The Adventure

12 January 2008
6:47 PM

Good song. It’s by Angels and Airwaves, if you’re interested in listening to it.

Damn. It’s been so long since I last wrote. I’m writing on the bus back to Los Angeles now, so I don’t have Internet access to check my last entry for where I left off. I know that I haven’t written since before Thanksgiving, though, so I guess I’ll start writing from there.

Coming back for Thanksgiving was great, but definitely too short of a break. I met my brother Richard’s new girlfriend at Thanksgiving dinner, as well as her two daughters. One is ten years old and the other one is sixteen. It was a bit of a surprise to find out she had kids, but the whole lot of them seem really cool. His girlfriend is a looker, too. They seem pretty happy together, and it looks like Richard does well with kids. We played Wii at Thanksgiving dinner, which my sister bought for her boyfriend, Liermann, for his birthday.

The rest of the weekend was spent hanging out with family as much as friends, which was nice, because I didn’t really hang out with family that much when I lived in Vegas, but I do quite a bit now that I’m not always around. I went with my cousins to SkyMania – a much-needed exercise. Friends were supposed to go too, but by the time we went, a lot of people were busy, and had to bail out on me. I didn’t mind, though. I went to the mall on Black Friday, which I don’t think I’ve ever done before. We went at like, 6:00 PM, so it wasn’t too crowded. I got a good deal at Express Men on a T-shirt and two pairs of jeans, and because it was Black Friday, I got a promotional pair of pajama pants with my purchase. Chyeah!

On Saturday, I went to the UNR @ UNLV basketball game. I sat with Chris, Dallas, Alexa, Alma, Alex, Cortney Beasley, and Maricela, but I also saw Sabrina before and after the game and I saw Alicia at half-time, when she and Niki came over to our side to say hello. I bought a UNLV Athletics T-shirt, haha. UNLV won, which I was happy about. It’s kinda sad that I went to a UNLV basketball game before I went to a game for my own school, haha. After the game, Chris and I went over to Angela’s house for Game Night. There were a lot less people there this time than there used to be when I was younger, and would go every Saturday. Back then, I met new people every week because the regulars would bring their friends from work and such. Now, I guess it’s usually just the regulars, and it’s more hanging out than the semi-parties it used to be.

Chris told me he’s jealous of them because they’ve known each other for so long and still hang out with each other at least once a week. I’m not so jealous. I trust that we can be like that in the future, no matter who we end up working for. Imagining something like that, I think about what’ll happen after I get my degree. Maybe there will be some computer hardware company in or near Las Vegas that I can work for, and I’ll be able to come hang out and visit with people like Chris, who might be working his way through the ranks in a nice hotel or high-rise in Vegas.

I think the only other thing I did before I went back to L.A. was go to lunch with my brother Richard one day and with my uncle and cousins another day. Then it was back to my life at USC. I finished out my classes, some with good grades, some… with not-so-good grades, haha. My group in my Engineering Freshman Academy class built our semester project, which was supposed to be a device that allows you to walk on water. You can find video of it on YouTube. On the day we were supposed to present our project, there was a race among the groups across the diving well. The initial goal given was to walk on water for at least five seconds unassisted, but we were confident in our project, so my team wanted to win the race, too. I was the one who used the device, and when the race started, I worked my ass off trying to get across the pool. The only other guy that got a good start besides me fell down about half-way across the pool… but I also fell down when I was about ¾ of the way across. I pushed so hard on my device that the frame of PVC fell apart, which destroyed my balance, and once I was down, there was no getting back up without going back to the edge of the pool. If we had glued the PVC together or if I had gone slower, I’d have won the race easily. In fact, after the race, I put the frame back together and made it across the pool a second time. We came in a weak third in the end, however, losing to the guy who fell down and later cheated by getting help from his teammates and to another guy, who didn’t get a good start, but ended up getting across the entire pool without assistance.

That was one of my big projects for the semester. That course was a credit/no credit course, and I earned credit for it. The other project was the programming of my BoeBot to go through an obstacle course. I’m pretty sure that in the end, my team’s BoeBot made it through the obstacle course with the most precision. We earned a 99% on that project, and I ended up with an A in the course for the semester. I also got an A in Calculus I, which was expected. However, I did get a B- in my Writing class and a C- in my Law, Politics, and Public Policy class =x My GPA after first semester is 3.04. Not bad, I suppose. I’m still eligible for the MGM Mirage Family Scholarship, so I’m happy, and so are my parents.

I relaxed a bit over the weekend between the two final exams I had. On Friday, I celebrated Festivus in Matt’s apartment with the guys from Sigma Alpha Mu and drank with them afterward. I invited this girl, Natalie, over at some point during the night. I went down on my rollerblades to meet her, and she rode her bike back to Matt’s apartment with me. We took a shot when we first walked in, then talked while everybody else played XBOX 360. After a few people left, we decided to play a game of beer pong. I had been on my game pretty well earlier in the night, only losing one of about four or five games that I played. By the time I played with Natalie as my teammate, though, I had lost it. We played ten-cup with three beers instead of two, too, which surprised me because it was Natalie’s suggestion, and I had never played with that much beer with these guys. I think we played two games like that, and later on played one game with six cups and one beer on each side.

Alright, I have to put something in here. We play beer pong on the balcony at Matt’s place. Every once in awhile, a ball will go over the railing and into some bushes, and we lose a lot of balls that way. Well, we’ll usually go look for the ball for a few minutes and ditch it if we can’t find it quick enough. Usually, looking for the ball involves going out the front door, down the hall, out through the building entrance, and around to the side of the building to look. On this particular night, early in the night, instead of going through the front, I decided to just hop over the railing and climb down the wall to grab the ball. I did this a few times, climbing back up after I found the ball. Well, this happened once after Natalie showed up. The second time it went over while she was there, something interesting happened… Natalie decided to climb over the railing and get the ball herself because she thought it looked fun. At first, I was pretty concerned. I didn’t want her falling down and breaking something, especially since this was the first time she had come drinking with me. But she insisted on climbing down, so she climbed over and I held onto her hand to support her weight while she figured out how to climb down. After she climbed down, I came to the conclusion that… this girl is fucking awesome, haha! She’s a more hardcore drinker than I am, she’s really easy to talk to, and she’s a decent ninja, haha. Anyway, I ended up passing out in the middle of the night, and Matt and his friend walked Natalie back to her suite.

The morning, Niki drove over to pick me up. Niki came down for the weekend to pick up his mom from her cruise/have a little fun in San Diego. He drove down to San Diego with Daniella on Friday, stayed a night in his hotel room, and came to pick me up the next day. Before I go on, I want to mention something that I found out about before we left my apartment. If you read through my last post, you’ll notice the one paragraph in there about that girl I met while tumbling, who used to be a cheerleader in high school. Well, I checked my Facebook before I left my apartment, and she had written me a message saying that her friend had seen my blog, told her about it, and that she had read it. She didn’t like what I said about her, and pretty much told me that she has no interest being my friend anymore because of what I said. The thing is, though, that she misinterpreted my blog. See, the way she read it, it sounded like I was planning on breaking up her and her boyfriend so that I could go out with her. Now, I’m not sure who all reads this, but I’d like to think that it’s mostly people who know enough about me to know that I’m not the kind of guy to try that kind of stuff with any girl. I’m usually not one to fight for a girl when there’s another guy involved. She either likes me or she doesn’t. There’s no point in trying to impress her to get her attention away from the other guy. If she doesn’t think I’m a better person, then hey.. her loss. So you see, I never meant for my blog to say that I was planning on breaking two people up, if that’s how you read it. The way I wrote it, what I was trying to say was that if she and her boyfriend broke up for any reason, without my influence whatsoever, I would take an interest in her and try to get to know her. But as long as she and her boyfriend were going out, I’d just be her friend, and hopefully have someone to tumble with out in the quad. Honestly, if I were interested in her as more than a friend right now, I’d at least talk to her more often than whenever I went tumbling. I’d ask her to lunch and or dinner at one of the cafeterias every now and then or something. I actually specifically made sure not to ask her to lunch all that much or even at all because I didn’t want to look like I was coming on to her or interfering with her relationship with her boyfriend.

Now that I’ve gotten that out in the open, I can continue with my story about Niki and Daniella visiting. I sent a message back to Michelle and we left on our way to San Diego. Niki let me drive because he was sick of all the California traffic he had been exposed to in the past couple of days. It took us a few hours to get to San Diego, but eventually we got to the hotel. We chilled there for a bit and then left to Viejas, the casino Niki had picked for us to go to. There was a mall across the street from the casino, so we dropped Daniella off there to go shop around while we played poker. Niki borrowed $100 from me, and I withdrew $60 to play with. We both bought in for $40 at first at the $1-$2 no-limit hold’em table. I lost my $40, bought in with my last $20, and then turned it into about $90-$100 within a few hands. I should’ve left then to go eat dinner, but I got stupid, and didn’t. I played a few hands, and then told myself that if I got back above $100 or got down to $30, I’d leave the table. Well, I went up and down a few times, and then finally got down below $30… and didn’t leave. I lost that $30 plus another $20 I withdrew from the ATM, leaving me $80 down for the night, haha. Niki left the table with about $60, so he was up for the night. He paid me back and we got a late-night meal in the casino, after about five hours of playing poker. We stayed the night in his hotel room, drove to pick up Niki’s mom from her cruise in the morning, stopped at the beach, and then I got dropped off back at my apartment and they drove back to Las Vegas. Overall, it was a fun weekend.

I took my last exam and then packed up and got ready to go back to Vegas for winter break. At 5:00 PM the day before I left, the power went out and… didn’t come back on until 3:00 AM the next day. The guy I was catching a ride with back to Vegas almost decided to leave early because the power was out, but instead we just packed in the dark, put our stuff in the car, and waited ‘til morning to leave. We made it to Vegas in about 4½ hours, stopping at Denny’s for breakfast on the way. I paid for his breakfast since he didn’t ask me to pitch in for gas or anything. My parents also gave him some comp tickets to the Bellagio as a thank-you.

I’ve been writing for about an hour and a half, so I’m going to take a break. If I don’t write more on this bus, I’ll just leave off here and try to recount winter break another day.

Best,
Vaniah Schwenoha