I originally typed that title with my left hand shifted one key to the right, so when I looked at the screen, it said "S plrsdsnyly..." and I thought I was typing in Czech or something.

It's the first day of classes, and things are progressing well so far. Tuesdays and Thursdays are actually my busy days, with ROTC at eight, Linguistic Structures (aka Bill's Madurese Class) at eleven, and Algorithms at 2:30. I like how spread-out these are. I get time to go home for breakfast in the morning, and a big hole in my afternoon to spend studying, writing, journalling, or whatever. Today I think I'll go visit Teo, then go to the library and get some writing done.

Bill's Madurese Class should be interesting. We're each required to pick an additional Austronesian language to learn things about, and over the semester we'll write four short papers about the structure of whichever language we choose. As it turns out, the Madurese language family came into being about 6000 years ago when people moved from southern China to Taiwan, and three of the four primary subgroups are referred to as the Formosan languages because they're only spoken as minority languages in Taiwan. I'd like to work with one of these, but Bill says that any reference grammars in the library are probably going to be in Chinese, so that kind of screws me over. Ah well.

I had forgotten one of the reasons I stopped being a science major as an undergraduate: the textbooks are so goddamn expensive. $84 for my Algorithms text. It's in hardback, because if it were a paperback it would probably collapse into a black hole underneath its own weight.

I can't believe January's almost over already. I have all of ten days to finish my FLAS application (not really a big deal, but I do have to get the rec-letter paperwork to everyone), and another fifteen beyond that to get my statement of purpose written for CS. Angst, angst: this had really better be just a formality, because I'm really 95% sure that it's only by the grace of Teo that they're even remotely looking at me. I am so not qualified for this. I wasn't qualified for my job at Compaq, either, and I pulled that off, but I mean, there are people who have gotten their BS's from this computer science department and still don't get into the MS or MCS program.

I will not stress. I will not stress. This will be a relaxing semester, especially compared to last one. I don't think anything could possibly be more stressful than last semester. ugh.

In other news, I've been working on what I think is an insanely clever story for the Polyphony 3 anthology, deadline conveniently the same day as my PhD statement of purpose. It's in 32 parts, four of which are written, 18 of the remaining of which are planned out. How do I know there'll be 32 parts? Um, well, the title is "The Gold-Bug Variations". You figure out the joke.

All right, off to go get more things done. I can hardly believe a year and a half has gone by so quickly. In less than four months, I graduate!