It's true that such spaces remind us in a scary, but seductive way of our own temporariness and the relatively short life of all that we build and do.

As always, I am at a lack of ideas for how to start this post. It's probably better to just jump right into it rather than giving you this preface on my lack of creativity.  I guess I just want to remind you all of how not awesome I am.  Except, not really. I'm pretty awesome, let's be honest.  Rachael and I talked about this earlier in the semester, how our friend group can be completely honest with one another when we talk about our strengths and weaknesses.  There is no awkwardness in admitting to each other that we are better at certain things and that we are worse at others.  I like this.  I think a reflection on how comfortable one person is talking about stuff (serious or unimportant) to another is a great sign of how deep a friendship is.  That little spiel sounded like it was intended to justify my being awesome, but I can assure you it wasn't.  It was just my train of thought after I made that joke.  And, if you unfortunately do not see this characteristic in the friend group I am implicating then I am sorry.  And that's a little awkward...

To all that hate the overuse of the word awkward that is a growing trend among myself and many others I apologize.  I simply lack the dedication to find a better, more appropriate word.  So, I'm going to just start at Saturday because a lot of stuff happened over Sat-Mon and nothing really happened on the other days.  Except Friday I guess.  I met with Kevin Yin who, for those of you who don't him, is a senior at CDM that will be attending Berkeley next year.  We got food (Top Dog, and by we I mean him because I happened to have a tummy ache that night) and I showed him around all of the dorms.  I think he liked it. I suggested the Units because I think those are the best for incoming Freshman.  Although smaller, they are cheaper and, more importantly, the most social.

So now we move onto Friday.  I woke up at 11am and headed over to (I'm just going to refer to the fraternity house as "the house" or "my house" from now on.  Last post I tried interchanging many names in the hopes that the more descriptive titles would help your understanding of where it was I was going, but it felt alien to me and I didn't like it.) the house to get my Cal Day BBQ on.  So I think all of you know what Cal Day is, but in case you didn't I will now explain:

Cal Day is the day in which prospective students come to experience the campus and make their final decision on what college they will be attending next year.  As implied, most are undecided, looking to finalize their choice of college ( I would bet the most common contender is UCLA).  It is a day where Cal puts a bunch of information booths up everywhere and hosts programs and tours to help one get better acquainted with the campus.

This Cal Day was situated on probably the best day it could possibly be on.  Saturday was the hottest it has been up here this entire year (74% of statistics are made up on the spot, but seriously I think it was the hottest...).  It was a staggering 81 degrees when I checked my phone mid-day.  It was amazing.  I really forgot how awesome the warm So-Cal weather was like and I'm happy to have experienced it this Saturday.  So, being such a great day, we (we is referring to Phi Psi) decided to have a BBQ.  And now we get back to my story I cut off a short while ago.

So I went to the house and we began BBQing.  It was pretty low key at first.  Kolya Keats (who I have yet to talk about I believe) was on the grill and he made this amazing rub(actually, thinking about this now I might have talked about Keats meat before) for the meat.  So basically I was getting fat off meat.  On a side note I seriously need to start working out more, I'm gaining fat/losing muscle and I feel like I have absolutely no cardiac strength (idk how to say that?).  It was me, a bunch of brothers, and some of the brothers friends.  My friend Nick was there and we chilled for a bit, but like I said it was low key and it wasn't the most fun so we decided to bounce and go tour campus.

I was severely disappointed with the overall effect of Cal Day.  There was a less than satisfactory amount of events taking place and everything was concentrated in one part of campus, arguably the worst part.  Also, Nick and I thought it would be funny to actually go and try and take as many fliers as possible, because normally it is a TFM (total freshman move) to accept fliers on Sproul (where this took place).  We literally made ourselves the biggest targets and were rejected so many times.  We WANTED fliers but were unable to get them.  Something was definitely wrong.

Courtesy of Barbara Lin <3

So, after slight disappointment, we decided to go back to Phi Psi (I guess sometimes I will call it by the name, idk I call it many things I guess you'll just have to deal with whatever I feel is most appropriate at the time) to resume the consumption of delicious meat.  Little did we know that we were to come back to one of the most fun afternoons I have ever had up here at Berkeley.

Our entire balcony was full of people as well as the main room just inside.  The sun was shining, and everyone was having fun.  What cannot be conveyed through the picture that is to the right is the atmosphere.  Everyone there was smiling.  it was honestly one of the most happiest moments I've had up at Cal and even some of the seniors in Phi Psi have had (more on this later).  It was amazing to say the least.

D'AWWWWW

Another amazing thing that happened at the BBQ was that my future roommate for next year when I live in the house (Aaron) brought his puppy that will possibly be living with us next year.  And ITS SOO CUTE.  You can see for yourself.  I'm a little apprehensive about living in close quarters with a dog, but a) its cute and b) I'm trying this new philosophy where I try to put myself in situations that I would normally be apprehensive about.  I'll describe why in a bit, but I really want to make the most out of my college experience and I think that putting myself out of my comfort zone will help me learn the most.  By living with a dog I will be able to say for certain whether I like to or not. If I embrace my apprehensions I may never know.  I really want to take every opportunity that comes my way and learn as much as I can.  Plus, this dog is fucking adorable.

I got tired around the middle of the day so I ended up crashing in Sam's bed for a small nap.  I woke up just in time to catch the sunset though and we climbed to the roof of our house and I got Sam (because my phone was still in his room) to take some pictures and send them to me.  It was a beautiful end to an already great day.  Except the day wasn't over yet, there was still more to come.

That night we hosted a party that quickly got a little bigger than was originally intended, but overall it was fun and when we eventually did get shut down we did a good job handling the cops and emerged unscathed, no fines to speak of.  It was Nick Taylor's (I talked about him earlier) birthday that night (12am Sunday) so a bunch of guys went down to the bars to celebrate.  We shortly got the news that Nick would need to be driven back from the bars, so when Mike (so many names you guys have to keep up with) drove down to get him I decided I would accompany him because I wasn't just ready to go to bed and it seemed like a good idea.  (This sounds like I'm prefacing a drunk driving story.  I'm not.  Mike was sober.)

It seemed a good idea because my idea was we would pick up Nick and then head back.  Apparently I missed the part where Mike (and other passengers age 21+) would join him for a bit to celebrate.  So I was left relatively far away from my dorm with nothing to do.  I began the trek back to my dorm and because I lacked anything to do I decided to call my friend (woo more names) Curtis (who is absolutely awesome, more on him later) for some small talk to pass the time.  Curtis was shortly apprehended by Vlad (also awesome, more on both of them later) who took the phone and invited me to sleep in his roommates bed because his roommate was in Yosemite that night.  Foothill (where they live) was slightly closer than Clark Kerr so I was like, hell, sure.

I got to Vlad and Curtis's dorm and we all discovered that Marvin, Vlad's roommate actually came back from Yosemite (this is about 1am).  To have some fun (which could be argued is mean spirited, but I would argue with you that it's harmless fun) we decided I would pretend to be an overnight stay program student (more on this later also).  I guess it doesn't translate how that could be fun, but it was so trust me.  To avoid awkwardness, we departed from his dorm and Vlad showed me to the top of a rooftop on one of the foothill buildings.  There was surprisingly a couch there so I'm assuming it is a frequented spot and we sat and looked at the amazing view of the city lights that I reluctantly do not have a picture to show you because at this point in the night my phone was out of battery.  We stayed there a bit and talked.  It was cool.

Then, we went back to Vlad's room and Curtis had given us his cot so we (read Vlad) set that up and I took Vlad's bed and he took the cot.  Then, surprise, we went to sleep.  Also, there was some joke about me sleeping in Sam's bed and then Vlad's bed all in the span of a night saying "I get around."  It was funny.  I didn't know where to include it so here it is now.

We woke up around 10am and headed back to the house.  I continued on to Clark Kerr (this path we took is a straight line, Foothill -> Phi Psi -> Clark Kerr) and I really don't remember what I did the rest of the day.  Maybe I slept, I don't know.  But I went to a short rush meeting at 5pm and talked about strategies for rush next semester and then left to go get dinner with my relatives (mentioned previously) at Saturn Cafe.  Saturn Cafe is a 100% vegetarian cafe with a futuristic (I think? haha you would get this if you've been there) theme recommended to me by Jay (who is currently sitting across from me as I type this at 11:44pm in the library).

To humor Cole who likes to point out my lack of intelligence in all things Historical I will now relate a story that does just that.  Upon entering the restaurant my cousin made a comment that they had a Che Guevara quote on the wall.  I responded, "Who's that?"  After he explained it to me, I realized that I only know of this person from the pop icon he is represented as on some shirts and posters.  So that was a learning experience.  Oh and side note, my relatives showed up a little late to dinner so  decided to wander around campus and I came upon this odd ball/sculpture.  It reminded me of the death star a little.

I liked the restaurant a lot because they made their veggie patties more veggie than most places and didn't really try to imitate meat.  It didn't however give the burger an overly veggie taste, and thus I was pleased.  I would recommend it to anyone that comes down, specifically vegetarians.  After dinner we had pledge initiation ceremony where after 10 long weeks of pledgeship, the members of Epsilon class finally become brothers.  Curtis and Vlad are both members of Epsilon class and I really love the eleven guys that compose this class. Some of them being freshman, I can really bond with them more than other brothers because prior to their initiation I was the only freshman brother in the house.  Happy times!

I left the initiation early though because I had to pick up my OSP (overnight stay program) students.  I didn't know I would be hosting students until someone asked me to about 4 hours prior to when I was to pick them up.  I feel really passionate about educating prospective students as to what Cal really provides, and so I was down to host some kids in my dorm because we have a lot, and I mean A LOT, or space. I signed up for four students, but admitted I could take more if they needed more space.  They ended up giving me seven...

Luckily, Cole and my suitemates were okay with all of them staying in our common area, although Cole was being pretty greedy trying to get whatever monetary he could out of hosting these kids.  And Cole if you're reading this and think I'm giving inaccurate accounts to the readers of this post then I will respectably disagree because what we did shouldn't have been conditional on whatever rewards we were to receive. So, six (we lost one, but seriously he bailed to go take a final or something.  Idk, that's what he said I still don't understand what "final" he could be talking about on a Monday...) prospective students (all undecided, most looking at UCLA and Cal) stayed in our common room that Sunday night.

Monday morning I woke them up at 7:30am (yikes early) and delivered them back to the people running OSP (which I could have done because it was run by my scholarship foundation but I decided not to, in retrospect a bad idea I wish I would have).  After that, I had class for the majority of the day and nothing extremely noteworthy happened, but my E7 professor did try to convince all of us to go into computer science.  I will probably not go into CS (that was sarcasm, I definitely will not) but I did grow fond of the idea of taking E 177, advanced Matlab programming.  It sounded extremely daunting, but the idea of creating "graphical user interfaces" sounded extremely useful and its surprising how much you can do with Matlab.  I for one want the ability to manipulate and fight, rather than accept our future robot overlords

Perhaps the most meaningful part of my week came on Monday's meeting.  It was the last fraternity meeting that would be held this semester, and it was bittersweet because it was the first meeting of Epsilon class and the final meeting for some of the senior members of Alpha Class (the founding brothers when Phi Psi came back to Berkeley two and a half years ago).  There were a couple things I got out of that meeting.  Firstly, that these four years of college have the potential to be the best of my life if I choose to make them that.  Some of them mentioned in their closing speeches that this past Saturday (Cal Day I mentioned before) was one of the best days of their life.  It was simply the ability to hang out with people they love and just enjoy the day.  Enjoy life.

That living in the house was the only way to truly experience the fraternity.  It was not the parties or events that happened on the weekend that really stuck in their minds.  It was the Wednesday nights where random stuff happened.  To see where the fraternity is now today, and know that this came in two and a half years, and know that I have three whole years to shape it was mind-boggling to me.  I also came to realized that when it came for my final senior speech I would definitely be bawling.  I could just barely keep it together here and, bar a select few, these were the people I was least closest with in the house.

I thought of what it would be like in three years.  I thought of all the experiences I would have and hoped they lived up to what the seniors were relating to me now.  I looked around at who would be with me when I graduate.  People like Vlad and Curtis who, after knowing only for a semester, I already feel close with.  These people would be my friends for life.  The people I would catch up with when I come back to visit.  The people that would later attend my wedding.  The people that would be in my life forever.  It was a life-changing moment, and where my new philosophy of making the most out of life and trying new things stems from.  

I am now recording all of these moments that make an impact on me in a journal.  I already regret missing a year, and I'm trying to look back and remember what was important.  I know that I will forget some of this stuff if I don't write it down, so I'm going to begin early.  And I hope that I'll be able to recall this moments when I give my speech, and hopefully inspire the younger members to what I have been inspired of.  I can't wait to see what the next three years have for me.  

See you all next week,

Jason