Something I find really interesting is that this week, very little has happened to me personally. I've watched a lot of YouTube videos, moved to the dorm I'll stay in over the summer, played dumb flash games on the Internet, applied for a few jobs.
Outside the walls of my dorm room, however, bigger things have happened. The shootings in California happened last week, for instance; this has sparked a lot of controversy and discussion that I'm sure you can find online if you look up 'Elliot Rodger.' You can probably find his manifesto somewhere online as well. I've only read a few pages; I may read a bit more, but I think I'm getting the gist of it - he hates women and he needs to stop writing with disagreeing verbs. (For the record, I'm reading a copy of it here.)
It's an interesting read, I'll give him that, but I think part of Rodger's issues come from lack of apology. He stumbled into a girl at summer camp and she pushed him and swore at him; she hung out with the popular kids and didn't apologize later. Rodger didn't say he was mad because she didn't apologize - he was mad because a popular guy he had hung out with was now fraternizing with this mean girl.
I'm no expert in the field, so I'll leave the psychoanalysis to any psychology major willing to take it up. It's probably a fascinating topic.
I think that it's important to remember, though, that a few negative instances should not define one's views on an entire gender. For example, my girl scout troop took a trip to New York City near the end of eighth grade. We did a bunch of tourist-y things, including seeing a Broadway show. We took the metro back; since it was late, there was at least one person who was visibly not sober. To make a long story short, every female on our end of the car - even the six fourteen-year-olds - was offered a bouquet of flowers by a man who was clearly high.
The important thing to remember is that this is an isolated incident. That remains the only time I have been offered anything by someone hyped up on drugs; that is not the only time I have been offered flowers. Should I be wary of every man bearing flowers as a possible drug addict? Should I avoid going on the New York Subway? Should I be bolder about going on the New York Subway at night? After all, the worst that's ever happened to me is that an inebriated individual tried to relieve himself of a bouquet. They seemed to be nice flowers.
Experience is relative.
Friday, May 30, 2014
Monday, May 26, 2014
On Memorials
This weekend, I was able to finally hang out with many people on my dad's side of the family. I say "finally" because it has been a very long time since I've seen my cousin, aunts, and uncles on that side of the family - I think the general consensus was about eight years ago. There was even more extended family there, too, whom I haven't seen since the 90s. (To give you a perspective on how well I know the 90s... I started kindergarten, and that's one of the few things I remember).
Unfortunately, the whole event was spurred by the fact that my grandmother died in December, and we were only recently able to get everyone together to hold some sort of memorial for her. It's really fitting, as this is Memorial Weekend. She's buried in the same plot as my grandfather, in an area she lived in for many years.
With all the death and stuff, it was still a fun occasion - my dad actually said that she would appreciate the humor being held at her grave site. (The humor, for the record, was along the lines of, "Don't smile for the photos in the cemetery; this is a grave occasion!") It was interesting to talk to everyone, and I heard some really funny stories from my more immediate family about her.
For the record, my grandmother was a child of the Great Depression. She was born in 1920, so she had just turned nine when Wall Street crashed into the Depression. She kept up many of the money-saving habits that she and her family developed over the ensuing years, and it is from that frugality, something she kept up until she stopped living alone, that many of the stories come.
One of the most common stories I've heard of her is how Nana would save small things. For example, she didn't make new ice. She would have iced tea every day and a small vodka with ice every night; when she was done with the drink, the ice would go back in the freezer.
That wasn't the only water thing she saved. When she bathed, she would take a bucket to catch the not-quite-warm-enough water; when she was done washing, she would take the bucket outside and water the garden with the contents. She rarely used her dishwasher as well, and she rarely left a room with the light still on. There's a reason her electric bill was less than $50.
There are some crazy things that came out of this frugality, though. One of my favorite stories of Nana came out of this.
So my dad visited Nana regularly throughout my childhood; she was his mother, after all. Also, she was living alone, as his father had died in the early 1980s. During one of these visits, he decided to get some ice cream, and chocolate was somehow involved (I don't know if it was chocolate ice cream, or a vanilla base with chocolate parts, or vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce... anyway, chocolate was involved, and that's the important part).
At the time in question, Nana's eyesight wasn't that great. One night, Dad scooped himself a large bowl of chocolatey ice cream goodness, and left it on the kitchen counter near the sink - I guess he had to go to the bathroom or something? Anyway, the ice cream was left on the counter, and Nana came into the kitchen. She thought that the bowl was simply dirty, and not full of fresh-scooped ice cream, so she washed it out with soap and water.
At that moment, my dad came in to see his bowl of ice cream getting soap and water all over it. He told Nana that she was, at that very moment, washing his nightly dose of chocolate down the drain. Nana apologized and proceeded to rinse most of the soap off of the ice cream and offered the rest to Dad, as if it were a perfectly fine bowl of ice cream with no flaws whatsoever.
Unfortunately, I don't know how Dad reacted to this. I assume he accepted it graciously, and then waited until she left the room. He probably then finished washing the bowl and scooped some new ice cream into it. (I don't actually know, though).
In all, it was really nice to hear some of these stories. I didn't really know Nana that well; though she and I are related and were on the Earth together for two decades, I didn't really spend a lot of time with her. For most of my life, she was mostly blind and approaching deafness, and I guess that's hard to explain to a kid with patience issues, as I was. Also, since she wasn't in a great physical condition, it was hard for her to travel; traveling a family of four around is also logistically difficult. I am glad that I was able to see so much of my family again, though, and it was nice to hear the stories, even though they were second-hand.
Unfortunately, the whole event was spurred by the fact that my grandmother died in December, and we were only recently able to get everyone together to hold some sort of memorial for her. It's really fitting, as this is Memorial Weekend. She's buried in the same plot as my grandfather, in an area she lived in for many years.
With all the death and stuff, it was still a fun occasion - my dad actually said that she would appreciate the humor being held at her grave site. (The humor, for the record, was along the lines of, "Don't smile for the photos in the cemetery; this is a grave occasion!") It was interesting to talk to everyone, and I heard some really funny stories from my more immediate family about her.
For the record, my grandmother was a child of the Great Depression. She was born in 1920, so she had just turned nine when Wall Street crashed into the Depression. She kept up many of the money-saving habits that she and her family developed over the ensuing years, and it is from that frugality, something she kept up until she stopped living alone, that many of the stories come.
One of the most common stories I've heard of her is how Nana would save small things. For example, she didn't make new ice. She would have iced tea every day and a small vodka with ice every night; when she was done with the drink, the ice would go back in the freezer.
That wasn't the only water thing she saved. When she bathed, she would take a bucket to catch the not-quite-warm-enough water; when she was done washing, she would take the bucket outside and water the garden with the contents. She rarely used her dishwasher as well, and she rarely left a room with the light still on. There's a reason her electric bill was less than $50.
There are some crazy things that came out of this frugality, though. One of my favorite stories of Nana came out of this.
So my dad visited Nana regularly throughout my childhood; she was his mother, after all. Also, she was living alone, as his father had died in the early 1980s. During one of these visits, he decided to get some ice cream, and chocolate was somehow involved (I don't know if it was chocolate ice cream, or a vanilla base with chocolate parts, or vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce... anyway, chocolate was involved, and that's the important part).
At the time in question, Nana's eyesight wasn't that great. One night, Dad scooped himself a large bowl of chocolatey ice cream goodness, and left it on the kitchen counter near the sink - I guess he had to go to the bathroom or something? Anyway, the ice cream was left on the counter, and Nana came into the kitchen. She thought that the bowl was simply dirty, and not full of fresh-scooped ice cream, so she washed it out with soap and water.
At that moment, my dad came in to see his bowl of ice cream getting soap and water all over it. He told Nana that she was, at that very moment, washing his nightly dose of chocolate down the drain. Nana apologized and proceeded to rinse most of the soap off of the ice cream and offered the rest to Dad, as if it were a perfectly fine bowl of ice cream with no flaws whatsoever.
Unfortunately, I don't know how Dad reacted to this. I assume he accepted it graciously, and then waited until she left the room. He probably then finished washing the bowl and scooped some new ice cream into it. (I don't actually know, though).
In all, it was really nice to hear some of these stories. I didn't really know Nana that well; though she and I are related and were on the Earth together for two decades, I didn't really spend a lot of time with her. For most of my life, she was mostly blind and approaching deafness, and I guess that's hard to explain to a kid with patience issues, as I was. Also, since she wasn't in a great physical condition, it was hard for her to travel; traveling a family of four around is also logistically difficult. I am glad that I was able to see so much of my family again, though, and it was nice to hear the stories, even though they were second-hand.
Friday, May 23, 2014
Lessons from Finals Week
I have learned the following from my fourth finals week:
- Do your research before you do your essays.
- Do your research well before you do your essays.
- Like, have your quotes and everything done way before.
- Don't write a 20-page paper in a day. It will be a festival of quotes and footnotes.
- Presentations before papers are your friends, because you can have a lot of materials before your essay is actually written.
- If you're going to write a paper, pick a topic you really like.
- I don't like long papers.
- Sleep is important.
Monday, May 19, 2014
Finals, Day 1
Today was my first final, in Making Math. After a bit of stress and three hours of knitting, I finished a pair of hyperbolic baby pants.
Three things I learned today:
Three things I learned today:
- don't procrastinate on starting, or ending, or doing in general.
- Blackwork embroidery is really cool. It looks the same on both sides.
- Here's a joke:
Three ropes are wandering in the desert and become very thirsty. They arrive in a small frontier town and go to the saloon. The first rope goes in and asks for something to drink. The bartender says, "I'm sorry, we don't serve your kind here." The first rope leaves and tells his friend what happened.
The second rope hopes for better luck and tries his hand at it. He walks in and asks for a drink, but the bartender tells him, "As I told your friend, we don't serve ropes here." The second rope leaves and tells his friends about the incident.
After two stories, the third rope is pretty sure that she would have to do something a bit different from the other two. She gets herself tied up and ruffles herself up a bit, and walks into the bar. The bartender says, "What, are you a rope too?" To this, she says, "I'm a frayed knot."
Friday, May 16, 2014
The End of the Semester
Though finals have yet to begin, I'm doing this post now in order that I might do other topics next week, when I'm brain dead from all the essays and trying to figure out what to say. This is the post where I tell you THINGS I LEARNED THIS SEMESTER.
ACADEMICS:
ACADEMICS:
- HISTORY: THE SIXTIES: If you want to stage a protest, the 60s were a good time to do it.
- GREEK: THE GREEK EPIC: Odysseus was a braggart, and his companions were dumb. To be fair, though, he didn't tell them anything, so a lot of what they got into was his fault.
- JOURNALISM: MEDIA AND SOCIETY: Advertising isn't a media, but it damn well knows how to adapt to the new media markets.
- HONORS: KING ARTHUR IN LITERATURE: The love triangle was a French invention. Also, the characters are more complex than you might think. Also, just read all of it, because it's sometimes worth a laugh.
- HONORS: MAKING MATH: Non-Euclidian geometry is super confusing.
FRIENDS:
- Be honest with people.
- If you like someone, say so.
- If you don't like someone, say so.
- Friends sometimes drift apart. This is not always a bad thing.
- Friends sometimes stick together. This is not always a good thing.
- Friends get frustrated with people you like. As much as you want to them to see the other side, it doesn't always work.
- People are sometimes assholes.
- People are sometimes great.
- People sometimes need to get over themselves.
Monday, May 12, 2014
On Sourcing Your Papers
Right, so today I'm working on a final presentation for King Arthur. (Technically, I'll be doing that all this week, but that includes today). Since I'm a filthy procrastinator, I only started looking for sources properly yesterday. This means that I have very little of note so far to say about the weaponry of the Arthurian legend.
This is in part due to the fact that nobody else had anything to say about it, either.
There are very few papers about this topic anywhere online. The only ones I could find were from the last quarter of the 19th century to the first quarter of the 20th century, and archaeology has probably caught up quite a bit since then. I assume that nobody has written much about this in a very long time because there are two sorts of people who are interested in ancient weaponry nowadays: collectors of ancient swords and LARPers. (this is what my web searches are telling me, anyways). The former group should get their acts together and write some cool stuff about their artifacts, because I WANT ALL OF YOUR RESEARCH. The latter group should name their weapons something different (well, I should probably yell at the creators of D&D for that), and get their butts out of my Medieval Weapons searches.
Since there are no academic papers on the topic, you have to go to books. Like, actual books. Like, my right arm is sore because I was just carrying three 500-page hardcover books around for half an hour as I looked through the library for sources on What Might Have Been Used to Kill People in the Middle Ages. I know that Arthur was technically in the Roman era, but there's always room for authors to impose what they know. There wasn't Google back then, so Geoffrey of Monmouth couldn't have gotten an image of the sort of sword Arthur might have used in reality, so he probably took his own mental image of a noble's sword and assumed that weapon had always been used. Same goes for Thomas Malory, Edmund Spenser, the Gawain poet, and a lot of people who wrote about the Arthurian legend.
Time to do some real-life research, though.
This is in part due to the fact that nobody else had anything to say about it, either.
There are very few papers about this topic anywhere online. The only ones I could find were from the last quarter of the 19th century to the first quarter of the 20th century, and archaeology has probably caught up quite a bit since then. I assume that nobody has written much about this in a very long time because there are two sorts of people who are interested in ancient weaponry nowadays: collectors of ancient swords and LARPers. (this is what my web searches are telling me, anyways). The former group should get their acts together and write some cool stuff about their artifacts, because I WANT ALL OF YOUR RESEARCH. The latter group should name their weapons something different (well, I should probably yell at the creators of D&D for that), and get their butts out of my Medieval Weapons searches.
Since there are no academic papers on the topic, you have to go to books. Like, actual books. Like, my right arm is sore because I was just carrying three 500-page hardcover books around for half an hour as I looked through the library for sources on What Might Have Been Used to Kill People in the Middle Ages. I know that Arthur was technically in the Roman era, but there's always room for authors to impose what they know. There wasn't Google back then, so Geoffrey of Monmouth couldn't have gotten an image of the sort of sword Arthur might have used in reality, so he probably took his own mental image of a noble's sword and assumed that weapon had always been used. Same goes for Thomas Malory, Edmund Spenser, the Gawain poet, and a lot of people who wrote about the Arthurian legend.
Time to do some real-life research, though.
Friday, May 9, 2014
On Final Essays and Stuff
Well, the end of the semester is nearing. Since I am an English major, this means ESSAYS AND PRESENTATIONS! YAY!
Well, not really. I like writing, but academia and I have an understanding; if I get assigned a paper longer than ten pages, we will be very terse with each other until the paper is done. (Academia and I are not really talking right now; I have a maximum of 33 pages due over the course of finals week).
Anyway, in an attempt to make myself feel better, there's a blog called lol my thesis (find it here), where college seniors writing essays submit the easy version of their thesis - in other words, the simple and humorous way they would talk about it with someone who's not in their major. This includes things from "If we nuked each other, we'd really miss the soccer rivalry" ("Scientific Communities, Nuclear Energy, and the State in Brazil and Argentina, 1950-1991") to "Nobody's done this before, and it turns out that there is a very good reason for that" ("Development of an Interdisciplinary Simulation Environment for Traffic Safety Modeling").
In this vein, I present to you my final papers in History 101 and King Arthur in Literature: "Women are important because we don't suck and we all realized that in 1960s" and "I just really wanted an excuse to look up types of weapons" (I'm talking about shields and Excalibur in King Arthur). I really need to stop procrastinating on that. On that note, I'm going to go write and stuff.
Well, not really. I like writing, but academia and I have an understanding; if I get assigned a paper longer than ten pages, we will be very terse with each other until the paper is done. (Academia and I are not really talking right now; I have a maximum of 33 pages due over the course of finals week).
Anyway, in an attempt to make myself feel better, there's a blog called lol my thesis (find it here), where college seniors writing essays submit the easy version of their thesis - in other words, the simple and humorous way they would talk about it with someone who's not in their major. This includes things from "If we nuked each other, we'd really miss the soccer rivalry" ("Scientific Communities, Nuclear Energy, and the State in Brazil and Argentina, 1950-1991") to "Nobody's done this before, and it turns out that there is a very good reason for that" ("Development of an Interdisciplinary Simulation Environment for Traffic Safety Modeling").
In this vein, I present to you my final papers in History 101 and King Arthur in Literature: "Women are important because we don't suck and we all realized that in 1960s" and "I just really wanted an excuse to look up types of weapons" (I'm talking about shields and Excalibur in King Arthur). I really need to stop procrastinating on that. On that note, I'm going to go write and stuff.
Monday, May 5, 2014
On Modes of Storytelling
As the semester draws to a close, my attention, like many other peoples', is turning to summer plans. I'll be honest: I don't really have many. The biggest claim on my time is going to be summer school - a total of eight hours a week for six weeks, not counting study time. That's not a lot of hours. What else am I going to do? I'll have plenty of time for studying, but I'll need to do things that aren't studying and knitting, for fear of losing my mind. (not that it isn't already gone, or anything).
Soooooo that leads me to the next point. I'm an English major. By definition, words are kind of my thing. I'm thinking that at least one other thing that could occupy my time is BLOGGING! Before you get excited about MORE POSTS FROM ME (I dearly hope that you were getting excited), the type of blogging that I was thinking about is a weird one that might not work. For those of you familiar with the Lizzie Bennet Diaries, a popular YouTube series, the project I have in mind would be in a similar vein, but the main character would be a blogger, not a vlogger. The only issue with it is that I have a tendency to write fantasy; as a rule, fantasy worlds tend to not agree with tech-based worlds. That would be the biggest obstacle.
I'm sure other people have done this, but I don't know who. This is an idea that I am positing to my readers (all two of you. Hi, mom and dad!). What do you think?
Soooooo that leads me to the next point. I'm an English major. By definition, words are kind of my thing. I'm thinking that at least one other thing that could occupy my time is BLOGGING! Before you get excited about MORE POSTS FROM ME (I dearly hope that you were getting excited), the type of blogging that I was thinking about is a weird one that might not work. For those of you familiar with the Lizzie Bennet Diaries, a popular YouTube series, the project I have in mind would be in a similar vein, but the main character would be a blogger, not a vlogger. The only issue with it is that I have a tendency to write fantasy; as a rule, fantasy worlds tend to not agree with tech-based worlds. That would be the biggest obstacle.
I'm sure other people have done this, but I don't know who. This is an idea that I am positing to my readers (all two of you. Hi, mom and dad!). What do you think?
Friday, May 2, 2014
On headaches.
Today, I have a weird sort of headache wherein my brain feels like it is poking itself. Because of this (and because I have a whole ton of stuff to do today), this is your post for today. 😞 (I may post properly later)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)