Friday
A very busy day.
I had several dreams, including one very upsetting one, but I don't remember any of them now.
I went to the chiropractor and continued to feel better.
In Berkeley, I went by Berkeley TRiP and got a BART Plus pass. This is really cool; I wish I'd known about it before. I can ride Muni and AC Transit "for free" (at a significant discount) with this pass.
I went to Michelle's Spanish and Portuguese graduation in Zellerbach. The speaker was Prof. Robert Alter, who talked about the importance of reading literature, and got in a plug for independent bookstores, even mentioning Cody's and Black Oak by name.
My nose started to bleed just before the Italian Department graduated. Oops. Maybe it's a good thing that I never finished that hypothetical double major with Classics and Computer Science. If I had, I'd have been in that very graduation ceremony, and then, if my nose had started to bleed, it would have been extremely inconvenient.
I did think a lot about the fact that, if I hadn't dropped out of Berkeley, I would have been graduating around now, and quite possibly would even have graduated already. Things would have been very different for me.
In the evening, I went to a party at Sumana's house, which was lots of fun. I met Leonard in person there.
Overheard: "Geeks need advocates."
Sumana has a comic book version of the Mahabarata, in which the Bhagavad Gita gets an entire issue all to itself. She also has a different comic book version of the Mahabarata in which the entire epic is a single issue, and the Gita is a single page. I should have written down the text of that page so I could quote it.
I wish I were a cartoonist. Cartoons can be an amazingly effective medium, and you can certainly draw cartoons on very serious themes (I've seen physics and African-American history as examples). No wonder the Comics Code Authority wanted to make sure that cartoonists drew nothing offensive to faith or morals...
(The CCA is an amazing episode in the history of "industry self-regulation" in America, and how much more powerful it can be than the government censorship it seeks to stave off. What do you mean, you've never heard of it? Well, I hadn't either until I came across some of Seth's web pages.)
We played Trivial Pursuit, and our team lost. I went to sleep.
