SLEONID

words of wisdom

fghtoffyrdem0ns — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 16:50:03 -0400

from my head, books, family, road signs, advertisements, the future? (not the future)

“Love may fail, but courtesy will prevail.”

take only what you need; give away the rest.

Breathe.

“Love people, make them tasty food.”

Play hard, work harder, sleep well.

Human beings, like all animals, sometimes need things.

Value truth, but also understand that truth is different for everyone.

Always say hello, ask questions. Smile at strangers, because that might change everything.

Be interested. Be interesting.

Do what you can, practice kindness, know how lucky you are to be.

Every single day is a reason to celebrate, so we tend to do exactly that. It feels like we’ve...

fghtoffyrdem0ns — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 01:03:21 -0400

Every single day is a reason to celebrate, so we tend to do exactly that. It feels like we’ve won. Our parents all picked an afternoon and taught us to ride a bike so that one day we would be where we are now. The past twenty years of my life have a been a series of lessons in the art of fruit picking, Mathematics, color coordinating, listening, saying “Thank you”, smiling at strangers, peeling oranges. They’ve taught us these things to make “a living” but I have never fully understood what it meant to make a life. But, I think you’ve won or made it or something when you are confronted with the fact that we are these entire human beings and our friends, enemies and strangers are these people with thoughtsfeelingsmemories, weirdfoodpreferences—it’s insane. It’s the reason we do things, learn things, make art, cook food, have dinner parties and it’s awesome that I’ve grown to a point in my life where I am truly grateful for what I have been given. It’s been said will be said again will never stop coming out of my mouth but I can never get over how lucky I am to be surrounded by so many people who care about things. I am so lucky that I know that I am lucky.

I think right now is an important moment in my life because I have grown up so much but I am also aware that there is still so much to learn, so many places to see, so many people to meet. I am so excited.

My apartment is the coziest. It’s been chilly and all I wanna do is drink tea, play Pokemon...

fghtoffyrdem0ns — Wed, 06 Jun 2012 00:49:59 -0400

My apartment is the coziest. It’s been chilly and all I wanna do is drink tea, play Pokemon and listen to Brand New. It’s too bad I’ll always be a 12-year-old boy.

love,

Sam

5:04 a.m.

rofleo — Tue, 15 May 2012 05:05:20 -0400

Writing in the Full House kitchen

and we're back

fghtoffyrdem0ns — Sun, 13 May 2012 23:29:33 -0400

Ten months later, Leo and I have rediscovered sleonid. After ten months, it seems like we should take stock. But like visiting an old friend, it also seems unnecessary. Things occurred, time has passed, knees scraped. So it goes.

A person is supposed to drink eight cups of water a day. Sleep eight hours. Get sufficient exercise. Eat three square meals. We’re supposed to do our homework, clean our rooms, get regular check-ups, call our mothers, listen to our elders. HOWEVER, I—like Leo—am sufficiently tired of what we’re ‘supposed’ to be doing.

Time is passing and we are so young and we think we know so much. I vote for taking advantage of this moment. Right now. It’s for making mistakes, running in circles, talking shit ‘til 3am, falling asleep in laundry right out of the dryer. It’s for spending time with people you love so much and sharing your favorite things with them. Big and small and tiny. I think that’s the point. I think I’ve got it all figured out. Today, at least.

Clearly this was not the smartest time to take five classes. I’m not in the right mindset. I’m not willing to devote myself to armchair academia—I love the feeling of being in motion far too much.

One more week. We’ll show everyone who wears the pants. Finish these exams. Then back to business.

If we were meant to do this, the sun would wait for finals to end before rising again. For a week,...

rofleo — Sun, 13 May 2012 23:03:01 -0400

If we were meant to do this, the sun would wait for finals to end before rising again. For a week, Wesleyan would sit in productive darkness, three thousand faces lit by blue MacBook screens and dim table lamps. Like robots, we’d be plugged into two or five electrical outlets at once, and with deadly efficiency we would—over and over and over again—memorize, skim, outline, highlight, write, strikeout todo-list items.

Outside, Foss Hill would be a frozen tundra, barren. Not good for music circles or acro-yoga or sledding down. Not good for people. People would stay indoors, in their rooms, at their desks. When the boldest of the bold ventured outward, they would feel the cold, change their minds, return to their rooms, get back to work.

If we were meant to do this, and we’re not, I would be actually doing work right now instead of complaining.

summer:

fghtoffyrdem0ns — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 03:40:24 -0400

_{reading summertime books and running up mountains and reaching the top and noticing the sky and playing in the rain and the smell of the drops hitting the sunbaked concrete and watching wildfires from the top of a hill and working, which makes playing so much better and being so much better and loving a lot and being care-free and free and people watching and admiring people and not planning and cooking or not cooking and good company and “the sky makes it look like it’s the end of the world” and bike rides and walking around just because and “it’s raining ash, holy shit” and three years of someone’s life and so many sunrises and welcome to adobe disneyland! and pets and pests and children and grown-ups and wanting to leave just to be in motion but wanting to stay forever and learning to dance and swimming holes and life lessons and doting and noting and drawing and so much art and growing up sometimes but being young and being and being happy, happy. happier than i have been in a very long time.}

So wonderful life is right now.

fghtoffyrdem0ns — Sun, 29 May 2011 16:30:08 -0400

“Help will always be given at Hogwarts to those who ask for it.” — Albus Dumbledore

My friends are throwing a Harry Potter party. Thus, making tonight potentially one of the best/magical of my young life. I just hope I am a Gryffindor. This is so nerdy yet awesome and therefore perfect.

LEO: This must/will happen at school. BECKHAM IS HOGWARTS. S’gon be so good!

This is the kind of summer heat that makes Chinese people want to roll up their T-shirts and expose their bellies to cool albeit sticky air.

rofleo — Mon, 23 May 2011 02:22:00 -0400

I feel your pain, Beijing.

Friggin' Freegans

rofleo — Mon, 09 May 2011 21:28:00 -0400

When I first met twenty-nine-year-old Zaac sitting in Wesleyan’s student center, I noticed he was still wearing a bike helmet, though his bike was nowhere to be seen. His shoes were makeshift—it looked as though he wrapped the bottom of Christmas socks with duct tape. On his back, he wore a bag wrapped in bungee cord. His left pant leg was patched and dangling next to it was an empty water bottle. I later found out that he had biked three hours from New Haven to Middletown, which probably explained the empty bottle. He looked rugged, self-sufficient.

But in the student center he looked weird. Despite Wesleyan’s hippie reputation, none of the students looked anything like him. People passing by wore North Face and Jansport backpacks—no bungee cords. They wore boots or shoes or sandals—all store-bought, not homemade. However, if Zaac felt uncomfortable visiting Wesleyan in his outfit, I couldn’t tell.

Although it may look like it, he didn’t forget to do his laundry that day. He isn’t homeless or uneducated. In fact, he graduated from the University of Connecticut with a degree in computer engineering. He’s not working a full-time job, but not because he can’t find one. He doesn’t want a job, just like he doesn’t want regular clothes or a car. Instead, he prefers to sew his own clothes and ride a bike. “I can spend money in the retail economy,” he said to me later, “but why bother? It’s a pricey lifestyle.”

To outsiders, Zaac might look odd, if not pretentious. The way he’s dressed suggests that he finds wearing store-bought clothes wasteful. He tells me that we have a choice between living in or out of the traditional retail economy. What’s implicit is that those of us without duct-taped socks and bungee cord backpacks live within it, whereas he lives outside of it. And he’s not alone.

Zaac is what many people call a freegan, a free vegan. The word is a bit of a misnomer, because not all freegans are vegans, though Zaac is. All freegans, however, do try to live free of money. It’s an unusual goal, but not an altogether uncommon one. In New York City alone, there are more than five hundred active freegans.

But while most freegans have a save-the-world mentality—their lifestyle is a boycott of consumerism and waste—Zaac is a freegan primarily for himself. “I don’t want to need to work at a place that’s not fulfilling,” he says. “Even if it’s comfortable, it can be a suffocating commitment.” By sustaining himself off of free things, he feels he can subvert typical income-oriented living. He instead leads wild foraging tours for money, which pays for everything he can’t avoid buying.

Trying to not spend money, as well as being creative, has led many freegans to be dubbed “dumpster divers,” a label Zaac doesn’t mind. Zaac discovered dumpstering in high school, when he and his friends decided to build a treehouse. “We went to the store to get nails,” he said, “but along the way, we found that there were so many construction sites all around, it just made more sense to get nails from there instead. They would’ve been wasted. No one was going to use them.” Dumpstering was a way for them to reuse what others threw away.

While it’s one thing to dumpster for old nails, it’s another to dumpster for food. Zaac tells me that he and his friend Steven regularly go food dumpstering at an organic shop. This Easter, he’s not surprised by the food he finds, since he has done it many times before. As he shines his flashlight around the store’s pitch-black garbage room, there are boxes and boxes of food—not mixed in trash bags—but stacked and clearly organized. If the lights were on, it would look more like a storage room.

“Here we have some Clementines,” he says in the video he’s taking of his findings. (He likes to keep track.) He points his flashlight at a stack of cardboard boxes. They look like they haven’t been touched. “How many do you think we have, Steven?”

From the dark, his friend says, “I can’t see, but these boxes are usually pretty heavy.” He lifts it and grunts. “This box is about twenty pounds, maybe more.”

Zaac shines the flashlight to the left, where there are a dozen loaves of bread, some packaged tortillas (“which is nice because they have a longer shelf life than bread, despite what the expiration date says”), sixty boxes of jelly beans, and five pounds of bagels. He shines the flashlight down; there are fifteen pounds of onions, ten containers of hummus, oranges, organic rice cakes, and gluten-free cookies. To the right, there are organic medicinal supplements (“$44 a jar”), pizza dough, cheese, more bread, organic bananas, organic pears, organic apples, papayas, and grapes.

It’s a lot of food to bring home, but my question is: what of the health hazards? A box of strawberries only lasts three to four days—and that’s if they’re refrigerated. Strawberries in a dumpster, however clean, would definitely expire by the time dumpster divers find them. That goes for any fruit or vegetable. But Zaac says that in his many years of dumpstering, he hasn’t faced that problem yet. After dumpstering, he cuts off the bad parts of produce and makes a large stew that he reheats and eats for a week.

“At least for me,” he says, “the chances of food poisoning are cut drastically because I don’t use animal products.”

Back at Wesleyan, Zaac leads forty people on a wild foraging tour paid by Wesleyan student farmers. When Zaac isn’t dumpstering, wild foraging is how he finds food. He walks between a hill and the road, stopping the group periodically to show everyone just how much food there really is to find. Where most people see a beech tree, Zaac sees a black-stemmed polypore growing in the trunk. Where most people see grass, he sees an assortment of foods, ready for cooking: pungent field garlic stalks and their tiny bulbs, chickweed which he recommends for stir-fry and soup, the bamboo-like Japanese knotweed which tastes sour underneath its thick skin. There’s also wild oregano, the heart-shaped wood sorrel, cleavers, clovers, and violets. Without walking more than a third of a mile, Zaac has dozens of foods available to him. It’s an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Every time he points something out, the group circles around him. He kneels down, pulls out a clump of plant, and passes it around. As he describes the taste, the meaning of its Latin name, and how to cook it, a sense of wonder comes over the group.

The idea is enchanting. We are seduced into imagining ourselves as freegans who don’t do anything but gather our own food. We’d drop out of college and, like hunter-gatherers, form groups and travel into forests to find meals. We’d come back home with ingredients for nettle salad, blackberry jam, and dandelion wine. We might share our food with other freegans, or perhaps go back to the bartering system. I’ll give you a pound of stinging nettles for a half a pound of morels. Between finding and trading food, there’d be no need for a nine-to-five job.

But a freegan lifestyle isn’t as easy as it looks. We’d have to learn how to identify plants, as well as how to cook. Many of us have never sewed before, so we’d have to learn to do that too. Both cooking and sewing are time consuming. Even quitting a job, which sound liberating, might force us to give up our cars, gym memberships, or air conditioning. If we don’t quit our job, would we have time to learn about what plants are edible and what plants aren’t?

One person in the group asks, “Is there an easy way to determine if a plant is edible?”

Zaac answers, “If you can’t identify it, you can’t eat it.”

Not knowing what you’re doing when foraging in the wild is dangerous. There are over a thousand documented poisonous plants growing in North America. In 2011, the age of smartphones and tablet PCs, Zaac still relies on hand drawn keys to distinguish between different plant species. He’s especially careful with mushrooms, one of the most dangerous wild edibles. Though he’s trained to recognize different species, he doesn’t experiment with a mushroom unless it’s on his key. “I use the best field guides to define the mushrooms in the Connecticut area as thoroughly as possible.”

While mushroom-related fatalities are rare, they do occur. Amanita phalloides—or the death cap—looks a lot like Volvariella volvacea, except it’s deadly. An amateur freegan wouldn’t know the difference. Many immigrants from countries without the death cap fall for the deceptive trap: its cap color and size, along with the white cup around the base of the stalk, all look like its edible counterpart. Immigrants, children, and even dogs have died from death caps in New York, California, and Oregon. There are other deadly mushrooms too. For example, the four deadly white species of mushrooms that herbalists call the Destroying Angels. In the past thirty years, seventeen people have died and thousands have been hospitalized from these and other poisonous mushrooms.

Yet despite how dangerous, time-consuming, and inconvenient wild foraging is, there’s still something attractive about the idea. Forty Wesleyan students show up this time to Zaac’s tour to learn about finding edible weeds, even though they already have comprehensive meal plans. The last two times Zaac led tours at Wesleyan, they were just as popular. Even in New York, Zaac is able to lead regular wild foraging tours; ten to thirty people show up each time he leads one.

His tours are almost suspiciously popular. That he is making profit by showing people how to live a free lifestyle is hypocritical; it begs the question of whether it’s really possible to live without money. If everyone he introduced to freeganism started making their own clothes and finding their own food, he’d have no business. It’s also ironic that he’s introducing us to the very lifestyle our ancestors gave up. It’s nothing new, it’s primitive.

Nevertheless, the freegan movement is appealing, because it offers a proven alternative. Our ancestors foraged successfully for thousands of years. However, they eventually thought it easier to settle down and grow food instead, leading to mass-scale and industrial agriculture. Freeganism solves the same problem, but in reverse. Food grown industrially is no longer easier to get, because we have to work full-time jobs to pay for it. In some ways, it has become easier and more liberating to look for food than to buy it. The allure of freeganism seems to speak to the universality of not just wanting free food, but wanting freedom, too.

So why the bike? Does Zaac enjoy biking three hours from New Haven to Wesleyan and then another three hours back? Like foraging, biking is symbolic of freedom. When he was at the University of Connecticut, he and his friends shared a car—the only time in his life he’d surrendered to owning one. At the time, he figured carpooling with four other people compensated for how wasteful it was to drive a car himself. Little did he know, his car would leave him faced with a difficult decision. When they were picking an apartment at the end of their junior year, they had to choose between one that was much closer to the school and another that was fifteen miles away, but would cost $100 less every month.

Because they had a car, they picked the cheaper apartment. Immediately, Zaac regretted it. If it weren’t for the car, he says, there’s no way he would have picked an apartment fifteen miles away. “I realized having a car is uncomfortable,” he says, “because for fifteen miles, I’m sitting in a steel box and I have to worry about traffic, the police, getting a ticket, or my car breaking down. If I was on a bike, I wouldn’t have to worry about any of that.”

After college, he made sure to find an apartment that was a mile away from his job. He got rid of his car for good and made himself a bike. “It’s been better,” he says. “But sometimes, I think even a bike is too fast. There’s a lot I’d see if I wasn’t on the road—like mushroom species yet to be discovered with a discerning eye.”

Back on the tour, Zaac—still wearing his bike helmet—rustles through the foliage behind Wesleyan’s gym.

He tells us about a phallus-shaped plant that’s currently out of season. He shows us mullein, which is good for allergies. He feeds us red clover, cherished by the Irish as a cure-all. And he tells us that mugworth is a plant that causes vivid dreams if someone smells the aroma while sleeping. He hasn’t tried it himself.

“What’s this?” asks a girl, pointing at what looks like a weed.

Zaac bends down. People circle around him, as he pulls the plant out. He pinches it in half and smells the goo with his eyes closed. “Hm…” he says. Just as we are convinced he knows everything, he tosses it. “I’m not sure. I could probably find it in a field guide.” He can’t identify it, so we don’t try it.

We follow the road and Wesleyan is up ahead. The sun is setting and the tour is ending. Though he doesn’t say it to the group, Zaac had hoped to finish much earlier. He didn’t want to bike home in the dark.

Today, Zaac lives 65 miles away from Wesleyan at the Wassaic Community Farm, on the New York side of the Connecticut border. He lives among other freegans who dumpster, forage, and grow food too. Once a year, he compiles statistics of what he finds in dumpsters to find patterns. Whenever he finds something valuable while biking, he sells it. And twice a week, he heads to south Bronx with vegetables, herbs, and mushrooms to distribute to the needy.

While Zaac enjoys his lifestyle, it’s not for everyone. Zaac doesn’t lead foraging tours to recruit freegans. Though he disagrees with how most people live, he doesn’t care which lifestyle they ultimately choose. Instead, he’s happy to lead interested people on tours to make what little money he needs. Most people can’t imagine spending three to seven hours a day biking. Zaac would travel three times faster if he drove, but he doesn’t see it as an inconvenience at all. Others would probably disagree.

It is early morning. Zaac is standing next to his bike. He takes out his video phone, one of the only modern conveniences he can’t live without, and he starts recording.

The video is shaky. The camera shows crunchy leaves and thick tree roots covering the ground around the Wassaic Community Farm. His feet are outlined against the leaves, his colorful duct-taped Christmas socks demanding attention. The camera zooms and focuses on his bike handles. They are wrapped tightly with rubber, clearly homemade. Resting on the left bike handle is a small pouch. He says in the footage, “So here’s the thing I just constructed with an eyeglass case and homemade rubber bands. I made this contraption so that I can video while bicycling.”

The video cuts off and suddenly he’s riding his bike. The camera is fastened onto his bike handle, the lens facing upwards. The footage shows a white morning sky, with tree branches and telephone lines passing quickly as he covers distance. His head is in the middle of the screen with his signature bike helmet strapped tightly. The wind makes it difficult to hear as he yells, “I’m probably riding at about thirty miles per hour at the moment!”

“Yesterday I bicycled to Middletown, Connecticut to lead a foraging tour there,” he pants, the sky above him getting brighter. “And right now,” he shouts, “I’m heading north to lead another one!”

when in doubt, look for the truth.

fghtoffyrdem0ns — Sat, 07 May 2011 13:27:20 -0400

when in doubt, look for the truth.

Work obviously is slowly taking over me and Leo’s lives.. but today is a beautiful day. The...

fghtoffyrdem0ns — Sun, 24 Apr 2011 09:26:08 -0400

Work obviously is slowly taking over me and Leo’s lives.. but today is a beautiful day. The birds are chirping, I’m awake super early and I’m spending the entirety of my day with people I love, so much.

Going to bed early. Yes yes yes yes yes.

rofleo — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 23:49:14 -0400

Going to bed early. Yes yes yes yes yes.

class ends at 10:30

fghtoffyrdem0ns — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 12:14:02 -0400

It’s cold(ish) and rainy. There’s no real pressing work.

Pants: off

Naptime: on!

I feel like I’m being judged by my thermometer. The silence before the beep lasts thirty...

rofleo — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 23:16:00 -0400

I feel like I’m being judged by my thermometer. The silence before the beep lasts thirty seconds. The thermometer taunts me for that long, enveloping me in tension as I wait for the final verdict. He likes giving me strange numbers, and he especially likes watching me take my temperature again. He knows that whatever he tells me, I’ll think: that can’t be right.

It’s bad enough—waking up in cold sweat three times a day, feeling dehydrated despite drinking cup after cup of tap water, having no appetite but nevertheless forcing food down. It’s bad enough feeling too weak to do anything but sit in bed, maybe answering a phone call or two to be told I sound sick. Yeah, I know I’m sick.

But being told by an inanimate object—a Walgreens-brand electric thermometer—that I have a temperature leaves me powerless. I can’t yell at it. 100.4°? 99.7°? 101°? Every self-diagnosis affirms that I really am as sick as I feel. When will I get better? In a couple of hours? Days? A week or two?

And of course, there’s being told my temperature has gone down: 99.1°. Sweet. Except I’m not better; I realize I don’t feel different and my temperature inevitably shoots back up the next time I check.

Perhaps my real frustration comes from this question: how did I get this fever anyway? I wish I could say I had it coming, that I haven’t been wearing enough layers or that I’ve been spending too much time with sick friends. Then at least I’d know what to watch out for later. But I still don’t know how I caught it.

Until further notice, I’m not going to class and I’m not doing work. I’m staying in bed, taking my temperature every hour or two, because I don’t know what else to do.

When in doubt (and face it, we’re always in doubt), quit coffee, call your Mom or your best...

fghtoffyrdem0ns — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 12:57:49 -0400

When in doubt (and face it, we’re always in doubt), quit coffee, call your Mom or your best friend, read some Cormac McCarthy and become convinced he is trying to express what you feel in the depths of your soul, make a list, reorganize your room, eat only fruits and vegetables, drink only water, take a little longer in the shower, paint your nails, take the paint off your nails, chew your nails, download the new Fleet Foxes album, sleep for eight full hours—and when all of the fails (and when you are working on your proposal for your 15 page research paper, it will), RUN. One mile or three, around the Connecticut countryside on a gloomy Connecticut day and realize that it’s not that bad.

AND NOW, Modern African American History! From now until forever and I will awaken tomorrow morning relieved.

Dear Leonid Liu, please feel better. Perhaps take this opportunity of being awfully sick as an excuse to breathe a little bit and sleep a lot. Please do not stress too much, drink lots of your soup, take lots of herbal remedies and feel 100% better very, very soon. Love, Sam.

McCarthy

fghtoffyrdem0ns — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 15:54:12 -0400

“He talked to her a long time and as the boy tending to the wolf could not understand what it was he said he said what was in his heart. He made her promises that he swore to keep in the making. That he would take her to the mountains where she would find others of her kind. She watched him with her yellow eyes and in them was no despair but only that same recklessness deep of loneliness that cored the world to its heart.”

Like.

First Day Back From Spring Break

rofleo — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 00:54:00 -0400

It would not feel right to sleep tonight without first recapping today. To begin with: today is the first day of the fourth quarter—it’s weighty and symbolic by default. It’s the literal beginning of the end of my first year of Wesleyan, the final stretch, as Kirby might put it. But it was more than that; everything today fell in place, and I could not hide my happiness all day long.

WARNING: The following will be extremely self-indulgent. I do not recommend reading further, as it is not meant to be interesting to anyone but myself.

I had prepared for a terrible day. The night before, I didn’t fall asleep until 5 a.m., after laying in bed for hours, giving up, reading a couple of chapters, and trying to sleep again. I envisioned myself groggy, late, or taking a mid-day nap to replenish for lost sleep. Instead, I got to Spanish on time, ate a decent breakfast of pork bone porridge, and was alert the entire class. No sleepiness, no stuttering; it was a good class full of decent conversation. At no point did I feel behind or guilty that I didn’t review over break. I actually felt confident with my Spanish grammar. There were only good things happening in that class. The same for Psychology.

In International Politics, class passed normally—Chenoweth never loses my interest, as she’s such an organized and interesting lecturer. We talked about the Cold War: why U.S. and U.S.S.R., allies in both of the World Wars, turned on each other, and why they never fought directly. As always, there were three opposing theories, which were convincing in their own way. But the class had a twist. Chenoweth pulled up on her projector a copy of my midterm essay, a model she put online for others to learn from. She even annotated the sides of my paper, pointing out how and why each section was strong. Thankfully she didn’t put my name up—which might have been embarrassing—but I now know I’m doing well in what I considered my hardest class.

Immediately afterwards, I made for the gym. There was no need to return to my room first, as I had my gym clothes on underneath. I did the five sets of five squats, at 185 lbs and resting for five minutes between sets. Needless to say, I was out of there quickly, feeling more than accomplished for having been so productive already. Going to the gym on a schoolday has always been difficult, but leaving no downtime in between class and the gym seems to work. It’s also worthy to note that I read in between sets Fierce Attachments. Reading when working out is refreshing, as it clears my mind of distractions.

To finish my streak of productivity, I went from the gym straight to the library. Having already starting my reading, it was not difficult to sit down and finish the book. I then wrote a short essay for Spanish and left for dinner. By 6 p.m., my work was practically done.

Mind you I was ecstatic at this point. No regular school day, or first day back from break, has ever been so satisfying.

But of course something better did happen, I checked my mailbox to find that I made the Dean’s List with a 94-point something GPA. I knew this already, but I didn’t know, as the letter pointed out, that it would appear on my permanent transcript. As I walked through Usdan secretly smiling at the letter in my hands, I was stopped by Kennedy Odede. He talked to Jessica, who read my SHOFCO Summer Institute application, and he told her, “Take Leo. He’s the man. He applied early and I want him there.” Who knows what will happen after my interview tomorrow, but I now know that Kennedy knows my name (an accomplishment in itself, if you know Kennedy), and that the CEO of SHOFCO has put his word in for me. “We will eat elephant meat together in Kenya,” he said as he left, “See you there, man.” What a guy.

I have left some parts of my day out, but most of it is here. Had my day only been the account written above, I would have been happy already. Needless to say, life is great.

P.S. Watching Hey Arnold! with Sam, Lauren, and Mo was definitely also a highlight.

to sleep or to work?

fghtoffyrdem0ns — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 16:19:04 -0400

if i sleep, i can work later. if i work, i can sleep later.

SECRETS ARE FUN

rofleo — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 18:36:51 -0400

Especially your own secrets.