Thrilling heroics at an affordable price.
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Weeee! I didn’t even know this. I should walk through the MU Quad more often!
Link to Slashdot’s “Slashback” article… OSU’s blurb is at the bottom
Take Back The Sidewalk! Spread Firefox site too. :) :) :)
In Other News: I hope all you browncoats who are probably starting to loiter outside the theater in Portland all DIE have a great time at the movie.
Quote of the Day:
Gav (7:53): I am complex like a centipede–many, many redundant simple parts.
*sigh* Trying to write a stupid paper… gawd. this is hard. Ridiculous how difficult it is to write a paper that I am actually interested in. Or… maybe I’m interested in it because it’s challenging. Maybe both. Whatever. It’s still due tomorrow and I don’t have time to be fucking around not writing it. Go read about naturalized epistemology. I dare you. I double-dog dare you.
In Other News: I just breezed through a midterm and got pissed off about it. I didn’t slack off all weekend and then FREAK OUT and CRAM SINCE 5am this morning so that the midterm would be CAKE. bloody hell.
Wonderful complex ambiguity in Henry James’ stuff. My freshman year, I read Daisy Miller and started to write a cyber-punk “version” of that story (very bad. don’t ask for a copy) because I was so impressed with the skill involved in building and creating doubt, questioning, and a fundamental inability to know the truth of the story.
In Gavin’s words, Ahern’s a ninja because he says stuff like “If any of you say ‘the author leaves it up to the reader to decide the truth’ in one of your papers, I’ll smack you.” I know he was trying to drive home that explanations are to be found in the text but the same can be applied to pieces where explanations are deliberately left out, and must be accepted that way.
I like writers who refuse to anchor their work in some kind of logic. Not because I “don’t want to know”, but because I think complexity and subjectivity should be more celebrated. It’s a better representation of the “human condition” (*gags*) than trying to rationalize and attribute X to an either/or kind of “enlightened” understanding.
Tim O’Brien’s In The Lake of the Woods is also a book I’d bear children for.
For the record, I’m on chapter 8 of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw.
So, today I had two meetings, neither of which involved me contributing anything accept laughter at Geff for leaving us to pick up his tab the night before after our Budget-request thingie. I was slightly annoyed at the website meeting though, because the first half was basically my boss and co-worker talking about security issues with authenticating our future userbase… all of this I pretty much followed, if not totally understood. I can listen to people discussing security issues and contrary to popular anti-feminist belief, my brain does not turn off. The thing that irritated me was that when it came time for my boss to ask me how the design aspect of development was going, he immediately “dumbed down” his language, to the point that he should have been embarrassed. Yes, I know how to install extensions on firefox, and you don’t need to be surprised when I do it right in front of you. Yes, I know how to upload a static html file to my onid account. Yes, I know how to locate and view a page’s css. My co-worker also seemed to notice, and tried to enter the conversation on a more “normal” level, asking me more specific questions… but my boss maybe didn’t quite notice that.
*sigh* The problem is that I’m probably to blame, because I don’t know how to talk about what I understand. I can make webpages. I even know a little php. I’m learning how to work with more advanced web design stuff, and well on my way to understanding how xaraya themes work. I can modify and write css and “make shit look cool”, and make it work across various browsers, but because of my lack of group-experience, I’ve never had to actually talk and discuss stuff… so I don’t know what things are called, or how group-procedure is generally done. So if I would just learn the vocabulary/diction/discourse that they are involved in, and pushed myself into the conversations a little more, maybe he would stop thinking of me as an archetypal “non-technical girl”.
The funny thing is, my boss’s wife is apparently pretty feminist-ish… so it’s kind of funny that he seems to default to this way of interacting with me. It’s probably NOT because I’m a girl though… I should give him the benefit of the doubt… he’d probably talk like this to any guy who appeared to have the lack of understanding that he seems to think I have…
Anyway… that’s all for now I think. I have seven chapters of The Turn of the Screw to read… and a crappy Philosopy paper on Descartes (*pukes*) to write… and a nihongo test to study for… and a pallet page to make, and some layout mockups to make, and some MLA research to do…
And it’s all going to make me explode at some point soon because my personal life is growing more and more tense… and the more I try to ignore it, the more it scratches at the window. (I’m telling you… androgyny would be nice! demo, I think there’s something wrong with me if I’m trying to cut myself off from the very things that make us human beings and not ants. )
P.S. Hi and *hugs* to . I had no idea you were still lurking around livejournal. Glad to see that you are. ^_____^
Oxymoron of the day: significant minorities.
Word of the day: kokusaika (国際化）：the discourse of “internationalization”. I’m reading about how that word actually seems to mean “Americanization” and the significance of that disparity. Kinda interesting.
This is what I’m working on right now. A five-page essay on nietzsche.
Give me feedback NOW BITCH!
Among the many related concepts explored in “On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense”, Nietzsche describes a human existence in which it is impossible to ever directly experience or understand what reality actually is. He bases this philosophy on the idea that because we are unable to remove ourselves from our world and see it from an objective viewpoint, we can never hope to perceive more than the stimuli that reach our senses. According to Nietzsche, it is merely the “nerve stimulus”(82), which is already once removed from the original source that is then transferred into an “image” (82) or thought, no more than a metaphor, and then into sound and finally words. These then become our understanding of our world. However, these several degrees of separation between the original “thing in itself” (82) and our understanding of that thing prevent us from truly grasping its truth. Keeping this aspect of Nietzsche’s philosophy in mind, an inescapable paradox reveals itself when it is recognized that Nietzsche cannot hope to effectively convey or discuss the actual truth or reality implied by his essay using human language. A discussion of just the diction used in the text of the essay, even in a translated version, provides evidence that language can never be used to effectively convey the exact truth that Nietzsche hopes to reveal. This paradox then turns back upon itself when it is realized that the fact that language fails Nietzsche not only undermines and weakens the validity of his idea of an inaccessible truth outside ourselves, but also provides the strongest evidence in support of it.
Yeah. that is one paragraph. The intro at that. But according to MSword, it is a full page. :) So… only four more like it to go. And btw, ignore my incorrect citations. Fuck figuring out which citation style he wants.
Yeah… you know I secretly love this shit, right?
First class was Japanese… at bloody 8am. Gawd. Coffee shops are not even open in time for me to grab some caffeine before class either. Stupid coffee shops. I’m going to really dislike that morning class. Oh well.
I walked into my second class all stoked and happy because it meets in the spiffy-neat engineering building. (why do engineers get all the cool buildings?) I walked in early, and pretty soon the place was packed with lots of big loud male students. The first sign that something was wrong was the fact that everyone (all 2 or 3 hundred of them) seemed to know each other. Then I overheard much talk about engineering. Luckily, someone near me opened up their schedule to show someone, and I caught a glimpse of what class this really was. A 300-level engineering class. whoopie! So not CSS. hah. So I politely excused myself and about four other guys literally fought over my seat.
So, now I’ve got another 45 minutes to kill before I get to learn about dirt and shit. No, really. Dirt and shit. Crop and Soil Sciences, yo.
In Other News: I saw someone wearing a livejournal tee shirt on my way out of Japanese. I was too chicken to say hi though… maybe she’s a member of . For some reason, it made me think about how cool it would be if I could have a tee shirt that said I maintain <lj comm=”oregonstate”>. God, I’m so self-absorbed.
I’m calling this temporary cease=fire with Direct Loans ONLY because their office hours are now over. (Fuck office hours).
What I learned today:
There are a few things I need to find out in order to completely understand how to get my grace period back.
For example: In my Direct Loans “Borrower’s Rights and Responsibilities”, it clearly states when a borrower’s grace period begins. (The day “enrollment” falls below a certain point) However, it does not clearly state when the grace-period ends. If I can find something that says that it ends when 6-months pass and student remains not enrolled, then I know I’m right. It would be only a small task to prove that the date I registered for Fall classes was LONG before Sept. 21st.
However, if I find something that states that the grace period ends when 6 months pass and ’student is not attending class‘ or ’school-term has not yet begun’, then I’m in trouble.
In that possible case, I am not sure how far I could get with my original “I was misadvised in March by OSU Financial AID office” argument because I have nothing to document the conversation that led me to decide to take Spring term off in the first place.
I’m told that the last thing I’ll be able to do is submit a letter explaining my situation and OSU’s various offices will “see what we can do”. The Financial Aid office even said that they doubted they could do anything at all (bad form, you!), but to “keep it in mind.”
*sigh* I’m tired now.
In Other News: For shits and giggles, I downloaded an NES emulator and started playing Legend of Zelda. For the record: that game is infuriating. I’m coming to understand that players are expected to die a million times in order to get ANYWHERE. Wah. that just feels like cheating. But then again, I got hooked on gaming no sooner than N64-era games (And LATE N64-era at that.), so I don’t know what all this old-school shit is really all about.
Question for those who have played LoZ: You can buy arrows in one of the caves… where the fuck do you get the bow? I can’t use them. and I want to. wah.
If… my FAFSA transaction number is something like [04], does that mean I was the [4th] person to apply for financial aid this year? (I did apply a mere 48-or-so hours after they started accepting applications…)
That’s good right?
Wow. Maybe I’ll get work-study. :) :)
