I think I finally understand: writing one of these occurs to me only when I have nothing else to do. Wait… Doesn’t that make this exactly the same as The Boring Notes?! Zhuge Tianyao, wake up and smell the tea! How could you treat your diary like this?

Anyway, this long summer—scratch that, summer vacation—has finally reached its end. I sang The Clock in the Opposite Direction a hundred times and still failed to return to the moment vacation began. (That’s a lie. I can’t sing it at all.) And so: UTD, here I coooome!

The first day of school was extremely relaxing, because I have no classes on Mondays. What else did you expect? Tuesday gave my family more than enough reason to worry about my commute. Only on Wednesday—that is, today—did everything truly begin to settle into place.

Not that life has suddenly become easy. I still haven’t secured a scholarship. Whether my crucial credits will transfer remains urgently unresolved. I can scan the entire campus without recognizing a single person. And every day comes with more than an hour of commuting…

Fortunately, America’s atrocious network coverage has turned that commute into the perfect time for my writing stat to explode. Surely I will never vanish without an update again… R-right?

I had only one class today, but still arrived on campus early in an attempt to catch my elusive academic advisor. School has already started and I have yet to see her once; the only publicly available intelligence is that she likes Minecraft. When that mission failed, I figured I was already there and grabbed a random advisor for ten uninterrupted minutes of questions. (It was actually a scheduled Quick Advising session.)

I left disappointed, then decided I had to bring something home for my trouble. So I visited the Basic Needs Resource Center, activated my auto-loot, and successfully picked up a suit. Upon leaving the building, I wondered where all these people had come from. Turns out it was the Student Organization Fair—a battle royale of a hundred clubs. Thus did I raid the camp with a hundred riders and shock every hero under heaven. I still hadn’t turned auto-loot off. There was also a stamp-collecting event with a free T-shirt at the end, and obviously that had my name written all over it. Who is this person who moved to America and has not paid for a single new piece of clothing since? (

With my arms full of loot, I wandered around campus a few times and decided to check out the gym. Why was that packed too? Regretful retreat, take two. By then it was nearly time for class. In my one and only class of the day, math, I met a Chinese TA. Another Chinese student and I stayed afterward to ask questions—in English, naturally. Just then, two of the TA’s friends, both Chinese and also TAs, came looking for him. Realizing something, I finally asked:

“Uh… is everyone in this classroom Chinese right now?”

TA: “Then why are you all still pretending?”

After class, I tried to add him on WeChat so I could get secret tutoring and have my quiz grades altered. (The preceding statement did not come from me. I have not yet sunk that low.) He mercilessly refused. That, in turn, gave me the confidence to write the whole episode down. The TA will never see it anyway. R-right…?

In a rare idle moment, I checked my messages and discovered an unread one in “Xinglian,” a tiny friend group left over from elementary school. YYF and I, who had not seen each other in years, fell naturally into conversation. After catching each other up, I was grateful that neither of us was living on China time in America or America time in China—although if I keep staying up, I will soon be doing exactly that. (

Sometimes, simply recording a busy day is enough to make it feel fulfilling. Mm-hmm. Since I accomplished so much today, I can now slack off all evening with a perfectly clear conscience. Zelda, launch! (gets hit)