Lavender Walls

Home Sweet Home

I'm home!

My flight arrived somewhere between 7:10 pm - 7:30 pm. My parents, paternal grandmother and sisters came to pick me up at the airport tonight and it felt very wonderful to see my family again after all these months. After we left the airport, we all drove to the Old Flamingo Chinese Restaurant to have dinner. We went to hang out at my grandmother's place for a while before we came home. As usual, Lucky became excited and came propelling towards me as I have not been home for months now. He usually does that whenever we make a long disappearance from his life. =)

I'll write more and provide a recap of the last few days tomorrow. I am feeling too weary at the moment to form coherent and elegant sentences. By the way, I ended up writing 28 pages. I got my term paper back yesterday and I ended up getting 85%, which is an A. The only problem she found with mine was that she felt there were some parts where I could have developed my ideas a bit more and I appeared to have rushed a bit in the end. Overall, she wrote that it was a good paper. But then, I was already writing 8 pages beyond the maximum and that may explain why I felt I needed to rush a little towards the end and why I didn't develop some of my ideas more. If I did, I would've ended up writing more than 30 pages.

The Twenty Page Terror

It is another late night and I am working on the last term paper of my university career. I am nearing halfway through so if you were to measure the level of my relief in percentages, I would say I am currently close to 50% relieved of this burden. I have honestly never written anything this long in my life. If you are a grad student and you're reading this, please don't tell me that this is nothing compared to the number of pages you have to write for your thesis. I don't want to hear it. I am still an undergraduate student and I am new at writing a 19-20 page essay. It is the first time I have ever written anything this long and I am terrified.

And I thought 15 page papers were long.

I guess we can all blame the university for making all of its students take at least 6 units of fourth-year courses in their majors in order to graduate. But then, it is good preparation for grad school, is it not?

The following is a poor attempt at poking fun at my current, miserable situation (Oh! The misery! The agony!):

Fantasy

The 19-20 page has been transformed into a giant youma (Sailormoon fans will know what I'm talking about) and is sucking the energy out of me in its attempt to sabotage my dreams of producing a masterpiece.

Reality

Cat is staring listlessly at her laptop mindlessly typing words on her word processor while being fueled by sugar products and Mr. Noodles chicken flavoured ramen. Mmm. Ramen. The ever handy and reliable ramen. The staple of every university student's late night meals.

The paper will submit to my whims and I in return will submit the paper to Dr. Jay on Monday at 2 pm. Did I mention the final deadline is on Monday at 2 pm? =)

Why won't I just finish it during the weekend instead of torturing myself with another all-nighter, you say? Well, it just so happens that I have a morning exam on Monday and I do need to allocate enough time to study for it. Hence, off to the torture chamber I go. I must finish this by the end of the night.

Okay. Back to work. My internal slavedriver has just cracked his whip. =P!

I know. I'm not making any sense at all right now, aren't I?

Student Steals Laptop from Prof

Mike sent me the link to this entry a few days ago. A professor at Berkeley had his laptop stolen by a student in class who was apparently desperate for exam info.

Now, why would anyone be stupid enough to steal a laptop right under the prof's nose and in front of everybody else? Mike's guess was that the culprit probably took it at the end of class when the prof was answering questions at the end of the lecture and when the students were packing up and filing out of the classroom. No one would be able to notice something like this in such a congested environment.

After the incident, the prof made a long speech on webcast during one of his lectures. I could not help laughing when I read the speech because it honestly sounded slightly humourous to me. It sounded like an overblown scare tactic. Basically, the prof was saying that he had valuable and confidential information stored in the laptop and that the university can track him anywhere if he plugged it into any one of the outlets on campus. Moreover, if the student was caught, he/she could face some serious charges including expulsion from the university and imprisonment. The prof also stated at the end that he was the only person who could help the culprit if he/she would turn his laptop into his office by a designated time.

Oh boy. This student is in deep trouble. The doofus definitely incurred the wrath of his professor. How can a young, bright and promising individual and a Cal student at that resort to something as low-handed as this? My opinion is that the student probably didn't even bother to go to class, take notes, do the lecture readings, attend the lab sessions and probably partied or slacked off too much. I think that students are driven to desperate situations such as this when they don't take their studies seriously. Really, this is UCBerkeley we are talking about, right? Students who go there were most likely the cream of the crop in their high school classes. The valedictorians, those who scored high on the SATs, took as many AP (or IB) classes as they could and who didn't get anything short of an A while miraculously finding time to involve themselves in extra-curricular activities and/or sports. These are bright, well-rounded individuals with a promising future ahead of them. Obviously, the person must have neglected their studies to the extent that they felt they had to resort to taking a drastic measure such as this.

The prof definitely sounded like he was extremely irate, but it leaves me wondering whether he purposely exaggerated his circumstances or blew things out of proportion just to scare the kid into submission. He also gave the kid an ultimatum at the end where he demanded the return of his laptop or be subject to the ugly consequences of his crime.

If what the prof said was completely true, I certainly hope he put a security lock on his files and on the exam data.

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