Winter term classes

I registered for my 10 credit core, which is scheduled for more or less the same times as this term. Chemistry is still first thing in the morning MWF, lab lecture is Monday at 3 with lab section midday Thursday, and math is still MWTF although it is at 1 o'clock instead of 11.

I also registered for WR 123 and PHYS 162: Solar and Renewable Energies. The latter sounded like a perfect match to my practical interests in science and it is first thing in the morning too but on TR. Environmental studies and anthropology, two others I was strongly considering, were full but more importantly were huge (300-500) lectures. The freshman seminars all say that their cap is 0 and therefore they're full; I was going to ask about this at the registrar's office, but then thought if I figure out how to register for them I'll be more undecided and I don't want that.

I wanted to take WR 122 actually, but all the good sections were already taken, leaving only morning sections that interfere with my core 10 and evening sections that are waaaay too late. I got the best writing section I could, which still runs until 6:20 two days a week. I'm hoping that after some people drop stuff I can get into something earlier in the day, and preferably 122.

Pi, pi, mathematical pi

http://www.vvc.edu/ph/TonerS/mathpi.html

Dude. It's short, but hilariously awesome.

Different ways of pursuing relationships

I've been thinking and talking to some people, including Dancing Physicist and the ex-info desk guy (he quit), about romantic relationships. (Actually, that's silly to specify. Those are the only two local people I talk to about anything that isn't academic.) I've noticed there are two fundamentally divergent ways people think about them. Some people go "relationship first." They think about having a relationship, and if they decide they want one, then they think about what kind of person they want to be with - what kind of person fits into the relationship they want. Others, like me, go "person first." I meet people and get to know them, and if I have an attraction/connection to someone that makes me want to be with them, then I think about what a relationship with that person might be like and if I want that.

I said these are fundamentally divergent views, but I acknowledge that I haven't always behaved this way. I dated people in 7th, 8th, even 9th grade that I wasn't especially interested in, but I wanted to be dating people (well, "dating" for whatever it's worth in middle school). I attribute this to just the impatience of that age. At that point in life, it was an experience I needed to get under my belt. Now, it's something I can engage or not at my leisure, for whatever reasons I choose. So, I think that my attitude now is who I really am. Relationships (of whatever variety) arise out of the interactions between people, so it doesn't make sense for me think about a relationship as if it were an object that can be considered separately from a specific person. To use a nerdy chemistry metaphor, it's like talking about p orbitals in a hydrogen atom - you can do it theoretically, but the orbital doesn't actually exist until it has an electron to define it.

Self-defense

I just remembered something else interesting I did, which is that I took a three-hour self-defense class yesterday. Apparently there have been some assaults against women on campus recently and so the university offered this free class. It was pretty fun and I enjoyed the opportunity to be loud and aggressive.

This weekend

I'm appreciating the academic structure of this week and weekend. We just had midterms, so there isn't any homework posted for math or chemistry right now. That means the extent of homework this weekend is two papers: a lab report due on Tuesday or Wednesday (I can't remember but hopefully I'll finish it early enough that it doesn't matter) and my final project for Women's Studies, which actually isn't due for two weeks, but I ought to start now. Plus the reading for lectures tomorrow.

And I know that on Wednesday, I'm back to Portland again. So it really feels like this couple of days between midterms and Thanksgiving is just some leisurely housekeeping. Speaking of which, I ought to do some actual housekeeping today. The shower's been looking a little dirty; maybe I'll clean it.

Daylight Savings Time

Apparently Obama might get rid of Daylight Savings Time:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/opinion/20kotchen.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Well, I'm convinced. I always thought DST was silly and kind of a pain in the butt; if science says it doesn't actually save energy then I'm all for getting rid of it.

Blood, Civil War, Portland and the void beyond

I donated blood yesterday. I've wanted to for a long time, but I think I came to that decision before I was old enough and then I sorta forgot about it/didn't know where to go. Anyway, there was a blood drive going on this week in anticipation of Civil War and that's how I got to finally doing it.

By "in anticipation" I mean it was called the Civil War blood drive, but the game isn't actually until next weekend. I doubt that they predict injuries at the game severe enough to warrant an anticipatory blood drive in that sense.

I was going to go to Civil War, mostly because some of my Portland friends from this summer with OSU connections think it's a great excuse for a party. Now those "friends" don't talk to me, but I thought I might see if I could find SOMEone to go with and go anyway in order to experience a crazy big-school football game. I was going to wear a shirt with a platypus on it.

But fuck that. It's next weekend and I'm not spending Thanksgiving weekend anywhere but Portland. My Wednesday morning class is in session, but not my afternoon one, so I'm arriving around 4:30 Wednesday afternoon and leaving at a similar time on Sunday.

After that, it's really not very long until Winter Break - there's only one more week of classes and then finals. Then, we're past the point that I have plans for. I don't yet know where I'm living after I get kicked out of this house. I don't even know when registration is for winter classes, let alone what I'm trying to register for besides my 10-credit core. I don't know about any events next term. I have no earthly clue how Winter Break is going to play out either. I always have plans and structures of ideas for the future in my head. And maybe everything will catch up in the next couple of weeks. But I think I'd like it if I come home for Winter Break and say "okay... I have no idea what I'm doing now. Let's roll."

Winter term

Dancing Physicist isn't as sure about transferring as I thought he was, and I'm not sure what I'm doing for next term either. I have a nonnegotiable core of ten credits - chemistry, lab, and calculus - but the remaining 4-8 credits are up for debate.

I'll be continuing in calculus and honors chemistry. I'm hoping to take the advanced lab next term, but either way it's a two-credit lab with lecture at three on Monday, so until I actually get to registration I'm not worrying about that.

For the remaining credits, then - one thing to consider is I want to take a writing class this year. I don't have to take it winter term, but that's what I was planning for a long time. The geography class I thought was scheduled for next term actually isn't even offered this year, so that's off the table. The other thing I was thinking about was a freshman seminar - there are a couple of cool-looking ones. There are also many courses marked in my guidebook that I thought would be interesting. They include a selection from anthropology, psychology, environmental studies, and probably some others but the book is really long and I didn't want to look through all of it.

Today though, I learned about another opportunity which would replace all of that with a 6-credit bundle. I am taking women's studies currently in a class of about 100 from a professor, with GTFs leading 25-person discussions. In the next two terms, I learned, the GTFs will each teach a class of about 25 and students who've already taken the class will facilitate even smaller discussions. I could apply and if chosen, I would get 4 credits for attending the class and facilitating the discussion, plus 2 credits for an attached class on pedagogy.

It seems like WGS facilitation would be interesting, challenging, and a unique experience. The problem is it precludes me from taking writing or any electives. I wanted to explore a lot of topics and broaden my mind this year - taking women's studies in the first place was a step in that direction, but continuing to focus there would be contrary to my purpose.

Now that I've thought about it a bit, probably the best course is to take electives this term but keep considering the WGS option for spring term. Still, my thought on it is far from finished.

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is next week. I definitely had the impression that it was further away.

Portland has more to consider every time I go back. My grandma will be there now, and at Winter Break, everyone who went to college will be back at once. And to think that after that peak of craziness, there are still two terms of my year left. Life is weird.

Eugene means more to me now

Señor Evergreen came to Eugene this weekend. I showed him the cool places on campus, and he showed me the places he used to go when he lived in Eugene when he was younger. I met his older brother and one of his old friends - they both live in town.

We went to a hip-hop show at a pizza place that his brother was in. Their sister accompanied him for a few songs, which I thought was really cool. Not only is she an incredibly talented singer (and the brother, a talented poet) but in the midst of endless twentysomething dudes, it was awesome to see a twelve-year-old girl go up and give a great performance.

I remember one time when I was a lot younger and I drew a picture with my mom and stepdad the same height, and I recall being unable to distinguish a significant difference even when they pointed out that they're not. Well, the height difference between them is similar to the difference now between Señor Evergreen and me, and he is way taller than me. When he was showing me where he used to live, he told me the field next to the apartment complex seems much smaller now that he remembers it. That reminded me of when I was in Fairbanks two summers ago and visited a park I used to go to. Same thing - it seemed tons smaller. It's funny how your body size affects your perception of size of everything else, even if you try to correct for it.

I just remembered today that my grandma moved to Portland. I missed her by just a few days when I visited a couple of weeks ago, so she must be there now. I'll see her when I go home next.

I want to make some more progress in learning how to drive.

A last note on my friend's visit. When I saw him in Portland a couple of weeks ago, I was taking time out of usual life to go somewhere else and do unusual things. Even when we both lived in Portland, I usually went to his house in the way south of town to hang out, and he almost never came to mine. So it felt different to have him at my house, and think about the fact that this is where I live. The same places we hung out this weekend, I go every day. Our friendship hasn't taken place "at home" from my perspective before, and I needed to readjust my mind to think: when he has to leave I don't need to go anywhere - I'm already where I'd be anyway.

Kilowatt-hours are so unnecessary

WHY do we measure energy in kilowatt-hours? A watt is a joule per second. Energy divided by time. You multiply that by time, and you're back to energy again. Why don't we just use the SI energy unit, the joule? One kilowatt-hour is 1000 x 60 x 60 = 3.6 megajoules. I could understand if it were simply a different system, like feet vs. meters, but watts are derived from joules so there is no reason not to convert back.

Particle waves are WEIRD

Chemistry lecture lately has been covering the structure of the atom, and with it a ton of detail about electrons and their orbitals. Much more detail than in high school. And electrons being particle-waves makes them self-contradictory to the point of meaningless abstraction. They are particles with mass, things with a constant identity that doesn't get absorbed into anything else when they are transferred. Yet they are also three-dimensional waves, with undefined, probabilistic volume and routine overlap. So really, electrons are complex probability functions with mass.

It makes the whole world seem like special effects. Special effects in movies are images created out of nothing - made up by technological manipulation without the thing they represent even needing to exist. But what is our entire existence? Particle-waves! We perceive matter as having a fixed location, and color, and so on. But really, it's particle-waves of energy interacting with particle-waves of matter, bouncing off and interacting with more particle-waves that finally go back into the brain and give us an impression of "reality." None of it really differentiated. The order we perceive in the world is not really there, except in a mathematical, probabilistic sense. And in order to keep hold of THAT having real existence, you have to imagine math without numbers, because numbers are just artificial constructions. It's possible, hence the existence of the universe - but totally different from what we pick up with our five senses.

Part III: Addendum to part ii, and change

There was a quote in something we read for WGS and it went something like this: "No woman truly believes she has great legs. And if she suspects she might have great legs, then she is convinced she has a shrill voice and no neck."

In context with my improving comfort with my body, I consider that idea of "great legs." If you'd asked me before, at the end of the summer, if I had great legs - I'd probably have said "well, not really. They're alright, but not great." Now it's like the meaning of the question is lost on me. I consider my legs and can't give an answer. What makes legs great? They're my legs. They're able and fairly strong; I'm glad of that, but how does that relate to the adjective "great?" I don't know. Don't really care.

Dancing Physicist is transferring to the University of Idaho so he can change his major to engineering. It made me think about change, and how change actually reveals stability. Graduating from high school, moving for college and losing touch with most of the people I used to know seemed like a huge change. But really, it kind of "cleaned off the glass" and showed who is really important and solid.

I made some guesses about it, and some were right, but some were wrong. Mostly, I was wrong about the number of people I would stay in contact with. During the six months or so before moving (the end of senior year and the summer), I probably would have said I had 5-10 friends at any given time, 3-4 of them close, and a bunch of familiar acquaintances. I definitely expected to stay in touch with five or six people. What has actually happened is I've remained close with two people (excluding family) and keep distant contact with one more. There are some people I know who came to U of O, but nobody I would expect to keep in touch with had they gone to school elsewhere.

Part II: Recent thoughts

I've come to feel a lot better about my body lately. I think this is due in part to taking women's studies and realizing where society influences me even when I don't think it does, just because it influences many women so much more. Once I see where an idea comes from, if it's a ridiculous reason (like many societal norms) then I'm the sort of person who can just get rid of it. Ironically, this has resulted in me getting closer to some of my previous dysphoria-driven goals. When I started to pay more attention to how my body felt from the inside, I realized I felt better when I ate less and in a certain way - and now the external measure of my weight is creeping slowly downward.

But there's something else, too, and I don't think it's related to women's studies. Something is happening to my face. I feel more beautiful lately, and not by some predefined standard but simply that I feel like it works the way I want it to. When I look in the mirror, it looks like how I see myself. When I smile, it looks like I'm smiling and not grimacing at a bad smell. When I don't smile, I look pensive rather than grumpy. When I frown, I look sharply disapproving and not petulant. I hardly think about my misaligned teeth anymore. I used to think they were the thing messing up all my expressions before, but they haven't changed. Neither has anything else I can identify. I don't know where it's coming from but I hope it persists.

Part I: why I haven't been posting

I haven't been posting as much the past couple weeks because I have had a ton of homework. My math teacher assigned a huge volume of problems for the past two assignments, which aren't really difficult, but are complex and therefore time-consuming. Also, in chemistry we've suddenly gotten into stuff I don't know from high school - first thermodynamics, and now a bottom-up, historicized explanation of the structure of the atom. There was also another women's studies paper, which I think I posted about briefly.

On the other hand, lab has been really fun these past two weeks. We were doing "identification of common chemicals" which will be the basis of our final practical exam. This means we got a basket of reagents and glassware each and 40 chemicals were available around the room. The task: make enough observations to distinguish all the chemicals from each other when they are unlabeled. The homework: make a flow chart to use during the exam. Only 20 chemicals will be chosen for the exam, and I hope lithium chloride is one of them because it has a beautiful, brilliant magenta color in a flame.

I've also been re-acclimating to a certain extent after coming back from Portland. I'm pretty much good now, but last week it was hard to focus on school because I was thinking about Portland and the people there a lot. I called my best friend (who really needs a blog name but I still can't think of a good one) and it felt good to talk to her. I think we can relate to each other a lot lately.

Muffins

Wow! So I was kind of hungry, given that I didn't really make up for my truncated breakfast at lunch. I went downstairs and looked for a snack, and I chose a muffin because it looked good. As soon as I took a bite of it I thought "wow, this is really rich." I looked at the nutrition facts, and saw "Serving Size: 1/3 muffin. Calories: 220."

A seven hundred calorie muffin? What the hell?

It's really more like a dessert. I might finish it today, but definitely not until later.

Rough morning

I awoke this morning from frenetic dreams. I dreamed of C and D exam grades, of eating a restaurant meal with too many of the people I've been attracted to recently... yet with little enough angst to provoke thought upon waking. As I awoke naturally, it dawned on me that it was Wednesday - meaning I should have been jolted awake by the alarm.

I leapt out of bed and checked my phone, which told me I had about twenty minutes to get out of the door. I quickly ruled out the possibility of a shower and focused on getting clothes on my body and my notebooks and computer into my bag. By the time I was done I had no time to cook for breakfast and merely grabbed a tortilla on the way out the door.

The chemistry lecture contained too many equations and was presented in exactly the opposite order from what would have been best for my learning style. I rushed out afterward and bought a yogurt for breakfast part 2, then grumbled to Dancing Physicist about the lecture. I turned on my computer to do math homework - then realized there was paper homework I'd forgotten about, due in 50 minutes. I'd also left all my pencils at home somehow - an ominous portent in the face of math homework for someone who constantly makes simple calculational errors.

Somehow, though, it all worked out. Dancing Physicist loaned me a pencil and helped me FOIL an expression I was having trouble with, after which I finished in 35 minutes, leaving me ten to get to class. The math professor lectured on stuff that I find obvious, and then there was the quiz. I had some difficulty with one problem, but I kept on trucking, knowing partial credit is always possible. Amazingly, he allowed us just enough extra minutes for me to finish the problem. I headed off to lunch with no more issues than I'd expected last night.

Music videos

For my next women's studies paper, we have a choice to critique either a selection of music videos or a print advertisement. I'm choosing the music videos, and have so far found the following: popular music lately SUCKS, and most of the videos don't deserve the question "what's wrong with this" but rather "what ISN'T wrong with this?" For an example, I refer you to Katy Perry's "I Kissed A Girl."

Also, whoever is in charge of direction of the "above the influence" ads should contribute their gifts to the world of art and entertainment. (Yahoo music, where I'm doing my research, shows an anti-drug advertisement before most videos.) Although the content of the ads is vague and not very convincing, they are creative and more entertaining than most of the videos they precede.

OBAMA WINS!!!

Today's issue of the Daily Emerald naturally featured articles and opinions on the election. One humorous writer took the linguistic metaphor of "at the wheel" and expanded it to a metaphor of the "America Bus." He noted that "George W. Bush hasn't so much been driving the America Bus as repeatedly crashing it."

You wouldn't think that would be anything striking to point out, but it did strike me. All my teenage years - my years of political awakening - have been spent under George W. Bush. Ever since my parents marked their 2000 ballots at FuJin, I have grown up watching two businessmen - a moronic failure and a corrupt success - drive this country into two recessions, mishandle two wars, one initiated under false pretext, and re-elect themselves under circumstances of plausible (some would say likely) electoral fraud. I've understandably come out of this with the feeling that presidential politics are about fending against evil and stupidity.

How exciting, then, to have had the choice I did this election! To vote for a charismatic, idealistic leader whose election represents a smashing blow to one of our most peevish glass ceilings, and a smart-as-hell veep. Candidates, an entire ticket I actively liked. It was such a painless victory, too. One of my friends suggested Bush would declare of a state of emergency and stop the election somehow. My stepdad predicted drawn-out recounts. Everyone wondered about the Bradley effect. Yet by the time Oregon polls closed, Obama already had 220 EVs. A countdown to eight o'clock, and then CNN declared his victory, swept up by the West Coast. Minutes later, McCain was giving a concession speech.

I'm so excited to keep up on the news and to see what this duo does. What happens when the bus driver is actually competent at driving? Oh, my childhood enjoyed Clinton, but I wasn't paying attention back then. Obama even took Virginia, which hasn't voted Democratic since the sixties - and both of those sticky Bush states, Florida and Ohio. Isn't it all just amazing?

A wrinkle in housing

I got an application from the housing office and I'm filling it out and returning it pretty much immediately. I should find out in a week or two if I get in, and hopefully I'll just live in the dorms winter term.

There's a wrinkle, though. My landlords/housemates (is there a special term for when the person you're renting from lives with you?) OK'd me through finals week, but after that I have to be out. Move-in for the dorms will naturally not be until January. That's fine for my person, but I don't want to drag all my STUFF back to Portland and then down to Eugene again. Therefore, I need to find a storage business in Eugene to keep some of my possessions here.

If I don't get into university housing, well then I will have to find an apartment and have the choice of two inconveniences: paying rent for time I'm not really living there, or looking while I'm not living in the same city again.