nothing in particular happened today other than mom's been bugging me with finding a summer job (ever since i arrived newark on friday night). so...in order to please her, my aunt took me to arden hill hospital, the board of ed, and to the commons to get application forms. so i filled out 2 of them and took one of the home to fill them up. i wonder if i will get the job in the school...heh. if not clerical work, painting the walls in school would be kinda fun, too. or maybe i can ask zhuoyin's mom to see if they need someone to help out at the research lab. that would be fun too.

yee's friend has been asking me the same questions over and over for the past few days. "why did you choose to go to MSU?" "Don't you get pissed when you work your a** off and ended up in a not-so-good school while the people who worked less harder than you go into the ivy leagues? i would." "why don't you want to transfer?" "what's your gpa in college now?" "Is college hard?" questions like those... hmm... i try to explain why i chose msu over all the other good schools that i applied to. i tried to explain what college life is about. he doesn't seem to understand me, or perhaps, he is taking it from another stand of point. he wants to go to an ivy league school because he's been working so hard in high school and because he wants to show the others that hard work will pay off at the end. i do agree that hard work will pay off at the end. i wish him the best, but i reminded him that he has to be happy in a college so that he will be able to get the most out of it. maybe he's still a little young to understand it. he asked me why i did not go to harvard, yale, MIT, etc... i said, "well, i didn't apply to them in the first place, because i know that i will try to do my best no matter where i go, whether i go to harvard or msu. i love my school now. why would i want to leave it if i am totally in love with the place? i have great friends there who really care about me not because i am a good student and not because i have pretty things, but because of who i really am... a lot of people in new york don't see that side of me, but they do." i guess he's a more materialistic person than i am, which doesn't mean it is bad... we just value things differently, i suppose. i wish him the best... i wish him can get into MIT and become a successful engineer, but most of all, i wish that he will find where his dreams are and how he wants to pursue them. i wish that he'll fulfill his dreams and know that he had done something meaningful in his life...knowing that all that he's been doing are worth while, fulfilling, joyous.

i am 2/3 way done with "around the world in 80 days"...an easy read... actually pretty fun to read, and i found something interesting in side margin of the book. ;-)

"Mocha, a Yemenite port on the Red Sea, was noted for the quality of its coffee exports in the 17th centuries. A variety of coffee high in caffeine has the same name as this town. In France, the first cup of coffee was served in 1644, in the ourt of Louis XIV." p. 60. So Mr. Fogg and Passepartout passed by Mocha on the 13th of October, 1872 while in the Mongolia (the steamer). Ah, i had Mocha at the library one night during the finals week after someone recommanded me to give Mocha a try since it is a milder coffee. It tasted pretty good. =). i liked it.

so that's something l learned today. see, you can learn new things while reading at home too.