«  Tue.10.31.2000  » 4:38 pm EST        62°F (17°C) in Ann Arbor After five months, it appears that the great national nightmare is almost over. (Apologies to former President Gerald Ford.) On Thursday, I am scheduled to meet with representatives of the Scholastic Standing Committee to discuss my situation. I have a good feeling that my case for reinstatement is about ten times more open-and-shut than it would have been in September, mostly since I'm no longer working. The SSC would have wanted to use my work hours as a means of screwing me, but that's been taken away from them. Reinstatement or no reinstatement, though, I'm seriously considering leaving school after this term. I'm sure that the College of Engineering will continue to find ways to ride my ass, and my parents are going into "let's-save-as-much-money-as-possible-when-it-comes-to-Larry" mode. I won't go into detail in regards to them, but suffice it to say that my mother is more worried about the family's perfect credit rating than she is about my well-being. As of early January, I could be in an apartment somewhere in Ann Arbor, with a nice full-time job and a sweet car -- and I don't mean the Buick Regal that my parents have stolen from me for my sister's use. Sure it might look like an immature decision -- at least by my mother's idiotic definition of maturity -- on the outside, but when nobody accepts your best effort, sometimes you just have to move on and start over. Three midterms await me in the next week. Econ 101 will be the first, tomorrow evening; it will be followed by Physics 140 on Thursday evening. After that, I take the three-part Japanese 101 midterm over the next three class days (speaking Friday, reading/writing/listening Monday, grammar Tuesday). In addition to all of that, I have an important Japanese 101 lecture on Thursday, to be delivered by Princeton University Prof. Seiichi Makino; and finally, the Big Game comes up at Yost on Saturday night. So, I should be keeping quite busy, thank you very much.