I just can’t do it - not when there are two other people sitting in the computer lab, playing pinball, with sound effects. Cogent thought is nearly impossible under these conditions… unless of course that thought is about pinball. Zooooom.

So instead, it’s time to clear my system of random crap. Normally, web sites describing how to give a cat an enema are incredibly boring, but this one has such great illustrations…

Rasmus is starting a review project that works much in the style of Blogger Insider - and lucky for me, it happens over spring break. Sign up and tell your friends.

Here is an excerpt from a recent email, illustrating how one might go about obtaining an oxygen regulator, if one lives near a university campus which operates largely on trust:

About six months ago Rick in the Physics machine shop was asked by a
young woman he thinks was from Geology if she could borrow an oxygen
regulator. He loaned her an oxygen tote, hose, and regulator, but
they haven’t been returned yet, and he would like to have them back.

Though I was going to play with the Dada engine last night, and come up with a clever script to generate random mushy love notes and automatically mail them to a certain someone every 15 minutes throughout the day, it took too much effort to compile the thing and I was tired.

So instead I did a couple decidedly non-romantic things to mark the day - gave out Hello Kitty paper valentines to various kids in the dorm, and went in for a pap smear. The doctor told me that I should lift weights in sets for endurance, to keep my figure thin and sylph-like, and that because she had noticed the shadow of fuzz on my upper lip she wanted to start me off on a higher-estrogen birth control pill. I wanted to ask, is that the only reason? has your experience shown that women are more likely to follow doctor’s orders if you appeal to their desire to be beautiful? I always thought my moustache was mostly normal, but complicated by the fact that I’ve dark hair and pale skin - can you sit down and explain how my hormone stew affects it? but I didn’t - after all, five minutes ago this woman had been prodding my cervix with a pointy stick.

I’ve got another year and a half on my parents’ insurance with my wonderful family doctor back in Iowa - now I’m determined to make the most of it.

I’ve never been convinced, even a little bit, that a jury of my peers would be any better than a panel of judges under close public scrutiny. As a matter of fact, I think most of my peers are total fuckwads who have every incentive to do a half-assed job of reaching a verdict.

I’m sure that somewhere, deep in the bowels of the Los Angeles County administrative buildings, there’s a giant computer - so old that it’s still mostly vacuum tubes. And that computer is sending gleeful little currents through its front transistor-paws and laughing, because it knows how to pick the exact wrong time to call me in for jury duty.

May God damn it.

Also, one of my spams today called me Marlys. I don’t know why, but that made me feel just a little bit warm and fuzzy inside, as if I had just taken a shot of hard liquor.

The words “February blahs” have temporarily saved my willpower - you see, whenever I start feeling underacheivish, I immediately chastize myself for my lack of singleminded devotion to my own cause, wonder what other causes I could singlemindedly devote myself to, wonder if I’m even capable of the devotion I demand of myself and if this will lead to some loss of self-respect down the road, and then I get even more depressed and underacheivish. It’s a very productive mode of thought. Luckily, sometimes all it takes is a well-timed bitch session and one person to remind me that everyone feels this way during winter term. I’ll go to Mongolia later, I guess.

On a slight tangent, I’ve also been wondering what role gender is playing in my existential angst. The registrar’s office put out some figures a couple years ago showing that the women’s mean grade point average at Tech was a tenth of a point (out of 4) lower than the men’s - and that this was a statistically significant difference. It’s the kind of thing you can never, ever find a solid empirically supported explanation for, but there are endless convincing hypotheses. So ever since, I’ve been trying them all on in my head. I’ve got a friend who routinely begins all her questions in lecture with “I’m sorry, but…” - is this a girly thing that makes us all seem stupid? Do any of the TAs I know give more patronizing, less helpful help to the girls? What about that one creepy grad student who keeps flirting with everybody? Women are more vulnerable than men to iron deficiency, which has been linked to poor performance on middle-school math exams - should the board program include dietary supplements?

None of us are stupid, we can all see that our professors are men, and in many fields so are the grad students. Conversely, there are women all over the geophysics faculty at the University of Copenhagen. While I was there, I could let down my guard: clearly, said my subconscious, the Danes have eliminated sexism, so you don’t have to worry. I hadn’t expected such a feeling of relief. Is feminist hyper-awareness creating a self-fulfilling prophecy from the egregious sexism of the past?

And from the other side of things - I feel a strong compulsion to have an interesting career, but for me it’s more about self-respect and self-expression than it is about making money. If I could find a meaningful and deeply involving volunteer project I’d be perfectly happy to let Mr. Big Strong Man provide the family cash flow. But breadwinning is an integral part of old-fashioned Manly Manliness, and that should theoretically make men less willing to consider low-income options like art, education or househusbandry, and more likely to work their asses off at a prestigious engineering school. Not being a man, I’m not sure how well this actually works - any thoughts?

Here’s an old, but timeless, anecdote, because otherwise I’d post something syrupy and rambling about wondering where all my scholastic enthusiasm has gone to lately and if I should just go to Mongolia instead. You probably don’t want to hear that. Or maybe you do, but I don’t want to write it, because it still feels nebulous and silly and I can’t write a proper angsty rant until I’ve gotten all worked up about something.

Anyway. A couple of weeks ago I was sitting in the hot tub when this scraggly young man walks into the courtyard and asks if I’ve got any weed. I tell him something smelled kinda funky in the hall over yonder, maybe he should ask there, so he leaves which is all to the good. He didn’t seem like much of a conversationalist.

But then he comes back, looking pissed off, and as he passes the hot tub on his way out he mutters something along the lines of “man, I thought this was supposed to be the drug house!” - kind of halfway directed at me. And my dorm does have a bit of a reputation in this regard; this sort of thing happens often enough. But I’m still astonished by that naive optimism - do people really think they can just saunter up to some stranger in a hippie bath, demand illegal substances, and actually get them? It’s the sort of thing you imagine in some dreamland 2020s San Fransisco, but never in real life.

Perhaps it’s unique to the DARE generation, those of us who’ve been told countless times that drug dealers are lurking on every street corner, waiting for your one moment of weakness to pour gallons and gallons of high-grade heroin into your veins. Combine this with a little healthy intolerance for delayed gratification, and it’s perfectly understandable that someone would be angry at me for not producing a joint from the magical hot tub fairyland stash. I’m almost angry at myself, now that I think back on it. How inhospitable of me. Hmph.

Some days, you wake up, and it doesn’t feel at all like three in the afternoon. Most of those days, that’s because it’s actually well before lunch, but today was a genuine three o’clock. Ooops.

On the one hand, we have Mother Church:

Monsignor Cordes, elaborating on the Popes remarks, went further and said that the root of much modern illness lay in sinful or immoral behaviour.

Jesus heals sickness and banishes sin, he said. He therefore teaches us that there is a link between sin and illness. This does not happen in every individual case, but it is a fundamental law. The history of salvation shows us that illness is a consequence of sin.

[more]

On the other, Mother Nature:

“And oral sex has additional benefits, from a biological perspective,” [Dekker] said.

Professor Dekker surveyed 85 pregnant women, about half of whom had pre-eclampsia, in Amsterdam. He found that 82 per cent of those without the life-threatening condition had practiced fellatio, compared with only 44 per cent of those with the disorder.

[more]

It was the annual trek to bring a mid-sized U-haul full of snow back to campus, for the obvious recreational purpose. Ostensibly a celebration of Nunavut’s anniversary, which is officially April 1 but the snow’s all off the mountains by then. Not used as an excuse to pick on the resident Canadian, which surprised me. My shoes are wet.

Oh, yes: my weather’s better than yours is, nyah, nyah, nyah.

Overheard conversation, just a few minutes ago:

Yeah, I didn’t get any L4s, so she told me to just take some of Sarah’s, but Sarah’s were, like, starving to death so I just cloned some from Andrea’s plates and Sarah’s plates - hopefully I’ll get enough to do the lab.

My biologist friends are all a bit on edge lately, since they’ve been getting up every six or seven hours to feed worms and make sure their fruit flies are all virgins and whatever else people do in genetics lab. Whenever I’m down in the late-night greasebucket with them, they start hallucinating bugs on my food.

I’m very, very glad that I’m not a biologist.

The best thing about college on a quarter system is that you get 50% more exam weeks than those weaklings on semester schedules. It seems like barely an eyeblink since the term started, but it also seems like forever, and that averages out to midterms. If my entries for the next week or so are hasty, mathy, bitchy, or just not there at all - you have been warned.

I guess I did promise to say something about how the showers tried to kill me when I was just a wee frosh, but since they’ve mostly stopped that and I no longer live in constant fear, that’s not so exciting. Of course, last night as I was checking the water temperature prior to stepping in, I tried to adjust the angle of the showerhead. It would move up, but not down, and so after a good yank pointed it almost to the ceiling I stood there for a good five minutes applying all the force I could muster to various strategic-looking points… and then finally thought to turn off the water. D’oh.

So if I’m not living in constant fear, I’m at least living in constant confusion. That’s not so bad.