Rilo Kiley - "Paint's Peeling"
Good things tend to come in big, messy clumps for me, but I prefer it when they come attached to bad things. A pair of good and bad things has a nice cosmic justice to it, and since I'm an optimist (on good days), the net gains tends to positive. Like today. I haven't talked to Kristen since Sunday night, because she's off on a road trip to Kentucky with college friends. And when I finally got through to her cell phone today, the static prevented me from hearing a word she was saying, but the basic gist of it was that she couldn't talk and would have to call me later. And I guess from there, I just started feeling down, and I was all prepared to wallow in self-pity all afternoon, when Jeremy comes into the lounge to tell me I've got a call. I sprint back to the room, figuring it's the Smart Museum calling about the guard position. Wrong: a job interview next Tuesday with the University of Chicago Press! Inconceivable! How is it that I never got a single callback from hundreds of applications submitted last summer, and suddenly I get a call from the University of Chicago Press mere days after I send out a mere e-mail?? After last summer, I thought I was incapable of employment. So, this is cool. Granted, all I'd probably be doing is clerical stuff and moving books, but it's still cool to be working in an actual publishing house. And it's MONEY, sweet Jesus, it's money.
Otherwise, this week has been really easy on the brain. Work hasn't really extended beyond reading texts, and my chem labs don't start until next week. So I've had my afternoons free from 12:30 on every day. I've gotten lots of pleasure reading done, and lots of rest, which has done nothing to improve my cough.
The new suitemate moved in. He's Pakistani. He's from Druid Hills, Atlanta, where he attended the Paideia School. And he's a total prick. He's managed to offend the entire floor in a short period of time. Personally, I think he's a riot, and should provide a cornucopia of offensive stories. I thought this until he moved all his stuff into our fridge with asking. Now, in peaceful retaliation, i'm drinking one of his Red Fusion sodas. It tastes pretty much like Dr. Pepper with a lot of grenadine. I think I'll toss the rest of it.
The new Media Aesthetics teacher had me a little disappointed the first class. He's a foppish Irish hipster, and definitely not the sexy young intellectual who taught my class last quarter. And his Irish accent has been so Americanized that I wouldn't be entertained purely by listening to it. But now that we've gotten into the material, I've been thinking about the texts extensively outside of class, so I find that I'm going to like it just as much as last quarter.
My biology class, unfortunately, is going to be a total waste of time. Which is why I'm not going to waste my time attending it. I don't understand why biology is so hard to make interesting. Evolution, genetics, and DNA are all vastly fascinating subjects! And yet these teachers (ahem, freshman biology) go above and beyond to suck the life out of biology. I think I'll just read a Matt Ridley book and consider myself educated.
My new chem lecturer is, by contrast, a great teacher. He's a short befuddled Japanese (?) man who's prone to go off on these tangents about nature's quest for freedom in entropy, or this play he saw that reminded him of Gibbs free energy. And he loves chemistry dearly like he's teaching it for the very first time to the most interested lecture hall in the world, instead of for the 38th time to a bunch of sleeping disgruntled pre-meds. This man might actually get me to appreciate chemistry. And as we were walking out, I overheard this guy saying, "For all writing on the board, he sure doesn't tell us anything." I felt like slugging the bastard. All our last professor did was copy the entire chapter on the board and didn't tell us a single lousy thing that we couldn't get from the bleeping textbook. And he was a condescending asshole.
In relation to this, sometimes I feel like there's a subtle war between the humanities students and the math/science students in these core classes. There's people like me who go off on tirades of pre-meds when they can't stomach a little philosophy in their entropy, and then there's the chem girl in my Hum class who thinks she's making some provocative statement when she makes comments like, "I don't like poetry when they don't come out and say what they mean." A liberal arts education is just a powder keg.
Before I go, I have to tell you that I picked up an application for a job giving campus tour guides. Oddly enough, this is something I've wanted to do for a very long time.
For the record: 15 days since my last cup of coffee. I might actually be totally converted to tea.
Good things tend to come in big, messy clumps for me, but I prefer it when they come attached to bad things. A pair of good and bad things has a nice cosmic justice to it, and since I'm an optimist (on good days), the net gains tends to positive. Like today. I haven't talked to Kristen since Sunday night, because she's off on a road trip to Kentucky with college friends. And when I finally got through to her cell phone today, the static prevented me from hearing a word she was saying, but the basic gist of it was that she couldn't talk and would have to call me later. And I guess from there, I just started feeling down, and I was all prepared to wallow in self-pity all afternoon, when Jeremy comes into the lounge to tell me I've got a call. I sprint back to the room, figuring it's the Smart Museum calling about the guard position. Wrong: a job interview next Tuesday with the University of Chicago Press! Inconceivable! How is it that I never got a single callback from hundreds of applications submitted last summer, and suddenly I get a call from the University of Chicago Press mere days after I send out a mere e-mail?? After last summer, I thought I was incapable of employment. So, this is cool. Granted, all I'd probably be doing is clerical stuff and moving books, but it's still cool to be working in an actual publishing house. And it's MONEY, sweet Jesus, it's money.
Otherwise, this week has been really easy on the brain. Work hasn't really extended beyond reading texts, and my chem labs don't start until next week. So I've had my afternoons free from 12:30 on every day. I've gotten lots of pleasure reading done, and lots of rest, which has done nothing to improve my cough.
The new suitemate moved in. He's Pakistani. He's from Druid Hills, Atlanta, where he attended the Paideia School. And he's a total prick. He's managed to offend the entire floor in a short period of time. Personally, I think he's a riot, and should provide a cornucopia of offensive stories. I thought this until he moved all his stuff into our fridge with asking. Now, in peaceful retaliation, i'm drinking one of his Red Fusion sodas. It tastes pretty much like Dr. Pepper with a lot of grenadine. I think I'll toss the rest of it.
The new Media Aesthetics teacher had me a little disappointed the first class. He's a foppish Irish hipster, and definitely not the sexy young intellectual who taught my class last quarter. And his Irish accent has been so Americanized that I wouldn't be entertained purely by listening to it. But now that we've gotten into the material, I've been thinking about the texts extensively outside of class, so I find that I'm going to like it just as much as last quarter.
My biology class, unfortunately, is going to be a total waste of time. Which is why I'm not going to waste my time attending it. I don't understand why biology is so hard to make interesting. Evolution, genetics, and DNA are all vastly fascinating subjects! And yet these teachers (ahem, freshman biology) go above and beyond to suck the life out of biology. I think I'll just read a Matt Ridley book and consider myself educated.
My new chem lecturer is, by contrast, a great teacher. He's a short befuddled Japanese (?) man who's prone to go off on these tangents about nature's quest for freedom in entropy, or this play he saw that reminded him of Gibbs free energy. And he loves chemistry dearly like he's teaching it for the very first time to the most interested lecture hall in the world, instead of for the 38th time to a bunch of sleeping disgruntled pre-meds. This man might actually get me to appreciate chemistry. And as we were walking out, I overheard this guy saying, "For all writing on the board, he sure doesn't tell us anything." I felt like slugging the bastard. All our last professor did was copy the entire chapter on the board and didn't tell us a single lousy thing that we couldn't get from the bleeping textbook. And he was a condescending asshole.
In relation to this, sometimes I feel like there's a subtle war between the humanities students and the math/science students in these core classes. There's people like me who go off on tirades of pre-meds when they can't stomach a little philosophy in their entropy, and then there's the chem girl in my Hum class who thinks she's making some provocative statement when she makes comments like, "I don't like poetry when they don't come out and say what they mean." A liberal arts education is just a powder keg.
Before I go, I have to tell you that I picked up an application for a job giving campus tour guides. Oddly enough, this is something I've wanted to do for a very long time.
For the record: 15 days since my last cup of coffee. I might actually be totally converted to tea.
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