[2003.11.25 1943h]

   [vgame] advance wars [nintendo game boy advance]

i smell like a well oiled machine.  i just spent an hour giving a tour of
the clock tower to a mechanical engineering professor and some of his
students.  as a result, my clothing absorbed quite a bit of the metallic
smell of the clock.

on a whim, i tried wearing a pair of shorts over a pair of sweats the
other day.  after looking in the mirror and noticing that i was also
wearing two t-shirts, with the longer one underneath the shorter, i
realized that my clothing created four different layers of colors.  
personally, i thought the effect looked pretty cool, but i don't have much
of a fashion sense, and for all i know, it could easily have been a pretty
hideous getup.  regardless, i thought it was pretty neat, and with the
proper colors, i could have made myself look like a gradient or a rainbow.

although i didn't wear this layered look outside, i have tried other minor
clothing experiments in public, with varying degrees of success.  once,
during high school, i started putting on t-shirts without checking to see
whether or not i was wearing the front side on the front.  i figured that
i would save maybe a second or two every time i put on a t-shirt if i
didn't check to see if it was oriented correctly.

however, what happened instead was that, on the days that my shirt ended
up on backwards, a lot of nice people would inform me that i had put my
shirt on backwards, and in explaining to them why this didn't matter to
me, i wasted more time than i would have saved anyway.  the experiment
lived only for a week or so, as since it didn't seem worth it anymore.

the big game, an annual game of american football between stanford
university and the university of california, berkeley, was on saturday.  
apparently, after every year, i seem to feel more and more apathetic to
the game.  it is supposed to be a symbol of the rivalry between stanford
and berkeley, so a lot of school spirit is associated with it.  since i am
normally considered a spirited person, i'm not sure why i'm so apathetic
to the game nowadays.

it might have something to do with the winning streak that stanford had
had for seven years.  after a while, i was starting to feel really bad for
my friends at berkeley who had to deal with loss after loss.  in addition,
seeing stanford win again and again wasn't exactly that exciting anymore,
and i really didn't have much of a desire to see the game after a while.

however, berkeley won this year's big game, as well as last year's, so if
the theory above is true, then i should be more interested in the game
now.  of course, my apathy could simply be a result of being a graduate
student, as since a general lack of spirit seems prevalent in graduate
student communities.

yesterday, i did my laundry for free.  apparently, the stanford campus had
a few free laundry days recently, for reasons unknown.  e-mails were sent
to residents about the free laundry days beforehand, so i doubt it's due
to some computer malfunction or anything of the sort.  regardless of the
reason, i saved myself $6 yesterday, so i am happy.

the sink in the kitchen in my apartment is somehow connected to an open
pipe on the other side of the kitchen.  i'm not sure what the open pipe is
for, but i think it may have been used for a clothes washing machine.
regardless, sometimes, when the sink is being used, the open pipe seems to
spit out dirty water.  the other day, one of my roommates accidentally
made a huge mess in the kitchen with the open pipe, and we used up a lot
of paper towels trying to clean up the mess.  so now, in addition to not
having toilet paper, our apartment is running out of paper towels.

thinking that the open pipe problem could possibly be solved with some
form of seal, i figured that placing a condom over the pipe could do the
trick, as since condoms are designed to hold in liquids without breaking.
so my roommate broke out a condom and placed it over the open pipe.  the
sink hasn't really been acting up recently, so the effectiveness of the
condom solution hasn't really been tested, but yesterday, my roommate was
showing me how, after running water from the sink for a while, the
pressure in the pipe builds up, and the condom slowly gets filled up with
air.  i must say that this is a side effect that i didn't foresee.

i just went to the bathroom, and apparently, one of my roommates has just
bought toilet paper.