holy crap!

I won the guitar hero tournament! I think what made the whole ordeal the most endearing was the number of people who came to support me. I love you guys! So now I have a Wii and it only cost me the 20 bucks to enter. Expletive! Expletive! Dang. I'm still on cloud 9. Played Wii Sports with Noah and a friend of his. Dang. I couldn't have donoe it without the supprt I knew I had from you guys. :)

trivial

I have a guitar hero tournament in a couple hours. If I don't win, then this last year will feel very wasted. If I do win, that means I can flick a little nodule very fast. So what? Sure, I'm good at it, but then I can think of a lot of other things that I could've been doing in the meantime. Bah. I think of all the things I haven't done that I should have done a long time ago, and it bums me out. I feel very... lagging behind everyone. You hone your skills for countless hours and for what, that brief moment of personal satisfaction before you realize that everything else around you is in ruins? There's that Modest Mouse song that says "If life's not beautiful without the pain well I'd just rather ever even see beauty again. As life gets longer, awful feels softer, and it feels pretty soft to me." And even if I did win, I'd still just be in the living room, playing video games on a Friday night. I'm starting to come to the conclusion that I never grew up. I still watch cartoons as if I were 10. I don't have my license. The last time I even danced with anybody was 3 years ago at junior prom. Something crucial is missing, and I have no idea what or where it is.

that blasted schedule

so I think I've got it figured out what all classes I need to graduate in 4 years. If I take 16 this upcoming fall, then 12, then 13, then 12, I'm home free. Of course, that's for just the math and ENGR degrees. I want to take other stuff, intro to quantum physics, maybe 1st semester latin or Japanese, an econ class- well, now they've got too many restrictions now :(. <-- not a pimple. I was thinking of signing up for Psych 101. I know I've heard from people named Alice that it's waste of time, that it's more efficient to just read material o your own. True, but that would bring me to 19 units, so I'd be kinda swamped as it is. But the issue is that I AM signed up for 19 units now. I signed up for 2 engineering classes that I could use as electives, and I was gonna drop the one I liked less. But one is in serious distress of being dropped for lack of enrollment (9 of 35 seats- not too good) and the other one I'm not 100% sure if it actually counts as an elective because it's hosted by another engineering department.

To be specific:

AME 460- theh low enrollment one. Mechanical vibrations. Free and forced vibrations of simple mechanical systems; effects of damping; introduction to multi degree of freedom systems.

SIE 431- the one I'm not totally sure counts. Simulation Modeling and Analysis. Discrete event simulation, model development, statistical design and analysis of simulation experiments, variance reduction, random variate generation, Monte Carlo simulation.

So I don't know. I don't have a lot of wiggle room, but I might have too much. Not sure.

the news

So, yeah. I didn't hear about what happened today until like 5PM when I got home from class. (8PM Eastern). So I was pretty spellbound when it hit me like a ton of bricks. My roommate Noah said he talked to a friend of his who goes to VT; she's fine, and they actually phone interviewed her on channel 4, but watching it on TV for a few hours left this pit in my stomach that does not want to go away. That, and seeing the new Linkin Park video for the first time this morning has brought me to one conclusion: evil is winning and, worse, most people don't care anymore. They're too caught up in the trivial to see what's important. It takes so much effort to create something beautiful, and yet so little effort to destroy it. Let's just say I wouldn't want to bring children into this world. At least, not now. It's not fair, it's not easy, but it's all we got. On the way home from school, I went on one of my mind wandering trips, telling my grandkids that the rain was actually God spitting. And they'd go "Oh, Grandpa, that's silly." I can't wait for that day, 40, 50 years from now. But with all the hype and the hate in this world I... I just don't know.

My mom was getting into this discussion a couple weeks ago with my aunt. Basically they agreed that there's no more fear in people's lives- no fear of God, in particular. Our generation is now called the "young invincibles" by insurance companies because we just think we're so awesome. I'm no activist, but this world sucks.

But, hopefully, strength, honesty, and compassion will regain their throne.

standard tuning

This is what I've been doing instead of homework. I think it's hella tight. And they're supposed to be in 8th notes and all the frets are single digit. I tried to align them as much as possible. Each - in the first 2 lines represents a rest note or whatever.

2 0-2 0-4 0 |2 0-2 0-5 0|2 0-2 0-4 0|2 0-2-0---|

- -0 - -0 -- |--0- -0-- |- -0 --0-- |-- 0----- |

- - - - - ----------------------------------

- - - - - - --------------------------------

- - - - - - - ------------------------------

-- - - --- - - ----------------------------

2 0-2 0-4 0|2 0-2 0-5 0|2 0-2 0-4 0|2-2 4-0---|

--0 --0 -- |--0- -0-- |--0 --0-- |-0------|

- - - - - ----------------------------------

- - - - - - --------------------------------

- - - - - - - ------------------------------

-- - - --- - - ----------------------------