"Watch your thoughts; they become words. Watch your words; they become actions. Watch your actions; they become habits. Watch your habits; they become character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny." -- unknown

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results - Albert Einstein

a test and a missing roomate.
September 23, 2003 - 8:35 pm

that's sort of minor news though..

the real hot item is my korean roomate. now, all that i'm about to relate is second hand at best. i'd like to stress that i've no direct knowledge and can only offer up the purest of speculation on what's really going on. hopefully, i'll avoid the spectulation altogether.

the story starts about two weeks ago, at least by my poor memory. i came home from class and john pulled me aside to say that chow, our korean roomie, had come to him (john) and rob with some sort of problem. what exactly the problem is was lost in translation but it somehow dealt with people threathening chow.

when john asked him if he saw who threatened him, he said no.

when john asked if he could tell anything about who threatened him, he couldn't.

when the idea was offered to find someone else who knows korean, as it was pretty clear that chow didn't know the words he wanted to use - chow declinded.

taking the issue to our ra was also vetoed by chow.

rob would later mention that chow had told him something about hearing gun shots while he (chow) was alone in the apartment..

basically, it seems chow thought someone was out to hurt and/or kill him, but could offer nothing back that up.

when i next see chow, he's normal - no mention to me about any troubles. i don't inquire on the basis of if he wants to talk to me about it, he will bring it up.

a week passes, the hurricane comes.. and chow goes with the school on the evacuation. they go off to some area shelter or something, i don't know. i went to my brother's house.

i next see chow monday morning (i think it was in the morning). the power was still out here, but the housing office was letting us in for short amounts of time to get new clothes, empty rotten food from the fridge, etc. when i came in, chow was inside looking through his stuff.

i said some sort of greeting, i don't recall what. said something like 'isn't this fun?' and he mumbled some reply. par for the course as far as communication goes. he was busy looking for something and i just wanted to grab a fresh set of clothes.

in total i was in the apartment about five minutes and chow was here when i left.

on the way out a lady stopped me to tell me that since we couldn't stay in the apartments, the school was going to put us up in the big ass convocation center - where the basketball games are played. anyway, i decline.

it seems chow was going to go there to stay, but i'm not sure if he made it.

we started getting calls for him late last night and early this morning, but none of us had seen him. none of us stayed at the convocation center and we all assumed that's where chow was.

we got like five calls between 8am and 9am looking for him. his uncle was calling, residence life.. etc.

chow is missing. since the power came back on late yesterday, they nixed the plan to have people stay at the convocation center (rob, john and i had no idea if they'd done that or not.. but it appears they did) so he couldn't have stayed there. he didn't attend his 8am class - very odd.

rob talked with someone at residence life and they said that while in the shelter chow had talked about his troubles re: someone threatening him and seemed pretty anixious about things. he supposedly mentioned something about flying to nyc and then to korea - basically just leaving school.

that seems to be running theory - chow left school for korea, but it's very odd his family doesn't know he's flying home.

his area of the room is always a mess, so it's hard to tell what's here and what isn't. though, his laptop and desktop pc are here.. clothes are piled around like normal.. his pillow is the only thing i can see missing.

why would he take his pillow on a flight home? perhaps i just don't see it under the piles of stuff. or it's packed in a back from the trip to the shelter.

i don't know.

rob, being rob, is talking about how he knew something was up and should have paid more attention. basic hindsight blather that he's so very good at.

john and i are far more stoic (is that how you spell it?) i don't want to speculate and prefer to see what actually happened. like i said, i didn't talk to him about this at all and the bits and pieces rob/john offer don't make sense.

like the gun thing.. we live on the third floor of an apartment complex. a gun being fired would draw the cops pretty damn quick. perhaps he heard a car backfire?

it seems he's pretty paranoid and can't offer anything to back up his worries.. but with him being goine for 24 hours now, perhaps he had something to worry about. or he just went crazy? or he just was super homesick, the storm fucked with his head some and he decided to go home.

nothing adds up.

oddly, it seems i may have been the last one of us to see/speak with chow. i think i'll nail that down later tonight.

if so, i didn't notice a single thing wrong with him.. granted, i was really paying attention. perhaps if he had said something to me...

anyway, if you see an unfamiliar korean guy about 30 years old wandering around and he answers to chow, let me know.