Study

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 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 finishing the website, I went an entire month without writing a diary entry. Why? Partly because having one more place to update felt troublesome, and partly because everyday life gave me plenty to do. But if you kept pressing me, you would probably receive only stammering and evasive glances. It is true that the past few weeks of school have been rather intense, but with a mere thirteen credit hours this semester, I can handle the assignments comfortably enough. At least I do not stay up until the middle of the night. (Ah, a deadline warrior.) ...

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.” ...

Unable to think of a topic for my first English Composition II essay, due tomorrow, I began digging through old papers on my computer. Omnibus has a special sort of “reputation”: it makes you consider questions no one else your age would ever think about, yet which an American citizen apparently needs to consider. It is an American textbook, after all. At the same time, if you replace “Country A” with “Country C” in each essay’s cultural analysis, the difficulty of publishing that essay immediately rises by an entire level. Unfortunately, that is what we did for most prompts involving Country A. Consequently, most people who can see this post on WeChat cannot see those pieces of my “dark history.” On reflection, perhaps that is not so unfortunate after all. ...

We meet again after n days. I missed you all so much! I recently made a website introducing my university and sharing some of my experiences here. Teacher Zhang once asked me to give a talk for some younger students at the end of September, but who knows how long I will keep procrastinating on that? I may as well publish this instead: My Life at LETU You will need a VPN to access it from China. The site is entirely in English for now, because it was actually an assignment for my English Composition class. (Gets punched.) In the future, I will gradually archive the Sojourner’s Diary series there, making all my dark history entries easier to find. (In the end, I still put them here.) Questions are also welcome; the answers may be added to the site! ...

Career Fair, but I Forgot to Turn Off Auto-Loot LeTourneau is famous for its extraordinary employment rate. Supposedly you can come here and have nearly a 100 percent chance of finding a suitable job. Whether reality is quite as miraculous as the stories I have heard, today’s Career Fair certainly opened my eyes. Most companies came looking for interns for summer 2026. According to my roommate, their selections are generally settled before next spring, while next semester’s fair will already be preparing for the year after that. ...

Today was actually rather relaxed. In theory, once I had run to English Composition carrying a half-eaten burger and finished class, I had nothing else to do. I still ended up making several trips between professors’ offices to sort out my switch to a double major, and spent ages chatting with one professor in Chinese while I was at it, haha. In any case, dinner was probably the most leisurely meal I have had in days. Allow me to set the scene. Starting from the far left side of the long table, there was Jaemin, the Korean student I met on the bus during the orientation Walmart Run—technically a Walmart Drive, haha. Next came the aggressively multicolored, questionably edible cafeteria cream jelly that some people could calmly consume any number of. Then there was wrinkly Kris, still clearing his game dailies over dinner. Because of this, we taught everyone the Chinese pronunciation of “gacha-game addict” and enthusiastically explained why the players are compared to cockroaches. Our Korean classmate was delighted. Beside him sat Ted, who finished the jelly with the same untroubled expression. (Incidentally, those last two are both exchange students from the Shanghai Civil Aviation College.) Finally there was Korbin, who has started learning Chinese under the professor I mentioned and who prepares a detailed to-do list for every day: the God of To-Do Lists, in sharp contrast with the many Gods of Last-Minute Deadlines present. ...