Midterms, newspapers

Well, I just finished with my two midterms. Chemistry went pretty well. There was a combustion problem that was a pain in the ass and took about twenty minutes, and in the end I got answer with a bigger molar mass than what the problem said. I didn't have enough time to go back and find my error, but I'm pretty sure it was just something in the calculations for the percent of sulfur. I have a whole page of the right process, so I should get most of the credit for that problem. The only other issue was that I didn't finish the last problem, but I wrote down enough that I should get some credit for that too. I rocked the math exam; I got answers that made sense to everything except the bonus problem. I got stuck on that because I ended up with a negative discriminant in the quadratic formula, but it was the bonus problem. If I'm lucky, I might still get over 100%.

In other news...

Street preachers! They have them at PSU, and we have them at UO. Now, I'm all for free speech. The first amendment is an amazing thing and I would never want to compromise it. That said, it grates on my nerves when I have to listen to random dudes yelling about Jesus to people who are ignoring them every single expletive-deleted day.

I also was reading an article in yesterday's newspaper covering a "feminist roundtable on the election" that I wanted to go to but couldn't because I had class. It quoted someone who said as a black woman, she didn't feel like she'd been spoken to and shouldn't have to choose between two parts of her identity. I think that person is thinking about this election in a dumb way. I'm a white woman; by her logic, Sarah Palin should speak to me. Well... she doesn't. I really dislike her, in fact, and I'm highly enthusiastic about Barack Obama, my theoretical opposite. I admit that race matters more to minorities than the white majority here in the U.S., so I'll throw out that factor, but we are still left with gender. Nobody should have supported Hillary Clinton and then switched to Sarah Palin because they are both women; anyone who did, was doing wrong to their values in supporting one or the other. Identity politics have always existed, but to me it is ridiculous to give them enough weight to actually influence your decision in an election like this.

And one more article. Somebody left a New York Times at this computer with a small article titled "How McCain Hopes to Defy the Polls and Win." I started reading it but stopped in disbelief when I read this quote: "The McCain campaign is roughly in the position where Vice President Gore was running against President Bush one week before the election of 2000. We have ground to make up, but we believe we can make it up."

But wait... we got President Bush. Is this guy admitting that Gore rightfully won the election? Oh, there are ways to weasel out of that conclusion - "It was so close that a repeat could be anyone's game," "McCain has a week plus a few days," - but I still think it's pretty damning.