I awoke, slapping at the infernal alarm clock next to my bed several times. Blinking the sleep out of my eyes, I could hear the pit-pan of rain outside on my fifth floor window in the Revelle College apartments as I got up and stretched. Crap. I have to meet Sara at the Trolley stop this morning. I thought they said it wasn’t going to rain.

I swiped at my mouse, and the interference OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diode) display on my desk next to my bed sprang to life, casting a ghostly shadow across my room. Sitting down at my chair, I came in range of the pseudo-depth effect of the screen and brought up Mozilla. Click, click — MyUCSD. I was right — 10 percent precipitation. It was coming down like Noah out there. Well, while I was on the site, I thought I might as well get some work done; Sara wouldn’t be coming for another hour or so, and I’d been meaning to apply to graduate anyway.

“Make sure you have cleared with your departments that you are ready for graduation. This application will be automatically rejected if your departmental clearances are not in our system.” I ignored the message; half the departments still missed the deadline in Winter quarter anyway, the net result being they had left the system open to any application. Digital paperwork, my ass. I’m probably going to have to stop by Physics today to make sure it gets done.

Nonetheless, I filled out the necessary fields. Major: Physics. Graduation quarter: SP24. College: John Muir — by virtue of seniority and way too few apartments in Muir to handle the number of their seniors, I was stuck in the Muir seniors enclave of the relatively new Revelle apartments. They had bulldozed the Fleets a decade ago, but only recently gotten around to building the new Revelle housing after the state budget freeze seven years ago). Submit. Wait. I’m forgetting something.

Oh, that’s right, basketball tickets. UCLA was playing us next week, and I promised Sara that we’d go despite the fact that I loathe attending sports events. It’s completely ridiculous: five years ago, coming out of the budget crisis, the administration decided that the only way to avoid perennial budget insanity at either the state or federal level was to boost alumni donations and to move the school to Division I. So, they railroaded a student fee vote, demolished the perfectly usable RIMAC Arena, and built the bigger and better Watson Arena that opened this year. New, shiny and perfectly built for television broadcasts, so the entire country (or anyone who tuned into ESPN 5 that day) could watch UCSD get creamed by UCLA — for the fifth year in a row. And for this they think they’re going to get money? Well, I haven’t been paying enough attention to Sara lately anyway — senior year physics will do that to you.

Still, I can’t help but think the entire endeavor is a bit like watching the Christians and the Lions. The ones being eaten, incidentally, were the UCSD athletes. At least UCSD still did not give out athletic scholarships, although as of late I’ve felt I’m the only sane one who still thinks it’d be a bad idea. In the last 30 years, we’d gone from being UC Irvine to being a public Cal Tech or MIT — and they want to turn us back into UCLA or Boulder, complete with athletic scholarships, post-football game riots and an orgy of worship at a circle of pagan gods whose anointed task has nothing to do with the real mission of this university, namely the pursuit of higher knowledge and its conveyance to a greater number of individuals.

Grudgingly, I bought the tickets online while eating a bowl of cereal. I tweaked some of my RSS feeds and got rid of the Triton basketball news that Sara has inserted into the rest of the news feeds that projected from the larger OLED hung on the wall closer to my bed (which also serves as the HDTV and console gaming screen when not being a news ticker).

Grabbing my FlexPad and heading out the door, I started the long trot from Revelle to the Trolley stop, which by way of irate city residents was on the far side of Camp Snoopy (which now housed Tenth, the final college). The FlexPad itself was a cheap 802.11 wireless OLED computer, which as one might assume from its name, was flexible, waterproof, dirtproof and probably flushable if I ever felt like going to the sewer to get it back in perfect working order. Reading the latest issue of the Economist on it was, in any case, a welcome distraction from the gutted lot where the old Student Center and the crafts center used to be, and where the Bonner Hall extension would soon be constructed. The biologists already owned half the campus, and it depressed me to walk by the bulldozers every morning where there were once horrendous-looking orange wooden buildings that actually had some feeling of character to them.

Absorbed in the Economist’s cogent analysis of the demise of the Republican Party into the Libertarians and the Fundamentalists at last week’s convention in Boise, Idaho, I made my way by the construction and all the way to the Trolley stop without so much as a pang of melancholy.

Sara was waiting for me, a bit damp and a bit perturbed, as she had only her jacket and no umbrella.

“I got tickets for the UCLA game,” I grumbled at her, a bit damp myself, but at least with an umbrella, which I promptly shuffled her under. She visibly brightened at this news, which was oddly both irritating and gratifying in some way. She squeezed my hand.

“Ready for Quantum with Intrilligator?”

“Sure.”