The Berkeley Archives: Jon Yip Talks to Himself
A Systematic Commentary On My Life At Berkeley
Spring 2003
Week 2: Milling Around the Ghetto
1-19-2003
Went home for the weekend, on Friday, packed and stuff, watched Country Road, a good but sappy Miyazaki movie, and went to sleep. The next day we went to Sugar Bowl to snowboard. It was a pretty good day, but I was tired. We came back late for cell group and played that leg-slapping game again. Heh heh.
Today it was Friends Day. There was some skits and stuff, and I got to dress up in a fancy-pants suit and everything. Christina was my associate and we totally outclassed those Revison people. I took a bunch of pictures. Afterward some of us went to Crystal’s house and listened to Doris talk about her work and stuff in China. Then I went to go pick Les up from the Cheesecake Factory at Valley Fair since she went with the whole “girl’s lunch” thing with Angela. We went home, went to eat at this really expensive restaurant downtown for Mom’s birthday (but we had this gift certificate; I don’t know where we got it). We came home, and I packed until Wayne picked me up. He also go Leon and we came up to Berkeley, where I messed around on guitar and stuff until Wayne came back to our apartment and we organized the whole movie deal for tomorrow with Julia via AIM, and then played Texas Hold ‘Em with Leon for pushups. I got royally owned and ended up with 108 pushups to my credit, all of which I completely, though they steadily increased in weaksauce-ness.
1-20-2003
Woke up today, changed, and people came here to meet for some movie. Most people were going to watch Catch Me if You Can. We barely made it. Julia (a different Julia, not in our small group), Lisa, Jason, and I watched Adaptation instead, which was a creative movie, really odd, and not quite as good as Being John Malkovich. Anyway, we went to Baja Fresh after that, then went to our apartment to watch even MORE movies. First we watched Monsters Inc., which I found funny again, but I also realized to an even larger extent how manipulative it was. After that we watched Shaolin Soccer which was a doofy and really cool movie. Then we played that truth-or-dare-ish card game until midnight. Yup, that’s about all that happened today.
I found a couple of classes as options for my final four units. Whew.
1-21-2003
Wow, I had to get up kind of early this morning... like at 9:00. I got myself together and prepared for school; encompassed within this task was taking my contacts out. I wasn’t even standing next to the sink, and my hand was over my eye ready to catch the damn thing, but somehow the left lens bounced out of my hand I couldn’t find it. Soon I realized that it had probably gone down the sink. I looked in and I could see it floating around, but way out of reach. So after my first class (Sociology 141, which seemed sort of interesting but a lot of work; or at least too much for a class that I wanted to take for fun. It was really hot in that room by the way), I went to Ace Hardware and bought a pipe wrench for 11 bucks, then went home and tried to take the bolts off of the pipes. However, when I turned them, the joints were so crusted over with hard water deposits and the pipes were so old, rusted and weak, that they just cracked. DAMN!!! So I kind of cracked the whole thing off and went back to Ace AGAIN to buy another J-pipe, took it back, went to another class (English 150, my Mark Twain senior seminar, which seems pretty good and there’s only one assignment: a paper at the end, but also seems like a class in which I’d easily fall asleep. And it’s an especially bad place to do so because it’s a small class and everyone sits at the same table and looks at each other), and went back to the apartment and installed the pipe, which was a huge hassle because it was a tough fit and it was hard to stop the leaks. And besides all that, I didn’t even get my frickin’ contact back! It disappeared! What a a frickin’ day!
There was small group. Jason brought me some ribs from this restaurant that he, Jonny, and Ryan went to, which is supposedly the top-ranked ribs place in the nation. And they were herra good. In the end we had about 21 or so people at small group today (!), packing our apartment like a can of sardines. It was cool. Wayne and David hung around after to duke it out again on Madden, which Wayne again won.
Surprisingly, I did some reading today, on the first day of class! Pretty odd, huh? I’m fairly tired from all this charading today. Ugh. Here we go.
1-22-2003
Ugh, it just feels like a crappy week. Getting back into the whole school groove came back to me in this unholy flood of heaviness and quickly flushes out all the cool stuff that I got from the break. I have to buy books, go to Safeway, take care of my schedule, get my class pass, etc. I had to already do all this thinking and worrying and junk for the past two days and it’s tiring the herr out of me. And I have to start thinking about getting a job after I graduate, and even the GRADUATION... I have to make sure everything is in line and there aren’t any flukes that I missed... that and I’m now HALF FRICKIN’ BLIND... blargh...
I enjoy reading other people’s blogs and journals. It’s a lot of fun to see what other people are going through. What an ingenious invention. For real.
So this morning I woke up at around 9 to pick up some random phone call (she asked for Leon Young, but he was sleeping so I said he wasn’t available... she then asked if he was the Leon whose mother was like Ann Sullivan or some random white name like that... so I said no), then went to sleep again until 10. I got ready for class and left with Leon for the Anthro 153AC class that he is taking with Wendy and Elliot and a bunch of other IV people. It was kind of boring and I couldn’t hear or understand the teacher, but hopefully I’ll be able to get through it with the lecture notes and stuff.
I went back. On the way I heard someone say my name. It was Suzy from Davidson last year! She was back from Paris. Her hair was longer. I talked wither her a little bit, then she had to go to class. So I headed back to the apartment and ate a lot of food, then went to my English 176 class, which seems OK. It’s in the same room as my English 135AC class was last semester. It’s as if I never left school. Auugh.
It was raining when I came out. I went back to the apartment and hung out; Shirley came back and then Victor came with Leon. Basically we just chilled. I helped rehearse Shirley’s lines and test her memorization. That was lots of fun because I got to do voices and all that great stuff. Then they all left or something and I hung around some more. Leon came back. I ate chili. I called Stephen Liu, and that turned out to be a pretty good conversation. After a couple of minutes it seemed as if he got more into it, and enjoyed conversing. I love this whole calling deal!
I wrote a whole lot more of my story, did some reading and read a bunch of blogs and stuff. I finished all the reading! Yahoooooo!! I practiced some piano, which I haven’t done in ages.
I want to enter those contests in February. I need a song composition, a good photograph, and some good essays or stories. Hmm...
1-23-2002
Last night I went to bed before 12:30! Amazing! And what do you know, I still wake up at 9 this morning, like always. I walked to Safeway and bought a ton of food. This time I brought weight gloves so I wouldn’t hurt my hand when carrying all the bags, but I eventually took the bus back. I got a lot of stuff. YAH!!
I didn’t have class til 2:00, so I just did a bunch of random stuff until then, such as start writing a story. It was a really good story, and for some reason it all came to me quickly, as I wrote. The class later (English 150) was OK but I almost fell asleep again, until the last half hour, since I always get sleepy and then wide awake toward the end of class. After that I went to Kroeber fountain to meet with small group people for a prayer meeting, but the actual “meeting” part before praying took so long that I had to go to chorus before we had a chance to actually pray.
Chorus was OK... Marika kept us there for the entire time. Whoo, I was tired. I went back to the apartment and dropped off my heavy-arse pile of books that I got from the English seminar, then went to meet Shirley at Kroeber to go to her drama practice for the play thing at IV tomorrow. That went for a long time but it was fun because I really like to see dramas, and their practices. We came back, I called Steve Yang and Tiffany, but they didn’t answer and I left messages instead. I worked on my story some more until I finished it. I like this story a lot. I think I’ll submit it to some contests, or the New Yorker, or something like that. It involves a lot of food, because I was really hungry today; small group was fasting today.
1-24-2003
It was an early rise for me today... 9:05 or so. I went to kickboxing with Shirley. It was the first time this year, since the before the break, and I got totally owned. At the point when I started getting tired, I looked at the clock and like five minutes had passed. Plus there was HERRA people in there; we were cramped in there, knocking into each other, for real. Again, I’m one of the few males in there, and I feel strange. Anyway, after that we came back and I took a shower. My stomach started hurting (probably because of eating after fasting) and I kind of wanted to take a crap but we had no toilet paper left. Therefore, I resolved to snag a roll from campus today.
The Anthro class was, again, completely un-understandable. Leon might drop. I don’t want to be left in that doofy class myself! I hope Elliot or Wendy stays in. At the end of class, Wendy gave me a pass to the free advance screening of The Life of David Gale which was showing at Shattuck Cinemas. She and Judy were going. I went home, at two sandwiches that I heated with Shirley’s radical new sandwich maker machine thing. Ohh yeah... Then I went to the discussion for English 176 and spent 10 minutes in Barrows looking for room 104. When I got in I was looking for a seat and this girl patted the seat next to her. Shrug. Later the GSI (who seems gay, because a) he wore a tight shirt, tight jeans, and really small, shiny black shoes, b) because was really clean cut and made all these flowing, airy gestures with his hands and head, and c) his doctorate thesis thingy is about something to do with homosexuality in the Victorian age or something) told us to find email partners. So I partnered with the aforementioned girl, whose name is Crystal. The GSI guy said himself that he grades the papers very strictly; that he is a hard grader. Great.
He ended it early, so I went to a bathroom and swiped a half-empty roll of toilet paper from a bathroom (SCORE!), then I dropped my stuff of at the apartment and went to Shattuck Cinemas and met with Wendy and Judy. The movie was involving and good; the writing was OK but had some problems (later I discovered that the it was the writer’s debut) and it was kind of one sided, glorifying the cause of the death-penalty abolitionists and making Southerners out to be Bible-thumping, stupid rednecks. The movie was also very sentimental and manipulative. Guess who was there after the show??? Alan Parker (director), Laura Linney (!!!!!!) and Kevin Spacey!!!! WHOA!!! They had a really good, lengthy Q&A session with the audience. It was sooo awesome. Spacey is really funny; he cracks jokes nonstop. I think he is really a comedian at heart, even though he is also an excellent dramatic actor. I also really like Linney, she is just cool and I like all her movies. Kate Winslet, who was in the movie, wasn’t there, and I’m not a big fan of her (or wasn’t before, at least) but I really liked her in this movie. Anyway, it was cool because the director said that he was totally against the death penalty. Linney said she felt in innate feeling against it. Spacey was especially interesting because he felt the same thing against it, but at the same time acknowledged that there’s another side to it all. He said he’s never had a family member murdered, and for the families, and a lot of other people involved, the situation is quite different. Anyway, at the end he treated us all to another great Christopher Walken impression (“It’s crazy. You should all go see David Gale... ‘cause I’m not in it”).
I walked back to my apartment, at a very quick peanut butter jelly bread (not a sandwich because it was just one piece) and hurried just in time to meet small group people to greet at large group. It was a good large group meeting. The drama went well; there was a lot of stuff that they kind if threw in on the spur of the moment that wasn’t present in the practice yesterday. Pretty funny! A ton of people hung around afterward. We went to eat at the ghetto, which took up even more time, almost until 12. I ran into Emily (from Griffiths last year) and caught up with her a bit. I also briefly saw Shane from Davidson. AND I ran into Wendy, the girl who was sitting next to me in Eric’s car last semester on the way back from the beach bonfire. I don’t think she quite remembered because she just jumped up to me and introduced herself to me. I was thinking “Wendy... she looks kind of familiar but I can’t be sure because it was dark that other night...” but I asked her and it turned out to be her. Again, today, at discussion, large group, and with Emily and the Unit 1 and 3 freshmen at the ghetto, I (personally) thought I was astoundingly sociable, something that is quite unusual for me. I am getting better at this.
After much milling around the ghetto we headed to Ehrman at Unit 2, in the study hall on the first floor. We ate Julia’s snacks and played that Truth-ey card game again for a jarring amount of time. By the end we were all really sleepy, so we headed home. I have to wake up in like 4 hours to hitch the ride home with Wendy.