Aleksandra the Great’s Exploits

It appears I have been robbed. On Monday last I had $189 in my wallet. Today when I opened it, I had $3. I spent $52, which leaves $132 unaccounted for (allowing for the change I’ve left out of the equation). I’ll be damned if I ever give money to a beggar. I suspect one of the ones I encountered took my money. Although I didn’t think I was doing anything stupid, apparently I’m a very foolish girl. Well, never again. I’ve got some more lamenting to do now.

Edit: And please, no comments about how losing money isn’t the worst thing in the world.  I’m quite aware of that, but probably only my roommate, who had her wallet stolen, is in a position to lecture me.

I finally got my blue belt at Seido tonight. It tied much better than I thought a stiff new belt would.

I’m feeling a bit sick. I hope it doesn’t progress to what my brother, who is now recovering from two days with a fairly high fever, had.

I discovered in the World Cultures recitation this morning that a girl who went to maybe two classes of the Speaking Freely Japanese is taking my WC as well. I think she lives in my dorm, too, but I haven’t talked to her since my first failed attempt to ask her about anime (her reason for taking those two Japanese classes). Anyway, this means I know three people in one class. Neat

Not that anyone cares, but Palladium had fish tonight. And they’re out of apple peach juice.

[Note: Those opposed to knowing anything about a game before playing it probably should not read on unless already familiar with FFX-2.]

This past weekend I started a game of Final Fantasy X-2 with my little brother. Stephen wanted me to do the Luca mission so he could see how the city was doing since X, so I obliged him and went to discover “the truth behind the music.” Most of the mission is a flashback, but, as usual, the player has to actually complete the memory. Yuna is dressed as a moogle, and at one point in the mission someone hands her balloons and says she needs to hand out ten of them to the people in the plaza in order to promote the concert.

Without Stephen there (he had already gone to bed) to point out the painfully obvious tenth person seated right next to one of the kind people who had accepted a balloon, I spent twenty minutes talking to people repeatedly in the hopes that their response would change on the fourth or maybe seventh try. No luck. The little child running around in a circle wouldn’t take two, and the grouchy engineer only said, “Do I look like someone who wants a balloon?”* So I gave up for the night, and in the morning it took Stephen about ten seconds to find the other person. He’s got younger eyes.

Anyway, one of the people who accepted a balloon did so with a comment about having to fill quotas. Yesterday, as I hurried past a Quiznos Sub sign and a man thrusting a coupon at me, I realized that I should have taken the paper from him. It wouldn’t have mattered to him if I ever looked at it; he only needed to hand out a given number of them and probably shouldn’t have gone home until he did. I don’t imagine that most solicitors on the street really care whether the coupons and ads they hand out do anything. They were just given the job of standing on the street corner in the increasingly cool New York fall handing out papers. So I’ve decided, thanks to FFX-2 that I should take whatever people eagerly present on the streets, not necessarily because I’ll actually use the coupon later, but because they just need to get rid of a certain quantity of papers.

*Not necessarily exact quotation.

A couple of years ago my parents were picking me (and probably Christina, though I can’t remember some details) up from skiing. At the base of the stairs to the parking lot was a fallen pair of goggles. Although the right thing to do would have been to turn them in to lost and found, my mother and I probably walked past, commenting apathetically about what a shame it was that someone lost his* goggles. My step-father, though, saw it as his gain, and he took the goggles. I’m not sure how he justified that to himself; my mother and I couldn’t believe he’d do such a thing. After all, those goggles belonged to someone else, and what if the person realized it and came back searching for them in vain? My mother and I, in later conversations of the found/stolen goggles, agreed that his taking them bothered us so much because either of us—especially me—could easily have been in the former owner’s position.

Last Tuesday at 2am I realized that my trusty TI 83 Plus (I never did upgrade to an 89) was not in my bag. It’s never anywhere else, and since I’d used it in my NatSci lab earlier that day, I knew it had to be either there or in someone else’s possession. There was nothing to be done at that hour, though, so I went to sleep, planning to go back to the lab to check for it before work on Wednesday. So I went back to the Silver Center the next morning and up to the lab room, but it was locked, and apparently no security guard in the building has keys to those rooms. Significantly more upset now that my plan was failing, I decided to call in late to work and wait around for the lab to open up at 9. When it did, the man with the keys—he might have been a kind of supervising TA or at least one with power, but he didn’t seem old enough to be a professor—said he hadn’t found any TI 83s. He opened a drawer and looked at the most recently lost calculators, one of which, he said, belonged to a girl and was lost just last week.

Then he went to another drawer, one filled with calculators. He picked up one, checked to make sure there was no name in it, replaced its batteries, and handed it to me, saying something along the lines of “so many people lose these calculators and never come back to claim them.” So I’ve basically adopted this orphaned calculator.

As I made my way through the park I couldn’t help thinking about possible scenarios involving kids and their lost calculators. Perhaps a student left his calculator because he was in a hurry to catch a train somewhere, and as he was rushing down the subway stairs he slipped and landed at the bottom with all of his bones broken. Naturally the kid would have to stay home in bed and wouldn’t be able to search for a missing calculator, and what if he didn’t have any friends or acquaintances who would be willing to retrieve it for him? And now I’ve gone and taken the calculator from this immobile, friendless kid. Thoughts like this kept plaguing me, so I came up with these justifications:

1. The calculator must have been there for a long time. The man who gave it to me would not give away the calculator that was lost only a week before, so mine must have been lost a while ago.
2. There is no name in it. Even if someone came back, he would never know whether the calculator he received was his or not.
3. I looked for my calculator. I was back at that building at 8am the next day. Surely if someone had looked for the calculator I now have, he would have found it.
4. My calculator now belongs to someone else. The number of calculators out there is still the same. Besides, there is a possibility that my original calculator is now in the hands of the person whose calculator I have.
5. I have almost exhausted all possible fates of my calculator. Tomorrow I will check with my other lab partner, and if the calculator is not in his possession, then I will accept that I am not likely to see it again. (Of course, if he does happen to have it, I’ll return the one from lost and found.)

I know that my reasons for accepting the calculator don’t fully negate my being a hypocrite, but what else can I do? This calculator might just have sat in the drawer until TI 83s become obsolete, never to be used again. At least with me it serves a purpose.

*The appropriate female word should follow an “or” here and in several other cases; to prevent overly-garbled sentences, I left that out.

Well, new in the sense that I haven’t recorded one in at least the last four years. I suppose it was Wednesday that I realized that breathing cold air was unpleasant, and by Thursday morning I had a terrible cough. I thought perhaps I should skip my boring ConWest recitation to sleep in the 8th floor lounge at the Kimmel Center, but I ended up just taking a brief nap there before class. I did skip karate last night though. That was more of a matter of not wanting to have to carry my knee brace home. I didn’t know then that I was actually sick.

So I got to come home early (arriving in Trenton at 9pm instead of 12am), and I stayed up till maybe 1am playing Sims 2. When I went to bed I felt very achy, and I thought to myself, I’m going to wake up with a fever. Lo and behold, I did. It could have been a lot worse, though. I remember waking up with high fevers when I was younger and not being able to lift my head or call for my mother. This morning my temperature was barely over 100; 1000 milligrams of Tylenol brought that right down.

I guess I picked the best time to be sick—when I have almost three whole periods of 24 hours at home. If I were in New York, I’d have to bundle up to go get food, and I’d probably end up going out, not realizing that I’m sick. It isn’t like a have a thermometer up there.

I know I haven’t written anything lately. It’s probably because I’d feel silly writing too much just about me, but I’ll update soon. For now, though, a bit of shameless bragging about my little brother. Unfortuantely, he did not make seminar during this round of testing. He only missed by three points because his “cognitive efficiency” wasn’t high enough above average. Oh, well. So they tested his IQ, and naturally it’s above average (but not high enough overall to satisfy the district). He’s in the top 98% for reading and the top 99% for math, but what’s even more exciting is that his math reasoning IQ is above genius level. Yay, Stevie! Heh, and his teacher had thought to keep him in the middle level math class with her to make sure that he could hear everything properly (he’s in the upper level math now, though). I completely forgot to mention here that he passed the test for his orange belt a few weeks ago. He goes to karate four times a week now. I’m so proud of him.

I don’t see Amanda nearly as often. She was in her first horse show last weekend and got second place in one event and fifth in two others. This is her in her equestrian uniform on a horse:

And I suppose Nate is surviving. The last time I talked to him was right after he downloaded Advent Children, which I still have yet to do. Anyway, that’s it. There should be an update soon.

I walked through Washington Square Park today on my way to dinner and Japanese, and as usual I was stopped by someone. This time it was a woman, probably in college, who stopped me very politely. [I haven’t decided yet whether it’s better to kindly refuse people and walk past, or to stop and listen and then refuse them (since I’m rarely interested in what they’re saying). So, I listened to her proposition.] She said she was doing a film project that required people to talk about something traumatic that had happened to them and how they got through it.

So I thought for a moment. I didn’t really want to stop and help her—possibly because it would require my being filmed, and I can’t really deal with that—but I wasn’t in a rush or anything, so I could have. Except there was one problem: I couldn’t think of anything really traumatic through which I had gone. Sure, my parents are divorced. I thought about that, but all that probably caused life to be a lot better for me than it would have been if they were still married. And anyway, it isn’t like I even knew the details. That was their trauma, not mine.

I told the girl that I couldn’t really think of anything. She tried suggesting possible, common situations that I could relate to her future audience. She asked if I had ever had boy troubles, namely if I had ever liked someone who hadn’t liked me back. Well, sure, I had, but in my mind those sorts of problems were too trivial to bother recording. I guess if she wanted commonplace, average troubles, those stories would be great, but how much of that could anyone really listen to? I know it is unfair of me to judge “boy problems” as trivial. They very well may not be for some or most people. In my experience, however, even my serious romantic difficulties do not seem so horrible in retrospect, so how could I deem them traumatic enough for her film?

I finished reading Sister Carrie yesterday. It really makes me worry about homeless people, and the sad paths that lead to their reaching that state. So, when I talked to the woman today, none of whatever I have gone through seemed so bad at all. And I know it isn’t. I thought about a woman I had seen earlier walking with her head so far down you couldn’t see her face, pushing a cart with around twenty plastic bages fixed to it. She might take offense, but I think the story of her troubles would be far greater than that of mine. I don’t think the young woman with the film project was looking for Dreiser’s sort of problems, though.

NYU has a number of alluring extracurricular programs. I went to the club fair (which took up the entire open half of the fencing salle—there are a lot of clubs here) and put my name down on far too many email lists. The first table in the fencing salle was for some socialist club of sorts. That’s pretty telling about the political nature of NYU students. There was a surprisingly large number of fraternities and sororities; their tables took up probably 15% of the salle. Since I walked up and down the rows, and since there were a lot of people, I often had to go right up to a table to find out what it was. As soon as I saw Greek letters, I backed away quickly before they tried to get me to pledge.

I signed up for some literature things, but I probably won’t be able to go. So many of their clubs meet at the same time. I gave some clubs my email address simply because their representatives had gone through a whole excited explanation of the club’s activities, and I felt bad just walking away. I got an email about the fencing club, and it was like, “If you’re good, join the varsity team. Otherwise, there are some classes you can pay for.” So probably no fencing for me this semester. I might be part of their Hiking Club. They basically just go places in New York City and walk around.

I am part of their martial arts club. It offers free Tae Kwon Do three times a week (but one is an advanced class). The opening meeting last night was fun. For the first half of an hour, the club officers were just answering questions and getting these white cards from everyone. The white cards want to know such silly things as hometown newspaper. The boys sitting next to me were wondering aloud why they wanted to know that. One said in case you get famous, another said in case you die. If you want to test, you have to buy a uniform and pay for the tests. The boy president said that kids in the club would only test about once a year, but a girl later confirmed that students who want to test can usually get two belts (yellow and green, I believe) in freshman year. They only have five belts, she said. They kept us there for almost the full hour and a half last night, despite our starting late. My muscles didn’t even hurt that much today; I haven’t decided yet if that’s good or bad. There are lots of unexperienced people, and quite a number of girls, so it’s nice and not intimidating. The only downside is that I, as a beginner, can only go two times each week, and the Friday class conflicts with another club.

NYU has these Speaking Freely classes to teach kids (and maybe teachers, too?) basic communication in various languages, and there’s of course cultural stuff thrown in. I had Japanese on Monday. I’m not sure how much Japanese I learned there because she didn’t have a set plan for teaching anything, but she did go through some basic phrases. Supposedly there will be handouts next week. The Mandarin class on Tuesday was much more organized. I really liked it, too. There were lots of handouts with pronunciation guides on them. I figured I would take Japanese and Mandarin in preparation for this (required) World Cultures course I’ll try to take next semester. There are lots of World Cultures classes, but the one I really want is on China and Japan. That’s only offered in the spring.

Greenwich Village really is a good place to live. I’m near Union Square, and it’s very nice up here. It’s about 13 blocks, give or take a few depending on the exact location, from “campus.” I like my dorm. It feels like home. And my roommates are all very nice people, though there is a small, silent, and ongoing war over the thermostat. The food is good, too. Some of the places are All You Can Eat, which means get a sandwich and other food and take the sandwich back to your dorm. Plus, every meal comes with at least one piece of fruit. I’ll really have picutres of the area, et cetera, soon.

So that’s basically what I plan to do this year with NYU that has nothing to do with actual school. It all works in to a nice schedule, for the most part, but I won’t publish that here. I’ll put something up about my classes after I actually go to all of them. Until then.

[Note: Posts won’t always be this long about very self-centered things. Just this once, I promise.]