So, I’m home. Not San Diego home, but Nevada City home. San Diego was bright, sunny and warm as I drove nearly 600 miles north, and now I’m cold and bitter and we’re expecting snow tomorrow night. At least the tap water is tasty here.

Mazer came over shortly after I arrived home, and we set out in his car to repeat the inescapable theme of our home town: staving off boredom. Of course, there is nothing to do around here, so we just drove around talking. The police were nice enough to pull us over and question us when they caught us committing the crime of driving past our old middle school. The jackass reported us over the radio as “code 420,” but we weren’t high. He just needed a reason to stop us. Awesome. Small town cops rule.

We came home and watched 25th Hour, which didn’t have the tidy plot line I was craving at the time. Edward Norton, however, is still rad.

I already miss San Diego. Time to sleep in my old, cold twin bed instead of my comfy queen-size at home. Don’t even get me started on how agonizing it is to try to function on a dial-up connection.

Having two computers means I can do twice as many things at once. For instance, I’m typing up this blog entry while a list of Battlefield 1942 servers refreshes. Three cheers for productivity!

The last couple of days have been pretty uninspiring. Good thing I’ve got three weeks of vacation ahead of me, otherwise I would have kicked myself for wasting this weekend. I attended a couple of parties (Happy birthday, Paaj), watched a few movies, ate good food, tinkered at my computer, and otherwise laid around wasting time. I’ve got a slew of things I want to accomplish, but it felt good to decompress after wrapping up the past quarter’s work.

Crap, looks like I have to download a 143mb patch if I want to play 1942 online. So, 5 minutes to kill.

Here are things I might be doing for New Year’s Eve, followed by an estimate at their chances of being executed. Note that the percentages add up to 100.

Renting a house in Mexico with 5 other people, eating too much lobster, drinking too much Mexican beer and good tequila, walking drunk to the beach a lot and being an otherwise annoying tourist. 30%

Staying at Mike’s house in Capitola with a few other people, drinking a lot, walking drunk to the beach a few times, watching TV, cooking for ourselves (poorly) and playing the cliche role of “annoying college student.” 40%

Staying at Kimiko’s Uncle’s house in Mammoth and doing the same, predictable things listed above. 2%

Never leaving San Diego but making up for the lack of change in location by drinking extra hard with all my friends down here. 28%

Ha HA! The download finished!

Finally, all my finals are over. All my classes are done. And all my friends are leaving. Guess I’ll go home too. If you’re a hometown friend give me a call and I’ll promise to entertain you for a while.

So I was thinking the other night. I was thinking about this whole survival of the fittest thing, and how in the wild sick, weak animals die and don’t pass on their bad genetic data. So then I thought about how we humans can cure all sorts of diseases now and let people live full happy lives. Isn’t that going against evolution? Aren’t we going against the huge fucking rule of survival of the fittest? By saving all the lives of these “weak” people and letting them pass on their tainted DNA we are, in fact, slowing or even stopping evolution. The more people we save and let have children, the more abrupt cutoff of evolution we will create. Does this mean that when we have the technology to save every human being we will also have effectively stopped our own personal accent towards greatness in the cosmos?

Hell if I know, ask someone who’ll live that long.

Well.

Friday night (or Saturday morning, whatever), laying on my bed, typing away on my new laptop. Woo! Kimiko is busy setting up a new modblog on my desktop system, so I’m sitting happily on my wireless connection with my notebook. Mmm, notebook. It’s nice to surf during boring lectures - I stay awake that way, and I seem to glean just as much from the prattle rising from the front.

Hmm. I try to commit certain daily activities and occurrences to memory, but I can never recall them once I sit down and try to write on this damn blog. Maybe I’ll just try for today.

I got my hair cut today after roughly four months. Saw the doctor about some long-term health problems and I’m very excited that he’s decided to refer me to a specialist in La Jolla that is covered by my insurance. Maybe I can eventually work out these digestive tract problems. After that I met up with my VIS70 group and we interviewed a graduate student in the Social Sciences department for our documentary on Asian stereotypes in the US and at UCSD. She had a lot of awesome insight and basically set all our minds at ease about the disaster that our film had been up to that point. I worked for 2 hours, then Kip picked me up and we went by the University Annex Gallery to see the art collection our VIS 1 class had amassed in the cramped space. Our cool costumes were partially obscured by other shit, so we basically stomped around and traded bitter cracks on the rest of the crap that was there. We left after only 15 minutes and came home to Mario Kart and snacks. Far better than wading around waist-deep in the worst shit that art classes have to offer. Ever seen a crappy collage made from printed-out AIM away messages? Yeah, be thankful you haven’t. After the art show I was supposed to join my documentary group to do some editing, but they finished ahead of schedule and I went out with Kimiko and Kip instead. We got food at this awesome little Italian deli thing where the waitress/frumpy woman behind the counter jokingly hassled us and threatened to not give me my food for messing up the salt shaker. It was a pretty good chicken parmesan sandwich; I was pleasantly surprised that the cheese didn’t set my stomach off. I plan on visiting the deli again sometime soon.

Next week is finals week, and although I only have one exam, on Thursday, I do have crappy busy work to attend to this weekend. Bummer. That and laundry. Curse you, gods of all that requires laundering!

Out.