Inauspicious

I am writing the most boring research paper in the world right now, literally. It involves a 100 page article from 1937 called “Historical Development of the Graphical Representation of Statistical Data.” It also involves a book called The Commercial and Political Atlas and Statistical Breviary, which I checked out of the library because I thought it had the world’s first bar graph in it. Except it does not have that. No no. That is only in the first edition. This is the third edition, so it only has line graphs. Forty-three line graphs. Zzzzzzzzz.

One of the boring problems this boring paper has boringly generated is that I have to parphrase a sentence that includes the phrase “under government auspices.” But I can’t paraphrase it, because at the end of the day, what the fuck is an auspice?

I thought, well. I will just go on the internet and look up the definition of auspice. And then I will know it. Wrong! When you Google auspice, the definition that comes up is, “Noun: A divine or prophetic token.” Under government divine or prophetic tokens? Dubious.

So I thought, I will look it up on Wikipedia. And I did. Maybe it is just because I have been writing this paper all day, and my life is feeling increasingly empty and auspice-less, but the Wikipedia page is hilarious.

FIRST SENTENCE: “An auspice is literally ‘one who looks at birds.’”

WIKI SECTIONS INCLUDE: “Auspices in Ancient Rome,” “History of Auspices,” and “Types of Auspices.”

WHAT AM I GOING TO WRITE IN MY PAPER: Under government ones who look at birds? Under government Ancient Rome? Under government prophetic coins? Underneath the government? Or maybe I’ll just say “Romulus and Remus,” because somehow they come up in the “auspice” Wikipedia page–and also in Harry Potter!

Consider the GF

I just read “Consider the Lobster,” this article thing David Foster Wallace wrote about the Maine Lobster Festival. It basically starts with him and his parents and girlfriend at this festival, eating their lobster, and it ends with these really intense ethical questions about whether it’s moral to boil lobsters alive. Maybe they can feel pain! They try to climb out of the pot when you boil them! But then, what does “pain” really mean? What does “pot” really mean? What is the True Nature of Suffering?

It’s sort of not supposed to be funny–I mean, maybe sporadically, but I doubt he’d be thrilled if you texted him like, “Hey man, read your lobster thang. LOL!”–but I couldn’t stop laughing because I kept thinking about how weird it probably was for his girlfriend to read. Or maybe how weird it would be for me if I went on a date with a dude to a lobster festival and then he wrote “Consider the Lobster” (because DFDub’s GF was probably used to him).

Think about it! You go to a lobster festival with your boo. He’s writing an article about it, but for you it’s just a vacation. So you eat a bunch of lobster. You stroll around. The sun is shining. The birds are chirping. The lobsters are dying in droves, but that’s probably not your main focus. You hang out on the beach. You’re with his parents, which maybe is a big deal. You leave thinking you all had a nice, relaxing time.

Then a couple weeks later, you read the article he wrote about your vacay, which includes the sentence “There happen to be two main criteria that most ethicists agree on for determining whether a living creature has the capacity to suffer and so has genuine interests that it may or may not be our moral duty to consider.”

And you’re like, my god! I thought me and Dave had a good time at the lobster festival!

Words I Hate

I have so much homework that the word “copious” definitely applies in some way, but after a lot of effort I have realized I don’t know how to use copious in a sentence. So I will let you imagine a nice correct sentence on your own time. My point is: I should do work. But instead I just gazed at my reading for several minutes while in my head, I wrote a list of words and phrases that I irrationally hate.

The List From My Head

• “Arguably the greatest _______ of our generation”–I might hate the word “arguably” all the time, actually. Unclear.
• “I am writing a short piece of ______.” Or even worse, “a short work of _______.”
• Delightful
• Nosegay
• “Rate of speed”–SPEED IS A RATE ALREADY MY FRIEND. It is like saying “length of distance,” or “distrust anything I happen to say about rates in the future.”
• “Principle component regression”–It is just so hard. See also: the prefix “eigen-”.
• “Imma let you finish, but…” ENOUGH. Kanye made a mistake. He has made many new mistakes since then. He’s putting out a song with Jay-Z called “Ham”! Let’s make fun of that! Let’s move forward into the future!
• Titties–REAL TALK: Why can’t you just say tits? Nobody calls dicks “dickies.”

Coming soon–words I irrationally love!  Also, coming as soon as I can think of it–list of reasons it’s okay that I am always in the effing library.

I can read!

I read Jane Eyre for a class freshman year over the course of one week (I had not yet figured out that sometimes you can just like, not do your reading).  Jane Eyre is a long-ass book, so I was kind of grumpy.  And then I wrote this, which I just found on my computer.  Miraculously, I still like it! Mainly because I just freaking love any and all jokes at the expense of Conor Oberst. Even like “Haha – Conor Oberst!”  I would laugh at that.

I might be laughing right now!

***

I have to read Jane Eyre for one of my classes, and christ!  The girl is such a WHINER!  Even Conor Oberst would be like, “Jane.  Here’s a picture of a rainbow.  Now perk the hell up.”

I haven’t finished it, but so far, the book is just a fatty list of complaints.  In case you haven’t read it, here’s her top five (in order of importance):

1) Her porridge is burnt (MAJOR source of narrative tension).

2) She is cold.

3) She is ugly.

4) Her friend is dead.

5) Her life is sad.  (Seriously, she refers to it as “my sad life.”)

At first, I thought this was just because it was winter, and she had seasonal affective disorder or whatever.  But then it became spring, and Jane got even more emo than before.  Check out her description of the garden at her school: “[I]t glowed with flowers… and these fragrant treasures were all useless for most of the inmates of Lowood [her boarding school], except to furnish now and then a handful of herbs and blossoms to put in a coffin.”

It’s beautiful!  The flowers are blooming!  But I still want to talk about coffins, and you are NAIVE if you think I will wait for a new sentence to do it.

Fun Thing To Do

It is finals week for me, and so I am running low on Fun Things To Do.  I thought studying for statistics might be fun, because I love numbers – the last time I was doing my homework and a test resulted in a very high p-value, I SCREAMED in PUBLIC with JOY!!! – but sadly, studying for statistics is more like screaming in agony because you are being gored to death by a bear (blah blah blah bears don’t have horns well I AM DOING MY BEST) than it is like screaming with any positive feeling.

However, I have found one very fun, finals-friendly thing to do.  Go on Gchat.  (If you don’t have Gmail, I don’t even know what to say to you except that the G in Gmail stands for GANGSTA and you should probably make the switch.)  Then, type this in (except with no spaces):

: – ) < 3

They will both rotate – but the face rotates clockwise and the heart rotates counterclockwise!  IT LOOKS SO COOL. It is a very Fun Thing To Do.

The only minor problem is that you have to do this to somebody else. So you need to find someone to chat with who you love and want to smile at… which makes this the ultimate fun!  Because it encourages interpersonal connections!  I could talk about this forever but I don’t think anyone wants to listen forever so I’m going to stop now!  It is almost summer and then I will write more and hopefully it will be better quality!

I stay fly

There have been a few moments of my college career where it really hit me: I go to school with huge nerds.  Like HUGE.  Like SEVEN FOOT TALL MONSTER NERDS metaphorically.

One of those moments occurred in my stat class.  Our professor was transitioning between PowerPoint and the chalk board, and to pass the four second gap where he wasn’t teaching he said, “Hey, have you guys heard that they’re changing the genus of the fruit fly?  Apparently, the current fruit fly genus is getting too full, so they’re moving it to another insect genus. It’s very political.”

It was supposed to be a joke.  It’s political for biologists, was the idea, because they are really invested in things that don’t matter to the average person. Boy, did THAT joke go over like a bowling ball.  It was political in our classroom.  The class was split about fifty-fifty.  Half the people were distraught.  How will this genus change affect the order of biology as a discipline?  Others were strongly for it.  An over-full genus is just not practical, was their thought.  The whole idea of typology is that it separates out the something something I DON’T CARE but we talked about it for what seemed like years.  The order of the classroom broke down.  Things got heated.  Someone started declaiming so emphatically that they spit on the back of my head (true).  Someone threatened to stab someone else in the genus (false, but I so wish it were true!).

When your classmates are uniformly obsessed with genuses, that is when you really know. That you need to actively not talk about genuses for the rest of your life to make sure it doesn’t rub off on you.  Which I had been doing successfully up until right now.

This whole post is such a strategical failure…

The sexy construction of space

I have a very talented friend.  She has normal talents – for school and being vegan and running – but what I am talking about right now is her outrageous talent for dirty talk.  She is so good at it, it makes me uncomfortable.  Once, I was sitting on her exercise ball.

“Oh my god, this feels so good,” I said (mistakenly).

“Does it?  Does it feel so good?  Tell me how good it feels,” she said.

“Um… it feels okay,” I said.  I stood up.

“Oh yeahhhh.  It feels okay.  How about now?  Do you like it now?  Do you like standing next to it? You love it, don’t you?”

I decided to strategically leave at that point.

Later, I was talking to her and I said, “How do you do that?  Can you do it about anything?” She said anything.  I could pick a topic.

I looked at my reading and picked the social construction of space.

“Oh yeah.  Construct that space for me.  Oh, construct it right there.  Oh my god, it’s so… social.  It’s so social!  Don’t stop socially constructing that space!  Don’t stop now!”

I have never felt more outclassed in my life.  I have no remotely comparable talent.  I guess I can transcribe dirty talk from memory, though? That is something. Meaningful.  Never mind I WILL GO FAR.

1762392

So I’m a statistics minor, and I actually kind of like it, even though it is in most ways boring.  Do you know what a t-test is? Well, then you are missing out on A LOT.  Of nothing.  But here’s the thing: I freaking LOVE numbers. And that’s what stat is all about.

It is actually becoming a problem for my friends and family, how much I like numbers.  Once, I was talking to my roommate, and I wanted to really emphatically tell her a number, and so I said something like, “Ten!  One zero.  Dix.  I wonder what ten is in binary…” Then I started very slowly converting ten into binary.  (Do you want to know what it is? 1010.  WORD UP.) She was not amused, but I was amused enough for both of us and probably a third party too.

I also do this thing where I needlessly quantify qualitative things.  For example, how happy am I today?  Well, I could say, “Pretty happy.” Or I could say, like, “1.72 times as happy as I was yesterday.”  Sometimes I do the second one, although only with people who like me at least sort of unconditionally.  I also almost had a happiness attack (I am just as unclear on what that is as you are) on the bus because I looked at my iPod and realized that three quarters of my Justin Bieber songs have titles that start with “One.”  There are THREE NUMBERS in that realization (if you count a fraction as two numbers, which I do).

It gets super socially inappropriate in class, though.  Once, in one of my lecture classes, my professor was talking about survey methodology.  He said, “What if you had a survey that made people solve simple arithmetic problems?”  Then he wrote some numbers on the board, like 3+8 or whatever, and I was so happy I almost exclaimed something like “Hooray!” or probably actually just “NUMBERS” because I’m not that creative in times of great joy.  The only way I restrained myself was by g-chatting my friend, who is also in the class (we are extremely studious and never distract ourselves with the internet), and saying, “I am so happy now I want to jump out of my chair and SCREAM!”

That was when I thought, you know, maybe I have a problem.  Also because she g-chatted me back and said “wtf is wrong with you.”

The Situation 2.0

Okay.  So I haven’t posted for a while.  I don’t think I will be posting for a while.  I am one busy mofo.  Also, nothing that whimsical has been happening.

I’m not going to post the thing I wrote in my nonfiction class last quarter.  It is too sad and it would be weird to post it in between like, a Justin Bieber video and a joke about ferrets.  I am taking another nonfiction class this quarter though, and I’m writing something that I’m pretty sure won’t end up sad – maybe sad in that it is low quality but definitely not sad as in somebody dies – so maybe I’ll post that someday.  It’s about Harry Potter.

Also, note to all the HP aficionados out there: I have been doing some “research” for my “piece” (I hate calling things pieces… pieces of what?!) and it involves reading slash.  Did you know that there is slash involving Snape?  Of course you did.  Here is what you didn’t know… there is slash involving Snape and JUSTIN FINCH-FLETCHLEY.  That random Hufflepuff kid who DOESN’T MATTER.  WHAT ON EARTH.

I am so upset.  That is just unrealistic.  Snape’s standards are too high for him to ever let JFF be his love muffin.  Yeah.  TAKE THAT INTERNET!!!  You contain low quality fanfiction.  I WENT THERE.

The Situation

So I’m back in real school, where there is work and I have to scrounge up food and do my own dishes (rather than lounging in India, attending serve-yourself buffets that are still inexplicably staffed by six or seven waiters), and I have less time to write this.  It is a fact.  So.  I will post less.  And you will read less.  If you can even read.  (JUST KIDDING I’m sure you read great!)

BUT I want you to know that I am writing something long that will probably drop (ahhaahha wow I am really laughing at my own word choice… Chicago winter, what are you doing to me?) in about a month (??).  It’s for a nonfiction class, and it’s going to probably be more sad and creepy than usual, but if I don’t disastrously mess it up it should be interesting. It’s about MURDER so… basically, I’m hella hard.

But not so hard that I committed the murder.

But still hard.  Very, very hard.

Oh my god, who I am kidding.  I am listening to Justin Bieber as we speak.  It’s pretty ironic that I have listened to “One Time” like, a thousand times.  Even the song itself is telling me that I have taken things too far.

You should watch the video for “One Time” at least once, though, if only to enjoy the intro scene where Mr. Bieber answers his phone and says:

“Yo, Usher!  I’m just playing video games with Ryan.”

Now that – THAT is hard.  JB, you ball outrageous.

(Point being: I’m going to be posting more like weekly now, with a really long one coming soon.  Try not to fall into a pit of despair without, you know, constant Ramayana analysis.  Or whatever I write.  I know it’s tough.  Wow, I really do not even know what I DO up in here.)