The Daily Adventures of Mercat

I am a graduate (assuming I didn't fail my grad-level tech elective, that was awful). I have no idea what I'm doing except for this summer, lots of projects and trips and relaxation planned because this year was a bitch.

I miss UD already, although I do not miss engineering.

I can't recall if I posted already, but Friday was a crazy day. We did TOSRV backwards, sort of, so we rode Sunday's part (up from Portsmouth to C-bus) on Friday to be able to go to graduation Sunday. I got 2.5 hours of sleep because I turned in my last take-home exam at 2:30 am Friday, and I did the whole ride both days (on the tandem with dad), somehow. Anyway we got two flats Friday morning but when we were getting into Chillicothe we saw a kitten on the side of the road that had been hit. It was maybe eight weeks old and its right arm had been snapped in two and was hanging on by some skin, and it was trying to crawl away. It was so, so, so sad. We took an extra plastic bag we had and picked it up and tried to look up an animal hospital on my phone, but we couldn't get anything, and, of course, we were on our bikes anyway. So we rode into town with me holding the tiny kitten in the bag in my hands on the back of the tandem and we took it into the sheriff. He called the dog warden but the dog warden wouldn't take it. My mom and I were in the lobby with him and he just looked at us and said, "I don't know what to do." My mom and I, I'm sure, were thinking, "are you for real? You're THE LOCAL AUTHORITY, you are local and we are from out of town and you don't have any ideas?" So we asked if he knew anyone who would or could take it and he asked around and found a lady in the office who called a vet's office who said they would take it. I felt so bad for it but I had high hopes because he was barely bleeding and he would sit curled up in my hands (which I made sure were not putting stress on his broken arm, not that that stopped him from trying to use it) and look up energetically whenever something caught his attention. We named him Lieutenant Dan because he was obviously going to need an amputation and we talked about adopting him.

However we just called and although he was doing okay earlier, he died in surgery Friday because of the massive trauma. The vet said he was probably either hit by a car or was hiding in an engine and was injured that way. :'C

Hopefully he had a calm, relaxed death and was feeling better with fluids and such (they gave him an IV and I'm assuming put him under for surgery). Most likely better than wandering on the side of the highway to die in pain or be eaten by a wild animal, but still sad. :C

On the lighter side of things, I thought it was a little funny that when we saw it both my mom and my first thoughts were "don't let it bite/scratch you, it might have rabies!" which was why I was looking for something to pick it up with. The reason being that a few years ago there was a story in a bunch of medical journals about a bunch of people who got rabies from a kitten that was being passed around at a softball tournament. =( And also my worries about bats, although bats apparently have rabies less commonly than thought. Not that that means you should treat them as if they don't, because if they do, and you get bitten or scratched or get fluids in your eye or a cut or something, you are basically screwed. If you think an animal with rabies has infected you, you can get a shot, but if you don't catch it until the onset of symptoms... Only one person has survived that. Ever. A 6-year-old girl with probably a lucky immune system and lucky circumstances.

But I digress... R.I.P. Lieutenant Dan, the cutest little pegleg kitten ever.

They got-slash-found Bin Laden, he's dead.

My entire facebook wall is going crazy. There's a lot of "AMERICA FUCK YEAH" and "DING DONG THE WITCH IS DEAD" and "THANK GOD THE EVIL BIN LADEN IS DEAD" and one Bob Barker joke (which I then stole).

But I just kinda feel like... really? Is this really significant as everyone my age seems to think it is? I pretty much thought he had curled up in a ball and died of kidney failure a few years ago just never to be found, I mean, it's not like we actually talk about Finding Bin Laden when we talk about America's Wars anymore. It's not like we're getting out of there any sooner, even though I wish that were the case so we can put some fucking money back into education and science and that kind of shit.

And maybe cut shit out with the TSA? That'd be nice. But that's also unrealistic.

Basically what I'm saying is that I'm not sure this warrants quite the party everyone's saying... Also all the "praise god he's dead" statuses are making me give people the serious side-eye. Like really, you're sooooo religious and yet you're excited for his death? Doesn't that make you... not any better than them wishing for ours? RELIGION: I DON'T GET YOU.

So anyway, this is the shit that happens while I'm trying to study for my 8 am exam tomorrow...

Although one of my sorority sisters JUST brought me an awesome bag full of candy and games for exams. Um, hell yes?!

My final senior capstone civil engineering design presentation was yesterday. 3 hours, 43 people, some couple-hundred (at least 250) powerpoint slides, and a seven minute video. It went, for the most part, pretty well.

However, the night before, I started freaking out. Which, to me, did not make rational sense as I had presented my slides at least six different times this semester. I knew the information. But the fact that I spent the seven hours of "sleep" in that half-awake state where you are waiting for your alarm to go off so you don't miss it, waking up every hour to freak out for 30 seconds before turning over and begging for it to subside, and giving up on trying to get any real sleep 20 minutes before my alarm was set to go off... To me, that is solid evidence that my public speaking anxiety is far beyond your average public speaking anxiety.

You take public speaking classes and they say, "oh, everybody gets nervous," and yeah, I believe it. But does everyone get uncontrollable shakes of their knees, their hands, their voice? Get dry mouth? Okay, yes, some people do. But what about shutting down into Emergency Mode when it is your turn to speak? Here is what happens (slash, happened yesterday morning). I start panicking. My stomach starts jumping, I start trying to control my breathing, even three years of drum corps can't help. I sweat and shake (and try not to bounce my knees in high heels so I'm not making noise backstage). When it is my immediate turn, I go into survival mode. My adrenaline decides it wasn't pumping high enough before and jumps off the high dive. No matter what I'm thinking about--slowing my speech, making sure I hit every bullet point of information-- my brain immediately shuts down the ability to analyze questions and focuses only on Not Presenting Any Information Wrong. If, in that instant, someone got hit by a car, I am the person you want. I jump into action and call for doctors and call 911 and try to do what I can. But public speaking? No way. And yesterday's experience was enough to let me know, as everyone in my group told me "you'll do fine!"--yes, rationally, I know that. But this is an irrational fear, and as someone once explained panic attacks to me in a similar light (or that was my experience with the one that I ever had--a zombie under your chair is NOT rational), this irrationality tells me that it is maybe not a normal level of anxiety for such a situation.

The interesting part is, I have to wonder if it's Nature or Nurture. I don't know anyone who seems to have such profusely strong reactions to public speaking as I do, but of course I could be wrong and they could just be very good at hiding it. But in fourth grade I got called out for messing up a reading in church, and in our eighth grade play the guy playing the lead antagonist decided to not memorize his lines. Which was fine and hilarious since he could ad lib pretty well, except for the part where I can't and there was a scene with just me and him and he STARED OFF INTO SPACE FOR AT LEAST A FULL MINUTE.

So, yes. There's that.

But also, I am done with engineering! (Except for passing this last tech elective and getting my paper degree.) HURRAH, on to better and brighter things.

I do have to say, my conceptual design for our convenience store was FUCKING FABULOUS and the site/civil team that decided to tell us the wrong site data so we had to rotate the building and kind of destroy the view can go fuck itself. The facade, that glass elevator, ALL MINE, BITCHES <3

I was up until 5:30 last night working on an art project. YAY. I'm glad I got a good part of it finished (despite the fact she's probably not going to grade them) because I can put it in my portfolio. Which is actually looking pretty threadbare.

Final prompt of the month: honestly, I'm too tired/lazy to upload and post a picture right now. So... deal with it. =)

I'm considering doing a daily challenge for December since I don't have any Hardy Boys books on me, although I don't really have time this week anyway, but I'm considering doing a daily doodle or something.

Oh, as I discovered last night, my solution to getting bored in the art classroom is either to be so-tired-my-brain-is-barely-functioning or, revelation: put on crime shows while I draw. Crime shows are perfect because the exposition is usually explicit so that clueless people understand what's going on in the "science" side of it, whereas comedies/dramas rely a lot on slapstick humor or conveying emotions through body language. (Family Guy is particularly frustrating in this department.) Now if only House were on more often, I could catch up on all the seasons I haven't seen! Or Bones, that's not on much either. I've seen pretty much every episode of NCIS that USA has to air, and I've seen a lot of CSI, so I have to try to find not-NCIS-not-CSI most of the time. Which leaves Law & Order, CSI:NY (BUT NEVER MIAMI), and Psych and Bones on the rarer occasions they're on. Also I discovered Leverage, which is pretty good.

I was actually rather productive today, despite my alarm deciding not to go off on time. I started my grad school applications, which is a daunting task, particularly since I have no idea who I'm going to ask for recommendations. My boss I guess? I just don't have any particular comraderie with any of my professors. =/ By which I mean, I actively dislike a significant portion of my department, and the others I am apathetic towards. Anyway.

I also paid some bills, started the FE Exam application process, and tried to fix OneNote (still no luck--Windows' "help forms" are practically worthless considering in four days I've had one response that actually provided me with zero answers, only more confusion). Tomorrow I'm going to work on stuff for my portfolio, which is also intimidating since I'm not actually an art major, and I therefore don't have much to pull from. (Man, what if you were just an engineer with no arts background? What at all would you put in a portfolio?)

Dad and Laura went out to get a Christmas tree, which I didn't help put up at all, though I'm not terribly upset about that. At the moment I'm feeling more "busy" than "Christmasy", although turning on Christmas music won't get me riled up now about how it isn't even Thanksgiving.

I kind of do want to go out shopping, though. Every few weeks I feel the need for crass commercialization. I think it's kind of a "getting out of the house" thing combined with a "need to buy groceries" and "looking for visual stimulation/inspiration" type thing. The curse of being artistically inclined, sometimes, I swear.

Anyway, prompt time, before I go do something entertaining this evening.

My probably number one example for "any place I would like to visit one day" is the Angkor Wat in Cambodia. However, also on my list are visit Australia and all the National Parks, although "go everywhere" is pretty much the rest of my list, to be honest.

I'm thinking for next year, in order to keep up the "daily posting" but with something more substantial than a prompt, I might start doing Hardy Boys read-alongs. I haven't nearly read as many detective/spy/mystery novels since college/discovering the internet in high school/etc., and I kind of miss the genre as a whole. Plus, Hardy Boys books are really easy to page through. I think I can conquer one in about three hours total. Plus, it's been ages since I read the whole collection anyway, it'd be good to recall some of the plots.

NORMAL POST

LEGIT EXCUSE: I TOOK THE GRE TODAY THEN PARTYFAILED. MOM WAS ALL "HEY WANT TO GO TO SKYLINE AFTERWARDS?" AND I SAID PROBABLY AND I CAME HOME TO COLD PIZZA AND A REQUEST TO CLEAN THE BATHROOMS. SO I DID THAT AND LEFT. AND THEN NOBODY ACTUALLY WANTED TO "GO OUT" LIKE WE PLANNED, EVEN TO DRUNK KARAOKE, SO I WAS KINDA IN A BAD MOOD AND THIS DAY WAS KIND OF A WASTE OF MY LIFE TO BE HONEST

SO I'M UP LATE CATCHING UP ON IMPORTANT THINGS (LIKE LIVEJOURNALLING) AND NOT GIVING A SHIT BECAUSE I'M GOING TO SLEEP IN BUT WATCH THE DAMN PARADE TOMORROW ANYWAY

AND THEN AS SOON AS GRANDMA GETS DEPRESSED AND ASKS ME WHY I'M NOT DATING ETC ETC AND MOM STARTS TALKING AT ME ABOUT GRAD STUFF AGAIN I'M JUST GONNA GTFO AND GO SEE DUE DATE AND THEN GO TO WAFFLE HOUSE BECAUSE I HAVE BEEN LOOKING FOR PEOPLE TO GO FOR THREE WEEKS AND NOBODY WANTS TO FUCKING GO AND YOU KNOW WHAT? FINE. I'LL GO BY MYSELF. THIS IS WHY I HATE PEOPLE SOMETIMES. BECAUSE LITERALLY NO ONE IN TOWN WANTS TO GO TO THE MOVIES WITH ME.

Some fucking friends sometimes, I swear to god. There is more to life than alcohol.

BUT I DIGRESS.

/capsrage!off

(Note, that is not capsrage "yelling" but rather "comically over-loud voice".)

Now onto your regularly scheduled programming.

OH, HOW APPROPRIATE, yesterday's prompt was the last movie I saw in theatres. INCEPTION. WHEN I GOT BACK THIS SUMMER, AND I FUCKING HAD TO DRAG MY SISTER TO GO SEE IT WITH ME. And before that?! Iron Man 2! My moviegoing track this year is a shame! WHY DOES NO ONE WANT TO GO OUT TO MOVIES THIS YEAR?! Fucking idek.

Last book I read... Well, last book I finished was probably Lost City of Z which I read for fun over the summer and was amazing despite its ending. I mean, the ending is still amazing from a historical point of view but (without giving much away) the whole thing is this buildup and then--AUGH. You have to read it, if you are in the slightest a history or Indiana Jones or adventuring fan, oh boy.



...Not gonna lie though, despite being in a general good mood, handling school okay, work is going fine, working out, et cetera, I am a bit emotionally unstable at the moment. I can tell because the slightest little comments are making me upset enough to almost nearly ruin my evenings. I really can't handle people brushing me off much more to go to parties/drink but "oh I don't have enough money to go to a movie". Because alcohol comes out of the faucet for free, I see. Well alrightythen. I'm hoping Laura's not going to be bitchy tomorrow because I think I'm going to need to run away from the rest of the family with her, particularly since the cuzs (cuzns? cuzzes? idek. "cuzs" looks like it should be Polish.) are on the other side of the goddamned country.


...*sigh*. I miss my drum corps family =(

Things I also failed to bitch about earlier this week: The DJ on Saturday, who took requests up to a few days in advance because he couldn't/didn't do on-the-spot mixing (HA, mixing, if you could call it that--what with jumps and awfully apparent tempo changes), in the three hours we were at the dance, played TWO, count 'em, TWO songs that were 1) older than 2000, 2) not a dance/pop/hip-hop song. Seriously, the guy was awful. About 30 minutes in to the dance he played "Wannabe" (Spice Girls--ngl had to look up the title of that song) and with about 20 minutes left he played "You Shook Me All Night Long". The only other song he played that wasn't some currently-top-40-but-actually-shitty-dance-tune-excuse-to-party-hard song was Pokerface. So out of the songs I requested (Fuck You, anything by Gaga, anything by Queen, and anything by Billy Joel), I got one song. Needless to say, I was PISSED THE FUCK OFF. I spent probably half to two-thirds of the dance glaring at the DJ from my chair. I mean, this could be the fault of the coordinators who hired a friend-of-a-friend and maybe forgot to forward our requests, but what kind of shitty DJ plays pretty much ONE TYPE OF SONG all night?! And not even varying between dance tunes and slow songs? WE HAD NO SLOW SONGS ALL NIGHT.

Basically I'm pissed at everyone and everything right now and I'm about to snap. Not angry-snap but just break-down-snap and no one seems to really give a shit, because that's just how things go. Ugh. I'm kinda tired of this crap, really.

Also I do not recommend trying to follow a conversation about a boyfriend's roommate's cousin who is that person's ex and their crazy parents at a party after taking the GRE, because the actual GRE's paragraph and word problems turned out to be much more difficult and brain-power-consuming than I expected them to be and I was (and am) rather brain dead on the this-idea-requires-a-complex-sentence-of-at-least-four-phrases front.

But onto the linkspam:

So, uh, this happened.

MY LIFE MAY OR MAY NOT BE COMPLETE NOW. <3

A really interesting article about Florence Nightingale's influential graph and a common mathematical fallacy of graph creation/interpretation. Fascinating because I encounter a lot of misunderstood data on a fairly regular basis (thank you, journalism majors), and also because these are the type of subtleties you may have to discern between on the GRE. (I did pretty well on the quantitative section, but the reading/vocab was much more difficult than I anticipated and I nearly ran out of time, having to guess haphazardly at a few questions.) Anyway. Data is pretty, and presentation is valuable. I wish I knew more about the historical context of these charts because it might be an interesting topic for Ada Lovelace Day, although perhaps something that focuses on the graphical fallacy is not the best topic. (Nightingale was particularly observant in clinical matters though, wasn't she? Wasn't she the one who told people to wash their hands, basically, kill less people with infection? Or am I thinking of someone else entirely? FIFTH GRADE HISTORY IS FAILING ME.)

An interesting article about Native American culture, race, and steampunk, with significantly more win than all the shenanigans last year. Although I must admit, I don't think I ever heard the story of "the first Thanksgiving" in school. At least, not as a history lesson, but as more of a holiday folklore type thing, minus maybe the "learning how to plant corn" part. ALTHOUGH ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THAT we never approached it from the accuracy point-of-view either. So.

For the record I still don't like "ray guns" as a steampunk thing. I have never come into acceptance of them. Then again I've also become more standoffish about pop culture's reaction to steampunk as a whole anyhow, so, some part of me just also doesn't give a shit (that my entire POV on steampunk is decidedly different, because the generic running-with-steampunk scene is not my cup of tea).

DAMN I AM RANTY TONIGHT. Sorry about that folks. I'm a bit tweaky, it seems.

(I do like that EL wire on the gun, though, despite my active distaste for mods of that nerf gun... Hm. Considerations, considerations.)


Holy crap this test fried my brain a lot more than I expected it to. First I was moody, now I'm just too tired to parse any article with more than one sentence and a funny picture. Basically my brain is running like MemeGenerator at the moment.

I'm actually liking this daily challenge thing. Some days I'm a little busy to catch it in time, but for the most part, I'm actually making daily posts. :D SUCCESSFUL POSTING IS SUCCESSFUL.

Today's! My favorite subject to study... Man, I don't know. I love learning. I don't always love lectures, or homework, but I love the sense of accomplishment from understanding something, and the perspective you gain from it. I love love love reading. In case you couldn't tell from the fact that I probably spend a minimum of $50 every time I hit the bookstore... which is like once a month. And the fact that I spend sooooo much time online reading blogs. I LOVE INFORMATION. I think it's all one of the reasons I chose engineering--not just so I could get paid more for doing technical stuff (which I'm actually starting to think I might hate, as a job)-- but so I could have that background and understanding. Math and engineering and physics can be challenging, but once you understand it it's kind of amazing, the way you can see patterns. However, I'm not good at learning from proofs or methodologies; I sort of work from multiple examples, working my way through them to understand the subtle differences. This poses a problem wherein most engineering professors don't like to do tons upon tons of examples, I don't have the time to be in their office hours all day long, and the textbooks aren't much better (they usually just have one or two examples).

I like history, but I've found that challenging, too. I was fascinated by ancient history when I was really young-- Native American, Egyptian, Greek, Hawaiian (I remember checking lots of books on those topics out in gradeschool)--but I found learning American history out of a textbook difficult because our textbooks were written really poorly. This continued into high school where I already didn't have a great sense of world history, but I gleaned a little bit here and there except European History with the best history teacher I've ever had. He told events like stories, and would sort of reenact them with the help of his "time machine" (his closet), which often contained props like Napoleon's really cheap bendy plastic sword. He would often stop his storytelling at the MOST EXCITING PARTS, glance at his watch and tell us, "oh, looks like we're out of time!" There was one day, I believe, he was "out of time" with 20 or 30 minutes left in class. SO RIDICULOUS. But to this day I still remember the whole crazy story of Rasputin's death and the Russian royal family's deaths. And why everyone thought Rasputin really was a holy man (from either heaven or hell) by withstanding poison and being shot only to drown. (I think. He might have also survived drowning and then died of hypothermia or something...? Okay, wikipedia tells me he did die from drowning, but what I was forgetting was that he was beaten and secured before being thrown in the river, but then broke free of these bonds to then drown.) ANYWAY.

College history is a lot better, because we had a "World-War-II-In-One-Lecture-Using-Only-Battlefront-Maps-of-Europe" day, which gives just the kind of summary on the war that our crappy textbooks lacked that is kind of like a five-sentence-outline version of the politics of the time and let me start placing events within that timeline. Honestly, whoever wrote the textbooks we used in gradeschool and highschool needs to reevaluate their methods. The problem is, they told history like a bunch of individual stories, which makes it very difficult for someone with no overarching view to tie them together. There were basically no ways for me to string everything together into one timeline, at least, not well. BUT. Strangely, I got another good "summary" of globalization through Hawaiian and Pacific history, strangely enough--because it's essentially watching undiscovered lands mature into modern countries in less than two centuries. A century and a half, even. Not to mention, the Pacific was a significant part of WWII, which is a good education on the Japanese side of things rather than the standard Nazi/European focus.

I also like art, because it gives more relationships for history, and understanding the context of famous art pieces makes them a lot more meaningful. Although I now find Warhol annoying. I understand his intent but him, personally... he seemed kind of pretentious in his videos when we studied him. Like the forefather of Hipsters. (For srs.) Also, art history also makes you more prone to getting into discussions about the meaning and value of art (see: trivia night two weeks ago, haha!).

(For the record the argument was whether or not modern art is worthless. My position is that modern art is much more meaningful than other art because it is completely expressive at it is freed from the necessitation of replicating life exactly--that is, the invention of the camera and video, etc. allows for much more "creation" in art. The opposition was saying that this is pointless because you aren't simply looking at something, the art is in the emotion or the context, which isn't the art itself. SO. LET IT NOT BE SAID MY ART HISTORY MINOR WAS EVER COMPLETELY WORTHLESS.)

So! What have I covered so far? Math, physics, engineering, history, art... Music? Music is my-life-outside-of-design. I could do it as a career if it were the right thing. I miss marching and I don't know what I'm going to do without anymore marching band... ever. Although I am taking tap next semester, so, currently, dance is my closest-approximation-replacement. And tap is percussive, so it's closer than, say, ballet, which I can't watch anymore BECAUSE THE DANCERS DON'T MOVE NECESSARILY WITH THE MUSIC /rant

Okay. Am I missing anything else? Oh! English (and languages). I love grammar, and spelling, although that is something my gradeschool also taught poorly that I picked up in high school better. One, because I was learning a new language as well, so there was a focus on grammar, and two, because we learned to diagram, which is also a focus on grammar, and it's basically all like one big puzzle. Now if only I could do better with strange verb conjugations! OH, SUBJUNCTIVE/PRETERITE/IMPERFECT/ETC TENSES. (I also miss learning languages.)

Uh... earth sciences? I guess that's what's left? Also fascinating. I love nature. I find psychology fascinating. Astronomy is SO COOL. It probably helps that my parents are doctors, so my sister and I got a lot of weird biology talk (and a lot of big words) and a pretty good grasp on some areas of science when we were young. BUT, my gradeschool had a completely awful science teacher for 6th/7th/8th grades (shared teacher), so that wasn't great either. Although our books were at least better, more diagrams, more straightforward, so I could at least self-educate to some degree. Now, another topic for another day, our lack of good science communication is evident in science fairs in gradeschool and highschool, because my version of "original experiments" were never quite on par with what they wanted. I still don't understand what they wanted. Because it wasn't a demonstration of a principle, but my ideas were more often too strange to be taken seriously, it seemed.

My science fair projects throughout the years: whether people could actually tell the difference between cola brands, whether kids carried too much in their backpacks, whether cat saliva prevented germ growth (e-coli or streptococcus? or both? can't remember], whether edible fauna (a.k.a. pansies) contains vitamin C, and whether fake or real wine corks do a better job of preventing germ spoiling of wine. I'm missing seventh grade's project... I don't recall at all, really. At any rate, these projects were all off the wall because everything else I had come up with would have "been done before" (meaning my teacher didn't really want me to do that specific project, although they never really gave much advice as to what exactly I could do to improve it) so my methods were always slightly bizarre, and my data was never quite clean enough, and other than the science geniuses who managed to do amazing things (these are the people who make it to international science fairs, I mean) A LOT OF PEOPLE BULLSHITTED THEIR DATA. And got better grades because of it, because their presentations were easier when they didn't have to answer difficult questions about their data's subtleties. So basically despite the fact that "the data you get doesn't have an effect on your final grade", meaning, let science do it's job and don't force a proof of your hypothesis, I generally got fucked over by being honest. Yes, I'm still bitter about this. WHY? Because ethics are important to me. Because human treachery starts early. Because I get punished for being honest. Because my generation clearly doesn't have a problem with cheating and lying to get themselves out of a challenge. FUCK IT ALL I'M SO GODDAMN BITTER ABOUT THIS SHIT.

Sorry to give this a turn for the sad for a moment, but I really don't tend to trust a lot of people my age, and this shit is why. (On the other side, I trust them more on the technical side than I trust myself because, unless I feel I can do something perfectly, I feel very unsure of myself and second-guess myself to no end.) Same kind of shit even happened on retreats! One of my many disillusionments with faith--all the people who act like their religiosity made them so much better than everyone else, when they couldn't even set aside their phones and cd players and everything else for our week of poverty. (To the point that there were prank calls and a string of tampons and pads let down from our room to the guys' quarters. Complete bullshit for a whole week.)

ANYWAY I LOVE LEARNING BUT DON'T TRUST PEOPLE MY AGE. They are not above buying their way out of things. =/

I kind of want to do an anonymous study of gradeschoolers and see how many bullshit their data now. Ugh.

(This is why I've started to think I don't really want kids--I look at adorable babies and toddlers and think, "some day you are going to be an asshole.")

I may or may not be a horrible person.

BUT I LOVE LEARNING :D

Oh, I guess, in terms of "favorite subject", specifically, I guess I could say marching. Because drum corps is my life, and I don't know what I'm going to do without being able to do it any more. (Teaching is definitely not the same and I don't necessarily have the desire to be a music teacher. Although I could do visual, but it's still not the same as competitive marching.)

If you watched Hawaii Five-0 tonight and saw a red-headed girl in the photos in the house they raided, that is my good friend Kim. :D

Have you seen this article about the college essay writer? It's so fucking depressing, on so many counts. That these students are okay with it. That the school isn't catching them. That they're so inept in the first place, and getting no real help. That entitled people are just paying their way to a degree. My only recompense is that they likely won't be able to get or hold onto the jobs they think they deserve, which is actually sad for the people who have just been forgotten and pushed through the system. ANYWAY. Poor ethics piss me off and if I ever meet a person who admits to using a service like that I... will no longer be friends with them. And will probably be paranoid. (An easy solution though, honestly? It looks as if these teachers just had in-class writing assignments they would probably be a lot more suspicious, at least based on the communications supplied in the article.)

Also, this metafilter comment wins for the Sneakiest Use of Xkcd in Serious Discussion Without Drawing Attention to the Fact:

If you pretend that the degrees are evidence of your mastery in some subject, and that this mastery will allow you to produce good work in some area that you could not without this mastery, ie, that colleges are not a waste of time in general, then this is a misrepresentation of your abilities to your future employers.

Imagine you buy a chair on e-bay, and it has a certificate of Being a Chair, and instead, it was a bob-cat who hired someone to forge its certificate of Chairitude. You have essentially had your money stolen. If you try to sit on it anyway because you also forged your certificate of Being Able to Tell What a Chair is, you will sit on it anyway and it will RUIN your butt.

Cheating on papers is ruining the butts of society.
posted by EtzHadaat at 6:38 PM on November 14

I missed a few days worth of prompts, sorry. I've been looking at grad school stuff... I'm kind of intimidated :( I'm starting to think I should have done mechanical or computer science engineering or something like that, but five years ago I didn't have quite the same aspirations.

Mean Girls: is a fantastic movie. Fun to watch, amazingly quotable, aptly quotable on an everyday basis, and hilarious. Also, it's probably a good icon for women in comedy. I don't know much about the comedy forefront but I do know that it's considered a job where men flourish and women fail. And the guys I always get to watch this movie agree that it is not a chick flick like they expected, but a fantastic (and wonderfully quotable) comedy. So. We should all just stab Caesar!

I have a sister. She and I get on much better now that we don't see eachother much, but we do tend to snip at eachother if we're both home for a few days in eachother's company. We're strangely opposites, and I think the way we have turned out isn't exactly how I would have predicted it ten years ago. Then I would have said that she would turn out to be the sorority-sister arts major, and here I am in an engineering sorority and not wanting to engineer a damn thing (well, sort of). And she used to talk about starting a fashion company, and now she's pre-med. And I'm a nerd who loves to read, but she is probably smarter than me. Or she's just really good and guessing and BSing, which is both accurate and enough. I am a little too honest and a little too paranoid to be a good BSer. Which is a shame, really, because being an introvert in a world of extroverts is exhausting.

Buuuuut enough about that.

My favorite junk food... is probably Mountain Dew. I try to treat it like a dessert; one, because it has a lot of empty calories, two, because too much caffiene headaches gives me mini-migraine-mock-caffiene-withdrawal headaches and they suck balls.

BACK TO APPLYING TO GRAD SCHOOLS =/

(and waiting for it to be Thanksgiving so I can get excited about Christmas except I listened to the Big Bad Voodoo Daddy cover of Mr. Heatmiser today and I DON'T CARE)

(The title has nothing to do with anything except that I just took a practice GRE and "gremlins" was the first word to pop into my head starting with "gre-".)

Forgive me for just nearly missing the daily-post--deadline by a few minutes, because I just finished a GRE practice test. How sad is it that engineering has made me excited to take a standardized test?! I work well within boundaries and certain expectations, or no boundaries at all, apparently. I don't know how well I am cut out for slightly-open-ended design work. Which is not good, because that is pretty much anything engineering is. I mean, there are the laws of physics, and the laws of the land, but the problem is that the former is very mathematically complicated and the latter is just very convoluted and you only come to know it really through exposure and experience. Neither of which I really have. And not to mention, mayhaps my brain just doesn't work that way, because I never seem to know where to find the equations/set-up I need for engineering projects. Which makes working in groups good for me because then the other people are good at starting the project, and I'm good at checking things and thinking (maybe a little too far) outside the box.

So... menial desk job or very creative in-charge job for me, I guess. Strange. ANYWAY. Onto the prompt.

My favorite meme of the moment... I don't think I currently have one. Being gone all summer I kind of missed Double Rainbow and Hide Ya Kids and I don't really... "get".... either. Although I think I saw Antoine Dodson a while back but never saw the Bed Intruder Song? I don't know.

Does Rally to Restore Sanity/Fear count as a meme? Because it was probably more that than real political activism (or anything) and I kind of liked that (despite people being bitchy for it). However, it's not quite as wild as Anonymous' protests, so idk.

I guess I don't have a favorite meme right now, so I hope something comes along soon. In the meantime, I'm always a sucker for EFG and since the 5th of November was just a few days ago, let's say that. Even though it was nothing to do with anything, legitimately.

MOVING ON. I was thinking about password access, which led me to think about where you keep that kind of information so that it's safe with you but easily found by others in the case that you were to die. Which led me to think about wills, and the fact that while my mom has every once in a while talked about what she wants (donated organs iirc) and my dad has mentioned his wants (a big party), they don't really know my beliefs in terms of my... lack of faiths... (BUT NOT LACK OF MORALS... byuh) ANYWAY. I don't need any kind of fancy burial, I'll be dead. I've kind of always been about pragmatism, and even when I was really young (early gradeschool) I remember considering the pros and cons of cremation. So this is my current set of considerations: (And let's not call me morbid here, because I honestly approach a lot of what most people would consider "morbid" as just purely interesting. Death is the natural extension of life. Morbid for me is a whole other level. Perhaps I disdain that word... I'm more of a naturalist than a goth? And science is nature, so. )

1. If there's any hint of foul play just preserve as much as possible. Not that I expect this to happen but being slightly paranoid from reading too many detective novels and watching too many crime shows, if there was any hint of foul play I hope there's a really good twist! Which probably means exhuming the body at least once. (...Maaaaaaybe that's morbid. BUT SO ARE CRIME SHOWS)

2. If not, donate any usable body parts to organ donor programs and/or to science. Basically get as much practical use out of it as possible.

3. Bury any remains in a manner as natural as possible because it seems pretty pointless to be dumping lockboxes filled with chemicals into the ground just to sit there and be preserved for... ever.

3b. Plus this ensures that I will never be Undead. (Zombie, vampire, etc.)

4. Possibly do something awesome with the remains such as:
a) use the bones for something awesome such as art, Yorrick's skull in a production of Hamlet, a modern reliquary, et cetera,
b) include them in a treasure hunt/puzzle or as a geocache (WITH ONLY AWESOME TREASURE INSIDE. If I am to be a buried treasure, I fully expect it to be a goddamn bitchin' one.)
c)...et cetera. Basically I think skeletons and eyes are pretty cool things from a design aspect and have many interesting and beautiful (if slightly morbid) options. (BUT I'M OKAY WITH THE SLIGHT MORBIDITY HERE. AT THIS POINT THE MORBIDITY BECOMES MORE WUNDERKAMMER-CURIOUS THAN NATURALIST-CURIOUS BUT IT'S STILL AWESOME.)

5. A really cool headstone. Some classic-and-slightly-creepy design, with a totally clever and awesome epitaph. Like the headstones at the Haunted Mansion, with their Victorian-Gothic-slightly-disquieting style and the totally awesome epitaphs (at least out front--I've never studied the epitaphs inside the ride).

OKAY TOTALLY DONE WITH MY MORBID MOMENT NOW, for those of you who may not like that sort of thing... er... sorry for the lack of warning... =/

At any rate. I have a rant but I don't really want to rant about it right now. Let's just say, between people going back on my Halloween party invite, and being whiny about the party, and my friend failing to do the one thing I asked him to do for the senior show (i.e. leave an appropriate mid-movement moment for the dead-bug), which I told him a month ahead of time when we were planning it as a group, but do people just blow me off when I make comments a few months in advance? BECAUSE I HAVE ACTUALLY THOUGHT THESE THINGS THROUGH, and I mean them. If I change my thoughts, I WILL ALSO BRING THAT TO YOUR ATTENTION.

Do I just... scream "IGNORE ME" or something? (Heh.)

Yeah. Anyway.




...Also I went to trivia tonight for the first time in a good while and I wore by awesome retro-rainbow Star Wars shirt that I bought from Target's boy section last year. The usual awesome trivia guy wasn't there, and the girl taking his place was not as fun. Plus, a lot of the questions were wrong tonight. "A one-note instrument made popular at the world soccer games this summer"? Vuvuzela, except that like all other objects with a natural frequency, if you halve, double, or otherwise multiply that frequency you will get other notes. Octaves, for simplicity, or perhaps... partials... if the instrument is more complicated. Say, like a trumpet. Speaking of trumpets, "a cornet most resembles this musical instrument". Maybe a cornet? It's actually a legit instrument.

And then Pat, being his normal uppity Classics-major self, called out the trivia girl on the question "what famous temple site on the Acropolis?" by screaming "Which temple do you want?! There are at least nine different ones!"

However I also learned that the F22 Raptor can go supersonic without having to use its afterburners which is called "supercruising". Also, the evil wizard on Smurfs is Gargamel and the cat is Azrale. (NO IDEA if I spelled those right, also don't care much.) And the compact disk was invented in 1965 (we guessed floppy disk).

Also-also I cleaned my room today. Go me!