I, being male, am immature sometimes. No excuse.
For instance, a good number of the RAs in my building this year have formed a running joke. Once or twice ever couple weeks, each RA has to be "on duty" for a night, which means we check the building periodically, take care of problems that arise, and do other RA type things. We, being the exceedingly mature individuals that we are, quickly noticed that "duty" sounds a lot like "doodie", a.k.a. poo. Therefore, whenever someone says "I'm on duty tonight" at least one or two other people will response with "heh heh heh... doodie."
Cause we're awesome like that.
However, today I was vindicated. In my creative writing class, we were reviewing each other papers. One girl read a piece she had written about a friend who pooed his pants in a K-mart. The teacher pointed out once she was done reading it that there had been a number of papers regarding poo/butts/toilets, but that surprisingly none of them had been written by guys. Most of the time, us males are responsible for the scat humor, but in this class, all of the papers regarding poo were the work of womenfolk.
I guess poo humor isn't restricted to purely the male species. Phew.
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Friday, April 23, 2010
Woe Is Me... Or Not
This semester I had to take a creative writing class. Despite a little skepticism early in the semester, I've realized that it has probably been my favorite class of any of the classes I've taken at my current college. I enjoy it FAR more than any of the engineering classes I'm currently taking. That's a post for a later, though.
Right now, I wanted to focus on the topics that people choose. I feel like a lot of work, especially poetry, deals with very dark or very sad topics, and it bothers me a little bit.
Don't get me wrong, I understand why these topics are so prevalent. Unfortunate as it is, the dark and sad end of the spectrum of human emotion is probably stronger than its opposite counterpart. The experiences that leave behind some of the greatest marks are often negative ones. Therefore it makes sense that writing which stems from the thoughts and feelings and experiences of the author should reflect this to a degree.
But here's the thing. We aren't in communist Russia. We aren't oppressed and threatened with death every day. Most of us have pretty decent lives, especially compared to the rest of the world. We all have rough or low spots. We all have bad things happen to us. But we should remember the good things as well.
For that reason, I've made an effort over the past few weeks to write pieces that reflect a little of life's joy. I try to make people laugh with my work. Or if not laugh, then smile. Or if not smile, then appreciate. I want to balance the bad with some of the good. Because I'm a believer that if you tell yourself your life is miserable, then you will be miserable. If you remind yourself of the good things you have in the various aspects of your life, you'll remain a much more balanced and even-keeled person.
Not all of my work has been happy or encouraging, and I'm not saying that my classmates are wrong to write about heavy or depressing topics. I just want to keep things in perspective.
Now if you'll excuse me, this post tastes too much like optimism for my likings. I think I'll go sit in my chair and imagine 1000 different ways for the world to be destroyed. :P
Right now, I wanted to focus on the topics that people choose. I feel like a lot of work, especially poetry, deals with very dark or very sad topics, and it bothers me a little bit.
Don't get me wrong, I understand why these topics are so prevalent. Unfortunate as it is, the dark and sad end of the spectrum of human emotion is probably stronger than its opposite counterpart. The experiences that leave behind some of the greatest marks are often negative ones. Therefore it makes sense that writing which stems from the thoughts and feelings and experiences of the author should reflect this to a degree.
But here's the thing. We aren't in communist Russia. We aren't oppressed and threatened with death every day. Most of us have pretty decent lives, especially compared to the rest of the world. We all have rough or low spots. We all have bad things happen to us. But we should remember the good things as well.
For that reason, I've made an effort over the past few weeks to write pieces that reflect a little of life's joy. I try to make people laugh with my work. Or if not laugh, then smile. Or if not smile, then appreciate. I want to balance the bad with some of the good. Because I'm a believer that if you tell yourself your life is miserable, then you will be miserable. If you remind yourself of the good things you have in the various aspects of your life, you'll remain a much more balanced and even-keeled person.
Not all of my work has been happy or encouraging, and I'm not saying that my classmates are wrong to write about heavy or depressing topics. I just want to keep things in perspective.
Now if you'll excuse me, this post tastes too much like optimism for my likings. I think I'll go sit in my chair and imagine 1000 different ways for the world to be destroyed. :P
Pretty Lights
My best friend pointed my to a band called Pretty Lights earlier this year (bless his soul), and I figured I'd pass along the goodness. Derek Smith, the guy who is behind Pretty Lights, gives away his music for free. All you have to do is go to the Pretty Lights website and download it. If that's not enough reason to check it out, I don't know what is.
Stylistically, Pretty Lights is something different from anything I've ever heard. The best way I could convey what it is to you without actually having you listen to it would be to have you imagine something like this:
You are driving through a city late at night. Any light from the moon is drowned out by the garish colors of the various city lights shining through the windshield. Everything around you seems to blur by, a surrealistic blur of motion that never coalesces into distinguishable shape. As you drive, you feel entirely calm and relaxed, almost to the point of being disconnected. You simply cruise forward without thought or destination.
Got the image? Good. Pretty lights is the music you would be listening during this.
I introduced a friend at my college to Pretty Lights, and he had a similar response. He is a snowboarder, and he said that it made him think of cruising down some mountain on his board, gliding through the darkness, taking the occasional easy jump, and making long, lazy slashes through the snow. That sounded about right to me.
Anyway, if you're reading this and you haven't listened to Pretty Lights before, you should go and remedy that. It's some of the best cruising/chilling music that I've found.
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
No Small Feat
It's a great big feat! Crikey, look at the size of 'im!
Earlier this week, I reached a milestone. I finished my first novel. Wow. I still feel weird saying that. I write novels? Since when?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I've created a masterpiece just yet. In fact, I've been doing a lot more learning that masterpiece creating. Writing a book is an enormous and involved task. A novel is not just a really long paper. Way more sophistication and depth is required in a novel than in a paper, and it's by no means easy. I'm learning as I go how to make characters that are realistic, interesting, and worth reading. I'm learning the importance of various elements of story line. I'm learning why certain techniques that author's use are important.
Nonetheless, I wrote a book.
It's been a heavy investment of time, thought, and sometimes even emotion. I've spent almost a year now planning, writing, and rewriting my story, and I'm just getting warmed up. I've loved every bit of it, though. I'll often be sitting in class or doing something else and suddenly I realize I'm thinking about my story world, considering possible future plot points or character traits that I want to tweak. Or I'll see something that will spark a really cool idea for a setting. I really enjoy getting to create a world in which I can make anything happen.
For now, though, I'm going to be spending a while going back through with successively finer combs, cleaning and polishing and changing and doing all those other edit-y sort of things to my book. In the end, I'd like to submit it to an agent and see if I can get myself published, as I realized a while back that that is what I'd really like to do with my life.
Here's hoping it goes well.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
This Is My Job
Life as an RA has been pretty good so far. The job is easy, and I haven't even ever had to deal with much more than telling people to shut up after quiet hours.
Enter this weekend.
I should've known it couldn't last. This weekend, I had to bust my first party, clean up my first vomit, and fix my first prank. All of these things were separate instances, which means that they take up even more time than if they had all been together. Things could have been a LOT worse, I'll admit that readily. I've heard of many a weekend that has had many times the number of incidents I had to deal with. Still, this weekend wasn't a lot of fun to deal with.
Busting the party went as well as it possibly could have. I had an experienced RA backing me up, and the residents were very cooperative. Still, I spent more than an hour of my Friday evening watching people poor alcohol down a drain and then writing about it. Yay.
Saturday night, I was going my 2:00 rounds, and I walked into one of the bathrooms and immediately felt something slippery. Great. Someone had vomited all over the place. A student was already in there trying to clean it up, but wasn't really equipped for the task. I told him I'd take care of it and sent him along. The building is equipped with these spill kits, which actually work very well for what they're supposed to do, so cleaning it up wasn't that bad. Still, it wasn't exactly pretty, and I'd rather have spent the time doing something else.
Then, as the group of people I'd been playing games with left the lobby, we found a prank someone had pulled sitting on the middle of the floor. I gotta hand it to the guys, it was a pretty harmless prank. They'd found a way to open the paper towel dispensers in the bathrooms and taken every single paper towel roll from the whole hall and used them to build a five foot pyramid in the middle of the hall. It looked like they'd spent some time figuring out how to do it quickly, so props for planning. Still, a fellow RA and myself would have had to go and replace them all, which would have taken a while. We didn't have the tool to open the paper towel dispensers, though, and neither of us felt like dealing with it, so we just threw all the paper towels in the office and figured people could do without for a few days.
Over the course of the weekend, I started to get frustrated, but then I stopped to think. The vast majority of the time (meaning the entirety of the year up til this point) has been pretty cushy. Sitting in the office for our duty hours is easy... most of the time we just play games. Staff meetings are actually fairly fun, and I don't mind going to them at all. Program ideas can be hard to come up with, but execution isn't all that hard and you usually get to do some fun stuff along with the residents who attend. Training is boring, but the same goes for any job.
So when things fall apart and I have to take care of them? Well, that's what they pay me for. I don't have much cause to get frustrated with a few things that go wrong, because the school compensates me (pretty darn well) for dealing with things that go wrong. I knew that coming in, too, so I don't have any excuse.
In the end, I decided that I'll gladly deal with the occasional mess or party, because the benefits of this job far outweigh the occasional crappy times. If nothing else, this weekend helped me gain a little perspective on that matter.
Enter this weekend.
I should've known it couldn't last. This weekend, I had to bust my first party, clean up my first vomit, and fix my first prank. All of these things were separate instances, which means that they take up even more time than if they had all been together. Things could have been a LOT worse, I'll admit that readily. I've heard of many a weekend that has had many times the number of incidents I had to deal with. Still, this weekend wasn't a lot of fun to deal with.
Busting the party went as well as it possibly could have. I had an experienced RA backing me up, and the residents were very cooperative. Still, I spent more than an hour of my Friday evening watching people poor alcohol down a drain and then writing about it. Yay.
Saturday night, I was going my 2:00 rounds, and I walked into one of the bathrooms and immediately felt something slippery. Great. Someone had vomited all over the place. A student was already in there trying to clean it up, but wasn't really equipped for the task. I told him I'd take care of it and sent him along. The building is equipped with these spill kits, which actually work very well for what they're supposed to do, so cleaning it up wasn't that bad. Still, it wasn't exactly pretty, and I'd rather have spent the time doing something else.
Then, as the group of people I'd been playing games with left the lobby, we found a prank someone had pulled sitting on the middle of the floor. I gotta hand it to the guys, it was a pretty harmless prank. They'd found a way to open the paper towel dispensers in the bathrooms and taken every single paper towel roll from the whole hall and used them to build a five foot pyramid in the middle of the hall. It looked like they'd spent some time figuring out how to do it quickly, so props for planning. Still, a fellow RA and myself would have had to go and replace them all, which would have taken a while. We didn't have the tool to open the paper towel dispensers, though, and neither of us felt like dealing with it, so we just threw all the paper towels in the office and figured people could do without for a few days.
Over the course of the weekend, I started to get frustrated, but then I stopped to think. The vast majority of the time (meaning the entirety of the year up til this point) has been pretty cushy. Sitting in the office for our duty hours is easy... most of the time we just play games. Staff meetings are actually fairly fun, and I don't mind going to them at all. Program ideas can be hard to come up with, but execution isn't all that hard and you usually get to do some fun stuff along with the residents who attend. Training is boring, but the same goes for any job.
So when things fall apart and I have to take care of them? Well, that's what they pay me for. I don't have much cause to get frustrated with a few things that go wrong, because the school compensates me (pretty darn well) for dealing with things that go wrong. I knew that coming in, too, so I don't have any excuse.
In the end, I decided that I'll gladly deal with the occasional mess or party, because the benefits of this job far outweigh the occasional crappy times. If nothing else, this weekend helped me gain a little perspective on that matter.
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
n00bs!
I was walking around my dorm and hanging up signs for a Frisbee event that I'm putting on (part of the RA gig), and I heard someone playing Halo. I could recognize the sounds of the campaign (the arbiter yelling, Cortana talking at you, etc.) and could even place which part of which level they were on (because I'm that big of a nerd).
The impressive thing was that I could pick all this out from the next floor down. They were on the third floor, I was still in the stairwell of the second floor. I figured it must be a room right next to the third floor stairwell, but I walked up and glanced around (continuing to hang signs) and didn't see any doors open. As I headed down the hallway, I realized that the sounds were coming from a room almost at the end of the floor. And they kept getting louder. A lot louder. As in thunderously loud. I glanced through open doors as I walked along, looking for the enormous setup that must be generating all this sound. Then I found it. And laughed. A lot.
The guys who were playing had an enormous surround sound system (an amp, giant speakers, a subwoofer the size of a small car, etc.)... and a tiny little TV. This thing couldn't have been over 23 inches. It looked so lonely and pathetic sitting there amidst all those speakers. I was seriously expecting an 80 inch plasma. Anything else would have (and did) seem silly when paired with all that sound.
How does someone put all that money into a sound system and not get a decent TV to go with? Maybe the sound system and TV belonged to different roommates and they'd decided to just throw it together. Or maybe they're silly. Hmm... yep, I think I'll go with just silly.
The impressive thing was that I could pick all this out from the next floor down. They were on the third floor, I was still in the stairwell of the second floor. I figured it must be a room right next to the third floor stairwell, but I walked up and glanced around (continuing to hang signs) and didn't see any doors open. As I headed down the hallway, I realized that the sounds were coming from a room almost at the end of the floor. And they kept getting louder. A lot louder. As in thunderously loud. I glanced through open doors as I walked along, looking for the enormous setup that must be generating all this sound. Then I found it. And laughed. A lot.
The guys who were playing had an enormous surround sound system (an amp, giant speakers, a subwoofer the size of a small car, etc.)... and a tiny little TV. This thing couldn't have been over 23 inches. It looked so lonely and pathetic sitting there amidst all those speakers. I was seriously expecting an 80 inch plasma. Anything else would have (and did) seem silly when paired with all that sound.
How does someone put all that money into a sound system and not get a decent TV to go with? Maybe the sound system and TV belonged to different roommates and they'd decided to just throw it together. Or maybe they're silly. Hmm... yep, I think I'll go with just silly.
Om Nom Nom!
Our dining food center isn't great. It's generally a dozen or so meals recycled over the course of a few weeks, with a very small bit of variety thrown in there. One thing I appreciate, though, is the fresh fruit selections they sometimes put out.
I'm a kiwi fiend, and one of their selections is a big pan of halved kiwis, of which I usually take about a half dozen. Kiwis are delicious.
Today, though, I walked into the dining center and, low and behold, I was greeted by piles of fresh, delicious-looking, gleaming-red strawberries. I love me some strawberries. It definitely made my day better. After all, I don't often get to pig out on as many of those delectable little morsels as I can eat. Hopefully they will continue to have them during the last few weeks of school!
Monday, April 12, 2010
Constructive Criticism
One of my friends already wrote a blog post regarding getting decent feedback from people. I don't care, I'm going to do it anyway.
I really hate the phrase "I liked it". More often than not, whenever I'm working with peer review groups, 90% of what people say to each other are "I liked it" or "it was good" or maybe, if they're feeling ambitious, "I liked the way you..."
That's all good and well, and I understand that people want to be careful not to rip on people and make them feel bad, but come revising time, the only comments that help are the negative ones. Because they point out something wrong, which you can then make better. The past few times I've sat down to revise, I've had next to no commentary to help me, and I've ended up just changing things because I'm not sure what to revise. It's somewhat frustrating.
I really hate the phrase "I liked it". More often than not, whenever I'm working with peer review groups, 90% of what people say to each other are "I liked it" or "it was good" or maybe, if they're feeling ambitious, "I liked the way you..."
That's all good and well, and I understand that people want to be careful not to rip on people and make them feel bad, but come revising time, the only comments that help are the negative ones. Because they point out something wrong, which you can then make better. The past few times I've sat down to revise, I've had next to no commentary to help me, and I've ended up just changing things because I'm not sure what to revise. It's somewhat frustrating.
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Cars on Strings
Today, I took a test in my materials science class. I'm fairly certain the test was put together by a monkey. A retarded monkey. With a bad cocaine addiction.
Allow my to illustrate. (Don't worry, I'll be using non-engineer speak)
Problem 1: You are asked to pick which material (copper, stainless steel or aluminum) you should use to build a 1/4 inch thick rod that will hold ten thousands pounds.
Stop and think about that for a second. A 1/4 inch thick rod is about half the width of your pinky. Ten thousand pounds is about the weight of three cars. It doesn't matter which of the three materials you use, a 1/4 inch shaft won't hold 10000 pounds. Common sense and the actual calculations (which I did) back it up.
Problem 2: Why do we use a certain type of acid to each steel instead of using water?
You don't have to know much about the problem to see what's wrong. You just have to know what that when you turn on your faucet, the only way you're going to get burned is if the water is really hot. Because water is not an acid. It doesn't burn things. That's why we don't (and can't) use it to etch steel. That's why we use acid. It's like asking you use gas to fuel your car instead of sand. Because gas works, and sand... doesn't.
There were a number of other frustrating things about the test, but they would involve getting technical, so I won't go there. The point is, professors should not write tests that are filled nonsensical questions.
*shakes head*
Allow my to illustrate. (Don't worry, I'll be using non-engineer speak)
Problem 1: You are asked to pick which material (copper, stainless steel or aluminum) you should use to build a 1/4 inch thick rod that will hold ten thousands pounds.
Stop and think about that for a second. A 1/4 inch thick rod is about half the width of your pinky. Ten thousand pounds is about the weight of three cars. It doesn't matter which of the three materials you use, a 1/4 inch shaft won't hold 10000 pounds. Common sense and the actual calculations (which I did) back it up.
Problem 2: Why do we use a certain type of acid to each steel instead of using water?
You don't have to know much about the problem to see what's wrong. You just have to know what that when you turn on your faucet, the only way you're going to get burned is if the water is really hot. Because water is not an acid. It doesn't burn things. That's why we don't (and can't) use it to etch steel. That's why we use acid. It's like asking you use gas to fuel your car instead of sand. Because gas works, and sand... doesn't.
There were a number of other frustrating things about the test, but they would involve getting technical, so I won't go there. The point is, professors should not write tests that are filled nonsensical questions.
*shakes head*
Monday, April 5, 2010
Sunday, April 4, 2010
Telephonic Talkin'
Stupid phones.
For some reason, I can't hold a decent conversation on a phone, not even to save my life. Something about talking on the phone just throws me off. There are always long awkward pauses, or I end up trying to talk at the same time as the person on the other end. No matter what I do, my conversations always tend to be staggering and unnatural. That's one of the reasons I'm not really a call-you-up-and-talk kind of person.
Luckily, I can usually hold a decent conversation when I need to, telephone handicap or not, but it's still frustrating the rest of the time.
I think part of it might be that there's a small lag with my phone that throws off my conversational timing. A larger part, though, might be that when I'm on the phone, I can't pick up many of the non-verbal cues that I rely on for timing and use to form my response. Often times people will say that 80-90% of the way we communicate in non-verbal, and while I've never been sure the number is that high, I will definitely agree that removing the non-verbal communication makes life difficult.
Some people can talk on the phone like they were born doing it, but I'm not one of them. Hope you can forgive me if I blunder my way through phone conversations. It doesn't reflect on you, I promise.
For some reason, I can't hold a decent conversation on a phone, not even to save my life. Something about talking on the phone just throws me off. There are always long awkward pauses, or I end up trying to talk at the same time as the person on the other end. No matter what I do, my conversations always tend to be staggering and unnatural. That's one of the reasons I'm not really a call-you-up-and-talk kind of person.
Luckily, I can usually hold a decent conversation when I need to, telephone handicap or not, but it's still frustrating the rest of the time.
I think part of it might be that there's a small lag with my phone that throws off my conversational timing. A larger part, though, might be that when I'm on the phone, I can't pick up many of the non-verbal cues that I rely on for timing and use to form my response. Often times people will say that 80-90% of the way we communicate in non-verbal, and while I've never been sure the number is that high, I will definitely agree that removing the non-verbal communication makes life difficult.
Some people can talk on the phone like they were born doing it, but I'm not one of them. Hope you can forgive me if I blunder my way through phone conversations. It doesn't reflect on you, I promise.
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