The Berkeley Archives: Jon Yip Talks to Himself

A Systematic Commentary On My Life At Berkeley

Spring 2002

Week 14: It’s Not Just the Sun

4-21-2002

After I took the BART home on Saturday, we all went to eat at Fresh Choice with one of Mom’s friends. Then we went home in a rush and came late to cell group, but everyone else was late anyway.

Church was cool this morning; there was plenty of good ministry time and all that. I’m still really peeved that people are coming super late and missing everything. If 30 out of 130 people are present when the service begins, that means that ONE HUNDRED people are late. That is a sickening ratio and it irks me beyond control.

Wendy was there, and so was Ling-ling. She came back because her mom came back to San Jose, too. She got FFX but she doesn’t even have a PS2... HAHA! Hmm, also at church, I’ve gotten many mixed reviews to add to the ones I already have about my massive amounts of hair. A sampling of the various comments I’ve received...

Monique: You call that long?

Ralph: You look like Ben.

Leon: You look like Shirley.

Crystal: It’s so shaggy!

Dad: You should cut it, you look like a hippie.

Mom: It makes you look like an adult. It’s just a little too long in the back.

Tim: Get a haircut.

Stephen: Don’t cut your hair for a month.

Leedah: Don’t ever cut your hair.

Ling-ling: I like it!

Troy & Marie: I like the new do!

Glen: Your hair is so long.

Gloria: YOUR HAIR IS SO LONG.

Zeke: You look like a villain.

Me: I look kind of like Tom Cruise and Keanu Reeves.

I don’t get it. It really isn’t that long; people are just used to me having shorter hair ever since I diced it all off for the Mongolia trip.

After church, I talked to Auntie Linda a bit. Leedah dragged me with him when Auntie Mier dragged him to her car, and she gave us both these Beijing 2008 hat! Neat! Leedah convince me to go eat with him and friends at a restaurant; luckily for my wallet we went to eat with Zeke, Leon, Leedah, and John Kua at Weinerschnitzel, where we saved a bundle of dough over not going to Tung Kee. I went home, played a little smidgen of MGS2 (stopped a couple of C4 packs in those few minutes, too), ate, and went to the evening service late. Leon drove me to his house, where we looked at old pictures and listened to Tupac until Jean came home, then she drove us to Berkeley.

I decided to write a paper on Fargo or The Man Who Wasn’t There, so I wanted to rent TMWWT from Blockbuster and Danny told me I had five minutes to get to there. The clock read 10:55. I bolted out the door, all the way down Durant to the store and got there SECONDS before 11:00. That has to be some kind of record. Anyhoo, they had no more copies of TMWWT, so I rented Fargo instead. I need to be writing a paper, but of course, I am not.

4-22-2002

Oh, did I not mention that Leon called Julie the other day, while Jean was driving us? WE GOT THE PLACE. Now all we have to do is go through all the paperwork and junk. YES.

OK, so this morning I called Leon, but he went to sleep at 4:00 last night, so we didn’t work out. We ate together later, and then I went to class, got that form signed by the instructor AND La Shana, but that wasn’t enough. I have to get it signed by all these other people as well.

Today, New Way Sales called Danny regarding the X-Men arcade. It still hasn’t shipped, those incompetent Canadian banks. The freight company does not take credit card, and if we mail a check, the machine won’t even come until finals, at which time it will be useless. NWS wasn’t a bit of help, so finally, after all these weeks of arduous labor, Danny just asked to have his money refunded. So we don’t get the arcade. Oh well, that’s the way the cookie crumbles.

I went to see Meet Me In St. Louis at the PFA for the Film 108 screening. It wasn’t that good; I just don’t like seeing rich, spoiled white people singing and dancing any more. Everyone Says I Love You is an exception, because it was kind of fun (actually, REALLY fun). I left right way after it ended to avoid the bombarding rain of shit that would fall from those old perverts.

I ate at the DC but the food wasn’t too noteworthy; in fact it was rather bad. My stomach felt queer after I ate the stuff. Anyway, Judy asked me to accompany her to the Durant food court because she didn’t eat earlier (because she is sick) so I did. Then I watched Fargo with Danny, and was further amazed by the depth and ingenious of the script. My mind flooded with ideas, I went straight to work for that second paper I have to write for the decal, and pretty much wrote straight until it was past my bedtime (2:00). I wish I could remember more of what happened during the day.

2-23-2002

I ate this morning with Leon, came back to worked on my English 100 assignments, ate with Meti, Jason, and Shane, and then went to class. After that I went to the Stagecraft lab, where we again went for the full 3 hours, building that steel pipe container thing from the pieces of plywood that we cut last time. We got to use the pneumatic staple gun (lots o’ fun) and when we finished, the sucker was as solid as a rock. Kevin and I left our mark on the back of it with silly pictures, so that someday, years from now, some Drama 60 student will be hauling around steel pipes and he/she will find a small piece of history scrawled on the back of the cart thing.

I ate dinner with Judy and a bunch of her friends (I can only remember one name, right now: Vanessa. But they were all girls, I can tell you that...!). I came back to the room, and I talked with Danny to some extent about trusts and stuff before I scooted off to small group. It was a pretty good meeting, and afterward I stayed for two hours playing Monopoly with James, Tim, and Rosie. Eventually, following a fierce fight on any account, James cleaned us out with all his houses and hotels on the purple and orange properties. I came back to Davidson to find Danny and Pablo watching Gattaca downstairs in the rec room. I watched the rest of it, then finished my decal paper up. Everything’s all set and ready to go for tomorrow. Except in the morning I am going to help Leon staple flyers all over campus. I shall arm myself with a stapler.

4-24-2002

You know what summer is? I used to think it was just the hot sun, and no school, and the uncomfortable hot nights. It didn’t have that much appeal to me. But since I’ve come to Berkeley, it has taken on a whole new meaning for me. It’s not just the sun. It’s the shorts and the t-shirts, the walking around town at night, the going to your friends house for a whole day and not worrying about homework that’s due tomorrow, the wind blowing through the open windows at night, the big fans that don’t really help that much, the afternoons in the movie theatre, the atmosphere of light-heartedness. Nothing could be better. And it’s all so close, and yet so far away! But the day shall come soon.

Anyway (the mist begins to clear from my eyes), I had to wake up at 7:30 this morning (you read that right, SEVEN THIRTY. I am NOT LYING) to go post flyers with Leon. No one met us at the Sproul fountain even though they were supposed to. So Leon and I started at Sproul Plaza and made our way through Dwinelle, Wheeler, Haas, LeConte, Campbell, Kroeber, Morrison, and a freaking ton of other buildings, the names of which I can’t recall (I can tell you that I’ve never been in most of those buildings at all until today), posting those flyers left and right (they posters are for Bill Baldwin’s talk this coming Monday). My estimate last night was satisfying accurate; each of us burned through about 200 flyers in an hour. I went back at around 10:15 or so, ate, and did some unmemorable (oh, I drew part of a new picture) stuff. Then I went to class, which I fell asleep in a few times. I stayed for the lab, which again went on for the full 3 hours. In today’s lab I did a tremendously difficult job;, first I cut a bunch of 1x4's with the radial arm saw, and then I had to climb into the compartments of the cart that we built over the last couple of weeks and glue and screw the 1x4's into the corners to brace them. Sounds easy, but it was made extremely difficult by the compartments being rather small, the particle board being rather hard (the screws refused to go in without a scuffle or two or three) and the cordless drills constantly running low on batteries. When we finished, I was sweaty, dirty, sore, and grimy. My hours are almost completed.

I dropped off my backpack at Davidson and went to La Val’s for the decal. It turns out there was no class last week after all, but that is only a deduction based on the fact that we watched O Brother Where Art Thou. The screenwriting is amazing, how they integrate all this complicated vocabulary.

I ate, finished my drawing and got an a silly debate on why Danny shouldn’t tape the picture of his head that HE drew over the picture that I drew. Eventually he went to make nice photocopies of the picture with his picture taped over, and we posted that on the door. I actually got a good chunk of my Film 108 final paper done, most of the introductory paragraph. It’s getting late. My head was hurting a heck of a lot this evening since I got less than five hours of sleep last night.

4-25-2002

Ugh... unusually for a Thursday, I slept in this morning and didn’t eat breakfast with Leon. I slept pretty late, actually; there was just enough time for me to read one of the assigned readings before running off to English 100. At the Stagecraft lab, Brian spent the whole time teaching us to cut and weld steel. It was kind of hard but a lot of fun (though I can understand how it wouldn’t be if you had to do it for hours on end), wearing the big clunky helmets and zapping the metal. Megan (not how it’s spelled) made a bunch of good cookies and gave us some.

I returned Fargo to Blockbuster, did stuff in my room, ate, did more stuff, played some guitar, wrote some of my paper, and all that usual stuff. I just hope this will all end soon.

4-26-2002

I went to work out this morning for about half an hour until I started feeling queasy. Must be because I haven’t done it for so long. But it was a good amount of time anyway, since I usually work out for an hour with Leon (which means double the time). I ate and all that stuff, then decided to skip Film 108 because I really didn’t feel like going (and also because of an anonymous encouragement that I received). Instead, I worked a little bit on my final paper for the course while idling around doing other stuff. I found a Yamaha P200 on Ebay with a Buy-it-Now price of $1,200! That is a freakin’ STEAL! Now all I have to do is convince Mom and Dad before someone beats me to it...

I also went to the post office to mail the Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon DVD to the dude who won my auction on Ebay.

I ate dinner and went to Interpraise at First Presbyterian Church, on Channing. The music was pretty good, the worship leader played the keyboard like a master and the electric and acoustic guitarists were also excellent. The speaker guy had some good stuff to say, but as I did last Interpraise, I fell asleep many times. I don’t know why; it wasn’t really that boring compared to many lectures I’ve had, but I just can’t stay awake during Interpraise (then again, I’ve fallen asleep in many a lecture, too). Maybe it’s because there is too much energy exertion in worship. No, that’s not the reason.

Afterwards we all ate a lot of junk food and communed with people. I talked with Huaiming, whom I haven’t seen since the last time (which happens to be the ONLY time) we had PSP this semester. She is planning another one on May 9^th. Sounds good. All these guys were jumping on each other (similar to the “Donkey” game we played in Mongolia) trying to pile up as many guys as possible before everything crashed to the ground.

I walked back with Leon, and wrote a very nice chunk of my paper. Now I will write a little of this Holes screenplay.