beer, broads and brown
I greatly dislike wet trays in the dining halls. I never thought wet trays would bother me so much, but I am not a fan. There are a lot of other niggling little things that bother me about college, but wet trays seem to be on my mind right now.
Another one is how, with the wireless network you have to logon through one of those stupid web browser things, and its not a particularly effective one, so you are constantly being prompted to enter your ID and Password. Third-party mail clients also don’t work on the wireless network, so you have to check your email using webmail. According to the guy I talked to at CIS, I can’t have a WAP in my room (though I know at least two people who do, because they didn’t ask first, and probably didn’t care) because of confusion that it creates in the dorm. Well, it keeps me firmly planted at my desk when I work, at the very least, because I have to have my laptop connected via an ethernet cable, and locked to my desk, all the time. My roommate is not particularly skilled when it comes to locking the door to the room, though he is improving, and should receive some small commendation for that.
I also greatly dislike it when people turn things into tiny bites. That is, when they are eating, especially things like sandwiches, they start out making rather normal sized bites, but as they get towards the end, the bites get smaller, and it becomes very pronounced when they get to what would normally be about two bites. Suddenly, those two bites have turned into five bites, and the frequency of biting doesn’t increase, so it just takes longer to finish the food, and for absolutely no reason. I just had to get that off my chest.
Classes are going well, mostly. Seeing as I am an engineering concentrator (it’s not called a “major” at Brown), my courses are already mostly laid out for me because there are so many requirements for an engineering Sc.B. So I am taking Engin 3 (Intro to Engineering), PS10 (Intro to Public Policy), MA19 (its some kind of calculus, but I don’t know what the course name is), and CH33 (Intro to Chem). I have five problem sets that I should be working on instead of blogging, but here I am avoiding them. After all, they aren’t due until Thursday and Friday. I have nearly a week. No worries…And I’ve finished my Critical Review tallies and reviews already, so the only extracurricular stuff I need to worry about this weekend is my article for the Brown Daily Herald. I’ve never written a newspaper article before, and I have no idea how to write one. So I am going blindly into the darkness. I guess I’ll know on Monday how well it went.
As for the girls, Brown isn’t exactly known for attractive women (and evidently neither is the rest of New England), but there are a few. Of course, they are mostly inaccessible… but not all of them. For now though, I can’t really go into more detail than that. One thing I have noticed is that no one is having sex. At least, it seems like that. There are guys who are trying to get some, but by and large, no one seems to be getting any. Maybe I just need to wait a few weeks for people to get more friendly and comfortable with each other. 19% loaded.
Partying has been fairly light for me, although there are people who are partying starting Thursday nights. More common here is the Friday night, Saturday night party routine with alcohol and illicit drug consumption at varying levels. There are a lot of “organized” frat parties here. Having never gone to another school, I don’t know if this is the routine or not, but it seems really strange. Essentially a frat sponsors a party that is in a school building, like some large banquet hall or ballroom type location. I haven’t actually gone to one of these parties, but I’ve heard varying opinions on them, ranging from “awesome” to “extremely lame”. Most of what I’ve been doing invovles going to people’s rooms and playing video games, card games and watching movies. Sorry I don’t have anything exciting to report, like jumping off high bridges drunk off my ass, or something like that.
I am not sure if I ever blogged about this, but I spent a lot of time (four days) over the summer trying to pick out an alarm clock. I drove all over to different retail outlets looking for a nice alarm clock and finally settled on this nifty atomic clock with big blue digits and a digital tuner. It was exactly everything I was looking for in an alarm clock, nothing more, nothing less. And of course, when I got here, I noticed that it wasn’t working correctly. The time would change randomly and completely on its own. So the alarm would go off at 11:37 instead of 7:20. The radio tuner sometimes also blocked the time display for minutes at a time. Rather than call the manufacturer (which is always a bitch, especially for a product like an alarm clock), I just walked out to the mall to go to Bed, Bath and Beyond and bought another clock. If this thing breaks, I will be out $50 trying to get alarm clocks that work. Ick.
One other thing, a really cool little tidbit about Brown that I didn’t know. On the mezzanine floor of the Sci Li (Sciences Library) they have aeron chairs. Ok, it might not be exciting to you, but its exciting to me.
Normally I don’t do this, certainly not at the end of a post, but I’m currently listening to Mass Pike by The Get Up Kids, and maybe its just because I’m in Providence, but this song kicks ass.