. . . . . entries for 28.2.10 . . . . .
Hell hell hell hell hell midterms hell hell SiS hell hell hell hell hell psych lab hell.
. . . . . entries for 27.2.10 . . . . .
It just occurred to me that I'm really looking forward to high school reunions - seeing where virtual strangers who once took classes with me end up in life, and also seeing them see wherever I am.
Also, I'm not totally thrilled about the neglected thing, actually. Apparently the only proven way to get a neglected egg to hatch is to view-bomb it after it turns - as in, put it on a really high traffic site, to the likes of which mere intarweb mortals have no access. There are dragon dorks who have access to such sites and are helpful, but it'd be nice if I could pull such a thing off relying less on The Powers That Be.
It is an absurd and affected luxury to be able to drink tea, especially many different types of tea with different stuff in it (milk, sugar, honey, agave, etc.) but among all the absurd and affected things I could do I suppose it's not all that bad.
WELP, as you can prolly see from the below post, my egg died. . . BUT NOT BEFORE TURNING INTO A NEGLECTED DRAGON OMG.
I am a pixel dragon badass for getting even that far, I'll have you know. :P Maybe next round I'll do better.
. . . . . entries for 26.2.10 . . . . .
Tonight I am holding an EPIC DRAGON EXPERIMENT. If you are disposed to be helpful and have some kind of auto-refreshing function on your browser, click this and refresh it like crazy!
. . . . . entries for 25.2.10 . . . . .
"Hardly education, all those books I didn't read - they just sat there on the shelf, looking much smarter than me."
Love that line from Modest Mouse's climate change album. :P
. . . . . entries for 24.2.10 . . . . .
The social science corner of Princeton smells delicious today, like spring thaw and fried dough and frying garam masala. And my psych precept thought my silly meta-inconsistent sentences were funny. And my bubble tea has SO MANY BUBBLES.
And it's all going to be covered with snow again tomorrow. Hell.
. . . . . entries for 23.2.10 . . . . .
In my distraction - at times, I think, looking right at my calendar - I forgot I had a reading response due for polipsy today. This is going to be a strange after-class conversation.
Rather than never going to neuro when I'm under the impression it'll be of no use to me because I'm so sleepy (twice, now, this has happened), I should probably suck it up and go and try to arrange the rest of my life so that it doesn't make me fall asleep in that damnably dark, cozy lecture hall. But . . . well. My life seems to bear only so much arranging.
Disguising, obfuscating, vagueness - such as often appear here, or in notebooks, written backwards - just make things easier for me, though probably not for you. I'm sorry if I ever weirded you out with that, my idiosyncratic coping mechanism.
. . . . . entries for 22.2.10 . . . . .
I don't know why it is that I sometimes forget the things that form the foundations of my life - not, understand, the "most important things," overtly, but that on which the rest of me is built. I don't know why, but I must implicitly expect that things will change, that things can't stay the same.
Some things never change, and when the rest of the world moves along - when party platforms change, kids move away, and cancer metastasizes - they are stuck and as miserable and befuddled as ever they were. If they thought they weren't, it's not that things were better. Things just were stagnant, and they forgot - or willed themselves to forget.
I don't know how we go around living without facing up to death. When it comes, or its shadow comes, even at the edges of our worlds, it reduces everything to . . . well, this, I guess. Whichever sad and frustrated and useless sentence you prefer.
Fact: I have not posted anything in my litblog in a long time.
Another fact: I have not posted anything in my enviroblog in a long time.
A third fact: I care more about the first fact than the second fact.
Hrmm. But I don't want to go trumpeting everything I've written to the world, either. Ah well.
. . . . . entries for 20.2.10 . . . . .
From an Atelier interview transcript:
"Yeah, we have a large theoretical framework. We called it our time project and now we just call it Steve vs. hope. Hope seems to be winning which is not necessarily a good thing."
Lol lol lol lol.
Of all the stuff I've done at Princeton - classes and extracurriculars alike - I really like being the editor of Science in Society. I'm glad it's a role I've fallen into. What does that say about what I ought to be doing with my life?
Okay, so, there have been some articles on HUM lately in the Daily Prince. I was actually interviewed for this one, though you may notice nothing from me made its way into the article. There's been a response to it from a recent HUMorist, but the content of my reaction to the question "did you like HUM?" was so different from any of this that I'm thinking about writing in an editorial to explain how I felt about it - what I think HUM was supposed to be.
It was supposed to be St. John's, I thought, in a minute dose, amidst more practical and schooly sorts of classes. It was supposed to be every student's individual search for the truth thrown together into a seminar room. It wasn't supposed to be about bitching about workload or how little we were able to engage the works, given the time we had. It was supposed to be a first pass at something we would all continue for the rest of our lives. It was supposed to be hard - for our brains and schedules, sure, but for our hearts and minds and (some would say) souls, too.
Blarg, I should've gotten up earlier. -.-
. . . . . entries for 19.2.10 . . . . .
I got one very important thing done tonight! (Though I suppose it isn't finished as such yet. It will be tomorrow.)
If the semesters just keep getting busier, will I eventually stop sleeping, stop showering, stop eating, stop procrastinating? If it happens, it will go in that order, I think, based on experience.
Between five classes, independent work, SiS, research assistant stuff, worrying about the summer/senior year/the rest of my life, and whatever other extracurricular junk decides to wander in my direction, I fear my imminent implosion. And I have often been one to bitch about work in the past - especially in high school (o, blog archives, the lulz you bring me) - but seriously. I wonder what I've gotten myself into.
Frank is busily living up his taper in Atlanta right now. Spare an enthusiastic thought for the UR team!
. . . . . entries for 18.2.10 . . . . .
Here is an update on the life academic!
There are really people in the world who say "like" about every fifth word, and tools with poise and not-even-insufferable confidence. Sitting in a dead silent precept is bad, but so is listening to truly inane, basic conversation about pieces of the reading that were discussed in lecture. Psychology of Thinking has taught me those things.
Cognitive neuro lecture puts me to sleep about half the time - the building is way overheated and the chairs are comfy and the slides are all online. But I like cognitive neuro lab. The TAs are adorkable and who doesn't like fiddling with brain scans and diving into MRIs for credit?
Atelier is kinda disorganized and dysfunctional, and the instructors are commuting from Kansas and California, which is really ironic and awful. But in some fundamental sense, it's what I wanted, what I'm interested in. Everyone has a designated special role in the class, and mine is "expert on the future." No joke.
More updates after class, har har. :P
. . . . . entries for 16.2.10 . . . . .
I think those who live adventurously have to make of the world an adventuresome place. I am quite bad at this, but I want to get better.
I wouldn't mind some help, but I'd hate to impose.
. . . . . entries for 15.2.10 . . . . .
I think, though I'm fairly level-headed in terms of future events - I don't think I expect things to go very well or very poorly, but just to go and probably somewhat downhill, based on our present course of action - I'm an emotional pessimist. Maybe that's because so much of my idea of what makes life beautiful and good has an unrealistic basis: video game romances, quests, backstories, battles.
But as I thought of this on my way to class this morning, listening to the Galbadia Garden theme in my headphones, I remembered a name one of my friends called me by. It is an unfair name, because she has seen a lot of the good in me and not so much of the bad, and it flatters me unduly, but it is undue flattery that fuels one of my stranger aspirations: to be a symbol of the possible to you, who know me.
The name was "eco-warrior." Looking at my classmates walking up and down Washington, I evaluated what I imagined them to be against Garden students. Many of them must be in school to become hired guns, but some will discover - or already know - that they are lions.
The villains do not have pretty hair in real life, but there are villains.
Man, if I knew more people at this school, it would be a disaster for my roommates. I'd be trying to set them up with boys all the time.
. . . . . entries for 14.2.10 . . . . .
I think the thing that really stresses/depresses me lately (not that school doesn't manage that at all; it does) is thinking about the summer. I don't know why it should. I guess I'm just tired of trying to get into things, jumping through hoops, paddling through life so far from what flows. I want a glimpse at what the rest of my life might be like - with all that entails - and not some frustrating 10-week gig that won't actually result in any forward progress.
Oh, hell. Where did my glasses go?
I don't actually know if it gets easier, baby.
Remember?
(Well, I know I have trouble. It's been so long.)
. . . . . entries for 13.2.10 . . . . .
Hot damn, am I ever an emotional mushbucket today.
. . . . . entries for 10.2.10 . . . . .
Snow day? In COLLEGE? WEIRD.
(traying, snowmanning, cocoa-making, tidying? . . .)
. . . . . entries for 8.2.10 . . . . .
I love Jeff Buckley kicks.
. . . . . entries for 5.2.10 . . . . .
I have started to write up D&D characters for my roommates. Clearly I'm insane.
. . . . . entries for 3.2.10 . . . . .
My mental clock - or something, I don't know - is apparently busted. My precept for the psychology of thinking isn't until 1:30, but I somehow got it into my head - looking at clocks constantly, apparently paying attention only to the minutes - that it was NOW and I was LATE so I HURRIED and now I am here, way, way early, and I spent about ten minutes freaking out, thinking, "this is the right room, right? Where the heck is everyone?"
-.- Fail. Fail fail fail fail fail.
My mind is filled with radio cure.
. . . . . entries for 2.2.10 . . . . .
I am so deflated, and so easily.
Here is that familiar, terrible problem: I could easily spend all of my time on perhaps two of the five classes (plus JP) I'm enrolled in, and yet here I am with six academic things and at least one extracurricular thing to be doing. Ho hum.
I'm sitting in political psychology, before it actually begins, and I just looked at the Google News for "climate change." The top hits are still climategate, and (augh! my heart!) Fox News, no less. Sigh.
It really does look like US policy is paying no particular mind to it, though - at least, the administration isn't, I think the democrats could be relied upon not to if they could be relied upon to actually muscle something through which, unfortunately, they can't. ARRRRGHHHHHH
My URL has gotten really inappropriate to the blog's content. :P
. . . . . entries for 1.2.10 . . . . .
I feel like I am central to my Atelier class - like I know so much that is useful to it, like I am such a good complement to my professors in the project. I forgot how strongly I felt that way before; it's nice to rediscover it.
For Atelier today, I had to read a quippy 100-item list of things to expect from climate change. It started, ridiculously, with wine: losing certain types of wine, including the dry and the light and pinot noir especially. So it was kind of silly, for a while, clearly trying to appeal to materialistic values. But it started getting to me, at length, with various more serious items, until I hit the item on the Ganges drying up. At that point I started crying and couldn't both dry my eyes and keep reading, because every new item was a new onslaught, a new horror; though I plodded on for a while, intermittently wiping my eyes and hiding them in my hands, I had to leave a good chunk of the list unread.
It's not just that the Ganges is drying up, or that glaciers and sea ice are melting - it is not just that it's happening. It's the horrifying disregard for the fact that it's happening amongst so many of those powerful enough to curb it. It's getting another email from my uncle harping about how great it is that Greenland will be green again, how it's all "natural cycles," how climate change is the invention of profiteers.
Is there a parallel for us, we who have no sacred river? Can we understand the pain, physical and spiritual, that awaits that people? I doubt it. Little - if anything - is truly sacred here, sacred in the way life-giving things were when the world was younger, and we have never been the kind to try and understand others.
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)