With my trusty roll of duct tape and some cardboard boxes, I began dumping my folders and books to be shipped back home. Packing is easy because I've been anal in my organization. My folders are color-coded. My textbooks are wrapped and meticulously labeled. All I have to do is swipe them off the shelves and into the boxes. (Oops. I swiped too hard. My yearbooks came tumbling down onto a hapless candleholder. Now there's glass all over the carpet.)
I'm not quite sure what to do with my lab notebooks though. They feel too personal to be lumped with droning textbook pages and copious (but boring) handwritten lecture notes. Perhaps I should stick them with my writing journals which will eventually end up in carryon bags.
No, I'm not leaving quite yet, but housing in its usual blunt-headed way will be shoving in transient summer boarders as soon as possible. I'll be rooming with a friend during most of the summer, particularly the AIM-addicted librarian, whom I roomed with last summer. Hopefully I won't have too many things following me around by then; her other roommate's stuff will still be sitting around waiting for their owner to come back from Europe.
But after all this packing, I had to find room to stack the boxes before shipping them out. So for the first time in three years, I actually took the liberty of moving my roommate's (the fencing roommate, not the AIM-addicted librarian) belongings. She's a lot more scatterbrained than I am--her side of the room was overflowing with blunt swords, aluminum bats, fantasy novels, comic books, plastic tubing, a fishing tackle box, a picnic basket, sheets, spare change, notebooks, bags, parts of sewing kits, etc.--and I normally am tolerant to a mess as long as it doesn't include dirty underwear. So now, after about a month or so, the room on a whole looks more manageable. (Now you may ask, where is your roommate? I don't know. I haven't seen her this past week. She's probably at her home which is 15 minutes away from Tech.)
So in the middle of this self-induced mess, my father and sister dropped by. They had just arrived from LAX a few hours before. My sister made a bee-line to my computer, intent on finally registering to her new school, the University of British Columbia, because her previous attempts had all mysteriously failed.
She finally logged on. "Should I major in Arts and Applied Science?"
I looked around me, the brown boxes stacked up against the wall, a testament to four years of undergraduate work. Some of it required. Some of it detested. Most of it actually interesting. I shrugged. "Choose what you can handle. You can always change your mind later."
She looked back at the screen. "I'm no good at science," she finally told me. She clicked on Degree for Bachelor of Arts.
Other links: Parade Tentatively Set for Friday. (via Martin from L.A. Blogs) Good God. I tell you, whenever the Lakers win something, something else will go wrong. I'm going to have to warn my parents of impending traffic jams when they come for my graduation. Stalker tech. Well, you could simply leave the PDA in your room, can't you? Book taste linked to dreams. Interesting concept. But that's no surprise. If you're exposed to something long enough, it's bound to affect your unconscious. Students, for instance, will dream of equations and proofs while hard at work on their problem sets. Me? I once dreamed about an entire immunology lecture. That was scary.
