Dallas

At first, nobody paid any attention to this ordinary math class. It was only another easy review, another ordinary failure of coordination between a TA and professor, another unremarkable quiz. Until Zhuge Tianyao discovered that the time was already 6:27 p.m. Currently available intelligence: the author spends an hour each day riding the Silver Line train and driving between home and school. Inexplicably, although this line opened only last year, trains arrive just once an hour outside peak times, in flagrant disregard of the economic principle that supply should rise with demand. ...

I went on one of those trips where you simply decide to go and go. Throughout the retreat, I kept saying I ought to write something, but I was genuinely too busy. Every day was exceptionally full, spent enjoying conversations with brothers and sisters and the messages being shared. At last, back aboard the familiar Silver Line, I began another round of typing. Let me think… I should probably begin with UTD’s battle royale of a hundred clubs. As mentioned in Diary 134, the fair itself was nowhere on my schedule. I merely walked outside, stumbled into a massive gathering, and found that no amount of desperate effort could get me out. Hailan Church’s booth happened to sit along a side branch beyond the circular route. Even if a question mark had appeared there on the map, a speedrunner like me would probably have skipped it. Yet by sheer coincidence I stopped, happened to glimpse familiar Chinese characters, then looked more closely—and suddenly, upon turning my head, there they were where the lantern light was dim. ...

I got up bright and early, listened in on the group chat’s puzzle-setting conference, and drove to school for soccer—only to discover that “starts at 11:00” was pronounced “first match at 12:40,” while my team would not play until 1:20. I stormed off to seize a computer at the campus esports center. At long last, Zhuge Tianyao briefly got his hands on a machine with an i9-14800 and RTX 4080. The students around me: FPS, MOBA, team-based competitive gaming, every stat maxed out. Me: rhythm games. It was all very… ...

Too tired, so I vanished for a day. But I brought something funny. (funny and bunny are near-homophones. Comedy has officially peaked.)

“I Will Finish It Tomorrow” Ahem. I preserved a little of my vanishing-without-an-update tradition… Fine, I simply forgot to write. Let me rapidly wrap up the previous entry. In keeping with the principle that nothing in this diary should be serious if we can possibly help it—the actual principle is that I am a lazy dog—I shall skip the entire argument and leap straight to the final conclusion: the greatest disadvantage of a large class compared with a small one is that I have to wear my glasses to see the board! Of course, if I arrive early enough to sit in front, even that distinction disappears. ( ...

During physics class today, I figured out what I wanted to write about. My physics professor is an old, white-bearded Russian man—quite possibly Soviet, too. He rolls his r’s with magnificent flair. I only find it magnificent because I cannot do it; meanwhile, other students on the train casually unleash absurdly long trills in the middle of conversation… Fine, you win. His hearing is not very good, so when someone answers a question in the enormous classroom, he has to jog all the way over to their seat before he can make out the words, even when the hundreds of people present have fallen unusually silent. Yes, the classroom might as well be an auditorium. It is packed, and almost nobody makes noise unless necessary. ...

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! ...

After tragically missing the very last chance to post a June update, I have decided to give up on monthly updates (jk The summer semester is finally over. As an international student, I’ve hit the six-credit summer limit, which means I am, at long last, truly free. Naturally, this activated my run-around-everywhere mode. (Funny how I moved to America and then never researched a single trip. Am I actually just lazy?) So far, July has consisted of one day in the cowboy town, one day around downtown Fort Worth, and one day around downtown Dallas. Total loot: museum maps +3, traditional caches +2, EarthCaches +2, virtual caches +4, the final coordinates for one mystery cache solved, and two multicaches abandoned at the very last stage (next time for sure). Driving skill ++, travel experience ++, cultural literacy ++ (citation needed). ...

Congratulations to the Sojourner’s Diary website on passing 520 visits on May 20! Zhuge Tianyao began the vacation promising an explosion of creative output, only to complete his evolution into a lazy dog. Recently, certain mysterious forces finally whipped him into practicing some reluctant self-discipline. So he dug out the long-neglected website and began tinkering again… I quietly added a comment section. Come share my embarrassing secrets!

How do you want to live your life? Whenever our generation talks about the future, sighing seems unavoidable. Over the shorter and longer conversations I had yesterday and today, I have lost count of how many times I sighed. I actually dislike this sort of behavior—complaining that solves no practical problem—but I cannot help myself. While talking with an old friend, I described it as “the feeling of wanting to hold on to everything.” ...