Done! Haha! No more Mr. Midterms knockin’ on my door ever again! I haven’t felt this free of responsibility since my wisdom teeth healed up in December.

It’s all an illusion, of course - not only is there still stuff to do, I’m now officially entering the market for a car and a job. It’s time to write resumes and research repair histories and gas mileage. And if you’ve got an entry-level surveying/analyst/research assistant position or an itty-bitty 100,000-mile jalopy in the L.A. area, I’ll be your new best friend.

Fearing flood of Democratic hopefuls, Iowa steps up border patrols. Wish they’d done this when I lived there - back in ‘96 three old ladies and a bunny rabbit were killed in a stampede away from Lamar Alexander’s press conference. It was pretty awful.

(link via Industry Seismology and Stuff)

Materials:

• Dust-bearing carpet with cereal on top
• Vacuum cleaner
• A couple old socks, and maybe the nice wash rag used to clean off the communal white board
• Dish soap, or hand soap, or something.

Procedure:

Notice that you’ve been harboring unspecified vile creatures in your room. Freak out, put down your cereal, take your glass of milk out to the living room where it’s safe. Clear the accumulated dishes from your work space, while trying to convince yourself that they were mostly water glasses anyway. Except for the leftover baked beans and spaghetti-Os and ice cream, but those aren’t that old. Do the dishes. Note with satisfaction that the spaghetti-Os didn’t even stain the bowl this time.

Now it’s time to vacuum. Get the area prepped. Throw out all those papers on the floor without looking at them: if you haven’t needed them in months, you probably won’t need them again, ever. Unless they’re important tax documents that the IRS will kill you for chucking. Stack the papers on top of the filing cabinet for safekeeping.

Pick up all the hair bands and spare change ($0.17! Put that in the bowl of pennies so you can build a penny sculpture later) and unfold that old map you found behind your desk. It’s a pretty map; put it on the wall with some gummy old tape. Cringe because it makes your walls look dirty. You should have gotten your room repainted before you moved in, but you didn’t, and you’ll be moving out in two months so there’s no point doing it now.

Grab the vacuum, plug it in, turn it on (once you’ve found the switch). Run it around for a while, ignoring the ominous rattles and squeals. Wait for your roommate to leave so you can rip out his network cable and get under the hub. While you’re waiting, turn off your computer, scooch the desk around to get at the corners, and make a few desultory swipes at the venetian blinds with a wet rag. There’s a dead spider on the window sill; why wasn’t it doing its job at your desk? Dumb lazy spider.

When the roommate’s gone, finish vacuuming. Try not to suck up any socks or pennies. Put the vacuum away, wipe your desk down with soapy rags, and boot the computer back up. Think about washing the rags, but throw them away instead - there’s plenty more old socks where those came from. Enjoy the tiny new clean part of your room!

(with insincere apologies to Cooking for Losers)

Just had a rather important realization: that dark sticky crud on my desk is actually bug poop, and there’s enough of it to represent a problem. There goes my midafternoon snack hour; it’s time to vacuum, yo.

The title of this post comes from my anthropology reading (Harvard has conveniently put it online) as an example of English syntactical ambiguity. The authors claim it has “at least three” meanings, and translate two of them into Italian… the third is left as an exercise to the reader.

Perhaps I’ve been addled by a thick stack of absurd people claiming differences in color-processing among blue-eyed vs. brown-eyed Missouri freshmen, or perhaps I’m a closet Italian, but I can’t find the third meaning. Help?

It’s interesting that examples of ambiguity in these sorts of papers are often drawn from newspaper headlines. After all, the headline is a young thing, barely as old as the printing press, and subject to constraints no sensible English speaker would obey in other circumstances. Judging English from headlines is equivalent to feeding Chinese speakers a poorly-translated story and concluding that Chinese can’t handle counterfactual reasoning (which happened elsewhere in the reading packet).

But enough of that, I’ve finished the readings, so I’ve got a midterm to take. Cheerio.

Here’s the biggest twinge of regret for not applying to grad school that I’ve had so far: It makes no fucking sense to say you’re the Bachelor of the Universe!

I wish my soon-to-be degree had more roaring thews attached. I mean, even Associate of Science sounds kind of cool, in a dark suit and sunglasses sort of way. As an Associate of Science you’d get to hand briefcases full of cash money and important documents to Science’s underworld contacts. But as a Bachelor, I’ll just be getting a lava lamp of Science and some cockroaches of Science for my efficiency apartment of Science. Instead of ominously placing my hand on my gun while Science negotiates a drug run, I’ll eat baked beans of Science straight from the can.

Sigh.