Tick, Tock.

Tonight was one of those nights where you go to bed relatively early (meaning 10 or 11pm) and after a nice full sleep wake up feeling fresh and ready to start the day, glance over at the usual digits, and see 1:30am. Bust. At school this would be a good thing, time to catch up on homework, movie watching, or go invade someone's room down the hall. At home for Thanksgiving, that just means internet surfing until anyone sane will log on and talk to you.

No dice so far.

I wonder if I've ever repeated a little heading thingy title. I hope not. That would be so, not creative.

So I was having fun with google (not a pet, the search engine) and dumping in random things, trying to find interesting people in my general area of the world. I think it was "friendly ucsb" that ended up bringing me to a particular female's page. It was an excellent read, neat that there are people like that out there. I then proceeded to make a retard of myself by posting a hundred something line entry in her guestbook about how cool that was, next to all the two and three liners. I guess e-mail would have been more intelligent. Sigh.

Some people get that "don't know what say" or "frog in your throat" thing when talking to new people. My problem tends to be I talk a lot, and end up saying something that just sucks. Case in point:

Scene: Airbus from Oakland Airport to BART station, window seat next to strange looking young man.
Conversation lead in: Discussing why we're both in the area, him because he's looking at Berkeley for graduate school having just come from MIT, me because I'm bored.

M: Yeah, glad that we're on vacation now, finals week was a real pain, physics just blew me away. I'm glad that there are other people crazy enough to pursue the subject, because they're saving me a life of torture. So, what are you planning to study?
New Person: Quantum and Theoretical Physics, actually... [nervous giggle]
M: [grabs his sneaker, inserts it orally, and proceeds to choke] Ah, hehe. Well, there ya go, everyone does what they like, whatever floats your boat, blows your skirt up, that kind of thing.
[the bus door opens, and the young man hurriedly escapes]

I was reminded of this because the new girl is also a physics major, something that impresses me, even if I loathe the subject myself. Real world problems are cool when its a ball bouncing, a man running around a track, cars racing, etc. Integrating the ocean moving across a region of the sand bottom in relation to the tides causing wave formations, is not cool.

Hm. There was a strange piece of hardware sitting over here next to my father's computer. I picked it up cuz it looked fun, was able to bend back in forth. Then it broke in half. Luckily, it was because there were about twenty individual parts that were fastened together, so it was easily fixable. Remind me not to touch things like that anymore. :/