Just a friendly reminder: if you still haven’t registered to vote, you should do that soon. Most state’s deadlines are approaching very quickly. The Obama campaign has set up this really useful website for anyone (yes, even those who don’t plan on voting for Obama) can easily fill out and print a voter registration form that can be mailed in at your convenience. The site also allows you to check if you are already registered, register to vote absentee, and check your polling location.

In the last 36 hours, the posts on this blog have suddenly and inexplicably begun being bombarded with comments. Over 100 junk comments were posted before I decided to finally set the blog so that only members can post. However, I currently have the ability to register as a member turned off, so for a while it will be totally impossible to comment. Once I have some time (hopefully next week, when I’m on Fall break) I’m going to try and get that working. In the meantime, you can email any comments to me at .

I know it’s a pain in the ass signing up just to write a comment, but at least this way any comments you leave won’t be lost in a sea of penis pills and lipitor.

I hate spammers.

Last night on the BBC News website I read an article about Hurricane Ike (which had yet to hit) and the evacuations were underway. Unfortunately, I can’t find the article again today, but the end of it included a snippet about how a journalist came across a man walking his dog on Galveston Island, when nearly everyone else had already evacuated. When asked why he was still there, going about his daily routine, his response was something along the lines of: “If it ain’t your time, you’re not going anywhere.” That is to say, if in his grand plan, God doesn’t want you to die yet, he’s going to stop the hurricane (which meteorologists were telling us would mean “certain death” for anyone who didn’t evacuate) from unleashing its full potential, but only on you. Even if you do believe that God has very specific plans for individual people that require them to live to a certain age, why should he do that for someone stupid enough to heed all the warnings that were being given. Where does that kind of arrogance come from?!

I wonder if he survived, or if it was his time.

“On Her Shelf” is a poem I finished on 6 May 2007.

“Regeneration” is another poem I finished on 23 April 2007.

“Bottled Up” is a poem I finished on 23 April 2007.

At the beginning of the summer, I started working with a couple of St. Olaf professors on their research project. They hired me to work on the project website and to do some photography for them. Because of this, I was lent one of the school’s Nikon D70’s. This is a huge improvement over my personal camera (a Canon PowerShot S50) and so I’ve been using it all summer for personal photography. It’s been absolutely amazing because this camera, along with the macro lens that I was also lent, allows me to do the close-up kind of photography I really love. (So far, I’ve only got around to adding the May photos to the website, but I promise more will be put up soon.)

Anyway, in an hour and a half I have to take the camera up to campus to return to the professors. Losing this camera is going to be awful — I got out my S50 earlier, and it feels like a toy. The functionality, which I used to be totally satisfied with, now feels so limited after using a DSLR for the last few months. All I know is that sometime in the near future I will need to buy a DSLR of my own, with a macro lens, so that I can continue to take pictures that I am really, truly proud of. However, being a poor college student, I have no idea when I’m going to be able to do that.

Donations to the Noel Peterson Digital Single-Lens Reflex Camera Fund are welcome.

Despite the fact that it’s summer, I’ve been getting more and more stressed out and nervous as it draws to an end. There are a few reasons for this. Firstly, once summer finishes I’ll be a senior, and that scares the shit out of me — especially because I know that afterwards I’ll have to leave everyone and everything to go to grad school. Secondly, the end of summer will mark Ana’s departure for her semester in the Middle East, and I’m going to miss her terribly for the next four months. And thirdly, the day before classes start again is the day that I take the GRE.

My philosophy about standardized tests in general (and the SAT and GRE in particular) has been that I should go into them without studying, to provide an accurate representation of my abilities as a student. Of course, this doesn’t make much sense in a society where virtually every student obsesses over these tests and tears through dozens of study guides and practice tests for years before actually taking the tests. I’m putting myself at somewhat of a disadvantage, but the idealist in me refuses to let me study for them. And that worked extremely well on the SAT. When I signed up for the GRE, I told myself I wouldn’t study for it because, being a math major, the math section won’t be too hard, and I’ve never really had a problem with vocabulary and essay-writing, so I wasn’t too worried about the other sections.

However, I’ve looked at a few random practice problems on the net, and some have very nearly made me shit myself. It seems that they pick the most obscure words the English language has to offer. Being a math major is apparently as much a curse as it is a blessing: I haven’t taken the kinds of classes that require lots of reading and, therefore, lots of exposure to obscure words. I want to start studying, but I can’t bring myself to do it during summer break.

To make everything worse, when I signed up for the GRE I thought I had made sure to take it the day before classes start, so that I wouldn’t have to think about it with a full course load also on my plate. However, I was looking at my note to myself yesterday, and noticed that the date I had written was actually the same day classes start. I wasn’t sure if I’d written this by mistake, or if I’d accidentally scheduled myself for the wrong day. I checked the ETS website and found that it costs $50 to reschedule (although the few days before classes start are now completely booked) and that if you cancel your appointment, you only get a 50% (or $70) refund. I tried to log in to the site to check the date of my exam, but the only way to do that was with a confirmation number they had failed to email me. It was too late to call their hotline, so all night and all day at work I was stressing over the decision I thought I’d have to make: do I skip four classes on the first day, or do I pay ETS a large chunk of cash to reschedule my exam to sometime during first semester?

I had to wait until work to call them, and I found out that, thankfully, I had simply written down the wrong date: my exam is actually scheduled for the day before classes. Of course, that means it’s one day closer than I’d thought, and thus one less day I can study — or put off studying.

After years of ordering what many would consider to be frou-frou drinks from Starbucks, I finally decided, while laying in bed last night, that I should really start making my own coffee. I mean, why not? I’ll save money and, hopefully, develop a greater appreciation of the different kinds of roasts.

My parents have always been instant coffee drinkers, which had kind of put me off of home-brewed coffee; the coffee I bought at Starbucks always tasted so much better. Not to mention the supermarkets in Hong Kong had fairly paltry selections of coffee grounds (although I can see that changing in the near future, due to the infiltration of Starbucks). I guess I never really felt an urge to brew any on my own.

For the last few weeks, however, I’ve been working at the St. Olaf IIT, and have had to be at work by 7.30 every morning. Since it’s summer, and since I’m living in a house with five friends, I’ve also been staying up fairly late every night, and as a result I’ve been incredibly tired every day at work. The solution? Caffeine.

This tiredness provided the impetus for me to invest in some coffee brewing materials. One of my housemates already had a coffee maker, so I bought some Starbucks House Blend grounds, as Starbucks has always been my favorite. However, I needed a tumbler to bring my coffee to work in the morning, and so I went to Caribou Coffee — there’s no Starbucks in Northfield — where I bought one of these. Their organic coffee also caught my eye, but they only had it in whole bean form, so I decided to go to Target and buy a coffee grinder.

After dinner tonight I ground up some organic beans, brewed them, and sipped them out of my new stainless steel tumbler, mixed with whole milk and sugar. My coffee snobbery has ballooned to a new level, and it’s only going to grow from here.

Congratulations, you are a witness to the first post on what is sure to become a momentous website!

I’m not sure exactly what my vision for this blog is, but it will probably end up being a combination of me posting my photographs for you to comment on, and me lamenting about the state of the environment and, indeed, the world as a whole. But who really knows? As the product of boredom at work, this site could end up simply collecting dust. We’ll see.

But for now I’m excited.