By virtue of not having updated for 13 days, I am officially a bad person. Stone me, don't link to me, and all of that painful stuff. That said, I still don't have anything good to say. Rather, I haven't had anything good to say at any time that I've had access to a computer and the spare time to write about it. All you're getting, then, are the facts. Emotions and opinions and feelings take too much time.

I'm going to take my first, middle, and last finals on Friday, June 7th. I'm going to stay a couple of extra days to work on the dorm yearbook. Fortunately, it's going to be a lot less low-key than what is handcuffing Karla to Wellesley. Then I'm going to get myself on a plane and fly home. Time at home will, with luck, consist of repainting the entire interior of my house, playing frisbee with a reunited bunch of sophomore gym class folk, and exploring the Appalachians or the Catskills. Sometime before the 24th, I'll come back here and start living in my little room in a Dead House on Waverley. It'll have rounded double doors, big windows, and lots of bookshelves. I'll be working on campus in the Academic Computing department, doing web and print publications for about 11 weeks. Outside of the hours of 9-5, I'd like to learn to juggle, learn to play guitar, take random bike rides up Alpine Road and Skyline Boulevard, go backpacking in the area, play in a coed ultimate league that some B-team guys are putting together, and generally get my act together and figure out what it is that I want from school and life. Then there's a week off, during which I'll stay in California, and school will start again.

Ooh, Draw results came out. I'll be living in a co-op called Synergy, which was Tory's and Molly's and Betsy's and my first choice, so yay! It has an unofficial but very strong environmental/ humanistic/ vegetarian twist, and while it by no means requires that residents be any of those things, all group-sponsored chores and activities and cooking are done in that spirit. As I was chomping into a yummy double cheeseburger with tomato at Branner's weekly Friday barbecue, someone asked why I wasn't vegetarian to complement all those other "hippie" tendencies (ha, ha). I may laugh, but it's a good question. From my vantage point, I see two basic reasons for being vegetarian. The first would be simple, direct relief of pain and cruelty to animals. See, I'm not sure there's something inherently wrong with eating other animals, as long as it's done well. Sea lions do it. Cats do it. Why shouldn't we? But if someone were to hand me an axe and tell me to decapitate the cow for the filet mignon I'd order later that day, I couldn't do it. It's the same inexplicable squeamishness and guilt that caused me to stop fishing with my brother and with my dad.

The other, and, to me, more definitive reason, is that stock is horibly inefficient. It takes between 11 and 15 servings of grain to raise a single serving of meat—the other 10 to 14 servings are simply lost in animal growth and exercise and all that good stuff. If we were all to eat lower on the food chain, we could conceivably feed the entire world on what is produced today. I interpret that to mean that while eating tofu would be better than eating chicken, eating chicken is still better than eating beef.

In that spirit, I'd like to start eating much lower on the food chain (thanks, Ben and Wan!). I'm hereby embarking on a vegetarian week as of yesterday, and expect to experiement some more with my food choices in the next few months. I imagine that this will consist of largely vegetarian food, but I don't want to rule out the occassional salmon filet, fried prawns, or even steak. They'll just become a lot more rare, and maybe I'll even learn to savor them more because of it.

That's all. Oops, I guess I lied about the only-the-facts warning.