. . . . . entries for 29.10.08 . . . . .
In other news, I love and miss FMOF, or, as his friends call him, Four-Oh Ferraro. OMG I love that nickname. What dorky resplendence.
(But I do not love it as much as I love him.)
The Obama ad was good. I'm not sure how I feel about him recycling stuff from other spots/speeches/etc, but whatev. Both Maddow and (I think) one of her guests noticed the waving wheat in the beginning, although I'm not sure how seriously either of them took it. To me, it was honestly striking: yellow wheat in autumn, the promise of a harvest, my studies of van Gogh. I wonder what it meant to Obama, or if perhaps he only knew that it was such a "ripe" image as to allow a million hungry points of view their catharsis.
It would make great fodder for WWS Paper Idea #1, which I guess I will maybe fall back on if WWS Paper Idea #3 falls through. (#2 I am not as thrilled with.)
. . . . . entries for 28.10.08 . . . . .
When I get home, I may drown myself in curry.
I am waiting on word from an Someone to see if they want to do something on Halloween. Failing that, I will be in the market for other Someones in the area to bother the evening of the 31st. Hrm.
. . . . . entries for 25.10.08 . . . . .
In other news, I'm in Rochester. :P Graham and Frank (they are roommates) are off at practice, and getting their pictures taken with the team. The boys keep the room pretty chilly, which I forgot about, so I foolishly went sockless to bed. I feel fairly rested anyway; I think Frank, with his encroaching sleep deficit, is drowsier than I.
AI article on the desk. Har har. (Frank, if you read this, remind me to tell you about something AI-related. Also some other stuff, about which the AI thing will hopefully jog my memory.)
Not sure what we're going to do today - maybe some strolling, if it's not raining too much, maybe a movie.
Awwww. Just looked at my email and discovered the calc grade distribution there. I got a B on the midterm. Could be worse, but could be a lot better too. Oh well.
. . . . . entries for 24.10.08 . . . . .
I got my calc midterm back. I didn't do as spectacularly well as I had hoped, but I scored a fair amount above the average, so hopefully with the curve it'll end up being a pretty good mark.
Lunch then train! Whee!
Your Surfing Habits are 70% Male, 30% Female |
 If we had to guess, we would guess that you are a man. You use the internet to make your life more efficient - and to make you smarter. For you, the internet is like a vast encyclopedia. You search and surf extensively. You look up everything online. |
Har har. Gender stereotyping is entertaining. So are very limited perspectives on what "Internet" means.
Seriously - I forget sometimes that most people haven't lived on forum websites at all, that most folks are deathly afraid of meeting strangers online, that roleplaying is weird and probably considered maladaptive by your average person. I forget that these perspectives make me different. I think they're useful - I think I can make them useful.
Foolishly - so foolishly - I napped. So now I am very chipper. I will not be chipper on the train, so I will probably fall asleep some. Which means I might be chipper at 11 PM, which would be bad, because Frank will be dead tired. :P So there will be reading and wakefulness on trains, hopefully. I procured some munchy stuff and Odwalla juice for the train, for the avoidance of death thereon, because a right and proper meal between about 1:30 and 11 is more or less out of the question.
The backpack and moderately-sized rolly suitcase are coming with me, which means awkward lugging. Oh well. I may see Susan and/or my dad along the way, at stops in New York and Albany, respectively. That could be neat.
It feels strange not to have immediate and pressing matters to attend to! Very very strange. How strange it would be, someday, to perhaps not have homework, just vast swaths of do-what-you-will time. I wonder if I'd do anything. Probably not, at least at first. But boredom would spur me to action in time. Kind of like retirement, or at least, what I hear about retirement. My mother will have sage words on the subject soon enough.
. . . . . entries for 23.10.08 . . . . .
Midterms are over for the Erin. EEB/ENV went well.
I'm mostly packed for Rochester and home. :)
. . . . . entries for 22.10.08 . . . . .
I love Dresden Codak. It kind of makes me want to understand transhumanism. Kind of. I don't know. Not highly evolved enough yet.
I think I might be occasionally idealistically insufferable, and so remain forever.
Of related note: Deutsch fehlt mir. :(
Of note: one of my HUM classmates from last year (the Iraqi War veteran among our number) showed me this. Was denken Sie darüber?
The explanation: it is midterms week. Today I had two tests, psych and calc. Weirdly, I think the latter went better than the former. This is partially because I had an advantage (named Frank <3) going in, and partially because test prep was just way better organized in calc than in psych. We shall see how all that goes over. For now I must study, because
tomorrow I have my EEB/ENV midterm, and God only knows what will happen there. Mercifully, I do not have lab tomorrow morning, so I can sleep/study a lot. I also have to do my problem set for calc tomorrow night. We have a problem set. It is distressing, especially since I can't pull my usual "flee to Lewis Library after class" maneuver, at least not so effectively, since
on Friday I am leaving, around 1:30 probably, to catch a train from Penn Station at 4 up to Albany and across to Rochester.
It feels like Rochester last year, a little. The leaves smell like that and the cold feels like that and there is a similar je ne sais quois to life, these past couple of days. I like it. I want to curl up with it and fall asleep. And I will.
. . . . . entries for 20.10.08 . . . . .
What would I be for Halloween if I had to invent a costume from the clothes I happened to have at school? Thursday night, there will be prizes for people who appear at Rocky dinner in costume, with a grand prize awarded by Master Jeff and it could be a good time. :P
I wish I'd brought my wench gear. Curses.
. . . . . entries for 19.10.08 . . . . .
Oh boy memoir drama! Oh boy midterm studying I haven't really gotten to due to other work and small quantities of goofing off! Oh BOY!
I want to write something for the litblog, some innocuous, accidentally perfect little story. But now isn't really the time, and I'm not inspired like I was. Ho hum.
Rochester, maybe. :P Frank does have class and swimming and stuff.
How on Earth am I going to study properly? I guess outlines for EEB, practice for calc, just reading and mulling over and maybe bugging other people about psych.
. . . . . entries for 17.10.08 . . . . .
I still love my U Chicago essay. I still love the Callie story. Sometimes I really get it right - sometimes.
I may have to buy this for myself.
Hmm. I wish I had done better on that lab quiz. Not that I did badly, but I could have done better. More nose to the grindstone, I guess. And plentiful midterm-studying.
. . . I wonder if the blog bears palette-swapping in the near future. It will remain mostly black, of course. Black is still the new green, even if perhaps it has gone gray a bit in the wash.
OH AND ALSO
I facebooked this, but I think it bears more permanent mention: the sad state of my Circadian rhythm. It has become normal for me to do about half of my sleeping shortly after dinner, and to then stay up until 3 +/- an hour to get up at 7:30. Wow, me - wow. You really outdid yourself this time.
So, no sleeping tonight until a reasonable hour, which (indeed) seems reasonable enough given that I am going to tea, then to the last Teach McCain Campaign event, then dinner. AND SUCH STUDYING. Such studying. I should set study goals. Oh my. Can I bear that level of pressure to actually do something on a schedule?
Well - probably not.
Blog writing style grows uncommonly disjointed. Evidence of . . . something. "A certain je ne sais quois." Something I will probably chuckle at (agonizedly? contemptuously? finally nihilistically and delightedly liberatedly? with excessive adverbs?) in a couple years' time without knowing then any more than I know now what the I don't know what is.
Blog death roughly correlates to proximity of midterms/other occupation outside bloglande?
I have three midterms. I do not know how worried I should be about psych or EEB/ENV (probably pretty worried) and I am worried about calc insofar as I am worried I might shirk studying. Catch me shirking studying in excess and punch me, bitte and danke in advance.
This time next week I will probably be in Penn Station, waiting for my train. OMG crazy.
If I could alter one thing about my physical self, I would make my skin stop being such a moody adolescent of a skin. SERIOUSLY EPIDERMIS, GROW UP.
. . . . . entries for 16.10.08 . . . . .
Drunken and overly friendly boyfriend of roommate = kind of a riot. And very coherent and bilingual despite the high BAC and wobbliness.
. . . . . entries for 14.10.08 . . . . .
Paideia tonight was on linguistics, originally on text messaging and so forth, but that didn't get discussed a lot. We talked about stuff happening to language right now, especially qualifying changes as good or bad. People started tossing around terms like "high-register English," so I tried to introduce some Malcolm X/Frederick Douglass-type stuff, and people seemed pretty reluctant to hear what I was saying. Frustrating yet fascinating. Are we so unwilling to look our own language in the eye, to look ourselves in the mirror, and cry foul?
Two things.
First thing: I have my absentee ballot. Now I just need to figure out if I approve this amendment, and who exactly all these potential state supreme court justices and congresspeople and so forth are. :P Oh brother.
Second thing: Young bull elephants who witness herd members being killed manifest similar behaviors to those exhibited by young men who witness genocide. Some people are calling this post-traumatic stress disorder. There is a well-established body of evidence indicating that social mammals, including humans and elephants, have similar enough brain structures to account for very similar cognitive processes. For more details, listen here.
We also just learned about PTSD in psych class. I don't think I've been so close to crying in class since APUSH, watching the moments before the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. The things humans inflict not only upon one another, but on members of species who can't speak but can clearly think and feel - it just . . . never ceases to appall.
So hey, I think this weird roleplay-memoir thing might work out. It will take some creative integration of pseudo-fact and pseudo-fiction, though.
. . . . . entries for 13.10.08 . . . . .
How easily I regress into old habits. But hey! I made friends. And I applied what I've learned in the Teach McCain Campaign. And maybe even told people some stuff they didn't know.
(also, near the end, was a ham. maybe it's good for me amidst the ego-crushing though.)
. . . . . entries for 10.10.08 . . . . .
This made me a little nervouser about that region today. Arg.
. . . . . entries for 9.10.08 . . . . .
Oh, so by the way. I have begun the real sleep deprivation for the semester. Last night I was up 'til 3:30 or so writing a paper for EEB, with a quiz in psychology lab at 9, for which I woke up around 7. Poor planning! Hopefully I will get this nonsense under better wraps.
I might be a propagandist when I grow up.
I grok that.
. . . . . entries for 7.10.08 . . . . .
We were looking at the illegal VP stakes up through August, and Wesley Clark went up and up and up and then plummeted. Kelsey was much disheartened. She has a song about Wesley Clark that she used to sing with her friends in Michigan:
"I heart Wesley Clark! Bomb another genocidal country, baby!"
(to the tune of I Love Rock & Roll. duh.)
The GoCrossCampus game is lost. :( Everyone hates us 'cause we won last time. Sigh.
There are times at which one should just stop talking. Or writing. Or whatever.
It was (and, I suspect, will continue to be) pleasantly humbling, after all, to reflect on myself as 13. Man, if I was like that six years ago, who knows what I'll be like in another six? It's all, like, flux, man. So you're like, standing in a river, and it's moving past you, and it's the same river, you know, but it's not the same . . . and that's flux, and the water goes into the sky, that's flux, and it rains and that's flux . . .
Someone upstairs wrote a Heraclitus quote on their whiteboard. It makes me smile whenever I walk past it.
But seriously. Some essential and very silly qualities seem to remain. That I am at once so unlike myself six years ago and still understandably the same person puts things in perspective.
In largely unrelated news: train/plane stress dream? Really, unconscious? Not helpful.
Lord save me from reading six-year-old blog entries!
Although - the latest incarnation of the creative writing projekt (I miss German; I am feeling infantile from blog backreading; so sue me) involves me at that stage of the game. It's just I can hardly stand reading it, let alone writing myself that way now.
And another although - I know people who were at that stage of their intellectual/emotional development at like. . . 16. And I was, what, 13? Credit where credit is due. Um. Well, thinking about it, I don't know if credit is due. But something to consider, at least, in judgment of past selves.
(Tralfamadorians [is that even how you spell that?] would see me at all maturity levels at once. That is so much weirder than seeing someone as dead and alive simultaneously. So it goes - can you say that to someone who gets Alzheimer's or schizophrenia, really?)
. . . . . entries for 6.10.08 . . . . .
I wonder who Bush will vote for.
And I broke
like a bad joke
somebody's uncle told
at a wedding reception in 1972
where a little boy under the table with cake in his hair
stared at the grown-up feet
as they danced and swayed
and his father laughed and talked on the long ride home
and his mother laughed and talked on the long ride home
and he thought about how everyone dies someday
and when tomorrow gets here, where will yesterday be?
and fell asleep in his brand new winter coat
(I love Weakerthans, seriously. What a weird relapse.)
. . . . . entries for 5.10.08 . . . . .
I. Miss. You.
How do you read characters - by forming opinions of them, or by identifying with them?
If/when I go independent next year, I will miss seeing Master Jeff all the time. I will have to seek him out when I shuffle up to Rocky to eat every now and again.
Did you know my sister has a boyfriend? My sister has a boyfriend. I have not seen them together but they are adorable. I may even be a little jealous of the new-love feeling, but eh. I am far more jealous of the aged-past-adolescence-but-little-further, and of the proximity to the Object. Both of these things I will get. There will be more rest then, and less worry.
I didn't mention it before, on my end-of-junior-year-reflective post, but it bears mentioning that I used more big words back then. :P I wonder why that changed.
One more month until the identity of the next President is revealed. Eep.
In related news: Um?
I kind of want to give Barack Obama a hug. I don't think that's gonna happen though. Bodyguards and battleground states will doubtless prevent me from meeting him. And, when I think about it, I don't know that I like him well enough to hug him. I'm a little scared of him, particularly when it comes to, say, Pakistan.
. . . . . entries for 4.10.08 . . . . .
I really like this poem. High literature? Perhaps not. A kind of adorable love/lust/whatever poem? Well I think so.
Interesting fact: the caduceus is not a symbol of Hippocrates. Actually it is a symbol of Hermes. Oops. Like really oops.
I had totally forgotten how much I love Weakerthans.
. . . . . entries for 3.10.08 . . . . .
Also remind me to freak out more ardently about my absentee ballot, because it's not here yet. WTF board of elections! WTF.
Remind me, next time we talk, to start freaking out about my WWS application and what I'm doing this summer (in DC?).
When I am troubled by the thought of my own insignificance these days, with regard to the election for example, the thought returns to me that I may well not have free will anyway, and I am more or less a mass of molecules operating in such a manner as determined at the beginning of time. But you know - masses of molecules still have to make decisions, whether or not those choices are predetermined. So it's not actually all that compelling. If it turns out that we do have free will, for that matter, I would think we ought to use it carefully.
To be more concrete: I can't find a certain necklace of mine. The alarm has been issued throughout Buyers, and hopefully it'll turn up someplace or another. My outlook on the probability of the "turning up" event is bleak, because I remember once being relieved to discover that the necklace, having come unclasped, had not fallen from my neck before I arrived in my room.
I wish there were a Google location search for important items like that. Someday there may be - it'll probably be scary, really. But I want it now because, like I said, of all things to lose. Ugh.
My calc pset, of which I have done just a bit, is due at 2 PM today. I don't envision myself getting any more of it done tonight, so I think I'll go read-sleep soon. I'll just finish my pset in Fine after class.
Incidentally, next debate, we're playing Newsweek bingo.
. . . . . entries for 2.10.08 . . . . .
Of all things to lose track of. Why this?
come home?
.:people:.
{ting}
she looks like the real thing
{mari}
out and about
[kelsey]
THIS IS AMERICA
{yianni}
stop being depressed
{alisa}
other
[shannon]
close and far
{frank}
islands where no islands should go
[cassie]
eating knowledge
{colin}
my dm
[emily]
shoulder to the wheel
[brian]
nostalgic for fantasy
[nicole]
industry insider
{elle}
angry enviro
[matt]
never heard of miyazaki
[pirate dan]
are you reading this?
[olga]
distracted
[messiah dan]
messiah/believer
{max}
approach focus
[natalie]
wait a minute
[susan]
solitude
{greg}
manbeargreg
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.:skin:.
turtles! turtles! by araglas
(heavily modified by yours truly)