(warning: particularly old content) I don't ask for it to make sense 
The number of people sincerely wishing love to their wives/husbands/partners at the Oscars tonight is making me all weepy and squishy feeling. Awwwwwwwwww.
OMG yes yes yes EXACTLY.
I'm editing the workshop documentation at work at the moment. Today's bit is documentation that we will point campus newcomers to about using our labs. I think I'm going to kill myself, right after I find out who wrote the original stuff, and kill them.
The Computer Labs has several different prints, each for a certain perpose. Color, for high quality color laser prints. Special, for high quality black & white prints. Draft, for quick cheap draft prints. Select the printer appropiately.
We also give the clients the opportunity to print to the OUGL Copy Center and pay with cash. This means that they will have to go to the Copy Center to pick up their prints.
People who've never had asthma just don't understand how much breath it takes to laugh. I know this because I certainly never appreciated it until I started occasionally worrying that I'd suffocate because I couldn't stop laughing. You also think that when you're laughing you can stop if you need to, but I'm here to tell you that sometimes you can't stop even though you need to to reliably sustain your life.
This asthma shit sucks.
Highlights: picture for TC taken, mention in last year's newsletter and didn't even know it, good class discussion, funding requests in, statistically significant results in research, being a force for good on the desk. Not so good: three hours of sleep, still sick, basically everything else. Go. Bed. Now.
But for those who have missed (hah) flailing political crap... I totally agree with freaking Andrew Sullivan.
Still sick, no vocab quiz tomorrow but a one-minute-speech and a big homework assignment and lots of TC reading and more of the unending crap of this quarter. Going now.
Being sick does no good for the workload (eyes spinning). To bed early then, and hopefully I can get shit done on the morrow.
Home sick today. Up until I woke up at 6:00 am with three people's worth of snot fountaining through my sinuses, a headache from hell, and the worst sore throat I've had in years, I was foolishly convinced I'd still drag myself into work and school. Um, no. I'm rather nervously looking at the clock—sudafed + ibuprofen appears to keep the worst at bay for no longer than six hours, and I'm already three hours into my latest stint. So anyway, what to do with my unexpected extra weekend day, other than sleep (which I appear to not be able to do any more of)? I fixed some navigation bugs in the gallery code, but don't feel up to tackling the problem of too-strictly-defined directory structure today. I did my Japanese homework last night, but I suppose I could study for my vocab test. And, uh, the mountain of readings I have for my classes still needs to be done. Oh, and the 2-3 page paper for international tech comm isn't done yet. Sigh. That's it, no more fucking around for me.
In quick wrap-up of yesterday, though, Jim and I went to see about a billion bands at the first show of the Experience Hendrix tour that Hendrix's family is putting on. The best of them, though, had to be Buddy Guy. I've heard a couple pieces of his here and there (he's an old blues guy from way back), but DAMN is that guy a master showman. I've never seen anyone as in control of the stage as him. I guess that's what you get with a guy who's been a musician for something like 50 years. Good runner-up credits go to Kenny Wayne Shepherd, for going fucking nuts during his set, and for Mike McCready for showing up randomly to play a couple sets with actual scheduled people.
Yay! The Kyoto galleries are up and running! Kobe, Osaka, and Nikko still don't work, but other location-specific ones (including Engrish!) have been up since yesterday.
Still sick, sigh. I'm going to claim better part of valor and stay home from school again tomorrow. Going to TJ at 8 am tomorrow would be <Jim Carrey voice> counterproductive!! </Jim Carrey voice>. Bleh. I frigging HATE being sick.
Delicious Saturday; I rolled out of bed at 2, read a magazine, had some lunch, ran some errands. Got together with Jeff and watched oh-so-missed cable all evening. I will continue to ignore that I have stuff to do until I wake up tomorrow, thank you very much.
Trust me when I say that as a girl whose sole nod to fashion is her earrings, it was a terribly upsetting shock to be hauling clothes out of the washer and see one of my favorite earrings just balancing beyond tipping though the washer holes. I swear that I nearly cried as I pulled out the other clothes, convinced that the earring's match was already gone. I found it, but who knew that I was that damn attached to my freaking earrings??
After three hours of coding and another couple hours of tweaking images and layouts, I have determined that I totally rule. The best part being that the code that I wrote to generate zoggins-styled albums can be ported to any big collection of pictures that I have (skipping). I'm extremely pleased with myself for not resorting to using someone else's crazy album manager; I mean, sure, other people's stuff is good and all that, but for some reason the idea of not using something homebrew here on zoggins just irks the hell out of me.
Jesus, can Seattle be pretty sometimes.
I had a truly lovely "grad school" experience today. My pompous ass of a teacher declined to come to class today (he was sick), but asked that we all go anyway and discuss the articles as we had originally planned. Now, at the undergraduate level, in this situation, I doubt even one out of twenty five people would show up. In my class, all but four of us came. The four that didn't come were four out of the five that I would have predicted to not come, amusingly. It was an absolutely outstanding class; without Professor Ass to drag us all down and freak us out about discussing things in the wrong way, we had a lively and interesting discussion that really addressed the questions that we (as opposed to he) had about the readings. I really hope he's sick all next week, too. Heh.
(delighted giggle) How deliciously serendipitous—to randomly go along with Jan (aka The Best Professor A Girl Could Ask For) to a meeting of the Puget Sound STC chapter, get goaded into dumping my name into a box, and turn out to be the interviewee in an upcoming STC newsletter. I mean, it's not like it's a national publication or anything. But hey, a lot of people in the tech comm field (STC = Society for Technical Communication) in the area could read it and go "wow, this Jen girl is pretty damn sweet," and then offer me a job. Maybe. Anyway, I think it's pretty neat. I'd ramble more about it, perhaps, but I've got to get my butt going on applying for funding. I'm presenting at two conferences this coming year: The STC 51st Annual Conference in Baltimore (May), and IPCC 2004 in Minneapolis (September). Well, hopefully I'll be doing the Minneapolis one... it's inconveniently slated for the first three days of next fall quarter. I'm hoping if I'm super pro-active in contacting my future profs this spring, there won't be any issues with me not showing up for the first few days (crossing fingers). Off to convincing land I go...
OMFG I can't believe how LATE it is and I've gotten nothing DONE! (screaming)
Went and saw Master and Commander tonight, liked it, am exhausted, going to bed, thank you.
Strangely comforting old activity, working in the Commons at night. The faces of the staff are different, but some of my old favorite clients still rattle around, and I can still diagnose most problems within half a heard sentence. And, of course, I've always enjoyed the old perk of getting paid to do research or just plain surfing for content. I may be working with some of the problem staff, but I've been able to herd them out occasionally... and voila, I get to learn about The Matthew Effect as a result. I love getting paid to learn stuff.
I got to use my new inhaler for real this morning. I've tried it out a few times in the last week or two, but my new allergy meds had been working so well that it'd been more out of curiousity than anything else. I didn't grow up with asthma; my association with inhalers is all about kids at summer camp. The idea of me using one as an adult continues to be an odd one. But this morning I woke with a deep, racking cough, unable to pull more than a spoonful of air into my lungs on any given breath. So inhaler it was... and I just have to say: "Wow." The immediate physiological effect of that thing is INSANE. Cool, but INSANE.
Had the MRI and the EEG today, but I didn't get to see any pictures yet. I wanted to write something about them (particularly the MRI, which was pretty sweet), but it's 2:08 am and I have to catch a bus in exactly 5 hours. Sniffle.
My god I'm dying, and the MRI and the EEG are tomorrow. Happy happy unjoy.
Sing it with me... stress stress stress stress! I did predict it, back in Japan, that life would suck as a student and I'd bitch about it. I just forgot that when life is sucking as a student, even bitching about it takes more effort than I can expend on non-necessary activities in any given day. Blame Jim, I say; I'm actually able to complain to a sympathetic audience about my day for the first time in six months, and it's all his fault.
Today, I found the greatest thing ever: the ability to search for Calvin and Hobbes strips descriptively. Hooray for Teh Intarweb!
The only thing more disorganized than my weeks at the moment is the way I spend my weekends (which for me start on Thursdays, even if I do have to work on Fridays). But I try to do a few things each weekend that make me laugh... and today, taking a silly online test was what did it.
Can't talk, midterm and research study to prepare for. AUGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
Thoughts! Well, more like thought-no-s. I had a plurality of writable thoughts earlier, but they sapped away sometime in the past twenty minutes. More's the pity, considering that the one that's left is really the one that I least want to write down. But in a play for some meager amount of writing, I'll see what I can do in the few minutes until I get picked up.
I've spent a lot of time complaining to $people lately about the grading in my Japanese classes. Of particular annoyance to me is when I craft a well thought-out, creative, and insightful answer to a comprehension question, one that shows that I'm connecting ideas throughout the reading and assimilating the information in some sort of cogent fashion, and get my homework back with half credit or less, while other people with far less original and elaborate answers get full or nearly full credit. WTF, I think, as might anyone presented with that surface analysis. It was Erin that hit upon the key the other day, however inadvertently, when we were all bitching about class and in response to my particular complaint, she said "that's not what's important in this class." Now, at the time, I heard it (and believe she meant it) as a disparaging comment towards the teacher, in terms of Aki-sensei being congenitally incapable of appreciating and rewarding original thought, and implying that to survive, we students need to turn off our brains and become robotic answer zombies.
However, over the weekend, the surface structure of Erin's statement percolated through my head until a sad and shameful realization bubbled to the surface. Bluntly, I've been wanting and expecting Aki-sensei (and all previous Japanese teachers) to grade me on my intelligence and not on my Japanese ability.
Ride's here; I'm sure people can see where I'm going, but I'll finish after I get home and have dinner.
I spent a while talking with Jim about this whole thing while on the way home, but I don't think I clarified my thoughts about it all that much. He did come up with a good analogy for what's going on, however—I have a very elegant algorithm for my homework, but I've got stupid coding errors that my teacher is dinging me for. I may have a better answer than a classmate, but their Japanese is better. When I'm not in a me-bashing mood, I think angrily about how my teachers should see that I'm reaching for something higher, and recognize that I comprehend the material better than other people, and am striving to use more advanced Japanese. I mean, fuck, I can regurgitate grammar as well as the next person; I like to think that synthesizing and trying to actually USE grammar or vocabulary in an advanced fashion should count for something. Sadly, it really doesn't.
People have likened my Japanese classes (and Class X in general) to a game that I just have to play and suck things up... I guess I just really wanted for technical Japanese to be about something more than the same old game.
I remembered one of the other things I was going to mention, but it was a really weird bit about how I feel all weirdly motherly and guidance-y towards Rob, and I can't figure out how to develop it at the moment. So I'm thinking to write some email and go to bed at a decent hour for a Monday night (read: midnight instead of 2 am)
Another ridiculous streak of not writing, punctuated with an excuse about not writing. The problem is that the nights when I have free time to write are the nights when I end up deciding it's in my best scholastic interest to get on the million pages of reading I have to do on any given week. Sigh.
I have found it funny in the last couple days to be walking around Microsoft and feel swamped in Indians. I knew that there had been a big influx of Indian software workers, but I suppose it hadn't really occured to me that that actually translated to that many people. I hadn't wandered around inside Microsoft for a year or two, and the last time I had, I'd seen perhaps one. On Friday night, however, I saw at least five within as many minutes, and nearly half of the attendees at Kevin's SuperBowl party were. More power to them—it just surprised me.
I had something else I wanted to write when I first sat down, but I can't remember it anymore and my allergies are bugging me. Shit, never mind, remembered it. But I can't develop it properly at the moment, so reminder to self: nesting instinct discussion.