The Berkeley Archives: Jon Yip Talks to Himself

A Systematic Commentary On My Life At Berkeley

Spring 2002

Week 15: Revised the Thesis

4-28-2002

It’s way past my bed time so I’ll make it brief. I woke up pretty late on Saturday because I stayed up until 3:30 working on Holes. Dad picked me up in the afternoon because he was driving Leslie and some girl from the ATI retreat thingy home. I ate at home, and we went to the conference that was going on at church. It was OK, some of the therapist stuff about tapes in your brain was pretty cool. I fell asleep in the beginning, probably because I am so used to doing the same thing in lectures: falling asleep in the beginning and being awake for the rest.

Today was pretty good; again, more comments on my hair. Eric (Dun) seems to like it a lot, and so does Leedah. Wayne, Tim, and Ralph are the ones giving me all the flak about it (except Ralph is joking, I think). We saw a new drama from the Mexico team called “Rag Man,” and that was good. They also did “Decision Time,” and they did a good job too. Then they did this “Shackles” thing, which had undecipherable pop girly nonsense music with a “Christian” message (though I fail to see how Spanish-speaking people are going to be paying attention to the already hard to understand lyrics when there are ten girls dancing around to some pop-ey music). We had a meeting for the Mongolia team at California Noodle House, our traditional after-church place of gathering, and mostly assigned dramas. We also did some vote about going to a smaller town and doing some ministry there, but only Shirley, Leedah, and I were against it. We are ending up not doing it. I am in “Redeemer,” “Ashton” (full cast!) and “Decision Time,” of which I am in charge.

I went home, ate some food, watched the end of Lethal Weapon 2 on TV, did Speech Day, and played some FFX. Then the family took me to Elliot’s grandfather’s house, and his parents drove us back to Berkeley. I spent the entire evening talking with Danny about interesting but random stuff while tinkering with the Visor Platinum that I bought from Troy at the conference! It is a lot of fun! I already got the KJV of the Bible from this site. Oh well, it’s late. I wasn’t even brief like I said I would be.

4-29-2002

Woke up nice and late this morning, since I knew Leon wouldn’t be working out (he still had to do his project). I ate, messed with my PDA, went to Stagecraft (which turned out to be cancelled; I didn’t even see the sign on the door and Gloria (neither Liu nor Yen) had to tap me on the arm and tell me. I used the extra time to head to Campbell and finally get that confounded schedule change petition signed.

I went back to Davidson and spent a good deal of time proofreading Nancy’s essay, the ideas of which I didn’t 100% agree with, ha ha. Well I wasn’t correcting her themes and stuff, I was only doing grammatical checks. Boy, it’s a good thing I caught a bunch of those. I wonder why I did so poorly last semester; my essays were incredibly well written (not to brag or anything. They were just INCREDIBLY well written).

We watched West Side Story in Film 108. It was a really good movie, with awesome cinematography (I bet it’s where David Fincher learned all his nifty movies from) and good music. It was also really long, and I left right after it ended so I could eat and make it to Bill Baldwin’s thing on time.

I ate with Tim, who did a ton of work over the weekend, and had a fever. I guess he couldn’t make the Bill Baldwin thing.

I went to 159 Mulford (I kind of knew the general area of the building but it was, for the most part, sheer luck that I found it... or was it divine intervention? Here’s what happened: I was walking through the area that I thought it was at, and I saw a few buildings that weren’t it because they had names that weren’t “Mulford.” There was quite a few more buildings, and I passed by one of them whose sign was too far away to read. I looked a little closer and it didn’t look very much like “Mulford” to me, so I was ALMOST about to keep looking but something made me go even closer to make sure. And sure enough, it was Mulford). The worship was really good, as IV’s team is highly skilled, and Bill Baldwin’s message was AMAZING. I’m surprised he recognized me through the froody hair-do. He was talking about prophesy (and not the “shandalay shandalay” type; HA HA HA HA I cracked up so hard at that one) and how to reach out to Jews and followers of Islam. It was quite raw (as in the fish kind of raw, as in it hasn’t been quite cooked yet) and very liable to offend people of any faith. But it was very good, and very funny, as his talks always are. His Power-Point thing was over a notebook background because WE WERE AT COLLEGE! HA HA HA HA! That guy is a total riot, I’m tellin’ ya.

I stuck around for a while, chatting with him and helping move the music equipment. I walked back to Davidson and I’ve been working on the paper ever since. I got a whole lot done, and revised the thesis so it is TOTALLY RADICAL and I think it’s AMAZING. The only trick now is getting Mrs. Fabe to think the same thing.

4-30-2002

I ate with Leon this morning. This time we got to eat a full, complete meal, because he skipped class. I then did the reading for English, went to eat with Igor and Pablo, and went to class. On the way (I was walking with Igor) I told Igor a few more riddles.

Class wasn’t exactly exciting, but fortunately I loaded up on caffeine prior to the engagement, so I stayed alert and nervous for the duration of class. We discussed the grading, and I look like I’m on a fairly good track to at least an A-.

Stagecraft again went for the full 3 hours; we spent the entire time painting identification stencils onto the chairs from Room 7. I have only 6 hours left before I finish my entire set of lab hours for the semester.

I came back, ate, and went to the last official study in small group for this semester. We tried to answer the apologetics questions that we asked last week. I was in Mariann’s group, with Ed. We talked about the Old Testament law, the slaughter of pagans, and how it all worked together with the New Covenant. Sweet! I also took their issue of Time magazine, the one with the cover story on Attack of the Clones! After reading the article (Time saw a rough cut of the film, and a copy of the script) and seeing all the good things they said, I am more hyped than ever! AAHH!!!

I “worked” on my paper’s conclusion and spent the whole night doing it because I was doing other stuff too. I spent a good deal of time chatting with Jen about A.I., which they rented and watched for April’s birthday. Eventually I finished the conclusion. That means all I have to do now is revise (a little bit; I don’t want to exert too much effort) and then get cracking on the English paper.

The funniest thing happened today! It was quite scandalous, but hilarious nonetheless. Nancy ran into room, announcing that Farnaz was wearing see through... well anyway, you could see ALL THE WAY through, or at least I was told. When I went out in the hall, she was carrying this big pillow so I couldn’t see anything. Well, Pablo wanted to get a look, but Farnaz already went into her room with her boyfriend to... anyway, Pablo, being the kind of person he is, went over with his cup of tea and knocked on the door. Many seconds later, Paul opened the door and Pablo stammered that he wanted to ask is Farnaz had any sugar. SUGAR. And the whole time, Danny, Nancy, and I were splitting our sides with laughter. This left Pablo looking like an idiotic pervert. HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!! Ahh, well, I guess you had to be there.

5-1-2002

I woke up at 11:00 today. Whoo. I had just enough time to eat and take care of a few things before going to Stagecraft. It was just some stuff, and wasn’t interesting. After class, I sat around and played SF Cave on the PDA until, before I knew it, 20 minutes had gone by. So I went kind of late, just in time for the rest of them to finish hauling some chairs around before finding out they couldn’t because a class was in session in Room 7. So we got signed out.

I went back to my room and messed around until 5:00, when I went to the decal at La Val’s to watch The Man Who Wasn’t There, a really good movie. However, the bar was so noisy, I was hard to hear anything.

The movie ended, and I went to eat dinner. Then I tried working on my next English paper, but my thesis seems really hard to write on, and I’m almost sure that I won’t be able to do five pages on it. Hmm. I’ve only written one quote from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland so far. ARGH.

To stimulate my thinking, I drew another comic and posted it outside on the door. It is the most senseless one yet, but the drawings are pretty funny.

5-2-2002

I didn’t go eat with Leon this morning because I woke up at about 9:00 and he had to go to class. Bah it’s past 3:00 right now so I’ll make it snappy.

Today was the last day of English 100 class. We watched a whole bunch of different movie versions of A Christmas Carol, and that was it. It was a good class. Now all that’s left is the paper. Argh.

It was also the last day of my lab work in the scene shop. We welded the whole time; I cut, rounded, and welded the steel to make a “J” (for “Jon”). Well, it was fun.

I ate dinner with Igor and Pablo, then went to the Lab Run show at Zellerbach. It was actually a set of 4 shows, and they were actually REALLY good, especially the first and third ones. Some great dialogue and extremely impressive acting. Yeah, so they sometimes digress into fancy, overly-abstract descriptions of feelings, but it was mostly really great. The third one talked was about this Chinese-American girl, and was a pretty good portrayal, and not too sell-outey at all.

I came back pretty late (the whole show was over 2 hours) and tried working on my paper. Pablo came in to offer suitable momentary distractions. Then Emily came in later and returned my Monkey Island CD, and we talked for a while about how things were going. I lent her my Sam and Max CD before she left. Good night, it’s so frickin’ late.

5-3-2002

Crap, I didn’t even get any of my paper done today. I woke up at 10:45 or so, went to eat, came back to my room, and discovered that the tickets for Attack of the Clones were on sale!! I (as well as Ben in Davis) spent a great deal of time trying (and often failing) to get onto the www.movietickets.com system and deciding which show to see. After much hassle, we ultimately couldn’t get on and none of bought tickets. This delaying caused me to be late for class for the first time this year... 20 minutes late for Film 108. Luckily, all I missed was some boring discussion about West Side Story. Mrs. Fabe wasn’t there, so it was led by some students. Then the reader guy had us watch Pennies from Heaven, which I was highly anticipating and disappointed by. Everything was just so thrown together and it wasn’t all that entertaining. I’m sure the scholars will tell me that it’s all part of its brilliance, but I didn’t see a damn thing in it. Steve Martin and Christopher Walken’s dancing was really neat, though.

I went back and continued to fiddle with that stupid ticket system, with no luck. I went to eat with Danny, then went to IV, where they had all the missionaries for the summer (including Elliot and I; Leon and Shirley didn’t show up) come up and say a little bit. Then they had sections of people pray for individual missionaries. It was a good meeting; I met a lot of new people this time.

At the end I talked to Crystal in a while; haven’t had a chance to converse with her for a long time. She gave a ride back to Unit 2 in her SHINY NEW (since October) Civic, and instead of writing my paper as I should have, I talked with Danny, Pablo, and Amy for a bit before Danny, Amy, and I watched Se7en. Arrghh. On an extremely UP side, however, I somehow managed to snag those tickets at last; the system must be functioning again. Woohoo!!!