cheer up, emo kid

Where did you come from? ... And why are you so cool? No, not you, emo kid.

There's something nice, floating about the backroads of the Berkeley hills in a jetta in the night with nifty music, searching for aurora but finding meteors. ("If we don't see aurora I'll just describe them in vivid detail.") Even something small is an adventure.

Small moves. Sit at Café Strada, prove theorems, drink coffee on ice with brown sugar. Hack away on a renovated hacktop. Transitive closure, Lempel-Zif, yay!

Night swimming with Sara just before dinner, at the pool by loth, freedom in water. It's perfect pool weather in Berkeley; nice to be friends with Sara, too. I've been swimming twice this week but never before in this city. I guess there are always new Berkeley adventures.

* * *

Maybe I'll apply for the PhD program in Applied Science and Technology. It sounds sort of vague, but the description matches my background extraordinarily well.

the days are just packed

It's amazing how much fuller the days are when you manage to get up before noon. First Jeff and I went to Judith Butler's talk ``Indefinite detention and the politics of confinement.'' Then I wrote a simulator for nondeterministic finite automata (get it here, it's awesome!) before running into my Esperanto teacher and then heading off to another talk (``Secrets, Lies, and Empire'') by Daniel Ellsberg (of Pentagon Papers fame). Man, that guy is fascinating and damn inspiring, and he knows his stuff. (Check out his book.) Then Jackson treated Toyoko and I to dinner at the vegetarian sushi place down on Shattuck. Mmmm. Experiment at 07:30 tomorrow, eek.