What's up?

Star Trek marathon

2010-01-03T22:06:00.000-08:00

Philosopher-Linguist and I spent the weekend watching all the Star Trek movies, except the newest one which we had seen a few weeks ago.

I suspected I had already seen the first movie, but didn't remember the content. It turns out I was right. I've heard criticism that it was just like a long episode rather than a movie, but frankly I don't understand the distinction in style. Wrath of Khan seems to be everybody's favorite and consequently I'd seen it a number of times - but still, I don't think it's that great.

Search for Spock and the Voyage Home, I did think were that great. Both were funny, compelling, and did a wonderful job of playing the distinctive personalities and especially showing the particular weaknesses of McCoy, Spock, and Kirk. Final Frontier was okay, and the Undiscovered Country was somewhat grinding but I liked it, mostly because of the extensive and multifaceted involvement of the Klingons.

Generations was entertaining, but logically full of holes, and I don't mean just the usual Star Trek continuity glitches. First Contact was great, as I remember it. Funny, I didn't remember the Borg being involved, but they were, and I LOVE Zeffram Cochrane. Insurrection and Nemesis were both solid sci-fi films, though I think I liked the first better.

Finally, the latest Star Trek film is AMAZING. Its plot is kind of arbitrary, and the direction is predetermined because it's a prequel, but I love what they did to show all the characters as young. Also, Kirk's mom is Cameron from House and young Sulu is Harold from Harold & Kumar.

On kouroi

2009-12-15T12:41:00.000-08:00

"The main argument of the lecture, as I recall, was that 5^th/4^th century kouroi evolved from a kind of prototypical anonymous person into a kind of ideological art representing the ideal of being Athenian, autochthonous, divinely descended. All the features were still in a sense idealized, abstract, even if the form became more realistic, but increasing realism invited the viewer to identify with it. This reminded me so much of advertising, particularly the beauty industry, today. Viewers, readers, consumers are encouraged to identify with images representing a small, culturally praised section of society – and with techniques like airbrushing, the visual markers of that group can be further idealized."

Xmas list updates

2009-12-13T20:55:00.000-08:00

Add:

digital camera, because I can never take photos

Subtract:

bike helmet, because apparently there's already one.

Dear Santa, this year I want in my stocking...

2009-12-11T11:56:00.000-08:00

I've been pestered persuasively enough to post my wish list earlier than I had intended. I actually went to the trouble this year of starting a list on paper about a month ago. Yay for preparedness! Here it is:

sneakers (size 8.5)
rain boots
new insoles & laces for my Docs (size 6 British)
soft scarves
everyday pants

new helmet
bike repairs

a red lamp, bulb, or shade for my current lamp
squirt bottle
a cool tote or small backpack
a copy of the Odyssey
chocolate, Burt's Bees, incense, and soap

geeky T shirts (some of my favorites below, usually wear size L)
*Music + science = sexy
*High on chemistry
*Particle physics gives me a hadron
*Mu kitten

Freezing

2009-12-09T12:54:00.000-08:00

I don't think it's ever before been so cold (relative to my location and what I'm used to) that I actually think about how to spend as little time outside as possible.

(that was more yesterday than today)

Last day of classes!

Joints, fire, and wind

2009-12-07T10:58:00.000-08:00

If you thought that subject line was going to lead into a stoner joke you will be disappointed...

Thursday night I twisted my ankle by "rolling" my foot, that thing that can happen where the sole kind of folds to the side underneath your foot. Unfortunately I was running at the time so it caused a bit of damage. It was quite painful for about 20 seconds, then seemed alright so I continued on... about 10 minutes after sitting back down inside it started to hurt again and swell. I had to use crutches to some degree for most of the weekend. Now, however, with the aid of my super-ankle-support hiking boots, I can walk pretty normally, if a bit slowly.

This morning in physics lecture we had an AWESOME demo. Our prof took a metal tube which evidently had holes in the top, though I couldn't see them until he started, and a hose feeding into it. Apparently it was a gas hose, and he set the gas coming out the holes in the top on fire so then there was this tube with a row of little flames poking out of it. Then the cool part: a speaker on the other end of the tube. He adjusted the frequency and the flames changed in height! When it was at a random frequency, they were mostly the same height. When it was at a resonant frequency, standing pressure waves were formed inside the tube and the flames were short, taller, super tall, back down again in a static waveform according to the pressure variations. It was awesome!

It's just starting to get cold and windy in the way I normally associate with most of October and November, and which I'm used to seeing break with a nice rain in mid-December. Since it was already raining quite a bit earlier in the fall, I'm not sure what to expect from the weather this year. Strange.

And this is only the first semester

2009-12-02T22:54:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I got up, had breakfast, and got to my classroom around 8:30 to do some reading before class. Starting at 9am I had three hours of class. I grabbed some food and oriented myself to my options, and decided to work through most of lunch. Three more hours of class followed, after which I went to work and did dishes. Finally after work I got dinner and messaged online for about half an hour while I ate. After that breather, at about 6:30, I swung by Commons for an energy drink and packed some books and my computer to the library, where I finished the first draft of my current paper and then continued reading Aristotle. At about 9:30 I got hungry and realized I'd better get to Commons quick before they closed. I got my snack and then migrated back to the library. It wasn't until 11:30 when, my concentration fading, I looked up at the clock and thought - my god, I've been working almost nonstop for 14 hours. I'd known the whole time, of course, that I was planning to stay up until about midnight - that was the purpose of the energy drink. But it didn't hit me until the very end that I'd done nothing but school for just about the maximum amount of my day plausible.

I really like this final paper I'm writing. It's about irrationality in collective life as portrayed by Plato and Euripides.

I guess high school was a little bit relevant

2009-11-24T21:42:00.000-08:00

In the Biology building there is a perpetual "free stuff" table. Today there was a box of clothes and I found a few neat things. It was like going to the bins, but without paying bus fare and sorting through a bunch of stupid crap.

I don't know why for my open-ended physics lab I picked the one that is just like what we wrote our anchor paper on in high school. Friggin' springs.

Chromated copper arsenate came up in E-chem today, which I wrote my portfolio piece on for intro to chemistry freshman year of high school.

Smarts

2009-11-20T13:23:00.001-08:00

I have to revise my third paper, which sucks, but at least I have until the end of the term. I think the fourth paper, on the other hand, is going to go well. I already have some rough ideas down and it's due in 2 weeks plus a day - and I'm only halfway through one of the texts I'll be discussing. This is much better start than the last two papers.

Yesterday and today, Roomie dazzled me with how smart she is. Last night I think she was talking about the importance of multiple sources in history and critiquing our Hum class as far as how they deal with the fact that we have very few sources about some things. Just now, we went in five minutes from her liking my pi shirt to the rise of the album along with rock music and associated factors in the mid-20th century, and its current decline with the internet.

Mrrr cold

2009-11-19T16:02:00.000-08:00

Apparently I am becoming a wuss. I say "becoming" because I started running in January, and I didn't even have sweatpants at the time. Yet now I find myself reluctant to go out when it's so cold and sometimes windy and dark. I think I'm going to go check out the sports center and see if they have an inside track or something. Might give me a new community to break into, too.

wow... pun intended

2009-11-19T12:04:00.000-08:00

So I was in conference this morning and we were discussing Plato's Republic. In book 2 they are talking about guardian soldiers and "Socrates" (aka Plato's mouthpiece) says:

"Well, then, don't you think warfare is a craft?"

The girl who lives just above me in Mac informs the class that next to that line, in her book, some previous reader wrote "warcraft."

Cue discussion of faculty members who play World of Warcraft. But getting back on topic...

"So what is the problem presented by... [I don't actually remember the subject here]?"

"Level 20 orcs."

Assorted happenings

2009-11-17T17:36:00.001-08:00

Alright, it's time for an update, no matter how disorganized my thoughts are.

Most of my major projects for the term are over. Last week I had a presentation for chem that I was pretty stressed about, but it turned out alright. I had a crazy day where I simply powered myself up on caffeine and went to the library to work on it for 4 hours straight, which I then followed with a run and more homework at about midnight. I'm glad it's past though. I've got a physics midterm on Friday, and the fourth paper is still to come. We got the topics this Monday, and one looks pretty good. Unfortunately, my conference leader said last week that they're going to have us revise the third paper, which is lame. I don't want to work on two papers at once again. I'll need to start the fourth paper early so I have something to continue on once my attention is split with the revision.

Next year I won't have to write papers at all. I'll have to write a lot of lab reports, but those are different and much easier. I'm looking forward to it.

Philosophy class has been canceled twice now, both on Tuesdays. Each time, I've found out by coming into class, observing zero people at the start time, and going downstairs to check my email and see what's up. Each time, my teacher had emailed us around 11. Class starts at 2:40. I don't blame him for emailing us on short notice; you can't do much about illness in that regard. What amazes me is that apparently everyone else in the class (which is about 20 people), both times, had the opportunity to AND actually did check their email within that little 4-hour window.

This weekend GP invited me and Philosopher-Linguist over for dinner and we had a nice time. I hadn't seen GP in a quite a while so it was nice to see her again. They seemed to get along pretty well, and we went out to Pix afterward.

Roomie decided not to go away next semester, which makes me happy.

That's about all I can think of for now. I'm making up my wish- and shopping-lists for Christmas but neither is well-populated yet.

My hair is annoying me again

2009-11-06T11:09:00.001-08:00

It's too short and too thick to manage by putting it behind my ears. It's also too short and too thick to manage with barrettes and ponytails, which isn't the greatest strategy in the winter anyway. Two particular hunks - they are in front and slightly shorter than the rest, so they seem like they were bangs at one point although I've just been growing out from an all-over short cut - are being a constant tactile annoyance. I don't want to cut the main body of my hair any shorter, so I thought of turning them into real bangs.

Pros:

1) I could then wear my hair down without constantly trying to get it out of the way.
2) I would be using my hair most efficiently for insulation in the winter
3) By the time warmer weather arrives, the rest of my hair would be long enough to put back in ponytails, and I could use barrettes on the growing bangs.

Cons:

1) I might not like the style.
2) I would still have to grow them out at some point and encounter the same tactile problem.
3) I would be exacerbating the problem of different lengths in my hair, which makes braids difficult.

Con #1 is just a gamble. I think I can do it so I like it, but nothing I can find out before doing it will settle the issue for sure. Con #2 is somewhat mitigated by pro #3; if the rest of my hair has gotten long, then it won't be so difficult to get my bangs out of the way with barrettes. Con #3 is really the troubling one. I know from past experience that it's frustrating to have bits of shorter hair that aren't really bangs anymore but can't go into long hairstyles properly. What I could do is, once my hair is a manageable length, keep the length constant until the bangs catch up. I think this is a reasonable solution, but it will mean an even longer delay until I can really play with long hairstyles.

I think I will do the bangs. I gotta say though, it is really frustrating because I like my hair short and I like it long, but there is about 6 months of medium length in between that is practically a no-win situation, so it's always a heavier decision than I think it should be to switch from one to the other.

What ABOUT Freud?

2009-11-05T10:28:00.001-08:00

Today we were discussing Oedipus Rex/Tyrannos/the-King and it went very nicely for an hour and 17 minutes. Then with three minutes left, conversation petered out a bit and the guy who obviously loves humanities more than anyone else and knows lots of extra shit says "so, what about Freud?"

Conference leader says he'd like to avoid Freud, but the damage is done - nobody can resist telling tales of Freud's ridiculous phallocentric theories. A couple minutes of Freud-riffing ensue. Then another dude, the one with good comedic phrasing (there's a girl who's good at that too), says "Fifty seconds, Carl Jung, go."

I jump on that one. "Led to MBTI, not entirely useless," I claim. "What type are you?" asks the guy across the room whom I'd talked to some after he left a comment on Philosopher-Linguist's blog. The three of us offer up our MBTI types - two INTJs and one INTP, it turns out. The discussion ends in laughter and on the way out I chat for a few minutes with the blog commenter about Freud and Lacan. I love my humanities conference.

Problem solved

2009-10-28T18:44:00.000-07:00

I got 100/102 on my chemistry midterm. I also reinstalled my wireless drivers and it fixed a problem I'd been having. I didn't really expect the solution to be that easy. I was stressing and having a hard time with my latest philosophy paper, but today I had a brilliant insight and now I have a full draft so I'm in good shape. It's pretty rough and will need at least one serious revision before it goes in, but it's only Wednesday. I'll worry about Thucydides next week...

Fall break is over and second quarter is tomorrow

2009-10-25T21:09:00.000-07:00

Fall break was nice, overall.

The beginning of the week was a little rough. I don't adjust well to suddenly becoming less busy. Suddenly becoming more busy isn't the greatest either, but I think I handle it better. When I suddenly run out of obligations, first I worry I'm forgetting things, and then I realize I don't have any backup plans or the backup plans I had no longer seem adequate/interesting. I also think I was suffering a little bit of PMS.

Little Sister went to Camp Hancock and then came back. E reminded me of how I came back from Outdoor School with annoying camp songs, but however shaky my memory may be I'm pretty sure she's more of a pain in their ass than I ever was, if for no other reason than she's been bringing back silly songs for years.

Philosopher-Linguist invited my family over for dinner and it was lovely. Both sides like each other which makes me happy. It was also really fun just preparing the dinner. I masterminded the pasta and he did the roasted vegetables.

I had lost my glasses while at my parents' house and got really frustrated by it. My mom found them and brought them back to me at dinner. Well, yesterday as I was riding home I slipped on some leaves on a corner (damn variable coefficients of friction!) and in the ensuing tumble my glasses were broken. After all that trouble. My helmet isn't visibly damaged, but I did hit my head so I should get a new one. Incidentally, when I got my physical last week they had me fill out a questionnaire and after the questions about alcohol, smoking, and drugs was "do you feel you engage in risky behavior?" I checked no, but wondered what they were driving at. When the nurse went over it with me, she said "now this one is really about wearing your helmet." I got out of yesterday with just a headache, but it gave me a stark look at what I'd be risking if I didn't wear the thing - it would have been bad. It's the first time I've needed that protection.

I read about half of the Odyssey. I don't really mind that I didn't finish it. Halfway is far enough that I'll be motivated to continue and not frustrated even if it has to be slow.

I'm already starting to worry about next semester, when I'll have more class and math at 8am. On the other hand, I'll be trading philosophy for math, which should be a lot easier. My philosophy professor assigned us a paper due the day after Halloween, which kind of puts a damper on the plans I was trying to wrangle up.

Midterms are over and fall break is here

2009-10-18T10:47:00.000-07:00

I got 40/40 on my physics midterm. The average was 31, he said. E-chem and philosophy were 2-hour take-home exams, and humanities was a 50-minute timed essay.

Over fall break and I'm going to read the Odyssey, the rest of the Oedipus trilogy, and do some homework I can get ahead on. I thought I might also reread the Oresteia, but I think the Odyssey will take up enough time.

Went to see high school science teacher at Cleveland on Friday. Senor Evergreen is also in town, so I hung out with him and LS last night. Going to the pumpkin patch today withe Philosopher-Linguist and his mom and sister. He's inviting my family to dinner later this week. Roomie is gone for the break.

Been listening to my Beethoven CDs and really grooving to the 9th symphony, 2nd movement. I also finished Dexter season 2 last night. It's a really fun show. When I catch up to the present, I might start watching it as I watch House.

Drafting

2009-10-09T13:32:00.000-07:00

Another thing that's going on academically is I think I'm learning to write my drafts rougher. This paper, I didn't even finish what I consider a complete draft until last night because I couldn't work on it very much last week, but it was long and rambled in the middle and generally was more pliable because it was less polished. I wonder if the sort of "write a bunch of shit down but don't worry about organization or a thesis" brainstorming I do is something other people would call a rough draft. But anyway, drafts that are less "together" have more room to reevaluate and change them without troubling any crucial aspects.

Science rules

2009-10-09T11:08:00.001-07:00

Just finished my physics midterm and I feel great about it. There were four problems in 50 minutes and it was very much like the practice exam we did in conference: problem 1 was qualitative and in two parts, 2 was purely kinematic, 3 involved forces including friction, and 4 was on circular motion with a little bit of entangled gravity. The first three were pretty straightforward and reminiscent of previous conference problems. 4 was a familiar situation, but it asked to find a quantity I don't think we'd solved for before. I didn't know exactly what to do at a glance, but I worked it out, and my faith in things canceling out came to my aid. If it hadn't worked out correctly, I might have ended up with a dangling theta somewhere in my problem, or even a dangling mass (though masses tend to cancel), but my intuition told me I'd get a tangent in one place that would cancel with the tangent I had in the other place, and I did.

Around junior year my mom told me her theory that I have spatial and linguistic phases. Apparently when I was a kid I would draw OR write for alternating periods, but not generally both at the same time. Considering that in the last couple of years I think it's a pretty good theory. Anyway, I seem to be going back into a spatial phase. I've been taking notes on my reading with concept webs, where placement and size and arrow connections remind me how things are related. And on my midterm to show my train of thought, in quite a few places I would bracket equations I'd written previously and then draw arrows to the place where they explain something new I was writing down. In a linguistic phase I might just get it all straight and then write them down in an order that makes the connection obvious, or write notes explaining what I'm doing.

Health and such

2009-10-08T20:12:00.000-07:00

Last week, as I wrote, was really busy and kind of stressful. After decompressing this weekend, on Monday I got up at a gentle hour of 7am and went for a run, followed by breakfast at Commons and a single hour of homework before class. I've followed the same schedule each day since then, except today when I only went for a mild jog/walk a few times around the dorm because I woke up with a sore-ish knee. I'm eating serotonigenic (caution: may not be an actual word) food and feeling really good. I have my physics midterm tomorrow, and next Friday one in class and two take-homes due, plus a lab write-up for the open-ended lab. My humanities paper is also due this Saturday at 5. I finished the whole Oresteia early, though, so I only have one more thing to read for humanities all next week. Then it's fall break.

Been watching House with LS at his house on Mondays.

Roomie had the flu for a couple of days and is just getting better. When she told me, the hand sanitizer went in my pocket - I do NOT want to get sick during midterms. I could have easily been exposed before she got sick anyway, but I figure as long as I don't wake up sick tomorrow, then it'll either hit over the weekend or by Monday be long enough that I'm in the clear.

Roomie also is maybe going to transfer to art school next semester. I wish she wouldn't go, I like her - and I also wonder what would happen with my room. Would they move me somewhere else? Would they put someone else in here with me? Do they get spring term transfers here? It's an awfully big room for one person.

Wow I'm busy

2009-10-01T22:30:00.000-07:00

This week is some kind of unholy convergence. We've had the mother of all reading loads for humanities every single lecture this week, a paper due next Saturday, and I also have a paper due this Saturday for philosophy. It's ridiculous. On the other hand, the chemistry assignment for this week is atmospheric modeling with some Excel-based software, which is really cool, but it doesn't make me any less busy. In fact it might be slowing me down since I elected to work on that earlier today and now I'm too tired to focus on reading. So I'm going to go to bed and finish in the morning.

Feeling a bit tumbled

2009-09-28T11:11:00.000-07:00

Last week was great. I got up early each day and did homework in the morning. I got all my Friday homework done Wednesday night, and Thursday morning I was astonished to find that I finished 80% of the chemistry problem set in just a couple of hours. After class I understood how to do the remaining two problems. I was quite happy with this state of events because I knew I'd be getting topics for two papers this weekend.

Friday things started to crack a little bit. I found an issue with my chemistry problems, which I corrected fairly easily, but it unsettled me. I got not one topic from humanities, but five. I tried to work on it, but found it hard to pick a topic. The philosophy topic came Saturday, and was much easier to pick (between two) and looks like an easier task to write. I put in my hours over the weekend that I'd planned to, trying to draft the papers, but the ideas just weren't flowing. I kept brainstorming on Sappho and Pandora, my two tentative favorite topics, but I just couldn't get more than about a paragraph of connections out of either one. Then I read the Herodotus for today, and I think I may prefer the topic based on that overall. I got up this morning and started plinking away on identity theory and dualism, which is going better now, but in the morning, it seemed like again I didn't have nearly 1500 words to say about it.

Still, I feel a bit "tumbled." My intentions and my willpower are still good, but my mojo seems to be off a little bit. This is what I don't like about papers: I'm dependent, so to speak, on the Muses. With science, a problem might be more difficult than expected, but as long as I put in the time and go to office hours if needed, I can be pretty sure it will get done. When I write, I'm always worried that despite my best efforts, I won't come up with anything at all.

Physics

2009-09-23T18:38:00.001-07:00

Today we went over circular motion and I realized a couple of things:

- "Need for speed" is a misleading phrase. Speeding up is exhilarating, yes, but for the same reason I always wanted to ride on the outside of the merry-go-round as a kid: it's the g's, man, the g's. Speeding along at constant velocity has no thrill; it's a "need for acceleration."

- When you talk about centrifugal force, all you're doing is using a non-inertial reference frame. This means you can't apply Newton's laws to it and it's therefore kind of useless as a physics concept, but speaking relative to the edge of the circle, it does make a certain kind of sense to talk about centrifugal force.

(Note: xkcd tackles this issue here: http://www.xkcd.com/123/ . But I'm pretty sure you CAN'T use Newton's laws in a rotating system because of the inertial reference frame thing. Then again maybe that's the geeky joke secondary to the Bond punchline... Note 2: What the dude will actually be crushed by is the normal force.)

Schrodinger's cat in the hat

2009-09-23T17:00:00.000-07:00

I worked in the third biology lab today and it was a little further down the hall than the others, so I took a different staircase down, in the physics building (they're connected on the top floors), and saw this:

I took the picture with my phone, so it's crappy resolution, but hopefully it's clear that the figure in the lower right is a cat-in-a-hat. There's a whole line of cats in hats walking up the hill and into that contraption in the middle. And if the resolution were better, you'd be able to see that the contraption is spitting out equations on the piece of paper and has two lights - one labeled "alive" and one labeled "dead".

Here's one of the more beautiful images I've seen this week:

It doesn't have any specific significance, but I thought it was extremely pretty, and since it came from a humanities lecture given by my conference leader it can stand in for things related to him and that class. I had my paper conference today, and he liked my paper. He said I made "intelligent use" of the editing feedback I got, and his main suggestion was to develop certain interesting ideas more. Today's lecture was also awesome. I think today's lecture is tied with the second one (the one about oral traditions) for my favorite. The guy talked about the nature of first-person perspective in Greek lyric poetry, and how it differs from what we expect from first-person perspective in modern poetry. His main thesis was that the first person in Greek lyric is for the benefit of the reader, or rather speaker, and that it is meant to represent not necessarily the perspective of the poet, but an identity for those who reiterate the lyric to "try on."

Like the octopus vase, I find Sappho's poetry very aesthetically compelling.

This weekend I'm going to get a new Hum paper topic and a Phil paper topic. I only get one week for the philosophy paper, but then again, I expect it to be more straightforward. It pretty much has to be on dualism or behaviorism - maybe identity theory - and I can discuss the hell out of those. I don't have to interpret nearly as hard.

Mornings

2009-09-21T19:41:00.000-07:00

Ever since last Tuesday when some homework took way longer than expected and I had to get up at 5:30 to finish it on time, I've been getting up relatively early in the morning (6-7). I like it. I think I objectively get more homework done, too, because my productivity tapers off at about the same time at night regardless.

I'm getting into a routine of trying to be 2 days ahead on most things at a given time. Friday I use the afternoon to power through a lot, and try to be caught up through Tuesday by the end of the weekend. Invariably a couple problems from Chem 230 have to wait until office hours on Monday, but then I spend Monday doing anything that's left and start my physics problems or humanities reading for Wednesday. Continue on Tuesday. Wednesday night I try to finish up through Friday's dues, so I have Thursday evening to relax.

Chem is really hard, the problem sets take a long time. Physics keeps me on my toes - the problems are fairly few and not too difficult, but due every lecture. Humanities is the most awesome class-on-everything, and philosophy seems to be seeping into my brain despite my regular dissatisfaction with the class.

My last couple days

2009-09-17T22:33:00.000-07:00

I finished the "tight draft" of my Hum paper on Sunday. I took it to the DoJo, the academic resource center, and the writing tutor slammed into it like an OH radical. He basically said the writing was fine, but I wrote a philosophical paper instead of a close-reading literary analysis. I was like, what am I supposed to do with that? He said talk to my conference leader, but he thought I was kind of on the wrong track.

Philosopher-Linguist gave me a more charitable analysis. He assumed I actually was doing the assignment and arguing from the text, and said I needed to make the connection to the text more explicit.

I started restructuring the essay and adding quotes early this morning. After conference I asked my conference leader about it. He said turn in the original paper and the revised version so he could tell what I lost and gained in the editing (one of my concerns) and see if he agreed with the DoJo guy. I spent my morning break mostly in the library finishing up my revision. I'll get Philosopher-Linguist's comments on it and do another revision if necessary tomorrow

I hung out with LS this evening and it was fun. I hope this foreshadows smoother waters.

My computer clock did a weird thing today. Around 12:30, it suddenly jumped an hour forward. I had a class at 1:10 so I was really perplexed for a moment. Then I forgot about it and later was going to bed because it was almost eleven, only to have it change back - it's only about 10:30 even now.

Wise teeth, wise choices?

2009-09-16T12:52:00.001-07:00

One of my wisdom teeth is officially coming in. I was getting frustrated by a little flap of my gum that always felt like it had food stuck in it and got sore when I would try to clear it out. Then I counted my teeth, and sure enough, it's the eighth one back. I looked at it in the mirror and it's a lot more embedded, too.

Now that the health insurance is worked out, I should go to a dentist, because I know wisdom teeth sometimes have to be pulled and I already have teeth out of line, plus I can't imagine I'm cavity-free after the last ten years.

A week or two ago, Reed put a bunch of hand sanitizer in the dining hall, in front of the salad bar and in front of the silverware. I raised my eyebrow a little at that, but it's probably a good idea. Tons of people touch that stuff. This is too much though: a little bottle of Purell in my mailbox. I'm almost sure this is a swine flu reaction, and I'm skeptical whether ethanol even works against flu viruses. It depends on if they have a membrane, I believe, but it's only guaranteed against cellular microbes. I hope the people behind this have done their research.

Writing papers

2009-09-13T16:16:00.000-07:00

We're right in the middle of the two weeks we get to write our first paper. And it's really funny to talk to various people about papers and see the completely different ways people approach it.

First, my dad. I asked him about paper length when a maximum rather than a minimum is given, and embedded in his response was this insight into organization: "The best strategy I've found is to choose a topic that interests you, subdivide it, figure a paragraph for each subdivision, add two paragraphs for intro and conclusion, count up the paragraphs (usu. about 3-4 a page) and see how many pages that comes out to. If it's too many, or if the subdivisions are logicially further divisible, maybe do the paper on a subtopic instead." Wow dad. That's really regimented.

Lost Rocket's process seems to be similar. I ran into her yesterday and I told her I had a draft, but one in need of some serious first-pass editing before I would give it to anyone else to look at. "Ugh," she responded, "I don't even have an outline." I never use outlines. Whenever I try to outline a paper first, I inevitably find that at least one of my bullet points I actually have hardly anything to say about, and then the whole structure falls apart.

Senor Evergreen, whom I hung out with one last time before he went up to Olympia, has a radically different strategy. "When I have to write a paper," he says dramatically, "I just sit down and... write a paper." I chuckled in recognition. That's what I used to do in high school, but the papers I produce when I do that aren't long enough for college assignments.

Apparently it works for some, however, because my floor had breakfast together this morning and several of my dormies were discussing the paper too - specifically, when they were going to work on it. "I'm not going to do it on Friday," one of them said. "Well maybe," he continued. "I only have two classes in the morning, so I could do it before everyone gets out of class." Should I infer that this person means to write it all in one session? He must find paper-writing really easy.

My friend the philosopher-linguist suggested something that resonates with me a little more. "Writing is like having a conversation with the page," he said. "You almost want to anticipate - not objections exactly - but responses from a reader."

The approach I've used for this paper went like this: I discarded the eerily prevalent (and in my opinion, completely fallacious) claim that you need a strong introduction to know where you're going. I opened up a blank document and just started writing whatever occurred to me about the topic. When a new point occurred to me, I made a line break and started a new paragraph. I developed several trains of thought at once, bouncing between the paragraphs on my screen, and my use of language became less conversational and more literary as I worked. When I got pooped, I left it alone and came back later until the flow of ideas was just about wrapping up. Then I looked over what I had written and assessed how everything connected. I pulled a thesis out of it and wrote an introduction. Then I started putting paragraphs in a logical order, trimming redundant information that had turned up in more than one place, and creating transitions. Some paragraphs didn't get used at all. Finally I got to the end, reviewed my work, and constructed my conclusion so as to pull everything back together. Now there is a draft and I'm just refining the flow.

Good things

2009-09-12T23:52:00.000-07:00

I think my new favorite musical piece is the Moonlight Sonata, movement 3. That's not the soft one with the triplets that everyone knows; it's an anxious, roiling piece. But it is pretty popular - you've probably heard it - and though it's not nearly as recognizable as the Moonlight Sonata as the first movement, it did make sense when I learned it was part of the same piece.

I wish I could find those CDs of Beethoven's symphonies that I got when I was eight or so.

I got my refund check and now I have MONEY! I bought some breakfast groceries and I'll pay off my bookstore account tomorrow or Monday.

I didn't drop philosophy.

To drop or not to drop

2009-09-09T21:30:00.000-07:00

So I wasn't very impressed with my philosophy class but I thought... hey, I'll still read some cool old material and write papers. Then, I got further frustrated with my discussion and a particularly tedious assignment. I combed the catalog and found that I could maybe switch into sociology, but they wouldn't let me in. No other classes! Well here are my options now...

1. Drop philosophy
2. Drop both philosophy and chem 230 and add another class
3. Drop philosophy, change my hum conference and add another class
4. Keep my current schedule

While options 2 and 3 are technically still possible, they are not really feasible, since I don't want to compromise anything else in my schedule and plopping into a new class two weeks in would be hard. The question has become fairly simple - to drop or not to drop.

To drop: I would only have 3.0 units this semester. This isn't inherently a bad thing - it still counts as full-time and there are worthwhile things I could do with the extra time, for example volunteer at MLC. But since tuition is the same however many units I take, something seems wrong with taking so few classes. And I won't get a chance to take any group A or B classes next year (I will be booked with chem-phys-bio-math), so I might be committing myself to either satisfying a group requirement elsewhere during a summer or putting it off until senior year.

Not to drop: I would keep 4.0 units, but I would have to take this class. There's an obvious question of, is the extra unit worth having if it's a class I don't enjoy? The other thing is that it commits me to taking another philosophy class to fill out my group A requirement, which is what I thought I wanted to do, but if this philosophy class isn't working for me how can I be sure another one will be better? Maybe I don't mesh with the Reed phil department, or it could even be that I just don't really like to study philosophy and my class at UO was an exception.

I talked to my advisor about it and he thinks that either option is reasonable. I also talked to my philosophy professor earlier in the day, but it wasn't very helpful one way or another. I have the class tomorrow so I will go in and give it one more chance. I need to decide by Friday what I'm doing. Technically the drop deadline isn't for a while, but I don't know how much longer I can get a full refund for my books and I just don't want to drag this out any further.

Portland is a goddamn tease

2009-09-06T10:42:00.000-07:00

I hate Portland.

No, no, I love Portland, but it drives me up the wall with its weather. I suppose I should simply be happy that it rained enough to speak of three days in a row and it's only September. But I really wish that when it's pouring and splattering and making a big ol' rainy mess outside, that it would KEEP doing that for long enough to change into my running clothes, finish my chapter, or whatever it is I need to do before going out. I see and hear the rain, I say "mmm that looks so fun" and I bolt for my room because I know it's liable to be fleeting but I hurry up and change into sweats hoping to go exercise and get soaked... and by the time I get out the door, it's down to a mere sprinkle. As usual. Why do I even try?

Yep, this is bad

2009-09-05T23:17:00.000-07:00

Okay, so we all knew oil was running out, but...

"Locate reliable current data on global petroleum reserves and consumption rate. Report these numbers and cite your source. Under the assumption that this resource is used at a constant rate, calculate the lifetime of Earth's petroleum resources."

I went and found some numbers from the Department of Energy. Reserves were reported in billions of barrels, and consumption was reported in thousands of barrels per day. I crunched them up and got...

About fifteen thousand days. I once calculated the remainder of my lifespan at something like twenty thousand, conservatively. Uh oh. Divide by 365, and we've got 42 years - and that's at today's rates.

We should all learn subsistence farming right now because in a few decades anyone who doesn't know how to live off the sun is fucked.

Food

2009-09-04T11:02:00.000-07:00

Commons has some really good deals and some really lame ones. Among the love:

- a bowl of beans and rice with salsa and sour cream = $1.85
- salad bar ranges from something like $2 for a "small" salad to $4.25 for a large, which is defined by what I would guess is an 8 or 9 inch plate. You can pile a lot of veggies, and tofu and beans and pasta salads, onto that.

But as I sat today eating breakfast - an egg, a bowl of oatmeal, and a cup of coffee - I realized it's simply ridiculous to eat at Commons for that. It cost me $3.20. Now that's not bad - my board plan allows a daily average of $13.25 - but when you compare it to real world pricing it's preposterous. For the price of one egg at Commons, I can get six eggs at Fred Meyer with 20c to spare. The superior steel-cut oatmeal I already have MIGHT have cost the same as today's breakfast for a whole pound. And even coffee must be going at a 5-fold markup. Once I have real-world money, there are certain things I will definitely be buying outside the board plan. Eggs, milk, and coffee are among them.

Trippiest bathroom in the world

2009-09-03T10:37:00.000-07:00

So I walked out of Hum conference in the library this morning and walked downstairs following signs to the bathroom.

First thing I noticed was "whoa, everything is really really colorful."

Second thing I noticed, I walked into the big stall and there were two toilets in it. Comic-style question mark appears above my head as I sit down on one of them.

Then as I'm sitting there I look down at the floor and notice it's green-and-white checkered, and the diagonals form these optical "lines" suggesting harsh orthogonal movement.

Walking out of the stall I realize that the indiscriminate colorfulness I recognized initially is in fact a series of murals depicting Dr. Seuss characters. As I wash my hands I take a minute to look about me and appreciate the sheer bizarreness of my surroundings. Woe betide the Reedie who is anything but sober the first time they walk into this bathroom!

A few more tidbits about how stuff is going

2009-09-02T15:29:00.000-07:00

I just got offered the job I applied for in the biology department. Looks like I'll wash dishes for about 4 hours a week.

Chem 230 yesterday was weird. Hum and physics are full of freshmen who are frantically trying to build a web of community but don't actually have one yet. I walked into chem and after a few minutes listening to conversation around me realized "hey, most of these people are juniors and all of them know each other."

Phil 206 didn't impress me that much. I like my professor, and there's another argumentative chemistry major in the class. But the class is too big, and there are some people who seem to favor skepticism for its own sake too much, i.e. to the point of ignoring the obvious. The professor gave an overview of what we will cover, and none of the topics he brought up seemed very challenging or even unfamiliar to me. I thought about trying to take a different class, but I don't think I will, for the following reasons:

1. I can't find anything I like that wouldn't require juggling the conferences or labs of my other classes.
2. I don't really believe Reed College will teach a class so basic it's uninteresting.
3. There are papers, which means even if the content is boring, I can hone my critical skills on it.

Hum lecture was intense today

2009-09-02T11:14:00.001-07:00

The lecturer was talking about oral traditions and the differences between literate and strictly oral cultures. A theme that recurred in the discussion was the idea that literacy encourages greater abstraction and oral tradition tends toward more concrete associations. In the notes she quoted this rather long passage which I will put in small text:

Anne Carson, Eros, the Bittersweet (Princton: Princton University Press, 1986), p. 43:

"An individual who lives an an oral culture uses his senses differently than one who lives in a literate culture, and with that different sensual deployment comes a different way of conceiving his own relations with his environment, a different conception of his body and a different conception of his self. The difference revolves around the physiological and psychological phenomenon of individual self-control. Self-control is minimally stressed in an oral milieu where most of the data important for survival and understanding are channeled into the individual through the open conduits of his senses, particularly his sense of sound... A continuous fluent interchange of sensual impressions and responses between the enivronment and himself is the proper condition of his mental and physical life. To close his senses off from the outside world would be counterproductive to life and to thought.

[...] As an individual reads and writes he gradually learns to close or inhibit the input of his senses, to inhibit or control the responses of his body, so as to train energy and thought upon the written words. He resists the environment outside him by distinguishing and controlling the one inside him. This constitutes at first a laborious and painful effort..., [an effort in which the individual] becomes aware of the interior self as an entity separable from the environment and its input, controllable by his own mental action."

So she reads out this passage, and then to elucidate the "laborious and painful effort," she says something to this effect:

"Remember when you were in kindergarten? And it was so hard because you had to sit at this little desk for long periods, looking at these little black squiggles on the paper and trying to make sense of them when the whole world was out there and you just wanted to go run around in it."

For me, the sheer unrelatability of that example is what drove the point home. It's not just that I didn't go to kindergarten, and it's not just that I always enjoyed sitting at a desk studying at least as much as running around, though that's getting closer to the heart of the issue. It's that I don't even remember learning to read. I remember learning how to write, in a sense, or at least how to spell, but as far my memory is concerned I've always been literate. I do have a few memories that probably occurred before I could read, but none in which learning how or not being able to was a feature.

Now here's the oh-shit part. Everyone who knows me knows I'm a highly abstract person. I live in my head; all I do is play with ideas. This whole facet of my personality, and the coupled drive to seek out sensational intensity - is it perhaps, in large part, a product of learning to read early? It's like a smack upside the head to think that such a fundamental part of who I am and what I've chosen to do for the last 10-15 years could be primarily derived from such a stupidly simple, and somewhat chance occurrence. Still, I suppose it could be that I always had the disposition and that's why I latched onto reading quickly. Even then, though, what does it say about the culture at large? Does literacy increase the potential of a society to produce people like me? Does it increase the upper limit of abstraction possible by its members? Do illiterate societies have an advantage in sensory awareness that is lost when writing is developed? Or do both kinds of society have equal potential at the extremes, but simply a probabilistic tendency toward one end or the other?

Ha ha, very funny

2009-08-31T18:20:00.000-07:00

*enormous fucking sigh*

So that paper, the one due on Saturday, was apparently an upperclassman prank. It was very well executed - it was sitting on the table outside the classroom next to the outline for the lecture. It had formatting specifications and although being due on Saturday is weird, I re-checked the syllabus website and the papers actually are due on Saturdays - but the first one is not until three weeks out.

I should be mad that I spent two and a half hours on a joke this afternoon, and I certainly wish I would've spent that time on my physics problem set, but in a way it's relieving. I did get about 600 words of disorganized ideas down, and I was pretty confident I could finish the assignment okay. Now that I know that's somebody's idea of a way to scare freshmen, I'm much less apprehensive about the work that will actually be assigned.

And at some point, there's reality

2009-08-31T12:20:00.000-07:00

Oh boy. What have I gotten myself into?

Wednesday I moved in, and although I was quite tired by the end of the day roomie convinced me to go out to the dance party, which was a great idea. My aerobic fitness gained from running and biking gave me a lot of endurance. Thursday and Friday I went to a lot of orientation sessions, some boring, most more interesting than one would expect, and laughably many describing a principle or issue as an "ongoing conversation." It sounds pretentious, but I can tell that here it's sincere, and I really believe everything intellectual ought to be, in terminology I prefer, a living discourse.

Thursday night Senor Evergreen came to hang out, and Friday night had Noise Parade. Only at Reed. Where else would you see sanctioned a mass of college students in ridiculous costumes marching about campus, banging on pots and pans and blowing whistles and playing bagpipes and trumpets, carrying torches and shooting off fireworks, with a couple community-safety peeps nonchalantly following the fire hazards with extinguishers? To join in the gratuitous noise I thought I'd yell something about how awesome Reed is, but then I realized such a formal expression would be counter to the point. Reed doesn't need a pep rally - we express our spirit by simply honoring the human urge to flip the fuck out without any pretense of purpose.

Saturday was "get acquainted with Portland" day, so I skipped off campus and went on a trip through Macleay Park with the guy I've been seeing. We spent basically the whole time philosophizing. Among the gems: every little thing is an immense conduit of information, a local manifestation of what is globally going on. Humans are amazing animals because we create our own habitat, and because we entertain ourselves with an infinitely versatile substance called language. (Think about language. Think about substances. Doesn't it fit?) Everything can be a metaphor for everything else, and when it comes to actual linguistic metaphor, it's far more precise than trying to literal all the time and it's the way we understand things in more dimensions than we can sense. Code-switching is does not necessarily imply inauthenticity, but is a consequence of the fact that people have different areas of overlap in their linguistic habits. Belonging is feeling like the catacombs in the back of my mind (where I live most of the time, in case y'all hadn't noticed) exist separately from my own individual associations, are still there when I'm not, and are visited by other people, comprising all those living discourses. Tension as a physiological state is malleable, can be manifested as anxiety, nausea, jitters, arousal, and released as laughter, tears, vomit, orgasm. Breath is a great mediator, and one of the great issues in the world is how abstract entities like nations try to engage with these very concrete physiological states of tension. Release of tension equals pleasure, according to Freud, but there's at least two kinds of pleasure, the thrilling kind and the comforting kind, which are almost incompatible and you can pit them against each other for a while, but at some point, as the necessary third pole to balance it all out, there's reality. That's where accomplishment as a motivator comes in, a motivator for doing unpleasurable but practical things. Nature is immanent and forms circles in both time and space, but us humans in our drive to feel progress make rectangles and frame our experiences in linear terms.

I've been trying really hard to be a normal freshman here, and curriculum-wise I can basically do it, but in some ways it's just not possible. I don't think it matters that I went to UO last year or even that I went to school, although it's not just that I'm older, but I've been out of high school and out of my parents' house, and it makes a difference. Regardless of my actual class standing, I'm not entirely a freshman because of that, whatever curriculum I follow - but I can't feel like a sophomore because I'm new here. Even though I did go to school, I'm essentially a freshman with a gap year behind me.

Sunday was getting loose ends tied up, paperwork and books. I'm now $325 in debt to the bookstore and still scrambling for work study. Then at night I watched a movie full of violence, sex, fire, and relevance, which was not actually that awesome in itself, but anything can be made fun by a roomful of Reedies shouting snarky comments at the screen. So it was with Troy. Besides, Brad Pitt as Achilles is hot and a badass.

This morning I had my first two classes: humanities lecture and physics lecture. Physics was fine; the professor has a subtle and attractive accent, but the content was rather boring since science starts simple: dimensions, units, graphs. Humanities was a fascinating lecture on our perspective on "the Greeks," the nature of anger especially in storytelling, and verbal vs. physical virtues in warfare. It did nothing, however, to elucidate the themes we are supposed to address in our first paper, which is due Saturday at 5pm. Jumping right in, I see.

It's also starting to get weird how I see Lost Rocket multiple times a day.

Tomorrow is environmental chem and philosophy of minds, brains and machines.

oh shit i have classes

2009-08-28T10:56:00.000-07:00

Hum 110 (0900 MWF and 0900 TR so yes that's every morning)
Phys 110 (1000 MWF and 1030 TR and 1310 W)
Chem 230 (environmental chemistry, 1310 TR)
Phil 206 (minds, brains, and machines, 1440 TR)

So my mornings are filled with humanities and physics, I have lab on Wednesday afternoon, Monday and Friday are quite light and I get out by 4 every day.

Spring on the other hand is scary. I have inorganic chem which means I have another lab. Due to the two labs and the packed mornings I have to take math at 8am, and Friday I am booked solid 8am to 5pm except for my lunch hour.

Chemistry, humanities, around and around

2009-08-27T17:13:00.000-07:00

So I thought they had changed humanities to be at a different time, but I was wrong, they just changed one of the sections. My plan to deal with this, of course, was to take other chem this year, and Hum 110.

So then I went to the chemistry department's open house and they say that putting off O-chem will result in a cascade failure off putting off chem courses because they're ALL at 9am. So I thought, well fuck, I guess I'll just have to take a 200 humanities to make it up.

BUT, apparently that 200 option is only open to those transfers who have some kind of credit equivalent to 110. I obviously don't. So I guess I have to take 110. Then what do I do about my chemistry?

I suppose I can just declare I AM A FRESHMAN DAMMIT and if other freshmen can take O chem next year so can I. That's what a petition for an extra semester is for...

But really, I'm just sick of this entire issue. Fuck it. Advisor, this is your problem now.

Moved into Reed

2009-08-26T20:29:00.001-07:00

Duuuuuude... I live at Reed now.

My room isn't divided like I thought it was going to be, but my roommate is chill and the room is fucking twice as big as a UO room. There's space I'm taking up, and space she's taking up, and there's still a little square of space in front of the fireplace to be common and undecorated. It's great.

Went to dinner with my floor, and we went around saying names three or four times so I think I pretty much know everyone already. One guy talked to me a bit, he's into cognitive science but says he's not into science in general... hmm. One girl, I actually can't remember much of what we talked about but I got a good feeling from her, like our conversation just felt like chatting with a friend.

Lost Rocket has the dorm that looks like a friggin' condo.

I think I like Commons. We'll see how I feel about the variety after eating there for a couple of months, but it seems like they have reasonably nutritive food, and it's all there in one place, so it's like a dining hall, but without the pressure to eat a lot because you pay a la carte rather than a flat, exorbitant fee.

Weird thing is I feel way more Not At Home than I did when I moved to Eugene. I could visit at least two friends in the neighborhood on any whim, I've got Lost Rocket here on campus, and anyone else I'm used to seeing is just a phone call and a bike ride away. Maybe it's just that home is school again, but it's not even really school yet.

Convocation was surprisingly good. At UO it was really boring, but there were a lot of cool speeches here.

Hey! At 9 there's a showing of No Exit (which I read in French) and something by David Ives, who wrote some hilarious plays done by MLC a while ago. Gotta go!

Reed health forms, notes #2

2009-08-24T10:53:00.000-07:00

Okay... so I just called the Reed health office about the physical, thinking I could get one there and save myself the trouble of trying to schedule myself somewhere else in Portland during O-week. They said it's not required to enroll, so I should come make an appointment once I know my class schedule and they'll take care of it then.

I'm going to go to Kaiser and take care of my immunization records today. They also said I should just fill out the "demographic information" form now and put down "uncertain" or something for the insurance question. The business office, once it all gets straightened out, will let the health center know what's going on. So it looks like I can take care of pretty much everything today.

Hahaha so true

2009-08-24T10:24:00.000-07:00

http://xkcd.com/627/

So true, at least for most problems. Now if my dad could make a similar flowchart for solving Linux problems, I'd be set.

Polenta!

2009-08-22T15:20:00.000-07:00

I invented the most awesome food ever yesterday. First, I made broccoli cheese polenta. That's a pretty good idea, but totally unremarkable and easy - just add broccoli to the polenta before it boils, and cheese when it's just about thickened. Then pour it into a pan, let it set, cut it into cute triangles... cool.

No, the best part is where I took a triangle, fried it in a pan, and put some beans in the pan next to it. Then I covered it up to let the heat permeate the polenta. So then I had warm broccoli cheese polenta with a crispy outside, with BEANS! Today I'm adding some sauteed onions to the beans. I think it'll be good.

Gettin' things done

2009-08-20T19:03:00.000-07:00

I had a very productive and inspired day today. I went on a run with Fidelity, did all my dishes, packed a bunch of stuff, painted TP tubes to make a tea organizer, cleaned out a small suitcase I've been borrowing from my mom for several years, and sent some emails regarding work-study and references for my application. All of this was done by bits and pieces while listening to good music, and Lost Rocket happened to be by the house in the early afternoon too.

In broader news: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/20/new-poll-77-percent-suppo_n_264375.html

'[77% of] Americans feel it is important to have a "choice" between a government-run health care insurance option and private coverage, according to a public opinion poll released on Thursday.
[...]
Earlier in the week, after pollsters for NBC dropped the word "choice" from their question on a public option, they found that only 43 percent of the public were in favor of "creating a public health care plan administered by the federal government that would compete directly with private health insurance companies."
[...]
While arguments about what type of language best describe the public option persist --"choice" is considered a trigger word that everyone naturally supports -- it seems clear that the framing of the provision goes a long way toward determining its popularity.'

So does this mean 34% of Americans don't understand the issue well enough to see that the two questions are asking the same thing? Or do they perhaps look at the question slantwise, thinking that the "choice" of private coverage must be preserved but not actually favoring the creation of a public option? Yet, in whose mind is private coverage the one in question? I really don't get how the polling numbers can differ by SO MUCH. And if the government doesn't create a public option, what is the health care bill going to consist of?

WTF

2009-08-19T18:29:00.000-07:00

Senor Evergreen cut his hair. Short. Like, ridiculously short on the sides and a little longer, so it puffs up, on top.

He showed up to pick up a frisbee he left here with his new haircut and a red plaid buttonup shirt tucked into blue jeans.

All of you who know him know how fuckin' weird this is. Six years. WTF.

Reed health forms

2009-08-17T11:21:00.001-07:00

Note to self (and slightly to mom): there is still health paperwork due for Reed apart from the insurance issue. Specifically, I need a physician assessment (probably can be done at the health center just after moving in but I'd better find out for sure) and I need to get a copy of my immunization records from Kaiser. There's also an online form that appears to be a kind of summary of everything but includes stuff about the insurance so I haven't filled it out yet.

Second timed mile

2009-08-15T12:51:00.001-07:00

Conditions: caffeinated, warmed up. Cleveland track (Franklin's was closed).

Lap 1: 2:32
Lap 2: 2:22
Lap 3: 2:26
Lap 4: 2:22

Total time: 9:42 (!!)

I was definitely straining my aerobic capacity, but I broke ten minutes!

Craft mania

2009-08-15T10:45:00.000-07:00

I now have 31 paper cranes. I'm running out of space on my dressertop, and I won't likely have an excessive amount of surface to work with at Reed, so I need to think about a more compact display solution. I think I will make strings of them after all, while perhaps keeping a small collection of the newest ones loose.

The two newest ones were experiments in folding cranes as small as possible (and one-upping Dancing Physicist's efforts) and represent the lower limit of my interest in folding tiny cranes. They came from squares of paper 3/4 inch on a side, and their wingspan is 5/8 inch, so although I might be able to fold something a little smaller... there's no further aesthetic value in doing so, and they'd just get lost on the first stray breeze. My mom however suggested spraying with a fixative and making earrings out of the ones already folded and I love the idea. It also makes me consider making smaller versions of my neurotransmitter/drug molecules and making earrings out of those. Though I really don't need any more earrings. Actually, the challenge with that would be making the molecules hang nicely. Dopamine is the only one that has a shape I'm sure would work well as an earring. Maybe a dopamine and serotonin pair?

Move-in is just a week and a half away! I should start packing and cleaning. I've already been going through clothes, narrowing them down and creating a sensible organization system in my dresser. I think the battery or something in the pseudo-vacuum died, so I'll have to call GP if I can't find a plug on the thing. Looking around this place, I feel like I have so much stuff I need to get rid of some of it so it'll fit in my new room... but it all CAME from a dorm room, so really I don't need to worry, just get it all consolidated.

Roommate

2009-08-12T11:14:00.001-07:00

I just called my roommate and talked to her for about 45 minutes.

She's from what she calls the triangle area of North Carolina - a triangle of Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill. We both like music and she plays the cello. (I can think of at least one person who will find that awesome.) She knows a couple of current bands in Portland and loves the music scene in Olympia. She almost wanted to go to Evergreen for Olympia, and I had a laugh at that and told her a bit about Evergreen and my friend who goes there. She wants to study language and history, and she told me an idea she had about indexing language and writing poetry by looking in the index for the kind of word you want. It sounded like something I'd do, and then my mom would tell me I was nuts. I told her about cabbage pH indicator, and she inspired me to the idea of making purple paper which could then be painted with "invisible ink" solutions of acid and base. I gave her advice about clothes to bring, and we decided that whoever moves in first will just set down her stuff and wait for the other to split up the room. Of course we are still at the stage of trying to be awesome for first impressions' sake, but I think we'll get along.

Kathryn/Kay

2009-08-10T21:57:00.001-07:00

Just before sixth grade, I started going by Kay.

Recently I started thinking about going back to Kathryn. I thought about how much trouble some people went to, like my parents, to make "Kay" a habit, and how it might be really annoying if I "change my mind" about it. Then again, maybe they'd like it.

I also thought about how everyone who's met me since (most of the people I know who aren't family) only knows me as Kay.

I kept it in the back of my mind for a bit and then in Eugene I spontaneously introduced myself to some housemates of a friend as Kathryn. That's also how I've introduced myself to my new roommate.

My final conclusion is it just makes sense to go by both names. Lots of people use their formal name often and also have a nickname. So anyone who might like to start calling me Kathryn again, it's on the table. But no pressure to go to any trouble re-learning (newly learning, for some) the habit.

(If this elicits laughter, you're really laughing at my 11-year-old self... so I don't really care. I've got eight years of improved sanity on her.)

XKCD has got it going on this week

2009-08-09T12:27:00.000-07:00

http://xkcd.com/620/

And I've worked out a possible schedule for next year, and realized I can use biology for group X. Yay!

Chemistry/humanities

2009-08-08T20:29:00.000-07:00

After tracing all the prerequisites and drawing out the tree of classes I need for my major, I've realized there might be another way to solve my chemistry/humanities problem. I might be able to study analytical and inorganic chemistry this year, which don't conflict with either Hum 110 or Phys 100, and thus make progress in chemistry while leaving organic for next year. I think that's not typically the order it's done, but we'll see what my advisor thinks.

Food decentralization

2009-08-07T23:22:00.000-07:00

Great article by Michael Pollan (whose famous books I still need to read):

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-pollan/a-food-revolution-in-the_b_190089.html

Hair and clothes

2009-08-06T15:18:00.000-07:00

Today I decided I didn't want to wear my sweatpants again and should go get the new pair of jeans I planned to buy this summer. When I went to Fred Meyer there was a buy-one-get-one-free sale so I bought both of my remaining pairs of pants. I've now got new jeans and a pair of brown Dockers. I'm apparently between a size 8 and 10, because the Dockers are size 8 and the jeans are 10P, whatever that means. There were plenty of size 10 jeans that didn't fit at all though. Jeans are weird that way. Anyway, I also discovered that my hair is long enough to put in okay-looking pigtails now. I'm now wearing the new jeans, my consent-is-sexy shirt, and pigtails and it's great to wear stuff that's all three: comfortable, good-looking, and casual.

License plates

2009-08-05T19:25:00.001-07:00

You know you're a geek when you see a license plate with the letters DNE and immediately translate as "does not exist." As in "the limit of f(x) as x approaches 0 does not exist."

It's even more amusing when two seconds later you see another plate with the letters DNA.

And for good measure, it all reminds you of how many years ago you decided to pretend the UAE on dad's license plate stands for "Uncle Albert Einstein."

:P

Are there any good reasons NOT to legalize cannabis anymore?

2009-08-04T11:33:00.000-07:00

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/04/the-benefits-to-legalizin_n_246356.html

As Glenn Beck says in the video, this is ridiculous. Why should such an innocuous drug, and such an incredibly useful and environmentally friendly fiber, be spawning violence, wasting government money, and actually harming the environment? It's completely stupid, and it was never smart in the first place. (1937: "uh, something called marijuana... I think it's a narcotic or something... yes the AMA is behind us [except they weren't]")

Legalize the stuff already.

Reed housing

2009-08-03T22:00:00.001-07:00

Just got an email about housing from Reed. I have a roommate and she has a name. I think I'll try to get in touch with her soon and get to know each other before moving in together.

First timed mile

2009-08-03T12:09:00.000-07:00

Lap 1 - 2:55
Lap 2 - 2:39
Lap 3 - 2:26
Lap 4 - 2:32

Mile time - 10:32

Today's XKCD is clever yet horrible

2009-08-03T11:00:00.000-07:00

Nooooo!

http://xkcd.com/618/

Well that was awesome

2009-08-01T19:57:00.000-07:00

I spent less than ten hours out today! I missed a couple of the prettier roads south of Canby because I just missed a turn and met the big road a little early. Otherwise the trip was pretty uneventful.

The entire trip from Portland to Eugene is uphill going south and downhill going north overall, though I think Central Point Rd. is uphill both ways. But I think it gets flatter as you go south.

Threw together some statistics:

Day 1
Hours out: 11
Hours riding: 9.5
Miles: 76
Elevation change: +104 ft
MPH avg: 8

Day 2
Hours out: 13.25
Hours riding: 11.25
Miles: 90
Elevation change: +376 ft
MPH avg: 8

Day 3
Hours out: 10.25
Hours riding: 9
Miles: 77
Elevation change: -376 ft
MPH avg: 8.6

Day 4
Hours out: 9.5
Hours riding: 8.5
Miles: 67
Elevation change: -104 ft
MPH avg: 7.9

Total
Hours riding: 38.25
Miles: 310
MPH avg: 8.1

When I do this again, I'd like to do it in cooler weather and stay in Eugene for longer. I'd like to find an alternative to Central Point Rd., too, but I don't see much on the map.

Day 3: Eugene --> Salem

2009-07-31T19:58:00.000-07:00

Mmm, road mirages. I think I've seen mirages before, but I never recognized one until last weekend when I looked at what I thought was a wet slick on the road, only to have it disappear as we approached in our car. Well, ha ha, the next day on the bike there was a mirage every mile or two. So on day three, when it's eight, nine in the morning and I start spotting them, it annoyed me. It wasn't even that hot yet; I felt like the weather was just messing with me for the hell of it.

Well, it never did get that hot and so I practiced deliberate indifference toward the false puddles. It was, in fact, cool enough to wear my hoodie all day, which saved me a lot of discomfort and sunscreen trouble midday. In general, day three felt remarkably routine; it was relatively no trouble at all. I kicked off the first two hours - Eugene to Harrisburg - like it was nothing. When I was hungry, though more frequent than at rest, it was normal hunger, not an "I need what's in that food" sensation. When I got back to Salem, I felt warm and fuzzy and happy to rest, but I wasn't spent - I could've gotten back on my bike and pushed onto Portland given enough time and patience.

From Harrisburg up to Albany I took 99. It was a little boring, but it was very straight, very flat, and of similar aesthetic and traffic quality to a typical country road on this trip. Peoria Rd. was nice, but I think 99 is the best way through.

On the outskirts of Albany I noticed something funny and figured out my back tire was squishy. I tried just pumping it up right there and it seemed to work, so I continued on. A sense that was it wasn't entirely fixed nagged at me though, and perhaps a mile later I knew I needed to check it again. It was squishy, but I thought maybe I'd let too much air out accidentally when removing the pump hose. If it was a puncture, it was clearly a pretty slow leak and maybe I could get to the park I'd stopped at on the way down before it became unrideable. I checked to make sure it was firm before getting back on. Again it took about a mile to fail, and I wasn't at my park, but I recognized the clock tower of the Albany Amtrak station, so I walked the bike over, sat in the shade, grabbed a few bites of an egg sandwich and started taking the wheel apart.

The repair went pretty well overall. While looking over the tire, I found a piece of wire stuck into it that was almost certainly the problem. The leak didn't show itself at first, but with enough pressure I was able to find it. It was difficult and painful to pop the bead back into the rim, but I eventually managed it, and the patch held.

Buena Vista Rd., despite giving me quite a lot of trouble on Monday, is really one of the nicest roads on the route, though I prefer riding it in the morning. I think I prefer everything in the morning.

Just inside of Independence, on River Rd., I found a wallet on the side of the road. It had an ID with a Salem address, and a business card for the Marion County sheriff's office. Since I would have felt weird either leaving a lost wallet or carrying it for two hours into the city unsure where to take it, I was glad to see the sheriff's office number. I called and they said to bring it with me and call when I was in town, after which they came to pick it up.

It turns out that the trouble with my camera was very mundane. There was no memory issue; the hand/exclamation symbol is a warning about bad photographic conditions. The picture that wouldn't take was a fluke. A random selection of the pictures I thought I took aren't there because I didn't actually take them: apparently the camera button has two clicks, and the first one is only focusing or something. I've been careful about pushing down all the way and all my pictures have been successful since then. So only some of the way down has pictures, but I'm taking pictures on the way back of anything that I recognize as something I snapped, then lost. Some of it, like the "entering Lane County" sign, looked better in the original direction and lighting, but what can you do?

Tomorrow I come home!

Day 2: Salem --> Eugene

2009-07-28T16:20:00.000-07:00

River Rd. out of Salem was beautiful, though some insect flew into me and stung me. It sounded like a bee but I didn't see it. The next bee that tried to buzz around me, while I was applying my first batch of sunscreen, got an earful of Deadwood-worthy cursing. After that, they were everywhere; some bumped into me while others just buzzed closer than I liked.

Independence was a cute little intersection that ended River Rd., but then the trouble started. I was on Corvallis Rd., and I passed Buena Vista Rd. I remembered that road as being somewhere between Albany and Harrisburg, so I thought wow, that road goes for a long way and I could get on it now, but I'd rather ride different roads. I had forgotten about it by the time I met another sign saying "Buena Vista" and again turned away. Then I thought wait - that was a really straight shot, I bet I WAS supposed to take Buena Vista. Checked my directions and found I was right. I went back (up a hill) and saw that it was Prather Rd., and realized it was probably directing me to the town Buena Vista. I didn't want to take an unknown road, so I turned forward again. Then remembered I actually had seen Buena Vista Rd. already, and way too far back to feel like retracing. So I went back again and took Prather Rd., knowing that if I got to the town I'd be able to find the road named after it.

Eventually I got to Buena Vista Rd. I wasn't sure how far east the sun would be at this time in the morning, but I judged one way went southeast-ish and the other was some form of west. So I took the southeast one, and everything seemed to be fine for a long time. Then I ran back into Corvallis Rd. Corvallis Rd. was a loopy one, so I didn't immediately think disaster, but this wasn't the one I was supposed to run into. I asked someone for directions and realized that I had gone in a fucking circle, and between a bendy road and not knowing how far east the sun was, I'd never figured that I was going the complete wrong direction. Apparently I rode this entire loop over:

Upon learning this, I turned around and thought maybe I should have checked my direction when I was in Buena Vista since the road turned into Meridian Street. But as soon as I entered town and saw the sign, it made a 90 degree bend. What the hell kind of meridian is that? Now I just say "chaos theory." You misremember a detail from your directions, you end up riding twelve extra miles around 9-10 am. On the hottest damn day of the year.

As I finally got to the last road into Albany, it was too hot. Now I used to go to Bikram and so I know can exercise in supercentenarian temperatures, but I was also really tired of riding after that extra loop. Between noon and 1 I stayed under a tree in a park and then it was really too hot. I tolerate hot air temperatures pretty well, but the overhead direct sunlight was a killer and Oakville Rd didn't have much shade. I also unexpectedly had to cross Hwy 34, which is why I will be trying 99 on the way back up. I took a break in a shady cove just before it joined up with Peoria Rd, which was prettier. Peoria Rd. went slow and steady - constant water, frequent momentary stops in the shade, and a perpetual battle to stay covered in sunscreen. As the sun got more oblique, I noticed riding into Harrisburg about 4:30 that the heat was already more bearable. I really think it's the direct irradiation that bugs me.

Stayed for about an hour and then hopped onto the 18-mile Coburg Rd. Now that it seemed to be liquid-warm rather than baking-hot and the long shadows made everything look beautiful, it was actually pretty enjoyable. Riding into Eugene in the early evening felt like the reward I deserved after a long day. I rode down Coburg Rd., noting where it crossed Harlow, and over the Ferry St. bridge into downtown, where I got cash from an ATM, and then continued into West Eugene to meet my friend.

I arrived covered in a gritty paste of TiO2 nanoparticles, sodium-potassium-chloride-phosphate salt, dust, and variously sourced oils. Ate Taco Bell for dinner, grabbed some groceries at Fred Meyer, and took a bus to his apartment, finding out that my UO ID still works as a bus pass.

Then I was very sleepy.

Camera issues

2009-07-28T14:55:00.000-07:00

I have no idea what is going on with my camera. A little red hand with an exclamation mark appeared in the window and it didn't take the picture - the click didn't happen. I changed some setting from "1 M" to 0.3 M." I took another picture and it worked. Then I called my mom to get suggestions and decided to look for old pictures that weren't mine and delete them, thinking this seemed like a memory issue. There weren't any - there were only 32 pictures on the camera and a bunch of pictures I did take were also missing, in random places throughout the trip. The last picture, however, was there.

I called my mom back and she didn't have any more ideas so I just decided to go try and take pictures, see if the problem happened again immediately or if it was fixed. I took quite a few pictures around the university (of my favorite places there) and the same symbol appeared a few times in white, then went away. The click and the momentary freeze-frame kept happening so it seemed like it was working. I checked the photos and none of the new ones had appeared; the same 32 were there. I thought for a bit that maybe there were multiple storage spots in the camera and I was viewing the wrong folder or something, but I couldn't find anything in the menu that looked like that. So now I'm just blindly clicking the camera and hoping that pictures are being taken, the missing ones still exist, and we'll find them when we plug the thing into the computer. Otherwise the photo record of this trip is going to be pretty poor.

Day 1: Portland --> Salem

2009-07-26T11:55:00.000-07:00

TIMELINE:

6:36 AM - left house in SE Portland
8:00-8:10 - stopped in Oregon City
10:05-11:00 - stopped in Canby
2:40-3:00 - stopped in Mt. Angel
5:30 PM - arrived at dad's in NE Salem

So I left Portland easily, as Clinton/Woodward hit the river pretty much right at the start of the Springwater Corridor. I spent the first couple of miles checking the half-mile posts and wondering how long I would care. Answer: about ten miles. I had my directions in my pocket at first, and at the top of nasty hill in Milwaukie, I noticed they'd fallen out. I didn't want to climb that hill again, didn't know how far back I'd lost them, and didn't want to waste time. I knew what I was doing out to Oregon City, so I decided to keep going and find more directions there. Luckily, a Best Western Inn was right there when I rode in, and they let me use their lobby computer to recreate my entire directions.

Oregon City was horrible. It was all uphill through the city, and the main road to Canby - Central Point Rd - was very difficult. There were long stretches of downhill coasting at 20-30 (?) mph, followed by equally long and steep hills, some of which I had to walk up. It was well-placed in the day, and I was also lucky that the clouds didn't start to clear until I got to Canby. I'm not looking forward to those hills during the third quarter of the last day in the afternoon sun when I do it the other direction.

I was surprised how quickly my strength rebounded. After about an hour sitting in a park in Canby and eating lunch, I felt practically new.

Just outside Canby, it was a series of flat country roads in between nice gardens. When I got to the longest straight shot - Needy Rd - it presented a series of medium-height valleys. Each hill on the other side, I wouldn't have wanted to climb starting from flat, but with the momentum from each preceding descent I could actually coast about halfway up. Eventually however I came across this confusing intersection:

It looks like a straight shot on the map, but there's just enough of a curve to make it look like a more or less equal three-way split at the intersection. My notes only said that Monte Carlo turned into Barlow, so I picked the wrong Barlow Rd and wasted several miles before I noticed the sun was behind me, and I was pretty sure all the temporary jaunts north were supposed to be done by this point.

So I got into Mt. Angel later than expected and pretty tired of riding. I knew I needed a rest, but I also knew I didn't want to spend a lot of time there. So I sat and leisurely but methodically performed each task I might want to do to prepare for the last leg: reapply sunscreen, eat an energy bar, take pictures, refill my water bottles, make room in my bag for my hoodie. It took about twenty minutes. I knew I was (give or take) around two hours out of Salem, so I mentally divided my remaining distance into the first hour - which I was ready to undertake immediately - and after I'd finished that, I'd have just one more hour left - no worse than a long cross-city trip in Portland.

The last leg was the weirdest. The terrain was pretty flat, hot and dusty. I'd tired out my legs and made good use of my lungs in the Oregon City hills, and through the midpoint of the trip my butt got sore and I needed my food and water more often. Now, my wrists and elbows started to ache. But after so long riding, so much physical demand, it was like my body said "ok, whatever. I'll do whatever you want." I was aware of the ache in my joints but it didn't bother me. It must have been some kind of endorphins, but it wasn't the same rush I'm familiar with after running - the pain wasn't entirely gone and there also wasn't any pleasure, just a lack of suffering.

The mental weirdness had started partway between Canby and Mt. Angel, but peaked here. Every so often, I would "wake up" and think "yup, I'm still riding my bike." It was as if I suddenly noticed it was unusual, yet had been doing it for so long I couldn't process it as anything out of the ordinary. I had little sense of progress sometimes - I couldn't tell if I'd been riding for fifteen minutes or forty minutes since the last road change, or the last time I "woke up", and in the course of an eleven-hour day, couldn't care too much. The ride stopped seeming like something with forward movement, as I'd rightly thought of it in the first half, and became a cyclical, immanent state of being like the fact that one must prepare meals, eat them, and do the dishes repeatedly in everyday life. As much as the amount of distance covered and time elapsed, I think it was this shift in my state of mind that made the hills of Oregon City seem so very remote when I remembered them. Really? I was gritting through those nasty hills this morning?

STATS:

Miles traveled: ~70
Hours on the road: 11
Hours in the saddle: 9.5
Bottles of water drunk: 7
Energy bars eaten: 6
Emergen-C's consumed: 2

After I finished, my wrist and elbow joints felt swollen and hot, and I felt like I had a post-run endorphin rush only it lasted for more than an hour. My hunger for dinner was different; it wasn't hunger pangs in my stomach, nor the cranky dissatisfaction I associate with low blood sugar, but a primal certainty that I needed food in order to live. My tiredness cast itself in life-and-death terms too; I felt like the sleep I needed was far more than the sleep I normally get and would have to be a temporary death, a complete dropping out of the world. I woke up at 6 because my dad was getting up to set up his moving sale, but I took another nap later in the morning and hunted down protein all day. I was surprised how little soreness I had in my muscles. About 24 hours after I'd arrived, I felt totally normal again.

I'm glad I planned this trip out to be so lengthy. I get to do this again, and then I'm in Eugene, yay, and then I get to wind it all down by going over it in reverse. Tomorrow, it looks like there are some tricky hills just outside Salem, but nothing like Oregon City. It looks to be a steady grade up out of Harrisburg into Eugene, but quite possibly some mild up-and-down like Needy Rd. We'll see.

And the fun begins

2009-07-23T21:25:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow I get up 6AM, whip up a quick-but-hearty breakfast (oatmeal, egg, yogurt shake and black tea), and hit the long long road to Salem.

You know what's a real trip? Getting up an hour and a half earlier than usual to the first cloudy day in a week. I kept stressing out because I had "so much to do" and it felt like late afternoon already... then saw it wasn't even two yet. Plenty of time. I even hung out with a couple of people briefly and fit in a run, not to mention lots of leisure reading in the morning.

This trip has ended up being more expensive than I'd hoped, but a great deal of it is in good investments (bike stuff, sweatpants), and what is money for if not things like this? I think I'll still be able to buy three new pairs of pants this summer, which were the most important items I wanted. Also, I have a LOT of bulk food, so I could probably cut down on my consumption of perishables and save money that way.

Funny thing... while working out my directions, I noticed that Oregon City is just like West Eugene - a bunch of streets named after early presidents in order. And High St., and Willamette, though not quite in the same positions.

Everything is packed except my lunch, purse, and phone. My breakfast and tomorrow's clothes are laid out.

Here we go.

My visit to Reed

2009-07-21T15:38:00.000-07:00

I love Reedies. I rode in from the Steele side, and drawn into the sidewalk was a chemical drawing of psilocin. Not even psilocybin, but the dephosphorylated, bioactive psilocin. How geekarifically specific! There were some other chemical drawings too, but I the sidewalk was pretty worn and I couldn't tell what they were. I think one might have been another tryptamine though.

I talked to the registrar, financial aid, and business affairs. The registrar took a couple of classes off my transfer credit (Reed doesn't have a WGS department, and Phys 162 hardly counts as physics) which dropped me down to freshman standing. I will have seven semesters of financial aid, which schedules me to graduate in December, but hey whatever. I can also petition for an extra semester if needed, which they say is typically granted for transfer students. In mid-August I can start talking to department secretaries about possible work-study as a lab assistant.

Then I went for a run through the campus, and read another chapter of the Iliad on the banks of the pond.

Reed itself is beautiful and so is everything east and south, so it's pretty astounding how ugly the neighborhood just north of the college is. Crossing Powell at 33rd in the hot sun is a singularly unpleasant experience, and Holgate has a bunch of nasty curves right around there - but I don't think there's any better place to cross without going out to 42nd.

Fragments of dreams

2009-07-20T18:29:00.001-07:00

I had a weird series of dreams this morning, four distinct fragments that did not seem to cohere, yet were all remembered upon awakening. Here are two:

***

I'm helping to set up a party and there's a young man and woman in charge. They're in their early to mid twenties, but the dynamic is as if they were much older or I were much younger. It's not with Lost Rocket's folks, but the house looks the same and the "of course I'm here four hours early" thing is very similar. I feel like I'm being very helpful for about an hour when I do something stupid, I think standing on the table or something. The man really gets on my case about it and I apologize but I tell him I feel like I've been very helpful so far and he's being really harsh on this one mistake. The woman says that quite the opposite, I've been an annoyance and a hindrance the whole time. I angrily tell them that fine, I will leave and not come back until the party actually starts, and I do. I'm aware of the fact that even though they made me feel like a little kid, I'm actually an adult and can do that. Later, not at the party but on the street, they see me and want to take my picture and seem to pretend nothing happened. I flip them off, forcing them to take my picture that way or not at all. They opt not to take the picture, which is what I hoped they would choose, and I've also made the point that they can't just hurt me like that and then ignore it.

---

I'm in the grocery store when I see my grandma Pat. At least I think I do. Then I go closer and there seem to be two of her. The one I saw has a rounder face and then there's one with a more square jaw and I conclude the second one is actually my grandma and the other is her sister. I go over and say hi to her, then my dad shows up and we all chat. Then she says something and it sounds rather philosophical, when I realize she's quoting a song, some 90's hit I know. (When I wake up I realize it's Glycerine.) My dad does that funny I'm-about-to-change-the-subject laugh and says he'd better get going. I say "why, 'cause grandma is quoting 90's pop?" He goes off and I say I ought to get back to my grocery shopping too. But when I go back to my aisle I can't remember a thing I wanted to buy.

***

In other news, I found someone to stay with in Eugene, so it's happening! This is gonna be really fun.

Week long crazy bike road trip

2009-07-19T21:13:00.000-07:00

I'm going to ride my bike to Salem on Friday and spend next weekend with my dad. Then, if I can find a place to stay, I'm going to hop back on the bike Monday and continue on to Eugene. Inconveniently, Dancing Physicist has already gone home and so I can't stay with him, but I still feel like I want to go back to Eugene, so I'm thinking of calling up a couple of people I met who actually live there. It's a bit of a long shot, but maybe it'll work. Otherwise I'm just going to Salem and back, or cooking up something like camping on the coast, but I don't know how much fun that would be. I'll take a rest day at my dad's on the way back, and then be back in time for my sister's birthday.

If Dancing Physicist is around for long enough and gives me the green light, I'd love to do a multi-day bike trip, camping on the way, out to the Wallowas later in August. I love the idea of just going the places I want to go on my own power. I don't need extra money and I don't need anyone else besides at my endpoints. Get me intrepid enough with a tent, and I wouldn't even need that.

Things to do this week:

- Get bike supplies (road pump, patch kit, a couple tubes, and H2O bottle cages)
- Plan my food and make energy bars
- Talk to several offices at Reed
- Go to Harry Potter, and hang out with sister while others shop for her birthday

Fair warning: this is a long one, and sentimental too

2009-07-18T21:10:00.000-07:00

So while I was listening to music last night I wrote a long mopey thing that I thought of as my next blog post, but wisely left until the morning in case I decided it was too mopey (and hormonally inspired) for the eyes of others. I've decided to post it anyway. Don't think I'm depressed.

***

I was listening to music. Joyful music, the Cocteau Twins, music that has always been associated somehow with my brightest dreams for the future. So I listened, and the visions filled my head, and I felt buoyant... until a dismal revelation crept up on me, and I realized "the future" is already here, and I'm so terribly off track.

The visions. Oh they're not so literally visual, like a screenplay in my head, but they're flashing images - colors - emotions - little scraps of knowledge. I think I'm with someone, someone I love. I think I wanted to fall wildly in love. Look at my love life now, it's in chains. The best of my love waiting for someone who may or may not ever come around, and the scraps of feeling for the person I was with before just reminding me, just barely tempting me to go back and get one more hug from someone who really shouldn't take me back, although he would, but I won't, because I'm not that dumb and I've been through the damn cycle too many times. And there's bright colors, sunlight, flowers, rivers, tall grasses, it's summer... an Alaskan summer, I'm almost sure. God, all this time I think I just wanted to be a copy of my mom.

But I'm not. I never will be. I never could be.

There's a Portland moment too, one that actually happened, one that happened to me. I was in the bedroom, the one that's part of the kitchen now, and this must have been before the addition because a sunbeam is coming through the window that goes into my sister's room now, and little dust particles floating in it. They look like magic - they look like gold. I was alone in there, I think I can even remember a dark blue sheet, or maybe that was the paint, but that was the color in the room. Yeah, there are Portland dreams too. Some house where we went to a party once, who knows who it belonged to, but it was the perfect Portland house, with a backyard and grapevines or whatever kind of vines and I think an arbor somewhere. Maybe a porch swing too, or maybe that's just me making things up. If I had some David Garza right now it'd be the perfect color, a translucent yellow-green that screams warm summer evening with friends and drinks. I can imagine the upstairs, I don't know if I've even been in a house that looks like this, but I just know there would be teenagery bedrooms all dark with oh I don't know, Nirvana posters, but one window lets in light, gently rather than directly. More dark blue, fresh air, a casual attitude toward cleaning and a place that just kind of absorbs it. Roommates who don't care, roommates who are just laid-back carefree laughing Portland twentysomethings. How am I ever going to be one of those laughing Portland twentysomethings?

I want my kitchen to look like the kitchen of friend of mine from New Day School. My parents say we called her Purple Sara but I just remember she was the Sara without an H at the end.

None of it involves science. None of it involves college or even a whiff of the erudite. Then again, none of it involves a job of any kind and those are rather necessary. God, I've been into science for so long, I get so absorbed in it, but what if it's just the /wrong direction/? None of it sure as HELL involves sitting around a house with only two windows that open, never so much as getting dressed some days except for my run, with all my friends busier than I am and putting all my energy into loving my body, as if that could be fulfilling. Yeah yeah, a body out of whack will screw up everything else, and it's great that I'm getting some exercise now, and I'm sure it's good that I decided to stop giving a shit about my weight. But really, I am so conscientiously listening to this body because I have nothing better to do, and it is NOT ENOUGH.

I want somebody else to love my body too. I want to love their body in return. And their soul, their mind, their love for me. In the middle of a dust-mote-ridden sunbeam pouring through the open window at nine in the morning, or eight, some quiet hour before our friends have awoken on a weekend, before the clock commands anyone with sense to get out and do things - but there we are, already arisen, because life is better than sleep, better to open our eyes, enjoy each other and enjoy being alive.

Nature. Love. A reason to get up in the morning. There's really no reason for me to get up lately except the fact that I wake up. No wonder I sleep until 9:30, 10, 11. I'm sure a lot of this is just due to my unusually dramatic hormone shift this month (my headache is coming back too). Also, I'll meet new people and get really busy at Reed. But boy do I feel like I'm sitting in the middle of giant mess on the opposite side of the planet from what I dreamed of as a kid. Yet every single thing I imagined belongs in this very time zone. How can I break through this invisible barrier? Did I just come twenty years late, or forty? Would I have just had different, irreplaceable dreams then? Oh I don't know, I don't know.

***

A few after-the-fact notes:

* My love life in chains does not in any way imply that I'm closed off to love. I'd be incredibly happy to meet a nice Reedie boy and fall for him. Just that it's a little hard to believe, right now, that I could let myself go fully and fall into that stuff of my dreams. I want to, but it's just a little hard to believe in right now.

* The co-op where one of my friends at UO lived was very very close to my Nirvana-postered Portland house. They still exist.

* I love my mom. She's the best. And I'll always remember that she thinks it's funny and interesting when I talk about chemistry.

* Yeah, all my friends are busier than me and I'm bored. Lost Rocket is in New York right now I think; I forget for how long. Senor Evergreen is leaving to go on a road trip across the country and won't be back until the end of August. My other friend (he'll get a blog name soon) is going on the second half of that road trip so I've still got a few weeks with him but like Dancing Physicist he doesn't have a cell phone so he's a little hard to get ahold of. Dancing Physicist himself is in Eugene and Fidelity has been out of town a lot so I still haven't seen her yet. Bother. Knee-Man lives close to me, but he doesn't always answer his phone and well, what do we have in common anyway? I imagine he'd be game for a bike ride sometime though... and there's a couple other people I know from MLC, but it's always hard to establish a new friendship with someone you haven't seen in a while. They've already got their own stuff going on. Gosh I need to go to Reed and find people who like to do the same things as me.

Downphase is also a pain in the ass - er, head

2009-07-17T16:50:00.000-07:00

Headache... dull diffuse headache that almost doesn't even deserve the name but it's distracting - it's better when I lie down or when I put my head down low, and I think exercise would help too, eventually I will get around to running today. Drank two liters of water and it helped out my digestion, but not the headache... I blame low blood pressure. Estrogen raises it and progesterone lowers it, so it figures when progesterone gets rolling and estrogen drops, the BP will have to go down... well I can theorize, but I'll never really know.

Downphase likes different food

2009-07-16T15:23:00.000-07:00

I think I just crashed my way into Week 3*, in part because I am desiring entirely different food than I did a couple of days ago. The cottage cheese I was eating for breakfast didn't interest me this morning, and the green pepper that looked so crisp and inviting when I bought it seemed boring, crunchy, and watery today, its delicate vitamineral content wasted on my palate. I'm not even sure I care for another meal of rice and beans. A cup of stovetop chai, on the other hand, tasted like exactly the right thing.

I want ice cream and other junk that I don't have, so I channeled myself into thinking about my shopping list for this weekend. What are some healthy foods that appeal to me, and that I will eat in moderation? I was surprised at some of things I came up with. Bananas, to start with - a fruit I'm generally not so hot for. Oatmeal. Yogurt, which I like in theory but lost my taste for (coincidence?) a couple of weeks ago. Noticing the themes here, I went on to theorize that potatoes, pasta, and avocados would fit right in (though avocados may or may not be available). I might buy some Gardenburgers too. Instead of merely-functional protein and complex, interesting flavors in my vegetables, I want the blunt satisfaction of thick-textured, creamy, mild sweetness.

I'll save the ice cream for my next up-phase, when I'll eat less of it and enjoy it more.

* where 4 Weeks exist and Week 1 = menstruation

An art piece I appreciate

2009-07-15T10:20:00.000-07:00

http://creativeface.net/berlin_co-berlin_10021-0

It doesn't take much to turn a fashion shoot into a gruesome spectacle. If beauty and fashion celebrated health, as they should, this wouldn't be possible without fundamentally altering the spirit of photo.

I like this comic

2009-07-09T13:54:00.000-07:00

A few of the best:

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1060 (displayed by my Phys 162 teacher one lecture, and my introduction to the comic)
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174

One that actually references current events:

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1077

And although the entire series seems to carry a theme of "my eventual fate,"* this one in particular stands out:

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=868

* Seriously, think about it. I decided to do undergrad at a place that has quals followed by a thesis.

Recipe for red & black chai

2009-07-07T14:22:00.000-07:00

Mostly the name is snappy, but this combination has a really nice flavor too:

Red & Black Chai
Boil 3/4 cup water in a saucepan. Add 1 bag rooibos chai and 1-2* bags black tea. Allow it to brew for a minute, then add milk slowly, keeping the mixture hot. Remove the teabags and add 1 tablespoon sugar. Add more milk to adjust the volume if needed and heat to desired temperature.

Specifically, I used:
Yogi Tea Chai Redbush
Stash English Breakfast Tea
2% cow's milk
Bulk cane sugar

*I only tried it with 1 bag of black, but if you wanted more caffeine, I think the flavor would still be good with 2.

Socially disabled... or just too weird

2009-07-06T19:28:00.000-07:00

So I just finished calling just about everyone in my phone and failed to get my sociability on. Most of them were already busy. Senor Evergreen feels like chilling at home, which is fine, but there was something else he said that bugged me. He said it seemed like the last couple times we've hung out, we didn't really do anything.

That's not completely fair - the last time we hung out, we played disc golf and then helped his friend move. But it does touch on something that's been bothering me in general, and Senor Evergreen is just the first person besides myself to say it out loud: I feel like a boring person to be around. I never have ideas for activities. I spend so much of my social time going "I dunno, what do you want to do?"

Yet I feel kind of helpless to do anything about it. My budget it too tight to go check out new things if they cost money, and I'm not going to school or work or anything in the day that exposes me to new people who might introduce me to new activities. And I'm not intrinsically boring, I just don't know how to make the things I enjoy on my own - like running, reading, and geeking over chemistry - social. Or maybe I'm just not objectively that compatible with my friends in Portland, because come to think of it, Dancing Physicist and I shared all three of those activities (replace chemistry with science of all kinds). Heck, Fidelity likes those things too - I just haven't gotten to see her yet because she's been busy.

It's sad to think that I don't actually have important things in common with my friends, especially when I really really like their personalities. But it's almost like a replay of what happened with LS, then Knee-Man, though thankfully I'm not dating anyone right now that I'm suddenly feeling alienated from. I could even say the same about the people I "dated" in 8th and 9th grade. Eventually, personality or one initial bond isn't enough. You need things to talk about or do together that you're both into and that don't "run out."

Oy. This is something to really think about, isn't it.

Spoilers for the Iliad, book six

2009-07-06T18:15:00.000-07:00

So the big head honcho in Troy is named Priam. His son Paris got everyone into this mess, and another son Hektor is the great warrior everyone takes seriously. Now, amongst the people killed, I'd noticed quite a few others were named "the son of Priam." Guy has a lot of sons, I thought, but I wasn't counting.

Then lines 242-246 of book six came along:

"Now he entered the wonderfully built palace of Priam.
This was fashioned with smooth-stone cloister walks, and within it
were embodied fifty sleeping chambers of smoothed stone
built so as to connect with each other; and within these slept
each beside his own wedded wife, the sons of Priam."

FIFTY sons? Plus twelve daughters elucidated in the next few lines! The dude must have a freaking harem, and a big one at that!

Multidisciplinary fitness

2009-07-03T13:13:00.000-07:00

I was inspired to start running by a very specific incident. I was sitting in a tree on campus sometime in January and Dancing Physicist suddenly called to me. He was in a red sweatshirt, loose pants, and running shoes. We would later run into each other all over campus, but since I'd just moved into the dorms this was one of our first chance encounters and it amused him. We chatted for a minute, and then he told me he was just going out for a run and bade me goodbye. As he bounced away I thought two things:

1) he looks so happy to be out running!
2) that's something I should be able to do with my body.

You know what else I should be able to do with my body? Push-ups. Normal people can do those. So I naively think "okay let's start doing push-ups." Except that push-ups are quantized. My running abilities were atrocious in the beginning, but at least I could gasp out my block-and-a-half and work from there. Where do I begin when I can't even do one push-up with my knees on the ground?

A-run-run-run, yeah

2009-07-01T20:09:00.000-07:00

I'm loving my running. Today was my fifth day in a row and I have no intention of stopping tomorrow. I should probably take a rest day sometime soon but for now I'm on a roll. I've been logging my distances, and my runs generally come in around 1600-2000 meters (1-1.25 miles). One of the things I like best about running several days in a row is that improvement - farther, faster, or easier - comes so fast. I'm thinking I'd like to train for an endurance event. I could probably do a 5k already, though it's still quite a bit longer than I'm used to. Maybe I'll look for one of those, or wait a bit and shoot for a 10k later.

Clothes shopping

2009-06-30T18:58:00.001-07:00

I biked up to the Hollywood Fred Meyer to go clothes shopping.

It was depressing. "Add a size!" exclaimed the bras, and "smooth out back fat." All of the pants talked about their "slimming" properties. Despite having taken women's studies, philosophy of love and sex, and having read Reviving Ophelia both as a kid and again a couple of weeks ago - actually going to the store and observing at length the advertising attached to women's clothing horrified me. This is how weight conscious we are, this is how seriously we think we need to manipulate our bodies? When I go clothes shopping, I'm looking for things that fit my body, not things that mold it into some shape it isn't.

I think I will take that screen printing kit I have and make a shirt that says "I love my body." Maybe on the back I will write "and that shouldn't be remarkable." It really shouldn't. I feel like doing something revolutionary. Seeing all that garbage tagged onto clothes, it was as if I'd walked in and everyone was smoking their cigarettes inside the store - so regressive! I wonder what there is to do. Are there body image support groups I could volunteer to lead, or something? I don't even know what society is trying to do about this issue.

I came home with just a couple packs of underwear. I didn't find any bras I liked. I actually found a lot of good pants, but my size and shape may change significantly as I exercise this summer, so I'm going to hold off on buying them. I learned a lot about what brands to go for, anyway. I found pretty much exactly what I looking for in terms of a shirt, but the medium was too big in the shoulders and the small was too small in the arms. Maybe that will have changed by the end of the summer too.

Spelling bee money

2009-06-24T20:04:00.000-07:00

I won a small amount of money from the spelling bee in 8th grade. (If only I'd asked the damn language of origin and made it one round further, then it would have been considerably more money.) Anyway, through convoluted circumstances the check left my possession and nobody realized it never got cashed. Spring Break of this year I get a letter informing me of this fact. I fill out the enclosed form indicating the check has been "lost, stolen, or never received," but then lose it, send an email to the bee, forget about it for a while but never get a response, then phone them some time later wondering if it's too late. They respond to my email saying they'll make an inquiry into the matter.

Well, it all worked out and they're sending me a replacement check that couldn't arrive at a better time. With this extra money, I can actually buy some new clothes! I also really want a stereo to bridge my iPod to these nice speakers I have and should probably get some bike supplies for myself, like a pump and grease and patch kit.

Nutritional musings

2009-06-23T15:47:00.000-07:00

Useful note: bulk grains and beans supply around 200 calories per dry 1/4 cup.

I should get some salsa next week at the store.

At the store

2009-06-22T16:24:00.001-07:00

I was at the store today and I noticed a couple of funny things.

First of all, one aisle said it carried "isotonics." Isotonics? I thought. In chemistry isotonic means "having the same osmotic pressure as a reference solution." Not exactly something I expect to see in the grocery store. I wondered what the heck it could mean as a noun that ordinary people would understand, so I walked down that aisle. I found electrolyte replacement drinks at the end, which makes some sense: solute concentrations, especially electrolytes since they are usually ionic, determine the osmotic pressure of a solution; the reference solution in this case is probably blood plasma. Still, unless I'm living under a rock again and it has become a flashy new buzzword, it seems like Fred Meyer is giving people a lot of credit for being able to interpret "isotonic."

Second, in the checkout line I looked at the magazines, and apparently the two stars of Twilight are dating each other now. "But will it ruin Twilight?" the cover sensationally asked. Now I don't see why the actions of the actors should have any effect whatsoever on the movie. The movie has already been made, and although I think there are sequels planned, the point of actors is that they act - they are not their real-life selves onscreen. Even if the audience cares for some reason, how could it possibly be a bad thing for the actors to assume the same relationship as the characters they portray?

Camping!

2009-06-21T15:32:00.001-07:00

I just got back from a great camping trip with my family and Lost Rocket's family, although Lost Rocket wasn't there. We rented a Forest Service cabin around Cottage Grove. We were hoping for sun, but it was at high elevation and it was tremendously foggy. This was fun in itself, though.

I thought I'd brought my phone, but once there I couldn't find it, so I rarely knew what time it was. We all got up very early (once in a while someone else with a phone revealed the time to us) except for Lost Rocket's 13-year-old sister. I'd have preferred to sleep in longer, but I was woken by the cold. That's the thing that sucks about camping sometimes: you wake up cold, and as soon as you get warm, you're sleepy again because you didn't actually sleep enough. I read lots of Atlas Shrugged, but I'm still only about 15% of the way in, because as stated before, it is fucking long.

I went on two beautiful walks on the same trail: one by myself, in which I appreciated the ecology of the forest, and one later with everyone else, in which we focused on the geology of the area.

On my solo walk, it was still very foggy. I loved looking at the diversity of plants; there were rhododendrons, a trillium, a pretty deciduous plant I didn't recognize, a funky fungus I've never seen before, and the usual smorgasbord of Oregonian evergreens trailing a lichen my sister says is called Old Man's Beard. Tiny Douglas firs grew in the middle of the trail and something not quite a nurse log flaked apart like salmon. I thought about how much damn life is tied up together in a forest like that; even a little piece of fallen branch on the ground is an entire ecosystem. There's the wood and needles from the tree, and then invariably there are at least two kinds of lichen, each of which is a fungus and an alga meshed together; it's caked with dirt and bugs crawl in it, not to mention all the prokaryotes that are constantly mediating every living system that exists. Eventually I came to a nice bit where the edge of the trail looked out over a steep hill and there was an empty space in the closest trees. Looking down the hill one particular tree was visible and one could imagine being sucked down by its very presence. Looking any further out or up, impenetrable fog. To all sides, trees stood tall with stringy lichen swaying in the mist, and I could hear myself breathing amongst brief birdsong into the chilled atmosphere. The overall effect was of a localized enchantment, shrouded from the rest of the world by vapor.

On the group walk, we discovered that the area has been mined, and there were a couple of abandoned mine shafts. The miners were likely looking for gold, and in the process pulled giants chunks of rock out of the earth, many of which had veins of quartz. We split a particularly large rock to reveal a plate of tiny quartz crystals. Some of the quartz crystals appeared to have rotted, and it made me wonder what in the natural world can dissolve silica. There were plentiful colored rocks on the path, and a robust iron content was betrayed by the patterns of red and orange across white. Interestingly the red and the orange rocks had different characters; the red seemed to appear in solid patches, while the orange meandered and swirled looking like an orange creamsicle. One orange rock had sharp straight lines, where fine cracks had conserved water in the rock and oxidized it into an X pattern. I wanted to keep that rock, but it was too big to justify and I brought home a swirly one instead, along with a red one that looked like a pumice stone and was flecked with white, a plain one that looked greenish when wet. Some of the rocks on the trail were not especially pretty, but amazingly complex, with reds and greens and stripes and spots. The prize beauty was a small piece of the crystal plate that snapped off while I was handling the big rock.

Nine people and five dogs fit in that cabin. My parents want to rent the place for a week during a hotter time next summer. I'm looking forward to it.

This is what my calendar looks like

2009-06-14T15:37:00.000-07:00

Or I would show you what it looks like if the "add image" feature were working. I'm on a library computer so I don't have time to troubleshoot. I'll post it later.

Here's the plan for the summer:

Reading-

- Read the Iliad
- Read (or at least begin) Atlas Shrugged
- Keep on hand that biography of Einstein that I still haven't read

Health-

- Eat healthy, low-fuss, built-from-basics food
- Continue running 4x a week
- Bike everywhere

I'll make a few good efforts at looking for work, but I'm not super optimistic about it.

Yesterday, I hung out with Senor Evergreen and had dinner with my family. Today, I went to the gay pride parade. I met the people in the "big house" and we were going to meet at pride, but I think they couldn't hear their phone. I'm in Central Library now and I'm going to see if I can update my voter registration while I'm downtown before going back home to get some food.

The bike ride from my place, through Ladd's Addition, to downtown is really beautiful.

People UO has given me

2009-06-14T15:30:00.000-07:00

(A post I've been putting together since the middle of finals week)

Some of them I got to know, some of them I've traded email with, some of them are simply people I noticed. Here's to the people that made this year stand out. There is...

Dancing Physicist, to start out with. Everybody's heard about him.

Then Fidelity, whom I knew in high school but didn't really get to know well then. I ran into her once fall term, and she brought back my pottery for me. Winter term we were in the same math class, and this term we've had lunch together almost every day after math. We will both be in Portland this summer.

Then there was that really beautiful girl in my chemistry class. I noticed her after a couple weeks; she might have been that "feisty voice" who told Williams he ought to take something from the physicists in response to the disappearance of the stick. We talked a few times - she liked my lip piercing - and gave each other notes when the other was out sick, but never got close.

Another girl sat right next to her. She runs and she lives in the dorm right next to Dancing Physicist. We talked a few times too.

Also from chemistry, a cute guy sat behind me whom I didn't really notice until a few weeks ago. He's funny and can calculate damn fast. I was chatting him up after class when Fidelity came in for her physics class (held in the same room directly afterward) and broke into the conversation trying to figure out how we both knew him. Turns out he's a 28-year-old postbac student who's taking only science. Never would have guessed.

My women's studies discussion first term had a lot of loud voices in it, one being a girl from Minnesota who joked with the GTF, also from Minnesota, about the "snow" we get here. She mostly disappeared winter term, but at some point I found out she was friends with someone I sort of knew from MLC in 8th grade. Things really kicked off when one day I went looking for Dancing Physicist and found him folding cranes, being taught by this girl. We've both been very fond of her since then. Just a few days ago, she called out to me on the sidewalk. I looked over at the group the voice came from... and recognized two people as her. It took me a very confused couple of seconds to remember from women's studies that she has a twin. We've traded email and I genuinely hope we stay in touch.

This Saudi exchange student walked by Dancing Physicist and I in Carson one time while he had his Arabic book out. They immediately struck up a conversation in half English, half Arabic. Since then we've both run into him all over the place. He's in Portland for a short break before continuing classes in the summer term, and I'm going to hang out with him next week.

The most Portland-y person I know from UO was a radical queer activist whom I first met because (he) started a sex positivity group. (She) came out as trans partway through the year, lives in a cool co-op off campus, and always seemed like the most down-to-earth of people I knew on campus.

There was a girl on my floor who was always really friendly to me. (She was always really friendly to everyone, but it was still nice.) I didn't expect to stay in touch with her, but she came in and made big show of saying goodbye when she left so I traded email with her.

Dancing Physicist's former roommate is a cute math major whom I only met twice, but I gave him my email the second time.

Oh yeah, and my own roommate, who spent most of five months ignoring me. Gotta love dorms.

Very zen

2009-06-08T19:58:00.001-07:00

Fidelity and Dancing Physicist and I went on a nice run last night. We are surprisingly successful as a social group of three.

I finished my lab report this morning and turned it in. Managed to get my last set of pottery out of the "bonus bisque" and glaze it in time for the glaze deadline. Then I backed up and restored my computer to "its original crapware-infested condition," so that all my data now exists on a small flash drive and five DVDs. When I'm done in the computer lab, I'm going to go study for my first final.

We're all geeks yay

2009-06-06T01:32:00.000-07:00

Today was the last day of classes, and this evening there was a barbecue for the honors chemistry class. It was at Prof. Page's house and Prof. Williams was there too. It was lovely. I realized many more people in the class know me than I know, because I've sat in the front row all year! It was nice and relaxed and we all cracked jokes about lecture and lab and told stories about calculus teachers we weren't sorry to leave behind.

Looking up?

2009-06-04T11:53:00.000-07:00

It rained this morning, my professor told me exactly how to handle my lame data set, I had pasta for lunch, I talked to Senor Evergreen yesterday, I told my other professor I'm going back to Portland for the summer, the chemistry class is having a barbecue tomorrow, and after just one more set of differential equations I'm done with homework. Things are looking up.

Oh, and reading my thiosulfate report from high school was rather painful. A materials and methods section does not consist of a grocery list of chemicals and a stepwise procedure. It also does not include notes like "rinse out the graduated cylinder."

Wow is this post #4 in one day?

2009-05-31T17:59:00.000-07:00

We're on our last full topic of the year in chem: electrochemistry. We have the quiz on Monday, one guest lecture on polymers, and review session on Friday. And it's striking me that electrochemistry was covered quite shabbily in high school. We've covered some entirely new things, like equilibria, and improved upon the math or the versatility in others. But I understand oxidation-reduction a lot better conceptually than I did after my high school chemistry class, though we ostensibly covered it.

I should look at my old thiosulfate report! It's pretty similar to the iodine experiment we just did.

It just gets better and better

2009-05-31T15:27:00.000-07:00

I just looked at the tag on my Reed T-shirt, and it's 100% bamboo fiber.

How cool is that? I didn't even know!

The internet is a double edged rusty old machete

2009-05-31T14:07:00.000-07:00

('Cause swords are so passe)

Apart from the obvious reasons (lots of information, but lots of distractions), the internet is something I love and I hate with respect to homework. On the one hand, online homework is nice because you get instant feedback - if you've done something wrong, you find out right away and can fix it instead of waiting a week for someone to messily and in-a-hurry grade it. On the other hand, these programs are just algorithms and not smart human beings, so you get stuff like the following:

"I'm trying to get webassign to fix the algorithm. Your concentrations give the correct equilibrium constant when you plug them into the equilibrium constant expression, which is the best way to show that they are correct. If I can't get webassign to fix the algorithm, I'll check all the answers to 10 (e) manually and give you credit."

"For #9 there is also a rounding issue. Webassign takes the [Ag+] concentration and rounds it to two sig figs before using to find [PO₄^3-] and Ksp. Note: this is NOT the way I would like you to do calculations on quizzes and the final and in general!!! You should carry an extra sig fig or two through your calculation and round at the end."

WebAssign is not usually this bad, but Webwork, the program we're using in math this term, has one or two problems with typos or that otherwise need to be removed almost every problem set - and its notation is very inconsistent.

We're at a rather awkward place with technology and I'm not sure if forward or backward is the direction I'd prefer to go.

Reed College is so nice!

2009-05-31T10:02:00.001-07:00

They sent me unexpected goodies! And the letter was rather sweet... they started off with "now that you're a Reedie" and ended by saying farewell from the admissions office, we're handing you off to all the other offices now.

And now I've got TWO water bottles - one to leave at my desk and one to carry with me!

A whole bunch of random stuff

2009-05-30T19:46:00.001-07:00

My aqua screen on my computer is getting worse, probably as a result of tweaking the screen so many times trying to see if the software remedies worked. I'm glad HP is repairing the computer for free, but it would be nice if this weren't happening right at the end of the term. I'm going to try and see if I can put off sending it to them until after school; if not, I ought to at least do the Chimera modeling assignment for my last lab report, because I'm not sure the school computers have the program.

Today there was a block party on the field between pretty much all the dorms that are served by my area desk. It was really hot, though not quite as hot as yesterday, and it was fun to drink coffee, eat a pastry and people watch and listen to the music. Before that I had been setting isopropanol vapors on fire and trying to calculate the rate of shadow movement in front of my dorm when Dancing Physicist came by. So he started trying to solve my math problem, realized it was just like the problems he was taking a break from in his engineering homework, and then we went to the block party where I did the above and he investigated the workings of one of those bouncy blow-up tumbling things. It turns out there was a track meet going on at the same time; he bolted when they announced a 4 x 400-meter relay. I got over there in time for pole vaulting. Then we went for a run and I really challenged my aerobic capacity, and it was really hot - it was great.

I have realized I really need some new clothes. That's reason number about three that I want to make money this summer (the first two being food and classes). Very few of my clothes fit right - a bunch seem to be too baggy or shapeless, and other tighter ones that used to fit well don't even go on. It's kind of paradoxical because it seems like the ones that are too big also used to fit better. My theory is that they're all just getting old and losing their shape and elasticity, but that I haven't actually gotten appreciably smaller. I think I've gained 10-15 pounds since moving into the dorms, but since I had lost 5-10 pounds fall term, that's not huge net change since when I bought most of these clothes. Running may be changing my shape, however.

If I keep running and also bike everywhere and buy my own groceries during the summer, I hope I can get nice and fit in the next couple of months.

This is hell, this is hell I am sorry to tell you...

2009-05-28T12:15:00.000-07:00

(It never gets better or worse)

I just spent a goddamn hour on the phone with tech support trying stupid software solutions before they finally figured out it's a hardware issue which my dad predicted right off the fucking bat.

I'm going for a run...

Frances Farmer will have her revenge on Seattle

2009-05-26T21:37:00.000-07:00

Probably the only song I keep on a playlist solely for its bridge. The verse music and lyrics are okay, but not nearly as good as similar stuff I have. The bridge on the other hand, is one of my favorite guitar riffs in Nirvana. Almost comparable to that in Smells Like Teen Spirit.

Also on this playlist are some new favorites from the 90's compilation Edward sent with me over spring break: The Distance by Cake and Pepper by the Butthole Surfers.

Okay, stuff needs to start happening again

2009-05-25T11:45:00.000-07:00

Goodness gracious, it's not even noon yet!

This morning I've already read the article my philosophy professor removed from the syllabus because it was "difficult" and she was getting behind the reading in lecture, washed my face, walked to Hamilton to get breakfast, checked my email, investigated PCC classes, made a blog post and watched some funny videos online. How can it still be this early?

I'm now caught up on my philosophy reading through Wednesday plus the one we skipped. I've drafted a few sections of a lab report my professor hasn't assigned yet. We've had no new material in math or chemistry since the last quiz in each. I can't believe how sparse of homework this weekend is.

This summer

2009-05-25T10:54:00.000-07:00

I am coming back to Portland this summer. I don't want to stay in Eugene, I want to go back to my family and friends and stay in the little house and be back home. But if I do nothing productive this summer, I'll regret not staying in Eugene to do research. If I do something interesting in Portland instead of research, then I'll be fine. So I'm thinking of taking class at PCC - maybe engineering. Something I probably won't get around to taking at Reed, but which might be good for my brain. This puts even more pressure on to get a job, but I don't know even know how to start going about that. Is there anything I can do from Eugene or will I just have to scramble once I get home?

Wait, WHAT?

2009-05-22T19:43:00.000-07:00

I've been out of home, out of high school, out of "childhood" for essentially a year now.

How'd that happen?

Uh oh

2009-05-20T20:37:00.001-07:00

I have discovered a serious problem.

Organic chemistry and Humanities both have only one lecture section, and they're at the same time.