The coldest winter since I’ve been at Duke, when will it end? I still remember those pictures I took last march when i stayed on campus for spring break; I was wearing jean skirts and short-sleeved polos. It’s the last week of february and the temperature is still hovering at an icy 30. There are those brief hours each day when the sun has been out long enough to raise the temperature into the 40’s, and if we are lucky there’s one day out of the week that tricks me into thinking that spring has finally come. But the next day we would drop right back to the painful 20’s. Nevertheless, this rollercoaster weather might still be preferable to a steady stretch of unrelenty coldness. At least when I’m just getting sick of bundling up, I have get one day of skirts (with tights).

I had the first test in…are you ready? nine months. Yup, i counted. And it has been nine months since I took my last test. Possibly the longest stretch without tests in my life since I was 6.

Now that I’m done with the first midterm, I’m moving onto to stressing about something else. For what is life, especially life in college, at Duke, without the obligatory stress? So I’m currently stressing about housing. Yes, that perenial little game that we all have to play, though I’m finally not required to play it anymore but really it’s just that the rules have changed a bit. In any case, I have decided to stay on campus; it’s my last year of college life afterall, might as well make it last while I can. But that means I’m submitting myself to sheer luck, the whimisical lottery system employed by Duke RLHS. There’s no way to game the system, though believe me I have tried. There are 20 2-bedroom apartments, 40 2-bedroom suites, and 140+ singles on west. I have weighed the proximity to classes, laundry, eprinting stations, and everything else on west campus versus having my own kitchen, bathroom, apartment living and being close to the majority of my friends (including not living in a single, which can get lonely at times). I have officially 45 minutes  left to change my mind and switch to a single on west, but once again, I’m going to take a chance and try my luck. What’s the worst? That I’ll end up in a 1-bedroom apartment. I suppose even then, I will find a way to find a way to make everything ok, or so I keep telling myself with as much optimism as I can muster. Like many other things in life, i will never know if the other choice would have been the better one. Oh well. It’s just housing. It’s probably not worth the hours I’ve poured over this, wavering between central and west, blocking and not blocking. 

I hope all goes well.

The weather was beautiful today. The two trees outside of keohane bridge bloomed 🙂 It was just a bit too windy for tennis though; and i still fail epically at tennis (and it’s not b/c of the wind, even though that’d be a nice excuse).

Waking up for class was painful as usual, but Owen always makes it worth it in the end. 

Took a two hour nap after dinner, and now I’m super awake. Yay!

Seeing the International screening at midnight. I love free movies 🙂

Oh and I haven’t had any midterms or papers. Though the first one is coming up in a week and half >.<

Damn, that was intense. Gotta love a movie that makes me painfully aware of my own much increased heartbeat. The pace was lightening from the beginning to end. And it’s always a pleasure to see someone like Christian Bale kicking some serious ass, as unrealistically-matrix-y as hollywood ever gets. Definitely a good way to end a friday evening 🙂

The middle is always hard to defined. It’s not quite one half or the other. Kind of like 0, it’s not negative, and even if it is technically positive, you don’t really think of it as a positive number. Or the dividing line, which side are u on if you are on the line? And what happens when that line is perfect line, exactly as defined by geometry, with no breadth whatsoever. Then is it even possible to be on this line with a breadth of zero? If you can’t be on either side, or even on the line, then I guess the best you can do is just to hover somewhere in between. One moment you might be leaning more onto one side than the other, and then it flips the very next moment.

That’s a bit like how I feel in regard to my college career at the moment. Not counting the London experience, I’m more or less hovering between the first and second half of my undergraduate years (let’s not be too technical here). The first two years can be nicely summarized into “getting used to college”. By the end of sophomore year, I was quite comfortable and happy. I had recovered from the shock of first year and retrieved most of my confidence. I felt that I knew what I was doing once more and I was rather sure about what I wanted and where I was going. 

And then junior year rolled along in London and I thought I was going to be happy and everything will go as planned. But of course not. Suddenly the stuff that I wanted turns out to not be so great, and I once again find myself questioning my previous decisions and trying to decide what i really want. So I decided that I want Duke and not LSE. Selecting courses has never been as confusing and difficult as it was this semester. I’ve always been quite sure about what I wanted to take and I was always quick in selecting them, bookbagging, and registering. Maybe I didn’t have enough time, but for some reason I felt rushed. I added, dropped, and switched half a dozen classes, and in the end I was still not quite happy with all of them. 

Somewhere in this chaotic process, I realized the root of all my problems: econ electives. It was easy (relatively speaking) for the first two years because all I had to do was just plow through one econ elective after another. They were all nice sequenced and there was little (or so I thought) choice in the order or timing in which I had to take them. So I took all of them dutifully like every other econ major. But now I have choices. What’s worse than being forced to do things you don’t like is to make choice when you dislike all options, though perhaps with varying degrees. That;s when it hit me, why do I have to take these classes if they are electives? Just to get an econ major? But do I really need it? No. Not really. I can graduate with a philosophy major and an econ minor, and it would make no difference to any graduate school or employer. My parents might care, but only to the extend they think it might affect my post-graduate prospectives. But ultimately, it only matters if it matters to me. 

But I thought I was done with forcing myself to take classes that I have little interest in and only regretting it later on. And I am. I have a little more than a year left of college and I will be done with one major by the end of this semester. With my remaining time here I can either continue with the plan of an econ/philosophy double major and fill up my senior year schedule with econ electives and other classes to fulfill the graduation requirements, or I can keep taking other classes that genuinely interest me and that I won’t have a chance to take again. It’s hard to decide. On one hand, I’ve already come this far and so close to getting that econ major. But on the other hand, this is the last chance I have to fulfill my intellectual curiosity in a liberal arts education. I guess it all depends on what I will find on ACES come March…