Sept 14
1. Went back to playing ultimate frisbee club team. I haven’t played since I resigned my freshman year because of my schedule and injure, and now I’m back. I thought it be really awkward to see some of the old teammates since I didn’t really announce my goodbyes, I just stopped showing, but the captains were super chill. One of the co-captains even remembered me from freshman year and made small talk with me.
We played lots of fun frisbee drills. One of my favorite parts of frisbee practice is always when they choose teams for scrimmages. What the captains would do is pick some arbitrary metric in which to line people up on a line, and either count off the line to split teams or, if they’re feeling particularly scientific and curious, split the line in half. I didn’t show up last practice, but apparently the metric they used was “when’s the last time you masturbated?” and had them count off. This practice, it was whether you were an ass person or a tits person. I won’t tell you which side I ended up in, but the teams were split based on the metrics.
The cheers were cute, and slightly embarrassing, as each team yelled out their favorite body part while the women’s ultimate team was practicing in the opposite field. I think if you were confused enough, the cacophony of cheers might sound like “tees” and “ahhhs.” The ass team won 3-2 out of 5 scrimmage rounds of best to 3 each.
2. I proceeded to eat lunch with the SwingCore folks at Bacheeso’s down telegraph avenue. I sat next to Megan and Dizzy, and across from Isaac (or what it Matt) and Eun Sun.
3. Alice Oh came to visit Leah and I while we were doing homework at Cory Hall!
Sept 15
1. I tried Judo for the first time today. Patrick invited me to join him for Judo. I didn’t know what to expect. For one, I didn’t have a Gi suit (judo uniform). I was told to wear long pants, but I didn’t have any gym pants, so I wore the MIT pajamas my sister gave me. Patrick mentioned that these were “free trial lessons for everyone,” so I assumed that there would be similar people without proper attire. Nope, everyone was properly dressed in uniform at practice, and I was wearing my pajamas and my free grey Pinterest shirt that says “Pintern” in all caps in the font. How fitting.
The instructor was really nice to me, and had a separate black belt student teach me the basics while we warmed up. The instructor even gave me a white belt to represent that I was a beginner. The overall lesson was challenging and fun, and every though I got a few stares, most of the students were more focused on self-improvement than judging my outfit.
I learned a few holds and groundwork. Another instructor taught me how to properly fall in judo. I appreciated that they took the effort to help a beginner out. I definitely felt like I belonged to the team in my own way.
I even got to eat the instructor’s wife’s cookies in the end!
Sept 16
1. Hackers@Berkeley had their semesterly existentialist discussion, spearheaded by Sebastian Merz. After the meeting, I must say, I have tons of respect for Sebastian, especially the way he handled the conversation and discussion with lots of maturity.
2. I had a Skype call with Enyu Hsu today. Interestingly enough, her email address is a_new_shoe. I chuckled when I saw that, and she said I was the first person to realize her email address was a phonetic play on words.
Enyu and I knew each other in elementary school. She was a stellar student (probably still is), I was a class clown. Since I left Shanghai for the United States, I haven’t seen her since. Our parents are friends though, and I had a brief reunion with her family at a sit-down restaurant.
Enyu called me because she wanted to jumpstart the ACM program at UCLA and she wanted to know how to go about doing that. We spent a brief amount of time discussing that, but the majority of the conversation catching up. I love giving advice so I gave lots to her. I think she appreciated it (I hope fingers crossed). I also said I would check in in 2 weeks when school starts to see how she is doing.
Sept 17
1. I went to the career fair. I made eye-contact for too long with a company that they decided to start talking to me. We talked, and the recruiter talked about my resume. Mid conversation, she said two things. 1: that my resume is impressive, and she wants to make sure I want to work at company X. and 2: what could company X do so I would want to work there? I responded to both points in kind, and hopefully left on good terms.
2. I usually ignore emails that come from the department, but I saw an eye-catching title called “Student-Faculty Lunch” and decided to open it. It was an email containing a first-come, first-serve opportunity to have lunch with a faculty member (a professor). I immediately jumped onto the opportunity to eat lunch with professor Wagner.
And I did. In a group setting with 10 other students. It was entertaining, and enlightening, and humanizing.
3. Alice’s roommates Kelly Fang and Yei-Yong planned out a surprise birthday party for Alice, since it was her birthday today. Several of her friends pitched in for a new Nexus 5. The split cost was $15, which meant up to 24 people were willing to contribute to a gift for Alice. When we barged into her homegroup meeting with a candle-lit cake, she screamed! She was speechless the whole time.
The best part? Kelly organized a scrapbook of the contributors with all their quotes, and I WAS ON FIRST PAGE HAHAHAHAHAAH. I don’t know how they decide who gets to be on the first page, but I’m so glad I was first.
Alice receiving her gift
She told me she was speechless for the rest of the night.
4. Dickson Tsai brought frozen grapes to our CS162 group meeting. It was so good! I’m freezing all my grapes from now on.
Sept 18
1. I had lunch with Austin Liou at Saigon Express. He paid for my meal since he wanted to thank me for helping him out with his job hunt. We caught up, talked about our internship hunting experience, and other shim-shams.
2. First [M]ovement swing practice! I’m stoked!
3. Did homework with Alice at the SLC late-night
Sept 19
1. I had lunch with Sebastian at Northside cafe. I enjoyed conversing with him and talking about H@B and general life stuff.
2. I had a 2 hour interview session schedule with a company. It was schedule for 2 1-hour interview session back-to-back. I was ready to go through a grueling session. However, after my first interview session ended, my interviewer told me, “James. I know you’re a really good programmer. I don’t think we’re going to need a second interview session. We’d like to invite you to come onsite for lunch and some interviews.” That totally made my day. Soon after, I got emails from 2 other companies that said I passed their interviews too! So happy :)
3. I had dinner with Josh Lim. I helped him out with some CS career advice and general school advice. It was great to connect on how we discovered swing dance (we met through swing dance). He also realized that I knew him from our Magic Decal but didn’t remember me.
4. SwingCal was fun. We had a short lecture on swing etiquette taught by Chad, and it was by far the most entertaining lecture I’ve ever had. I learned so much and got to dance with cool people like Calvin and Renee. Arty was telling me about all the fun improv games they were going to play at the picnic on Saturday. I was planning on trying some of those out with my friends as well.
5. Board game night at Sebastian’s apartment! I played lots of Set (I won). I also was playing Ticket to Ride with several other H@B officers (Leah, Davis, Daylen, and Daniel). I started off strong. All the other players thought I was going to win. But I quickly fell behind, and they lost all confidence in me. No worries, I had tricks up in my sleeve. To throw the other players off, I told them I had trick up my sleeve. They didn’t believe me, according to my plan, since it would truly be a surprise attack. Unfortunately, I miscalculated my strategy and everything fell through. Sad. At least I didn’t end up last! I ended up in 3rd place out of 5 players, the exact average of the other players expected how I’d performed from beginning to end. At least I surprised them??
6. I decided to explore Sebastian’s awesome apartment roof. It was popping up there. I bumped into lots of my friends. I saw William Wu, Josh Nowak, Shiv Sundram, and other people. Will, Shiv, and Josh are so nice because they introduced me to all their friends and their friend group. Eventually H@B officers started to wander up to the roof, and there was lots of mingling amongst tenants and guests.
Alice Oh came by after Leah suggested that I invite her. She talked to some H@B officers. We all sat down with Rita, Dylan, Caleb Kim, and Sebastian. Caleb and Dylan had a game set up called “Black Magic.” The game goes like this: Caleb turns his back away from the audience, and the audience picks an object for Caleb to guess. When Caleb turns back around, Dylan asks a series of question in the form of “Is the object ___?”. “Is it this plate right here?” Caleb would close his eyes, enter a brief trance, and then respond with either “no. black magic says this is not the object” or “Yes, yes this is the object.” We knew they were giving some signal to each other when they asked, but we couldn’t figure out what!
7. I volunteered Alice Oh for a Truth or Dare. She was dared to tell the tenants on the opposite side of the roof that their music sucked. She hesitated so long that the entire group felt bad and said “it’s okay you can come back, you don’t have to do it.” But Alice felt so pressure that she did not come back. She loitered around the group of people lounging around the speaker. This went on for what I perceived was a lifetime such that I decided to take on the responsibility for the dare.
I approached a blonde man wearing a Hawaiian shirt. He had double piercings and looked a bit blushed from the alcohol, and had a stare just spaced out enough that a normal, non-dared person would not confront. “Hey man, I don’t like your music. Can you play something more poppy?” He broke his gaze and looked at me, then he smiled, almost apologetically. He said “Yeah man totally.” He mumbled something about how he doesn’t even like dupstep. He eagerly asked me what I would like to listen to, like a DJ at 10 year old birthday party. I thought for a second, and said, “I’m really digging Ke$ha these days, can you play her music?” Immediately he started looking it up on Soundcloud and Youtube, and couldn’t find anything. We eventually settled on Katy Perry, and I thanked him for playing “such an banging song.” “For sure man, and you know, I like rocking to any kind of music that doesn’t suck. Anything.” I told him I appreciated it and gave him a fist bump.
8. I was walking home at 3 AM after a wild night of board games and catching up with people. I was jamming to the song I was playing on my iPhone when I approached a group of 3 hooligans next to a car. Man, did they catch me jamming to my music? That would be so embarrassing. I decided to sneak a glance just long enough to determine whether it really happened, but that glance was just long enough.
One of the guys stepped towards me, not enough to block my path, but definitely enough to believe maybe the next step would be more aggressive. He said to me, “He man, do you want some pizza?” Before I knew it a shadow from behind me emerged, and the short, dark-skinned guy produced an extra-large pizza out of nowhere.
He opened the box, and inside was a pizza half-eaten, but mainly intact. I polite declined, suspecting that maybe stranger pizza isn’t the best idea, but they insisted. So I thought that maybe they would let me go if I took a slice.
I don’t think they were bad people. I made some small talk to find out where they were from:
Me: “Oh where’d you get the pizza from?”
The guy (misheard): “Oh we’re exchange students from Brazil. He, he’s Pedro. He’s studying English at Berkeley. Me, I’m studying English here too.”
The small talk was enough to convince me that these people were probably just drunk nice people, and so I bid goodbye and left.
It’s hard to hold a pizza and not eat it, so I looked around my surround and planned what I would do if I ate pizza and started feeling sleepy. My apartment was around 300 yards away, maybe I could make a dash for it once I felt the effects. Maybe if I felt sleepy I should go to the center of the road so someone notices me. I was planning my hypothetical escape route, and while I was planning, I was eating the pizza they gave me, almost mindlessly.
I saw that a person walking in front had stopped. He looked ragged from the back. Grey hoodie, blue jeans, and kind walked in a stupor. Maybe he’s an attacker too. I slowly creeped towards him until I could either anticipate the knife jab or let go of all tension. I saw that he himself was eating a slice of pizza. Here’s how our conversation went:
Me: Oh did you get that pizza from the strangers too?
Him: Excuse me?
Me: Where did you get that slice of pizza? Were there three guys carrying around a large pizza giving them away?
Him: Oh yeah, yeah I got it from them.
Me: Oh cool cool. The reason why I asked is that I was afraid that these pizzas were drugged, and that we would be kidnapped or something. Knowing that we both ate drugged pizzas means we’re on the same boat together.
Him (thinking, then): No I don’t worry about it. If I were the attacker, I would only offer my pizza to girls and then take advantage of them.
Me: What if our attackers swing the other way? I don’t want to be butt-raped.
Him (laughing): Hahaha, I don’t think that the case.
Our paths were diverging now, and I bid a last farewell, “Well, if they do drug us both, I hope they take you first so I get a chance to escape.” He laughed, and went on his own way.
Sept 20
1. [M]ovement bootcamp! Every semester bootcamp starts out with an icebreaker. This semester’s game is a partner game. I paired up with this exchange student from Singapore who calls herself by her initials, J.R.. She had a slight accent and appeared a bit timid, but nonetheless friendly. I told her we’d be good partners.
The game works a bit like musical chairs. Each partner forms a circle with other contestants. The circle is suppose to continually rotate in opposite directions until the host calls out a command, in which you and your partner are suppose to perform some type of action. The partner who is last to perform the action is out.
There is one move called the “terminator,” in which one partner is suppose to lie on the ground and act like he/she is getting shot, and the other partner is suppose to keep shooting at the person lying on the ground. Another one is called “water under a bridge,” in which one person lies down like a stream of water, and the other bridges into a bridge over their partner. There were several more moves but…
There’s a particular one called “Lover’s Leap,” in which one partner carries the other partner, like a lover carrying the other. As a joke, I told JR that she would be the one carrying me. I thought my subcommunication was so obvious that I couldn’t expect a girl to carry me, but I don’t think my message got through. During the game, when the host called “Lover’s Leap,” JR and I rushed towards each other. I was just about to squat down to start lifting her up, when she was already in the position, yelling “hop on hop on!” Without thinking, I hopped on her arms as she carried all 145 pounds of my weight in her arms.
Everyone who did the carrying was a male. The only ones who didn’t were female-female partners. And here JR and I stood (JR standing), with her trying to carry me, me clinging around her neck, like a monkey desperately holding onto a tree.
The hosts couldn’t tell who was the last partner to perform the action, so she waited for the first partner to drop their lover. Immediately as I hopped on, JR knew she couldn’t hold me for much longer. She didn’t want to drop me, but she couldn’t hold onto me for much longer, so she slowly descended as she held onto me. Slowly and painfully (I saw that her face was red and straining), she descended until she was on the ground, and she rolled me out like a carpet. I just kept laughing the whole time. We were out that round.
2. I got a haircut! I look super derpy now. I’m still trying to perfect the art of not using too much shampoo for my first shower after my haircut. I always overshoot
3. I went to Eat Real festival with Alice Oh, Caleb Wang, and Alvin Chou. Caleb is actually one of my TA’s for my Operating Systems class. I apologized to Caleb for not paying attention in class. He said not to worry about it.
Eat real was fun! We ate lots of food. We went to this one barbecue place where they had pork sliders that came with a corn on the cob. Alice couldn’t finish her corn, so she carried it with her the whole time. At first, I wanted to eat the corn, so I asked her if she’s going to finish her corn. She would come up with some excuse, “oh I’m really full right now” or “I want to drink water first.” But she never ate it! I always prodded her as to why she never ate it. I even told her, “oh look, it’s that barbecue place again, you should ask the guy if he could heat up your corn again.” She eventually transferred her piece of corn into a water cup, and brought it home.
We also bumped into some cool people. We saw Eric Zhang and Michelle Bu along with Peter Gao and Vedant Kumar. Eric looks really fit now, and his clear glasses makes him look hipster. Michelle still looks the same, but I remember digging her shirt. We also kept seeing Dylan, Vivian, and Linda at the festival, frequently bumping into them throughout our visit.
Our group was really thristy. We didn’t want the beer or lemonade they sold at the festival, but couldn’t find any venues that sold water. When we bumped into Dylan, we asked him if any place sold water. He said, “Yeah, there’s a water bar behind the building.” I couldn’t tell if he was serious. I imagined a vendor called “The Water Bar” that charged marked up prices for cups of water. It sounded so ludicrous I thought he was joking. But lo and behold, there was a makeshift table connected to a water fountain called “The Water Bar.” Free water too. We were all happy.
4. After the festival, our group went to Shooting Star Cafe. Alice and I were going to bet on whether Shooting Star was Hong Kong cuisine or Taiwanese. I stated that the terms were that the loser would have to pay for the other person’s meal. She hesitated because 1. I was going to order more food than her and 2. she knew there was a possibility that it was Taiwanese. However, because she agreed to the terms, I found out from the back of the menu that it was Hong Kong, and said we never made a deal.
Everyone was full, and no one could finish the waffles Alice and Caleb ordered. I jokingly told her that we could shove the leftovers in the water cup, where her corn still resides.
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