I Am Completely Serious

I just saw the three Wunder-Deer again. They were standing out in the parking lot in front of one of the dorms, eating something on the ground. Mama Deer and Baby Major starting moving away when they spotted me – but they didn’t stop eating, so that they were kind of dragging their heads along the ground licking at it as they stumbled – they weren’t looking where they were going, this was very stumbly movement – into the bushes.

Baby Minor didn’t move until I clapped my hands really loud at it – then it stopped eating and looked at me. After a couple seconds of that, it looked around, appeared to realize it had lost its family, and darted into the yard after them. As I opened the door to my dorm, I saw a puzzled little deer head peek back up out of the bushes.

It probably ought to be adorable, except I just know I’m gonna see one of these guys’ bloodstains on the road sometime soon. I wonder if they even know about the whole “winter” thing? Where did they come from?

Incidentally, I was coming home 3:30 AM on a weekday morning because I had been coding, and had needed access to a Linux machine.

“Okay, so it is after midnight, so it is now Talk Like a Spider Day. So we will all just be like, “…,” okay?”

“Yarr. Yarr be all I know how to say, me droogy – damn, see, I’m completely crap at this.”

I named my program “randread” because if you read it wrong it looks like “van dread.”

Sleep deprivation

(this post originally written around 6:00 AM yesterday)

Shorter-Than-Me-san and I were in the kitchen cooking stuff a few minutes ago. She was making something complicated involving a rice cooker and leeks and water chestnuts, and I was making macaroni from a box. Deciding that my bubbling macaroni looked sadly monochromatic compared to her thing, I chopped up half an onion and put it in there, then still dissatisfied with its hue, went to get some green stuff.

Her: “Is that spinach?”

Me, dropping a handful in the water: “Yeah, do you need any?”

Her: “No, no – I heard that spinach was bad. My brother was watching TV and saw that people have died from eating spinach.”

Me: “…can you watch my noodles for a minute while I go on the internet?”

Her: “Sure, okay…”

So apparently there’s E. coli in the spinach. My lack of a television or radio meant I’d missed this. Fine. Damnit. I got up to go throw away my poor macaroni and onion, but then a brilliant thought struck me – shouldn’t boiling kill E. coli? I sat down again and inquired of Google, and Google said yes.

Feeling extremely smug, I returned to my spinach, which had now been boiling for several minutes – my problem, in perfect congruence with my rich-girl expectations, had taken care of itself. I reassured Shorter-Than-Me-san of my immortality, but tossed the rest of the deadly green so as not to creep her out.

Now I’m wondering if I’ll get a refund if I take my receipt down to the store – I only bought the stuff within the past two days, I’ve probably still got it somewhere. That spinach was the expensive organic stuff, I want my $5 back.

Yeah. So extremely minor brushes with death are funny.

Last night I made brownies. The ventilation in the kitchen isn’t very good, so the door’s propped open all the time, meaning that you could smell my brownies all over the bottom floor of the house.

I was just coming down the stairs after a trip to the store, and smelled brownies again. I’ve enabled someone.

Two classes today – one had five students, one had three. Both only got finalized a couple weeks ago.

So it was kind of a weird day.

The other four people in computer science were either sophomores or freshmen, all of whom had just finished up the prerequisite the previous semester/year. I took the prerequisite first semester of freshman year. Listening to the guy talk was kind of panic-inducing, but the actual text didn’t look at all bad when I started looking at it. This is the same set of reactions I had when I took the first class freshmen year, which was an easy A – I think it’ll be okay.

The professor was obviously worried about this random senior’s presence amongst his delicate little majors/minors, however, so I promised him I’d drop the course if it started to look like I was going to hold them up.

Modern East Asia, on the other hand, was very on-the-other-hand. It is being taught by a grad student who only signed his contract last Thursday – Professor Portentous, the usual East Asian history teacher, is out of commission for the semester for medical reasons, and the guy who was originally slotted to replace him had a family emergency. Hence, Grad Student. The class consists of:

* The Voice – a senior East Asian Studies minor, whose nickname I did not select at random, and who has been known to annex entire discussion periods even having blown off the reading. When I entered the room, he was earnestly suggesting to Grad Student methods of shutting him up, up to and including force.

* me – a senior East Asian Studies major who did a semester-long research project in Grad Student’s pet subject (the Japanese military medical corps) last semester. (project previously featured in this journal as “essaypocalypse”) Also, when Grad Student asked us to define “history,” I worked “constructed narrative” into my schpiel, which thrilled him – according to the people taking the early morning section of the class, this is his very favorite phrase. Oops.

* a guy who’s taking the class for a GE

GE guy looked very sad. I don’t know if they’re going to keep the class if he drops.

(Though Shorter-Than-Me-san, who’s in the morning section, said something vague about transferring over, which would be good. I really don’t want to rearrange my whole schedule again…)

Professor Portentous sent me a very apologetic email about how sad he was to have to be canceling his classes. (I think he sent personal ones to all the seniors.) This alarmed me slightly, and I reassured him that everything was just fine and he really ought to go back to bed. Now I kind of see why he was so fretful. His department’s not really prepared to lose both him and Shitty Art Teacher at once.

On the other hand, we do apparently have four Real Actual Japanese People on the faculty all of a sudden – I think we’d only actually planned for one, the Noh dance teacher, as of the end of last semester. The others are a replacement for Shitty Art Teacher (I have her class tomorrow); a second language teacher to take over the Intermediate class from Sensei; and apparently some kind of music teacher – I’m not sure whether she’s associated with the East Asian department or not, but she was in the library yesterday. These all seem to be older people (not grad students), which obviously isn’t a guarantee of responsibility, but hopefully their presence will help keep Sensei and Mr. Smuckles from overheating.

Ahh, yes. School is starting. Time to get back on a sensible sleep schedule – 3:30 AM to noon.

(Except not on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I guess. I need to talk to the dude about whether I really need that 10:00…)

There are some football players in full uniform out in the tall grass, looking puzzled. Either they lost a ball or they fell from the sky.

(This text was originally posted on LiveJournal. It has been reformatted (awkwardly) for use on WordPress.)

Oh, my god.

I might have driven Shitty Art Teacher away. She’s gone. She was tenured and her picture was on advertisements and she’s gone.

One semester after I sent in my horrible, nasty, mean, signed evaluation. A year after The Voice, who did the same thing, returned to haunt her.

Oh, my god.

The world probably doesn’t revolve around me, or even the anime club, but… seriously. I get the idea that people have only started getting really nasty about her the past couple years, and I know she’s really thin-skinned. Did I help break her?

I was just going, “I HAVE THE POWER” at first, but now I’m trying to figure out if I should feel guilty. I mean… tenure. She didn’t have to quit, she could have just stopped sucking, or something…

…

( And now, the happy post, written pre-the-first-stirrings-of-a-guilty-conscience: )

Edited to put a cut in, ’cause it was long.

Continue reading “Scary Monks = an okay band name”

Some girl said “reshape the framework of our viewpoint.”

I was scribbling stuff I found amusing in my notebook the whole time, but I’m too tired to type it up suddenly and am going to bed.

A couple minutes ago, a bunch of I-think-drunk-people stopped in on one of the girls down the hall, who was, at the time, in bed with her dude. The door was unlocked, and the girl and the dude laid off for a second and told them to come on in anyway. The drunk people had much to say about this as they left.

Following this encounter, the sex in the other room got audibly more energetic.

Frat boys scream a lot. Someday one of them’s actually going to be hurt outside my window, and I won’t call 911, because I’ll assume he’s just agitated about a commercial for an energy drink.

The last class of the semester was comm. Here are my notes in full:

I spent about fifteen minutes trying to decide what he was saying, and then the school year was over.

I walked out of the health center this morning with a paper bag containing:

* 1 box of Sudafed

* 1 bottle of Mucinex

* 2 packages of throat lozenges

* 8 packets of salt (for warm salt water for gargling)

* 6 packets of honey (for tea)

The sorts of things they hand out down there amuse me. I wonder if they also keep tomato juice for people wandering in with hangovers.

The nurse was very insistent about the curative powers of the honey, and my throat is presently so swollen I can feel *exactly* where the air’s going when I breathe, so I just used half of one of the packets. I feel completely justified in saying that you people who sweeten tea are criminals.

I nearly missed the mandatory East Asian department meeting because I was drugged and sleepy and totally forgot. I only left my room because I couldn’t get hold of Professor Portentous on the phone, and needed to ask for an extension on a paper. I went up to his office, saw that it was still empty, and laid down on the couch out front for a few minutes to wait, until The Artist who Formerly Wore a Beret All the Time pointed out to me that he was probably at the meeting.

So I staggered in something like forty-five minutes late, and Sensei, Mr. Smuckles, and Professor Portentous all laughed at me. I am not expected to be responsible.

There is an award ($500) that they give out to the really studious Chinese majors, and to absolutely no one’s surprise, this year’s went to The Tao. They’d made The Tao give a speech about his senior research, as an example to the rest of us of the proper way to do it, and I cleverly timed my entrance to right in the middle of this speech. I should argue that The Tao is only able to exist within the East Asian department because I am here to counterbalance him, and that therefore I should get $500, too.

A combination of the quality of the material my cheap jeans were made with, and the positioning of the expensive MP3 player in my pocket over the past couple of hours, has inflicted upon me an irritating dermatological condition which I term “nerdrash.”

Don’t steal my term, jerks.*

The buds on the tree I can see out the hall window get bigger every day. Tomorrow morning I expect to find that they have, sometime during the night, suddenly exploded into monstrous, bloated, cabbage-like growths, smashing some poor frat dude too drunk to ever have known what hit him into the window. His slow slide to the ground will leave a sickening smear of blood and pollen trailing down the glass. Also, arbitrary alliteration.

Spring is malevolent. I keep *sneezing* and stuff.

* It’d be even better if I could somehow connect this with Passover.

Fire alarms are a sport, and points are awarded based on the number of people who were in the shower. This time, the score was two.

I think you win if the RA’s naked.

Today’s (yesterday’s) methods by which I have amused/discomfited the masses while sleep-deprived and panicking for various good reasons:

Prof. Portentous: The question is, do I have the tests graded. The answer is, yes.

Me, “These-aren’t-the-droids-you’re-looking-for” voice: I don’t think you *really* have the tests graded.

Prof. Portentous: Oh, you don’t, do you. Do you think I should wait to give them out?

Me, continuing: In fact, I think the tests were lost in a… freak anteater accident…

Prof. Portentous: Yeah, pass those around, please.

-

Me, checking out a book with scary red eyes on the cover to Real-Tall-san: I’m laughing at your book… there’s too many books with scary eyes on the cover sitting back there, especially glowy red eyes…

Real-Tall-san, nervously: Heh heh…

Me: It’s what you put on books about terrorists or cryptography, there’s like laws about it -

Real-Tall-san, faintly offended: Okay, so next time I’ll -

Me: You should be more careful!

-

Me, answering the phone: Library Circulation, may I help you?

Person on line: [stuff my co-worker couldn't hear]

Me: …Jesus?

Co-worker: *looks up at me very slowly*

The girl on the line had been asking about a video titled “Jesus,” of which we had three. Since she’d called on the phone rather than checking the online catalog, naturally she could not identify which of them she wanted, and naturally each was in a slightly different state of availability.

Doing the headcount is annoying. There’s something about a student worker walking around with a clipboard that makes college students think they’re being written by Arthur Miller – there are always suspicious looks, and on weekday evenings, at least one person giving me a hostile, openly defiant look until I get off her turf. (It’s mostly girls who do this, for some reason. There is one guy who’s always in the stacks, always closes his book when he sees me, and having learned to recognize me as a library employee, now glares whenever he runs into me anywhere on campus. I have this self-destructive impulse to order him to Respect My Authori-tay.)

I don’t know what these people think I’m doing – I can’t decide if it would calm them down or make it worse if I started, say, pointing with my pencil while I’m counting, to make it obvious what’s going on. Maybe they think we go around looking for people who are eating – which actually *isn’t* against the rules – or who have cell phones out – which is, but mostly isn’t enforced, since it’s a general campus-wide thing that no one ever turns their phone off, and we’d never have time for actual work – breathe and think tea thoughts. Or maybe they think we’re looking to see who’s making a mess, since the ones who have laid out a perimeter of paper wads and Red Bull cans usually get the weirdest. If they’re so worried about being called on that, perhaps they ought give ease to their tortured consciences, and clean up after themselves.

(By the way – people who leave food in out-of-the-way corners of the stacks? I know God (she’s in my KoL guild, likes to play as a Disco Bandit) and she told me last week, you’re going straight to hell. You don’t even get to hang with Charon, they send a guy around with a *truck*. Take you right down to the cold place with that big head.)

I’ve seen one of the supervisors doing the count, and people actually didn’t react as badly to her as they do to the student workers. (I think I’m extra-sensitive to this, but it’s not just me that sets them off. No one pays attention when I’ve got a truckful of books, it’s the clipboard that makes them antsy.) I guess it’s because the supervisors are older and seem more like legitimate authority figures, the kind of people who have the *right* to carry a clipboard around and look at you. What would give me that right? A name tag? A lanyard with some keys? – no, half of everyone has a lanyard at this school, they’re like sleep disorders. What if I wore a lab coat, and held, um, held some *medication*? What would a psych student doing a behavior study carry around, flash cards or something?

I don’t think it really bothers me, but every time I see someone trying to hide from the clipboard, I just want to confirm all their darkest fears – ask the guy holding the Little Red Book if I can “please see some ID,” or tell someone to lift their feet like I want to pick up some garbage under their chair, then examine the soles of their shoes and explain in a grim cop-show voice that we’re still looking for the soda-spill perp. Walk past someone, stop abruptly and turn around to look at them again, look down at the clipboard, look up one more time to be *totally sure*, then hurry out. And one of the turf warrior girls would chase after me shouting out her inchoate suspicions about the Patriot Act and smoking bans, and there’d be a tense confrontation, and I’d get fired when six or seven people showed up the next day with signs protesting the new library policy against bangs.

One day, I will doubtless become so amused by airport security that I end up at the bottom of a dogpile. I apologize in advance to those in line behind me.

Maybe I’ll make a nametag that says “Attacked Mystification P.D.”

I have no idea why I am awake.

In preparation for this most holy of days, I yesterday placed these all over the dining halls. Two of the dining halls. I didn’t feel like walking over to the third one, I don’t believe in putting that much effort into my pranks. (I tried to come up with one make fun of the anti-porn speaker they’re having Monday, but couldn’t think of anything that wouldn’t get me in trouble.)

Argh, in KOL the Spectral Pickle Factory appeared today, but I didn’t notice until I’d already used all my turns up in the Thugnderdome. It also took me about five minutes to realize that *maybe* the main page had disappeared because of, you know, what *day* it is. I really shouldn’t be awake.