This is the last of the photos from that morning. The first two are from the coffee shop, and the last one was a large piece of glass from a sculpture in front of one of the university buildings. Sorry about the larger image size; I was trying to show a friend of mine how clear the 85mm f/1.8 is.

Because some of you keep asking, the woman in the first shot is a barista who works at the shop.

Here are some flowers from that other morning. Enjoy.

I need to post here about all the stuff that’s happened in the last… long while. Okay, where do I start…

There was the fantastic trip to the San Francisco area to visit Joey and Monica. We went to this distillery called Hangar One for a tasting. By far my favorite was their spiced pear vodka, but they also have raspberry liqueurs and weird citrus or kaffir lime hard liquor. Monica drove Joey and me up to Sonoma where we sampled the local wines and chocolates. We even got a chance to hit up a concert, and I got to see Monica’s laboratory with the subterranean-industrial-evil-genius plasma whatsit. Very chic, I’ll have to put one of those in my underground lair someday.

I got a girlfriend. She was having lunch with a friend in this kinda hippie cafe place where I was reading a book and having some coffee. She got up, I started talking to her friend, and then wound up spending the afternoon with them at the local street fair. It turns out she went to my high school, and her older sister and I were in the band together for all 4 years. Since then I was invited to the older sister’s wedding. Fun, interesting, and yet very bizarre.

The end of the semester brought quite a bit of chaos as everyone threw parties for everyone else, and because my undirected graph of friends is well-connected, there were n squared parties in the span of a week. This in concert with the unexpected 40 hours per week expected time in for my summer research job had worn my sanity rather thin. Meanwhile my girlfriend had been wondering why I’m so goddamn busy. So we decided to just eschew work for a bit and go camping. That was its own adventure.

Meanwhile I’ve written a paper with lots of help from my professor and submitted it to a conference. If it gets accepted, I might have a chance to go to Europe and present it.

That’s all I can remember for now. I’m going to drag my camera a couple places and hope to get inspired. My lenses and equipment are fine, I just need to take them out of the bag and take some photos with them.

I think I’ve almost settled into grad school. I really enjoy tossing ideas back and forth with my fellow students, though at times I feel out of place: about half are from India, half from China, and there a handful of white guys like me hanging in there. I still feel ahead of the curve, but only slightly. My friend Monica says I should have gone to Berkeley, where coincidentally much of the current ECE research is being done, and perhaps she’s right. But I’m not sure if I’d be able to keep up there. Maybe for a PhD, someday, when I can think up clever things to write papers about. I need to prove myself first, prove that I really do belong. But school certainly makes a lot more sense now than it ever did as an undergrad. I needed those years in Japan to get my motivation straight, to allow me to really extract the most from my university experience. It’s like an idea bakery here, all the smells of genius and burnt failure mingling together in an inseparable melange. But when it all comes to a head in a couple years, spending the rest of my life locked away in industry is still no more appealing than it was five years ago.

Most days I feel as if I’m in the right place, but every once in awhile, like today, I’ll look back at things and it seems as if my soul is in a thousand pieces, scattered to the four winds. I took a swig of liquid courage and made a phone call back to the board of education to take care of some paperwork, and chatting with native speakers brought me right back to that point in my life… minus a few forgotten words here and there. I didn’t stutter too much. But days like this make me wonder if there are two people fighting inside my skull for control of my life. One wants to follow the logical path of my strengths as an engineer, while the other says I should give that up and go do something, anything in Japan. I’m in my element here, I’m in my element there. The real world says I have to pick one or the other. Maybe I need a door number three.