Save the trees, kill the people!

As a friend said, welcome to university - making you pay money every step of the way.
My booklist for this semester has exponentially increased to a whopping 20 books for 4 subjects out of 5 I've signed up for. The last class is a computer class, so I'm guessing that the manual for that class is going to be as expensive as the rest combined.

It's funny...when I was helping out with the CALPIRG Higher Ed and Textbooks Campaign, I definitely had it easy compared to the others when it came to paying for textbooks. Now that I've quit as a full-time volunteer, someone up there decides to instigate some sort of financial retribution by switching the laundry list with my usual book list.

Being the poor international student I am, I refuse to buy any of my books in pristine condition. I probably won't use any of my books again after this semester, and it won't hurt the environment as much if I buy used (see title).

That said, one potentially good outcome of this is that my classes are all upper division, and therefore look to be more interesting since they're using more diverse texts. I sure hope it'll help relieve some of the heart attacks induced by the bills. $170 and still counting (I don't want to even attempt to calculate how much the lot will cost if bought new).

The second part of the title refers to the online game I found, Pandemic 2. Strangely addicting considering the objective is to wipe out the whole of humanity, but then again it's also rather thought provoking considering I made it through the heart of the SARS pandemic and have been living in a bird-flu-infested city for a while, in addition to learning a smidgen about bioterrorism from my Freshman Seminar.

[These thoughts have been censored due to international security issues]