i wonder if it's common practice for other blogs to randomly change their blog names once in a short while. because i did it first and then connie did it and we both do it now to a ridiculous degree. so i'll just go rename my blog now again.

why are you going home?

anyway, i'm sorry for not blogging. remember when there was a point where i blogged every single day? i'm sure that more than enough makes for this dry season. drought, famine, blight, i find that i like potatoes, which is advantageous (i couldn't think of a better word, i'm sorry) (convenient, beneficial, i'm looking for something else but i can't think of it) because the dining hall serves so many differently prepared types of potato. french fries, mashed potatoes, baked potatoes, hash browns, potato salad -- i know i'm missing others. i also like ketchup.

i wish i had a scale so i can see how i'm on track towards my freshman 15. i should start a gym routine (not like gymnastics choreography, which "gym routine" could very well mean, but more like a "exercise habit"), beginning tomorrow. actually, i think i'll play tennis tomorrow with this girl on my floor. she's from north carolina and she calls me "DEER-eck" which is amusing. i remember dr. chen called me "da-RECK". someone called me "derk" the other day and i thought, oh no oh no oh no.

we had a calc quiz today in recitation. two problems taken from the homework. it was ridiculously easy, but i'm not complaining. in fact, let me tell you what the first problem was. we're learning parameterization of curves (like we did towards the end of calc last year) and so the problem was to convert a parameterized pair of equations into a cartesian equation. here we had
x = 4t
y = 16t^2
and it was just substitution of t = x/4 into the y-equation. i was like "this is college math??" anyway, i'm sure it'll soon get unbearably difficult and i'll be crying. sobbing into my pillow every night.

i saw grace lee at fellowship and at church. that was surprising and weird.

so evanescence has this song "going under" (apparently it's their second single) that has this really catchy minor "do ti la, do ti la, do ti la do" verse. i first heard it when off the beat (the best a cappella group at penn) performed their version at the art museum, and then i saw it again when it was used for this korean horror movie (go see the video at www.4table.com). but then i read today all these articles about evanescence being removed from the christian music market because they say that they're not and have never been a christian band and then they said some insulting and very non-christian things, and then i saw the video for "going under" (scary!) and i have lost respect for the band. even though they make catchy songs. but an interview published some time ago had a quote where the guitarist said that they wanted to spread the message that "god is love" and there were also references in their liner notes and they played in a christian tour circuit before becoming popular ... it seems that they've used the "christian band" label just for their own gain. anyway, off the beat is really good. okay.

i'm going to see howie day and switchfoot, maybe guster and duncan sheik and michelle branch.




posted: derek derek, 3:49:47 PM [*]

this blog is so desolate


but i just wanted to say - i'm going home on friday, and i'm super excited. i can't wait to eat real chinese food. and see people. :)

and on another note: work sucks.

yay for college. =)

posted: stephanie, 10:08:13 PM [*]

wow it's so new. i haven't been here since june, or april, or may.

so the week before school started i went on this orientation frosh trip, Outdoor Action, and my group went on a backpacking/canoeing trip on the Delaware River and the Water Gap. The first day was really nice cause it was sunny and cool and we didn't have to hike a lot, but then we started setting up camp and things started to suck. I got around 120 mosquito bites all over my body. I counted around 25 on the inside of one leg, and 20 on the outside, and yea just to let you know i actually did count. so while we were chowing down on our fajitas i got my first taste of the Leave No Trace protocol, which says that we have to eat any food that we drop. you actually can't taste the dirt, but you feel the sand between your teeth. so we bearbagged and brushed our teeth and put out our ghetto tarp and sleeping bags and went to sleep and woke up in the middle of the night with your feet and some bodies in puddles and our sleeping bags soaked because it had rained all night. that made us feel very happy and sprightly in the morning.

so we got up and hiked about 5.5 miles until we met up with support, who gave us a reprieve of the next 2 miles b/c it was almost dark, we were all soaked, and it was 46 degrees and really foggy. so we camped out next to a road, which was actually illegal, but we didn't care. oh yea that was also the night i troweled for the first time. we had this scoring system, VODCA, for View, Overall satisfaction, Diggability, Consistency, and Ass-wipageability. it was on a 1-5 scale for each category. i got an overall score of 13 that night b/c view and diggability sucked, although i tied for the high for the entire trip with a 20.

anyway, support picked us up the next day to take us to the canoe launch site. i have to say we weren't very hardcore b/c we used the awesome bathrooms at the launch site to freshen up, but dude, if you had 120 bug bites and your glasses couldn't stay on b/c of the oil and other crap on your face, and you had a head full of sand, wouldn't you use it too?

so it happened that the rain from the past few months had flooded the river about 6 feet, and it was going about 5 miles an hour, which is pretty darn fast. there were trees floating by, and the river banks were basically the tops of some unfortunate trees. so we paddled and went so fast that we decided on a campsite a couple miles past our original destination. nothing much happened that night, but in the morning, we found that a couple of our canoes had almost floated away because the river had risen about 5 more feet, and that there was furniture floating by our campsite. it was then that our leaders realized that we should call support to see if we should be evacuated, but we couldn't find the satellite phone, which was actually a good thing, b/c the river was now going so fast that we didnt' even have to paddle. we did pass some pretty cool rapids, but mostly, we grouped our canoes together and played mafia while drifiting down to the next day's campsite. we finished two days' worth of canoeing in one day.

so we spent a whole day just hanging out around the campsite, carving out spears, making huge fires, playing frisbee golf and mafia, and exploring the weird New Jersey woods. the next day we floated down to meet support and got picked up and went home, as in school.

so i have to give props to my OA leaders because they are the most hilarious and irreverent people in the world. taylor helped us feel comfortable with being naked and bad hygiene by farting every minute and sleeping butt-naked in his sleeping bag. adam cursed just as much as taylor farted, which was cool because with the rain 4 out of the 6 days and the constant dripping from trees and wet clothes and sleeping bags, we all needed to let some steam out. and he made this awesome fire so we could dry out our stuff, even though fires were against protocol. there is also this interesting story involving tampons, where we were trying to get a fire going, and we suggested making a tampon bomb with gasoline, but adam refused to touch the tampon, and couldn't stop cursing every time he saw it.
another story: the day that we hung out at the campsite, taylor and adam decided to try to anchor their canoe in the middle of the Delaware by tying a rock to the bearbag rope. about an hour after they left, we heard a really loud "F*CK!!!!!!!" so it turned out that they had forgotten to untangle the bearbag rope, and they had almost capsized in the middle of the river.

so that week was probably the most incredible and hilarious week i have ever experienced, and if you didn't find any of it amusing you'll have to come visit me b/c i suck at telling stories on the phone or in blogger.


posted: richard li, 11:02:22 PM [*]

mm, college. all i do is eat sleep and study. eh, tha'ts not true. i play a lot too. but my eating and sleepign definitely outweighs anything else i do=) and saturday morning? what morning? by the time i wake up, it's not mornign anymore!! hahahaha! ok. that'll have to change... =)

well i hope all is well in pa! (it seems like only you two pa people are talking.) all seems to be well in il. i know more new jersey kids here than i know in new jersey! ok not really, but that was an exaggeration and you were supposed to deduct that there are an unnatural amount of jersians here in the cornfields of illinois. i've been hyper all day. i'm going to calm myself down with some logic gates and circuitry!

see you guys at thanksgiving;)

posted: Connie Yung, 12:41:38 AM [*]

thanks derek. you're a pal. :)

i can't believe i will have been in college for a week tomorrow. (i'm talking about classes and such.) man. it's at times like these that you feel reeeeaal old.

on a lighter note, there was an intercultural center dinner thing tonight. the food was good and i ate a lot. exciting, no? ;)

everyone should take aerobics classes at least once in their life. i highly recommend stepping to dave matthews band and macy gray (or is it grey?) as well. my aerobics instructor is also my bio teacher, and she's french. she's been teaching "ae-rho-beeks" for seven years or something, and she's really peppy. she's got that bouncy aerobics step in her walk. and great arms. dang, if only we could all have arms like that..

i think i'm going into philly saturday night. how exciting! =) i'm going to chinatown and eating in some vegetarian chinese place, and then i'm going to see this play with former swarthmore folk in it. cool, man. i feel like i have a social life. :o)

speaking of emmanuel. i really like it there. dave sun drove the shuttle for my school.. i felt really cool because everyone was like, how do you know dave?! aww yeah. ;) there is this guy there (i think his name is ju-ho or something) that looks like the hulk. heehee. he was really nice, and he was wearing a pink dress shirt. it takes a lot of man to wear a pink dress shirt.

posted: stephanie, 10:26:46 PM [*]

it's still early. take things slowly.

it's actually 9:06am on wednesday morning, and today is my first day of classes. microeconomics from 10-11am, compsci from 11am-12pm, drawing i from 1-3pm. and then there's an ice cream social tonight for ecf (emmanuel christian fellowship). i've met more korean people here in one day than i have in my entire life. they're cool.

classes start today. i have no books. i was planning on using my upperclassman connection to get the ones i needed, and so far it seems econ and calc are going to be taken care of. that leaves me to go to half.com to get the compsci book. i have only one lecture for each class today through friday anyway.

i meet so many new people. before it was going like over twenty people a day, but now it's dwindled a bit. i find that i can be social if i want to -- it seems to be something i can turn on or off. i kind of wish that it were always on.

posted: derek derek, 9:19:14 AM [*]

it's the second day of classes, and i already don't feel like doing work. mm. this bodes well for the rest of the year. :P

anyhow. college is still feeling strange to me. during orientation it felt like summer camp. now i don't know what it feels like. i'm feeling kind of impatient, actually. impatient to find that one group of people that i feel completely myself with. i mean, the people here are great, and i have a super time with them, but ah. i don't know. maybe it's supposed to feel different. or maybe it's still early. yeah. it's still early. :)

how is everyone?

posted: stephanie, 8:12:53 PM [*]