I kind of just feel like writing.

I can't say a lot has happened. There were stories on the trip that I left out that I considered writing about. I don't remember which ones those were now, and I'm thinking, at least for now, I'm content to leave them as memories. Just good memories.

On Tuesday night, I went over to Hime's before the INN, and Minnie and Catie were over, helping cook Festivals (Jamaican dumplings). The whole while they were experiencing bouts of girl talk. A man can only take so much of it, but behold! I endured. At one point I was talking to them in the kitchen and Catie was putting the dough into the hot oil (the final step in crafting these treats). The dough slipped out of the tongs and into the oil, which splashed all over, hitting my arm in five spots. It didn't really hurt; I suspect the nerves in the bigger spots were deadened instantly. I ran the spots I could feel under cold water for about a minute. With Raynaud's, running it under longer hurts more than the burn itself. At any rate, the spots that I did hit with the water never changed color. The three spots I couldn't feel, on the other hand, turned red, scabbed, and I think will scar. I don't really care, and they never really hurt after the first night, but I still give Catie a hard time whenever it comes up -- perhaps a harder time than she deserves, but after all that girl talk, I had to take my wrath out on someone, right?

The INN was good that night, and the Jamaica trip dinner before it. I'm really starting to like Rosa, not romantically, but she's very interesting and we get along really well. I think she gets along well with just about everyone, but since I don't, I can flock to her, right? What a single person flocking looks like, I'll leave up to the reader's imagination. Anyway, we laughed a lot together about some subtle stuff that people talking didn't mean.

Lulu talked that night on a parable that's often preached. I've never heard this take on it, though, and it stuck. It's always nice to have some light shed on verses that before didn't make sense to me. Yesterday, at Casa, a thought occurred to me that since Christianity is such a vast topic, it's like a Minesweeper game. You get to a point where you have to guess, or where you can't figure it out, but in a different spot, there's still new information you can work on, and I tend to give up on those guessing spots until later and get the stuff I can figure out now. But she made a valid point that maybe God wants us to struggle with the stuff we don't get. He wants us to ask questions of him, even stupid questions. He wants us to seek, and not live on our own understanding. So, I started reading Matthew.

I was supposed to meet Jan on Thursday morning, after my first class in the Underground Coffee House. I've been here three years and have still never entered those doors. Anyway, during math I got a text from her saying she was stuck in traffic and hoping we could reschedule for 2:30, which was during my only other class that day. So then she suggested 7:00, which I could do, but wasn't all that excited about.

Programming Workshop began. We waited in 405 for the assignment to appear. Waited and waited. A guy in our group downloaded a Firefox plugin so that the page would refresh every five seconds. We made a few calls, did some information gathering bordering on stalking, as CS majors are so good at. The prof was at lunch, probably drinking a bit of wine. Around 2:20 we were getting ready to email everyone in the class arranging so that no one would do the assignment, since he was so late and we didn't want to waste our afternoon. Before anyone got around to it, though there seemed to be universal agreement within 405 (other people were in other classrooms), the assignment appeared, along with an email saying the assignment was not ready (the 't' was supposed to be a 'w'). The problem was: Some guy flips the lights on and off at 'our university,' but he does it oddly. If there are n lights, he makes n walks. In the i^th walk, he toggles every i^th light. What is the state of the last light after he's finished his walks? There's a pretty obvious O(n) algorithm. We figured the hard part about the problem was limiting RAM usage, since it looks like it's asking the state of every light, and not just the last one. Several groups seemed to think that was the case. So we wrote our algorithm pretty quickly. After fixing a fairly obvious error, we ran it and it timed out. We ran it on the largest possible input and it took about 6 seconds, which is an issue since they only gave us ten. A kid started shooting his mouth off about his O(1) algorithm, which his partner thought up. At first it didn't make sense to me, but after some thought, they eventually convinced me that the problem we were presented with is equivalent to asking: Is N a perfect square? So, I can't take the credit on it. What I can take credit on, is that our group still finished first. The group with the genius who figured out the trick was still timing out. They were using a signed integer, which I was able to point out. You're probably all drooling now in your deep, deep slumber, but I thought it was funny, a generally good feeling, teamwork.

Not a minute after we printed our code, (which was still slower than the other teams' because we were lazy about memoizing) Jan called. She expected to get my voice mail and apologized for interrupting my class, which of course was unnecessary. It turns out she'd had a pretty bad day, unlucky really. Her car broke down, and then she got a parking ticket, even though a cop told her she wouldn't sitting in that spot so long as she had it moved before 5pm. She said she'd called AAA and that they would get there in about 15 minutes, but if we wanted to talk, I could meet her outside Mathes. I made the ten minute walk with two hours to spare. She and I talked and talked. About a half hour in, a girl who went on both the Detroit trip and the Jamaica trip with me (Jan had gone to Detroit too), Nynaeve, joined us, and we talked in the car and waited for AAA for a very long time. She called a good three times, each time being assured the guy was on the way and that if he didn't get there in the next 15 minutes, the person on the other end would personally call her back, which of course never happened. The guy did eventually get there. Personally, I'm glad he was so late. It was good to catch up with my old friend.

Friday night was both Joe and Susan's birthday, both on our trip. While in Jamaica I was telling someone, I don't remember who now, that there was about an 85% chance that two people on the trip had the same birthday. Turns out there were at least two sets of people with the same birthday. Anyway, Joe was having a party that I really wanted to go to, but I had CCF and then Sabbath. It was a hard decision, but I felt dedicated to both of the events I attended. I'm really glad I did, too, though I'm sure his party would have been fun. CCF had been moved from Artzen to Hillcrest for the week, because we couldn't reserve the room, and I'd forgotten, so after walking back to my room, without expectations, I asked if Gaul would loan me his car. To my grateful surprise, he handed me his keys. Cars are hard things to loan out, so I was very appreciative. I drove to Hillcrest, and got there about ten minutes late. I sat down next to Bernard (as aliased by Swood). It was a good service. The talk was on how Daniel refused to eat ceremonially unclean foods while Babylon was attempting to brainwash him, and how through that, God performed a miracle (that is, kept him healthy on vegetables and water alone, and actually stronger than the other people), and finally how it set him (and his companions) apart in the eyes of the Babylonian leaders. I'm not sure I got anything new out of it, but maybe I did, and maybe some years down the road, I'll remember that night at some dire moment and bifurcation will come to fruition.

From Hillcrest, I went to FPC. It turned out that Sabbath started at 10, not 9, so I drove back to my apartment and made a few calls to people I could think of that might be going and wanting a ride. No one I called did. I wish I had remembered that Marvel wanted a ride, but I still don't remember him saying he needed one on Tuesday (Hime told me I should have given him one a couple nights ago). But, what's done is done. Sabbaths are always so good. Just good. They're relaxing and restful and healing and real and Godly and good. That night's theme was healing, whether physical, emotional, spiritual, or any other -al. They had the SST team sit in front after the first couple songs and people could go up and be prayed for. Dee and Lulu (both of whom went to Jamaica and heard my testimony, which was really what I was and still am going through) were paired together, so I asked them to pray for me. Since then I am starting to see some of what they prayed for. Bo (which I came up with from "Black Ops") was there with a few people, and before the service I sat in front of him, alone. When Dee sat down in the pew across the aisle, I got up and sat with her, then she went up front to pray. A little later, Bo and all but one of his friends left, and his friend ended up standing next to me. He introduced himself, which was a relief, because I felt like God wanted me to introduce myself and I'm not usually very good at that, but I was working up the courage. We talked for a little bit, about how he knew Bo, and such. When he went up for prayer, I saw a female friend of mine, Jackie, whom I wanted to talk to, so I went and sat by her. We've not talked a whole lot, but we trust each other I think. It turns out she and I are in just about the exact same spot spiritually and emotionally. It wasn't encouraging that she was stuck where I was, but it was because suddenly I had another person who really understood me in this point in life. After talking for a little while, I said, "This probably sounds weird, but I really feel like God wants me to go sit by that kid," referring to Bo's friend, so I got up and left. I don't know what good it did, but maybe he and I will hang out, or maybe that I was sitting next to him was significant to him. I don't know. I'm just glad I heard God speak to me, something tangible, and that I obeyed.

From there, I talked with people after the service, and then went to Applebee's with 18 other people. I don't think the employees there were all too pleased with us, but they were kind. I talked to Poppy a bit and got to meet a girl on our trip's boyfriend. He seemed really cool. Incidentally, we're both black.

On Saturday, I had several plans. The first was to wake up at 7:30 and get to FPC for the local service project by 8:30. That didn't happen so much, as I slept in until 12:30. I also planned on starting and finishing my compiler for ATL0, which was replaced with a more attractive plan of finishing up season 4 of the West Wing. Then, the plan I did complete, was to buy Club Soda, walk to Hime's, and go to a mocktail party held by a few of the girls on our trip. Our group does spend a lot of time together. I enjoy it, but I feel like I'm starting to neglect some of my other friends, which is not okay. The party was a lot of fun, though I kept being "encouraged" to dance, and dancing is not my thing. Honestly, if I had gone out on the dance floor and made a fool of myself (which is what a lot of people call their own dancing), I would have ticked every single time I thought of that night, and it just wasn't worth it. (That is why I enjoy ballroom dancing; I can know what I'm doing and at least stifle the fool.) The drinks were delicious and the gowns were beautiful. Four stuck out to me, but I'm too lazy to think up aliases for now.

Sunday came and went much the same as Saturday. I began season 5. We had Casa, and because it was nice out, we were finally able to go to a park to talk. It got pretty cold by the end but it was worth it. Even if I don't particularly enjoy nature that often, there's something about talking about the ways we see God while being outside, next to the ocean, surrounded by grass, trees, and mountains. Donna said something that stuck with me, particularly because I've been watching the West Wing lately. She said she was in a poly-sci class where they kept up with certain international current events. In Kenya there were some massacres, just absolutely terrible deaths. Reporters asked a lot of the families of the people who were murdered, "Aren't you angry?" and they replied, "Yes, but God teaches us to forgive." That answer was a common one, not the exception. What stuck was the thought that, here we are, politicizing everything, making big issues out of who gets what, when, and how, making sure we're the most advanced, and have the world's greatest society, making us the most free nation. But what matters is what the Kenyans said. It's so simple. "God teaches us to forgive." We need compassion. We need selflessness. We need to let go of so many things.

I was thinking on the way back from class today. There's a general movement in the church lately (or so I've noticed) that what God demands of us is two things: Love God, and love people. That makes it pretty simple, and sort of implies the rest are details. Loving people can be as simple or as complex as you want it, I think. Christianity is a big topic. A lot of times I think we want to simplify it down to those two principles, and make it easy to understand. I think those principles are important. They are the core of our faith. But I think we might be trying to make it too small. I understand when people feel overwhelmed feeling that they're not doing enough, being "good enough" Christians. I understand that you can calm them, and should calm them, by reminding them that God loved us first, while we were still sinners, and that God loves us now no matter what. And I understand that's easiest to do if you remind them that they are being Christians if they're loving God and loving people, and since the first is rather broad, and the latter can be simple or complex, anyone can feel better, and that's a good thing. But I think too often we over-simplify it. At some point, we have to ask ourselves, what's it mean to love God. Mostly, loving God goes back to loving people, but Jesus says, "If you love me, you will obey what I command." Again, most of what Jesus commands is that we love other people, particularly the poor and the weak, and the hungry. But there are other things he commands, especially since he and the Father are one, and we have quite a few commands from the Father. I don't know. I don't like when we try to reduce Christianity to smaller than it is.

From Casa, we went to Joe's house. He had invited a few people from Detroit or Jamaica or both over for dinner. It turned out I was the only one from Detroit, besides himself, to show up. We had a good dinner, a good talk. We went over highs and lows for the day, and then how we saw God work this past week, much like team time in Jamaica. The food was the best meal I've had in months. We left around 10:30. Minnie had a 5-page paper to write (she thought she was 3 pages in, but it turns out one page was the Works Cited and another was the title page), and I had my ATL0 compiler to write. When I got home, I finally decided to drop the class. Some things I just get irrationally stressed about, and if I can just not do them, I'm a much happier, more well-focused person.

Today, after databases, I walked to Old Main and did the deed. I still don't feel that much less stressed because I haven't yet told the professor, and I doubt he checks his roster daily, particularly this far into the quarter. I'll tell him tomorrow, I suppose.

At 1:00, I met with Bill, like I did last Wednesday, only this time we had more than a half hour to talk. He's a guy I can really relate to in a lot of areas, and really open up with, sort of like my corefas were the last two years. I definitely intend to keep meeting with him each week. I think it's quite beneficial, definitely to me, and I hope to him, considering the meetings were his idea.

I still have yet to do any real work on Senior Project. I'm still waiting for Tonics to get us that server, and she's not been online lately. Tomorrow I'll have to do some work on my own, and set up a server on my desktop for testing. I have the basic outline of what is going into each table and how they'll be organized. Reedy used to be a database architect and so I want this to be well organized enough to withstand his scrutinizing eye. Databases and data structures are just things that come naturally to me, and when someone presents an idea that isn't as "good" as mine, I have a hard time accepting it, and rarely am I wrong in the long run. I don't know how it works, I just have good intuition. I don't have that with other areas of computer science (like algorithms, as was proved last Thursday). But I hope my intuition is good enough for Reedy in a couple days.

On a completely different note, I'm finding everything Hime says about me to be true, which is really irritating. I have this erroneous, sub-conscious assumption that I can make a girl like me, even though I've proved it untrue time and time again, and yet I'm compelled to try. The few good relationships I've had with girls, I didn't have to try for. They just sort of happened. In fact, at least one, I tried not to have. (The "at least" is because there were a couple I half-assedly tried to not have, on top of the one I have in mind.) I wish I were instinctively more patient in that area. I wish I didn't try so hard for a girl and end up pushing her away. I don't know that I have with this particular girl yet -- I don't even know if she knows I like her, but it wouldn't at all surprise me -- but I think I'm getting there. Everything I try to do to impress ends up backfiring. I don't think things through, and I ignore advice that seems off to me, because we all know how much of a better judge on this kind of thing I am than other people, particularly Hime. Anyway, to whom it may concern, I'm frustrated with myself.

For those of you who don't use "bifurcation" in every day language -- I know I always have, but some of you are lamer than I -- it's the branching of something into two parts, partitioning. I learned the word in differential equations last week. In mathy speak, it's where you have a value in a differential equation, and at that value, there's one behavior. Change that value even the slightest, and you get a completely different behavior of the graph. That's what really interests me in life: the little tweaks that completely change the way the world is run.