any criticism of the government or leadership. Maybe it's because there's no human enemy who might strike again and who we need to band together against, maybe because the level of suffering and the lack of relief are so stark on TV (and in the minds of all of those who may have families or friends in the area); whatever the reason, it seems like there's a much more critical, honest reporting of what's really going on and what has been done wrong.