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Friday, January 31, 2003
01:57 - accomplishments for the day/half-night include: reading a couple chapters of stendhal's le rouge et le noir and all of machiavelli's the prince, going to all my classes, plus doing almost all my nuclear homework. (the last problem's still being... problematic. but i think i'll leave it be.) i still have to write a 3-5 page history paper before 11 a.m., but i honestly didn't think i'd make it this far... so i think i'll go home and grab a shower and some more coffee to clear my mind.
Wednesday, January 29, 2003
23:07 - ok, so i get a bit over-enthusiastic. after a pic of angie w/the dogs, it's a row and a half of the spankies xmas party, then the rest is from ang's 23rd b-day party. maybe if i get ambitious i'll put cool mouse-overs to tell who's who and such, but for now they're unrotated and unlabeled. yay for pictures!
13:32 - one of the egyptian students here at tech messaged me to ask about my origins... turns out that "maher" is a very common family name in his country, and that my first name wouldn't sound all that outlandish among the coptic christian community. i think that's pretty nifty -- certainly not something i'd heard before!
Tuesday, January 28, 2003
20:51 - courtesy of aaron: the state of the union drinking game, 2003 edition. a tad late, but we're prob'ly 3/4 through and given proper supplies i'd already be sloshed on "nucular" alone.
19:39 - score! clark suggested watching a live webcast of the state of the union... it just so happens that ch313 has speakers on the helpdesk computer. so i'll prob'ly disturb all the poor apolitical engineers who hang out here and just want to finish their homework, but at least i'll know what to rant about tomorrow!
17:52 - i'm missing bush's state o' the union address this evening... working helpdesk instead. i just hope it's not as horrific as last year's -- the day after i was taking a train from bzak to interlaken, bought a copy of le monde to read on the way. it had a big article on the speech on the front, the whole thing translated into french on back. i can still feel the cringe from hitting the words l'axe du mal.... it's the sort of thing that summons visions of american embassies the world over spieling off travel alerts. does bush not know that people in other nations read what he says, even when he's addressing primarily americans? or does he just not care?
Monday, January 27, 2003
21:55 - i smell slightly less like kerosene now, having taken a shower at the fitness center. my hair also looks pretty interesting, having forgotten my hairbrush when going to aforementioned fitness center. but that's beside the point -- why, you might ask, should i smell like kerosene? why of course, because our heat doesn't work very well, thus inducing us to crack, to crumble, to use a kerosene heater. ang and john brought it in a few days ago. must admit, being warm is nice... but the house is getting pretty smelly in general. besides the noxious fuel scent, there's nary a clean dish since we still haven't replaced the dog-chewed scrub-sponge thingy... and then there's the litter box. tragically, i'm almost out of incense.
13:29 - note to self: iced over hair gets staticky (that would be a combo of "full of static" and "icky") after it melts. buy a freakin' hair-dryer. or move to the tropics.
13:22 - one thrill that never quits: the pleasure of sending off a grad school app, knowing you'll never have to look at it again or worry about how many components are missing. i find myself unabashedly showing off the envelope to anyone who'll look all the way to the post office -- "hey, look here, look at me, for once i'm getting one off in time to use priority mail instead of express!" well, ok, so i had to use express to get to hawaii in time. but it's their fault for not being continental. i find it a bit more than mildly disturbing that i've used more than three hours of my helpdesk slave wages on postage today.... but i never have to look at those applications again!
Sunday, January 26, 2003
20:01 - so usually the helpdesker stories are stupid user ones... you know, woman calls up because the coffee cup holder on her computer's broken. me, all i've got so far are stupid helpdesk worker stories. like me ruining 40 min. of some poor guy's work at lining up a print queue... i come in to the lab a little early, find that the helpdesker working before me was a no-show, and sit down to find 50 print jobs lined up. after a few seconds of conversation through a heavy accent, i get the idea that they were all the same, that he who needed printouts was just frustrated because there was no one here to tell the printer to do its stuff. so i, like an idiot, print one and erase the other 49. guess the rest of the story. fortunately, he's a cheerful type, finds 'em all again on the internet fast as i can print 'em, leaves with a "thank you bye bye!" then it strikes me: there's no phone in here. when asked, during my job interview, what to do when faced with a violently angry user, i'd suggested phoning campus police. so i must take greater care to not invoke murderous rage. *rolls into a little ball and hopes to make it through the rest of the shift without goofing up again...*
15:40 - superbowl=more helpdesk hours for me=more money for me. hurrah!
14:48 - i finally looked up the rest of the lyrics to the song that's implanted a couple lines in my head the past few days -- "and i find it kind of funny, i find it kind of sad, the dreams in which i'm dying are the best i ever had." thank you donnie darko.
Saturday, January 25, 2003
14:49 - utterly uninteresting but you're welcome to look... to make life easier on myself, i started another blog to keep track of when and where i'm working.
14:42 - i liked the comic strip zits this morning... can't remember why, but i know i did. however, i'm not sufficiently motivated to find a site that shows today's comic. so look there in a week. or buy a newspaper.
13:42 - i've redeemed myself -- just got a print job going in under a minute. hurrah! (i don't think i'm s'posed to let people print 20 copies of things, but oh well...)
13:13 - so i'm stunningly incompetent... first bit of actual work done on helpdesk, and printing a single document takes me nearly ten minutes. all because i loaded paper into "tray 3" and failed to notice the little "do not use tray 3" sign. i fail to deserve even the minimum wage salary i'm getting.
12:51 - some days i just want to take everyone i love one at a time and shake them by the shoulders until they believe me when i tell them that i will hurt them sooner or later and that they should get away as fast as they can. i don't think i'll ever actually give in to this whim, but consider yourselves warned without the violent belief-inducing bits...
so anyway. today's one of those days. combine this with a nearly-unnatural sleep-induced cheeriness, i suppose you've got psychotic. oh well, i'm just starting a helpdesk shift, so i suppose i've got time to reduce all intense emotions to normal levels...
Friday, January 24, 2003
00:15 - it's cold. i was contemplating washing dishes to thaw my hands earlier. unfortunately, one of the dogs chewed up the scrub-sponge thingy today, thus thwarting my designs... but the idea that the weather is severe enough to inspire housecleaning scares me. so now i'm double-layered bundled up in pajamas and normal clothes --couldn't stand to touch bare skin to the street clothes after they sat in my room and chilled during my afternoon nap. and at the physics study room until... well, until it gets warmer or i finish my physics homework, anyway. the roomies are threatening to call HUD if the new landlord continues the old one's neglect of our oh-so-weak heating system.
Thursday, January 23, 2003
08:43 - last night while the snow was still coming down it had a texture like sand... wading through, kicking it up to watch it spin away on the air just like i do at my favorite kinds of wild, not-sunsoaked beaches, i kept getting the urge to tear off my hiking boots and big wooly socks. i suppose it's a good thing that i'm old enough now to have my own little adult "you'll get frostbite" voice... but i kinda wish i'd done it anyway.
i like the snow. even though it's not as pretty now that everyone else has tramped through it too. even though classes are still going to happen.
Wednesday, January 22, 2003
14:52 - in the interest of keeping my mailbox thin while not completely losing the possibly neat links people are sending me:
http://allconsuming.net/#whatisthis
nytimes cybertimes
13:52 - i know i'm not s'posed to be working on my webpage during my hours in the lab. so i'm not going to. but i need to remind myself to add math world into the reference section later. even if they are selling something. because i keep ending up there whenever i try to get info on scary stuff like the Nyquist Frequency (say it in a big, boomy, 2 octaves too low voice for optimum effect) via google. so why not go there directly when i know it's scary math?
Tuesday, January 21, 2003
18:12 - the shrinking into a little ball and not dealing with anything instinct has been particularly strong today... but i made it. i think. i even got the form telling them, once again, to let me graduate without taking music apprec turned in...
Saturday, January 18, 2003
17:53 - combining two of my favorite topics of conversation in one weird tidbit... google search confirms that in the french version of buffy the vampire slayer, xander is known as alex harris. yet they'll stick with the name "faith" even though it comes out "face" through a french accent... (as seen the one time a bunch of us tried watching buffy last year and ended up rolling in the tv room floor.) ah, the horrors of bad translation!
16:52 - you've seen the belief-o-matic... (or maybe not.) now meet the ethical philosophy selector -- see how you match up to 19 favorite philosophers!
my results:
1. Kant (100%)
2. Mill (95%)
3. Sartre (94%)
4. Rand (89%)
5. Stoics (72%)
6. Epicureans (63%)
7. Prescriptivism (63%)
8. Aristotle (62%)
9. Bentham (60%)
10. Aquinas (57%)
11. Spinoza (56%)
12. Hume (52%)
13. Nietzsche (42%)
14. Hobbes (39%)
15. Noddings (39%)
16. Plato (37%)
17. Ockham (33%)
18. Augustine (30%)
19. Cynics (18%)
16:13 - speaking of uproars... check what happened when the weakest link went to thailand...
15:27 - happy b-day to my mom... i'm at home for the first half o' the weekend.
dad mentioned last night that there's a bit of an uproar over beaujolais being called "shit wine" in a lyonnais magazine... just sat down at his computer to find the story about the uproar and the uproar-causing story on the desktop. me, i like the stuff. or i like the party that surrounds the beaujolais nouveau release every year... or both. in any case, free press is good, telling wine critics what to think is bad, mmkay? and for chrissakes, they were turning the stuff into vinegar anyway.
Thursday, January 16, 2003
14:48 -
12:17 - it's snowing!!!! it's gorgeous... it started during my 9 a.m. class -- one minute the class is engrossed in the eyeball slice scene in un chien andalou, the next everyone's staring raptly out the window... i'm wearing terribly inappropriate shoes, no treads at all, so husband came along on my daily coffee-buying odyssey to laugh, point, and call the ambulance if i were to slip and break my neck. i'm all for getting eight or ten inches of snow -- it takes very little to keep me highly amused... but i hope it clears up enough for people to get to angie's b-day party sunday.. otherwise, i s'pose we'll be inviting people over for beers for a good little while.
Wednesday, January 15, 2003
17:48 - i'm employed!!! as a helpdesk worker. nice, lazy, lowpaying work. i'll be picking up nine hours a week, which should come out to slightly more money than i made as a physics lab t.a. with considerably more internet time involved. yay!
Tuesday, January 14, 2003
21:22 - more than a week later... it finally strikes me that provoke is another nice word for what my head calls "suscite." i'm slow.
18:55 - the final form of the statement of purpose? well, except for individual program adjustments, of course.
nice surprise today: my theater apprec course is in fact team-taught, so in addition to the-professor-about-whom-i-haven't-formed-an-opinion-yet, i get my well-liked sophomore yr. english prof, complete with dry sense of humor. (extra cool points -- his wife, also an excellent professor, just spent a large part of her afternoon helping me edit that statement of purpose linked above...) i'm one of 3 non-freshmen in the class. and it turns out that i knew the other senior way way back -- we both went to europe with the tennessee ambassadors of music (band made up of high school students state-wide) in 97, and i hadn't seen her since. (although her brother comes over to eat dinner with us about once a week... but long story...) her long curly hair is now short and straight, leading me not to recognize her, but her voice stilll sounds the same. ah well, too many connections in this town, i need to graduate... ok, enough parenthetical expressions already, eh?
Monday, January 13, 2003
17:19 - statement of purpose as revised by my dad, one of the world's top experts in taking awkward, blocky prose and turning it into efficient, power-packed stuff... other than that, it's monday. again. at least it's almost over.
Sunday, January 12, 2003
19:00 - hurrah! i have a rough statement of purpose now. sending it home for approval/disapproval. (deadlines getting far too close... aaaaaghh!) as always, criticism welcome.
15:10 - a warning. if you're in physics, and you ever want to do a physics problem again, DO NOT take a year and a half off from doing all but the most basic math. it will hurt. over and out, i must go continue brain thawing...
Thursday, January 09, 2003
16:53 - the dreaded afghanistan paper is done, turned in, finished; it may be lousy (and i know the conclusion's lousy...) but it's gone.
it's the first day of classes. hurrah for watching the pitying faces when the answer to "what class is this?" is "nuclear physics, don't-worry-you-don't-belong-here." monday-wednesday classes are looking a mite lonely -- 6 hrs of class, only one of which has other students in it. yes, i know it's thursday, but it's monday here at tntech. and did i mention, math scares me?
Wednesday, January 08, 2003
21:12 - for my convenience more than yours... the 5 grad programs with the chance to laugh in my face are:
American U
Columbia Teacher's College
Purdue U
UC Davis
U of Hawaii
14:55 - while i'm updating it... i present: my resume. if you happen to be bored enough to read it, let me know if you think of any careers other than graduate student for which i sound prepared.
12:32 - humans are cool. after about 5 attempts at getting the GRE phone system to send my frickin' score reports, i gave up and wrote down the customer service number. despite my initial grumpy imitation of the automated system messages, 20 min. later i now have a large bill on the credit card, the computer problem caused by using a middle initial two years ago and not this time is solved, and my scores are skipping along their merry little ways to the five universities whose selection committees get to mock my audacity in the next few weeks. thanks be to pat the customer service rep, whomever and wherever you may be!
10:40 - i very very much love the feeling of waking up after the first more-than-5-hrs-at-once chunk of sleep in several days... the lifting of the mental fog. and it's sunny out today, so it's even better. i know that the deadlines are all the closer because i slacked until post-8 a.m... but frankly, it was worth it. the near-completed paper on afghanistan is available here should you like to proofread, critique, etc... now that i'm rational again i'm going to go check for logic errors, flesh out the last few pages, tack on some form of conclusion, and turn that thing in.
Tuesday, January 07, 2003
13:21 - just happened to notice that the word of the day o'er at dictionary.com is quidnunc. for some reason my head instantly links that over to nunchuck. thus quidnuncs with nunchucks. or quidnuncs with nunchucks riding chuckwagons. it takes so little to amuse me when i haven't slept much.
11:23 - 2 pages to go. if only i can find a way to wrap it up in that... dad's running up a textbook that i had ordered under the assumption that it would arrive before i left manchester for cookevegas. (it came the day after i left.... grrr...) so sushi is in my immediate future. yay!
03:21 - to give rise to. i guess that will do as a translation of susciter. same little air of creation...
03:10 - dammit, why can't suscite be an english word? it's much classier sounding than cause or lead to or influence or anything in that paradigm. and chris berry, english grad student extraordinaire, has explained to me when and why i might need recurring motifs... i don't. hurrah. less than seven more pages, double-spaced, and i can go back to my lovely little world where franglais is a valid language. at least until i get going on the grad school applications...
00:06 - wait, are motifs inherently recurring?
Monday, January 06, 2003
23:32 - recurring... elements? motifs? details? i just want to stress that these people are having different adventures, but they all tend to fetishize a few key things that loosely unite the writings... if you have an idea which works best, or an innovation that could explode the whole structure, e-mail or message me. now. once upon a time, i could write several pages without having to refer to a dictionary or thesaurus to smooth the transition from brain to words... alack for the good old days.
15:47 - in other news, the paper shall be finished tonight. it's starting to invade my dreams, and i simply can't take it anymore. in last night's brain theatre, cold war-era russians and americans buried each other to the neck, producing what looked vaguely like cabbage fields... and then proceded to play a match of croquet, alice-in-wonderland style only with rolling faces instead of hedgehogs, to determine who would present the ultimate afghan aid program. or something like that. this must end.
15:38 - so the question of the day is... could i survive in france on $750 a month? the french government offers english-teaching positions in its high schools... i knew several people who were doing this last year. i don't have a lot of money with which to play, but this sounds like the sort of thing i could do and would enjoy... i'll get the application done, i guess, and also get the applications for graduate schools done, and see which works out.
Sunday, January 05, 2003
20:47 - while i'm glorifying random inventors... did i mention that i spent last year in the hometown of the guy who invented rayon? yeah, so one day in june when everyone with any money left had taken the train out of town for another vacation, i finally got around to walking up and reading what i'd been assuming was a war memorial when i passed it every day on the bus. it was a monument to honor hilaire de chardonnet, "inventeur de la soie artificielle." only in france...
20:30 - you know how in elementary school, we always used to study certain cultures in terms of what amazing things they've given the world? silk and gunpowder from the chinese, corn and chocolate from native americans? i just found one for afghanistan: minute rice. the invention of one mr. ozai-durrani, who in 1941 "walked into the offices of general foods corporation, set up a portable stove, and cooked a pot of rice in approximately sixty seconds." (louis dupree, afghanistan, pg. 527)
17:18 - further evidence that cookeville, tn, is among earth's most bizarre small towns (see low tax looper for reference): now, it seems that if you drop your wallet on the interstate, the police here might just shoot your dog. so, um, keep track of your wallet, eh?
03:17 - happy epiphany! just happened to hear on rtl2 to go get your galettes for the fête des rois... after some confusion, i found: epiphany's really tomorrow, but the french usually just celebrate it on the first sunday after xmas. there's no such thing around here, so i shan't be celebrating. but if anyone out there is, i wish you both the crown and intact teeth at the end of the day.
02:00 - oh, brent sent out a picture of zoe today. isn't she adorable? she usurped my thanksgiving dinner... well, ok, so not exactly, but her birth meant that angie and john suddenly had higher priority recipients for the plate of leftovers they were bringing back from john's family's feast. don't worry, i'm not bitter, i'll be nice if i ever get to meet the kid. anyway, suddenly having tons of friends with children and spouses and almost-spouses and careers makes me feel like i ought to be all grown up too... i can't even handle figuring out what i want to wear tomorrow, much less what i want to do next year; forget making an 18+ year commitment... *shudder* but they are awfully cute sometimes.
Saturday, January 04, 2003
18:02 -  picture from the park across the way from here... only place i've been outside the house in several days. don't ask me how mom talked me into posing when we were out walking this morning, long before such daily routines as showering and brushing hair that ideally precede photo-ops. but she just got the film developed and wanted this one scanned, so i figured i might as well display it someplace. back to cookevegas tomorrow!
15:57 - you know, it's really kinda sad how proud i am of being able to make a far more advanced, automated coding system look like my old primitive, hand-done stuff. but durnit, i spent time getting this gadget configured.
15:32 - ok, so i'm lazy, tired of checking the date everytime i want to add a detail, fed up with writing my own code, that sort of thing. alas. thus you see a blogger.com button at the bottom of this page. i hereby present the content this page, pre-bloggizing:
1/2/2003
funk is a verb. as in, "The camel men from Zarmardan, who had promised to go east to the Farrah Rud with Buie, had funked the first day out and turned back." Ernest F. Fox may be boring, but at least he's educational.
1/1/2003
happy new year's, blah blah blah. anyway, the serious stuff. no one's awake and sober, and i can no longer keep to myself my latest utterly insignificant but somewhat fascinating discovery: some of the books in the tennessee tech library were originally property of a temporary, WWII chemical warfare training camp. least that's what the "Camp Siebert Post Library" stamp in Ernest F. Fox's Travels in Afghanistan is leading me to think. for what it's worth, the book doesn't smell particularly interesting. ok, moment of awed wonder is over, back to work.
12/28/2002
so i'm a failure as a human being. still haven't sent xmas cards or done xmas shopping. erk. sorry.
12/18/2002
the persian word transliterated "barf" means snow. further discovery of such unfortunate sixth-grade-funny coincidences could delay my paper's completion indefinitely.
12/16/2002
christmas break. hurrah. 'cept i took an incomplete in the afghanistan colloquium and still need to do my grad school apps, so not so much "break" this time around. ah well.
11/30/2002
it strikes me that my list of links is getting increasingly esoteric for any audience but... me. but isn't that what personal vanity pages are all about? i just ran across radio afghanistan while working on research for a paper. i like it.
11/26/2002
look, look, it's a page! dreamwater.net kicked me off because i forgot to log in for a while. thank goodness for google's cached copies of things. but yeah, i'm still reorganizing. that's why stuff doesn't work. yeah.
8/6/2002
just moved back to cookevegas... i have 3 human roommates, 2 canine ones, and 2 feline ones. it's a fun house. i have no bed.
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