I haven't talked about what's been going on lately. Since my apartment was broken into and things have been getting stressful at work, I've been a bit of a mess. Something else I haven't talked much about is my girlfriend, Katie. I've been seeing her for about 4 months now. Things were good, athough this week was tough since the stress I've been under, and some of hers, has effected our relationship a bit. Yesterday, however, was a great day, enough to make me want to say something about it.

( If you read on, there's an explosion in this story )

I need to follow up on a few previous entries. A couple weeks ago I wrote about my hearing loss. Well, after a follow up appointment with a different doctor it turned out not to be as serious as previously thought. There was a bunch of wax and junk that was stuck to the front of my ear drum. She peeled it off and suddenly I could hear again. It hurt a little, and at first hearing again was weird, but now everything is normal again.

A week ago I wrote about the upcoming game competition between the ETC and USC. The competition was this past Friday. We won 4 out of the 5 events. We swept them, 2 games to 0 in Carcassonne, Literati, and Set (played after we knew we had won). There was fierce competition in the Burnout game that we won 5 races to 3 out of 9. The only event we lost, Halo 2, where they swept us, was a bit of controversy as they had changed the rules after the original challenge and we didn't get informed of that. In an unofficial game played later by the original rules, we swept them.

Oh, and the Pats won the superbowl again today. Sweet.

"What?" seems to be more and more of my vocabulary lately. I've been having some problems with my hearing. Starting the day after labor day I woke up and I couldn't hear fully in my right ear. Health Services treated me for an ear infection they said I had, although that didn't solve the problem. When I returned they couldn't tell me what the problem still was. Last week I finally had a chance to see a real doctor about this problem. They performed a hearing test and discovered that my left ear is fine but my right is 20-30 dB worse. As you know, decibels are a log scale so that is huge. The good news is that it is not nerve damage. The doctor thought he saw some kind of skin buildup behind my eardrum. On Wednesday I'm going to get a CT scan to see what is back there. If it does end up being what the doctor thought it was then I will probably have to have surgery to remove it. It is a bit of a scary prospect but I am enthusiastic because I will get to hear again.

To get an idea of what my hearing is like right now, put on a pair of headphones connected to your computer. Go into the volume control. Take the balance control and move it all the way to the right and then back about 4 pixel. That is the level that sounds the same to me in both ears.

In addition to the actual hearing loss, I think I have another problem. I find that a lot of the time my problem isn't hearing people it is turning what I hear into words. I feel like I have a harder time that most people at parsing speech if there is any kind of background sound. It is a running joke in my house that my roommate's girlfriend has to translate for my roommate and me because we can't hear each other.

For those of you who haven't seen my schedule... So I'm officially insane I think. I do too much. I wish I could deal with classes. I really envy people who can. I should be writing a paper now, but no, no I'm not. I wish I could be a good student, because I always had friends that were and I never felt good enough for them. But I just can't get into my classes. I don't really care about them. Everything else I do is just so much more enriching and rewarding. Why do I even have to take classes? Somes I wish my teachers would realize that the other stuff that I do is actually much more important than their class and cut me some slack, but that won't happen.

Speaking not being able to get into my classes, I finally got into my computer engineering class. Funny story. I got 101 on the first exam. It was supposed to be out of 100 but problem 1, which was supposed to be out of 35 points, if you added up the parts, was actually worth 36. Apparently the TA's noticed it when grading but thought it wouldn't matter because no one would get 101. I did and apparently there was some pressure on the grader of the last problem to take off points so I wouldn't. Anyways, in class all the TA's are giving me shit about it, and the professor decides to announce to the class that someone got 101 and then look around the room for me. Luckily he didn't see me, even though I was right in front of him in the second row where I always sit. So after the class I go up to him and ask him, "So can I be the class now?" He laughed and told me that there must be an open spot in some other section and go talk to Dean Kale and get in but still go to my lab section with my partner.

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