Things That Annoy Me - Today's Edition

Well, Katie's post concerning the errant loogies has reminded me of some habits that I can be crotchety at. ;)

First, yes, hawking loogies or spitting at heavily trafficked places. I can understand, if every once in a while you get all phlegmy because you have a cold or what not, you can't swallow it, and you just have to get it out. Then hold it in, do it in a trash can. Do it in a sink but wash it away. If you're outdoors, do it in a bush or off the trail. But I don't want to have to walk around your large, cruddy phlegm marks on the sidewalk. And when I see you doing it two or three times in about thirty seconds, that's a problem. You and Pavlov need to have a talk, because there isn't a bell ringing that I can see.

/horrible pun

Second, not flushing after you use a urinal. It seems like, much of the time when I use one, it hasn't been flushed. Why do they do that? Do they expect it to flush itself? Don't they know that by the second or third time someone does that it smells of stale urine? The bathroom doesn't have to smell like that!

But today! Oh today. I actually saw someone not flush. Twice. At different times of day. Both times in the dining hall bathroom, where I often go anyway to wash my hands. One time the person didn't wash their hands (I hope they didn't touch any of the food). The other person did, and they got to see me reach over there and flush it for them. See, that wasn't hard.

Third involves using the sinks around here. I live in a dorm with a communal bathroom, so there's 8 sinks for 14 people. That's a good ratio... 1.75 people per sink. But it's still not cool to put your personal crap in even one of them. Yes, sometimes dishes have to soak, but don't leave them in a sink overnight, especially when they still have crud on them. And, as I saw tonight, don't dump your noodles in the sink. You're stupid for doing that, because that's not a trash can, someone else has to take that out of the sink, and until that happens, we can't use a sink and have to wrinkle our nose each time we see the gradually putrifying mess.

It makes me wish sometimes that there was this... direct causality, so the people who do these things could experience the effects of what they do. I mean, have spit apparate around their bed as they wake up in the morning. Have septic backflow so they get to smell what happens when someone doesn't flush. Dump noodles all over their keyboard, and see how they feel about that. But I guess what I mostly wonder is whether people know that these things affect other people. Do they have a valid reason? Is it just laziness? Is that the lamest excuse ever?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43sbtkQM6zc

And this is totally unrelated. Just so I don't end on a "People frustrate me" note.

A meme is a good way to wind down the day

So I e-mail, post on a board, do some other things, and I've run out of things to wind down. But since Mom and Katie both posted a meme, I figured I'd keep it in the family. So here goes nothing!

1. What is your occupation? Student... more immediately, math tutor.
2. What color are your socks right now? A medium brown, about like the leather cover of a dictionary.
3.What are you listening to right now? "Don't Make Me Come to Vegas," Tori Amos.
4. What was the last thing that you ate? Two bowls of cereal for dinner (by the time I got done with work, I didn't feel like going out... and I didn't eat cereal for breakfast, so it balances out).
5. Can you drive a stick shift? No. But Leslie has promised to teach me sometime. And maybe Papaw will randomly acquire a manual truck again sometime.
6. If you were a crayon, what color would you be? The first thing that came to mind was cadmium, but that is an element, though one that is used in paint pigments, including some crayons, according to Wikipedia's entry on cadmium. So I'll assume I'm operating on some other level of existence in my sleepiness, descend from it, and say midnight blue.
7. Last person you spoke to on the phone? Angelique. She was wanting to know another person's phone number. It's all Model UN stuff.
8. Do you like the person who sent this to you? I think I can say that.
9. Favorite drink? Dr. Brown's Cherry Soda.
10. What is your favorite sport to watch? Commonly baseball or cycling, but especially the Olympics.
11. Have you ever dyed your hair? No.
12. Pets? None.
13. Favorite food? Don't make me pick. It won't be pretty. I generally go with the staple, bread.
14. Last movie you watched? Um. My. My oh my. A while ago. In theaters, Juno. Otherwise, it has to be... Dragons.
15. Favorite Day of the year? Unplottable on a calendar basis. I like it shortly after going on break, when I've seen my family but I'm not restless yet, and then after I get restless and I see Leslie. I like big family gatherings, and big gatherings with people I like in general, and during the year they don't happen nearly enough.
16. What do you do to vent anger? I do two things. I get heated, more agitated, but I also withdraw at the same time. Normally after a while I can reflect on it. Until then I normally grind donuts all over my mind trying to work it out.
17. What was your favorite toy as a child? I have to say, out of everything I played with (and we had a lot to play with), it would be the Commodore 64, yeah.
18. What is your favorite, fall or spring? Fall.
19. Hugs or kisses? Both. They each have moments.
20. What kind of pie? Apple pie!
21. Do you want your friends to email you back? Oh, this must be from an e-mail.
22. Who is most likely to respond? You.
23. Who is least likely to respond? John Adams. Because he's dead.
24. Living arrangements? A dormitory. Good location.
25. When was the last time you cried? I teared up briefly tonight, when I was glad that things went so well yesterday and today. I do a fair bit of tearing up. But I haven't really, unabashedly cried in a long while.
26. What is on the floor of your closet? Bowling bag, luggage, and pants I didn't get around to washing yet.
27. Who is the friend you have had the longest that you are sending this to? To quote Scott, "This is my friend Mom."
28. The friend you have known the shortest amount of time that you are sending this to? Anyone randomly hitting this site? Probably you.
29. Favorite smell? Currently, all I can think of is the smell of bacon.
30. What inspires you? Too broad of a question. Lots of stuff. Literature, professors, teachers, people, stories in general, science fiction and fantasy, the National Air and Space Museum and anything having to do with space travel or exploration, medieval ideals of chivalry, tons of other ideas and other things from all over.
31. What are you afraid of? Not being accepted to grad school the first time around.
32. Plain, cheese or spicy hamburgers? Chicken nuggets.
33. Favorite car? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugo ... no, I don't really have a favorite car, but I do have fond memories of the Ford Thunderbird and such.
34. Favorite cat breed? Right now, probably a leopard.
35. Number of keys on your key ring? 5
36. How many years at your current job? Being a student, it could be 4, but I could argue for... 16? ;) Being a tutor, two years. Both of these are rounding up.
37. Favorite day of the week? Saturday, though now that I'm done with Model UN I should be able to enjoy my Fridays free again. :) It's between them two. Wednesday gets a third, because it's the other night of the week I don't have anything going on.
38. How many states have you lived in? 2.

And, a brief thing about Model UN. I've done it four years now. When I started, I never would've forseen myself leading it. There were people in my year that were far more competent at it than me, pretty well organized... but they either transferred (Jeremy), dropped out (Clinton), or what not. The result was me and another member (who dropped out this year without the decency of letting us know). And now I'm going to graduate in May, and I believe I'm the only one graduating (we're a fairly young team, with a core group of juniors, a couple of sophomores, and a lot of freshmen). It's been a maddening process, and there's more of it tomorrow, and I've ranted to Leslie several times about the frustrations in the process, and how it has essentially swallowed up time I would rather use, could rather use, and perhaps needed to use for other things, but ... I will miss it. I will miss it. If I did this a second year, I would do it so much better. But I'm leaving it in good hands. And now I can let go. And that is good too. Because the third option, making myself immortal and allowing myself to forgo sleep if I need to, is outside the realm of current possibility.

Very Brief

I find it marvelous how events conspire to calm me down. This morning I was fairly distraught that I could not get the delegate dance to work. There is a long story around that... suffice it to say, most of my efforts the past couple of days have been focused on that problem. Lots of tentative leads, but nothing broke through.

After the last attempt, I came away frustrated and angry for several reasons. Probably not the best way to go into a Middle English class. When I got there though... chocolate was being passed around. Apparently we were to do a critical thinking test for the English department.

Whaaaat?

That did a lot to help me calm down. Thinking for an hour... tends to do that.

So I got out of there and eagerly went to my e-mail and checked it. I had a note from my advisor already, the one that had been working closely with me to try to make the dance happen. He had basically gotten over the administrative hurdles because of the deadlines I had missed. His last lines... "The cookie has crumbled." How true. How delicious. I think I will gorge on cookies tonight as I watch Project Runway and stuff folders.

The cookie... has crumbled. But there are still crumbs, and I intend to eat them.

Just trying to get out of this week...

Model UN is a positive timesucker. I like Model UN, but I really wish I were chairing at this point. That job is intensive, but really gets its rewards in working directly with delegates.

And to happen this week, when I have a paper and a test in the class of doom... argh.

And so I've been trying to figure out where I can get more time, and at what point I should just say, "I'm going to get this much done and now I'm going to enjoy myself." I'm taking off work tomorrow to get work done, but in compensation I'm not going to do any school work after 6 PM. Wednesday I stop by 7 PM. Thursday I stop early, around 4 or 5 PM, and set the time thereafter to really doing last-minute Model UN stuff before I go out with Leslie. And then Friday I'll be there at 3:30. I will be done with it in 48 hours. After 48 hours, I will either have pulled together a great conference, have managed to scrape together a decent one, or will have earned the ire of everyone.

It'll probably be between the first two. ;)

Then I get the work done that I haven't all weekend. And then the rest of this semester should go comparatively smoothly. Settle any unpaid accounts, give the bank account over to Morgan and her appointed successor, and give Model UN that last salute. Two hours of work spread out over two months isn't much.

After this, I don't fear the thesis very much.

The Other Side to the Trip I Took

Well, the recent visit to Atlanta went well. I've told various details of the trip enough to be weary of it at the moment, though I very well might make an extra effort to type those out later. No, no, I'm preoccupied with what I saw on TV while I was in the hotel room, either waiting to go to bed or trying to defrag or what I saw on Saturday morning.

First, there were quite a few interesting movies on. I suppose it must be a consequence of being in a hotel and having nearly zero chance of sitting still long enough to watch them. I ended up watching one of the Young Indiana Jones shows... I only watched one or two, but got bombarded by ads for them whenever I watched the VHS Indiana Jones movies, so they were hyped for me... suitably. It involved a WWI British excursion to Beer-Sheba (near the West Bank), and Indiana Jones's efforts to infiltrate it and make sure the wells aren't blown up by the Ottomans before the dehydrated troops get there. It was engaging. There was also this one movie where this boy pilots a computerized F-14 and tries to get his father out of a Middle Eastern nation where he crashed landed and was subsequently held hostage. He listens to 80s rock music while he dogfights, singlehandedly reduces a fully-armed airstrip to impressive showers of smoke and fire, and even evades and shoots down the flying ace. It was like the Karate Kid... but tons more implausible.

But what got my attention was a CSPAN call-in show on the Democratic and Republican primaries. Two people describing the primary process, one of them an expert, the other person conducting the interview. So at one point they start to take calls, presumably for questions. Questions, right? "Hey, I don't understand how superdelegates work, could you explain?" "Does its form tend to give advantage to particular movements in a party?"

No. No. The questions were statements. Statements on why they should support so and so a candidate, why it would be outrageous if so and so were elected, and so on and so forth. They were not questions. They hardly pretended to be questions. The expert tried to answer them in the best way possible, but how do you answer someone who gives you a proclamation, an assertion, a boldfaced endorsement? Silly people, that wasn't the venue for such a thing, and your saying that "X candidate is an honest man, you can just tell, he's quite virtuous and just feels like a president," even if it were in the right place, would not sway me in the slightest. They say that about everyone. I want policy, not gut feelings. I want them to prove they can be trusted. I want a distinguishing characteristic. Just... one.

And then I read the StoryChat page on the Leaf-Chronicle and get even more befuddled. People believe that President Bush is a really great president? I mean, I can believe thinking he was well-intentioned, or not bad, but making him sound like he's the best president ever? He is, at best, a mediocre president, and depending how the next few years play out, may be seen as a terrible one (my personal tilt inclines me here, make no mistake). But I don't see what he's done that could merit such heralding, unless they are only focused on a couple of issues (which I probably disagree with).

And really, writing a letter into the paper talking about how Senator Clinton should show more respect to the President during his State of the Union speech... one, there were so many other people you could pick on, so I wonder what motivated you to pick her. Pick on all of those people, not just Senator Clinton, and not just one party. Address the system. Otherwise (and perhaps even then) you're just trying to manipulate it for a little saber rattling, a little, shall we say, downtalk.

Needless to say, other people's opinions really rile me up sometimes. I wish they would base it in something, or have some methodology, but I know sometimes I don't, and I'm speaking with a college education and a whole lot of other expectations besides that. But what I wish most, what I so earnestly wish, is that people would stop trying to force what are essentially opinions on me. You, me, everyone can make no claims for other people when life begins, we cannot claim against the scientific community that Intelligent Design qualifies as science and should be taught as such, and we cannot decide whether two responsible adults can have a relationship and express it in a legalized format. I try, sometimes, to think these things through from the other sides, but they don't make sense. The claims of God-supported evidence make many people tetchy and arrogant. That isn't the only way to be tetchy and arrogant, but it's proven an effective one thus far. I won't go and pretend that there was ever a time when we, as a people, ever really respected difference, but I'd at least like to believe that we could continue to have that ideal written in our laws, if weakly held there on the federal level and overwritten by infantile scribblings in the Tennessee constitution.

There. That's a little ad hominem. I'm not going to change "infantile scribblings" to something more polite. I know I'm not arguing with children, but sometimes it just feels like I'm running against the stubbornness of one. Of many.

A Brief Note on Attendance

I don't know rightly who to blame. The professor who drops you a letter grade when you miss more than two classes, or the student who insists, just in case he has to miss those two days for some other reason, on coming to class when it sounds like I'll have to poke a hole in his throat for all the phlegm to escape so that he doesn't hack every thirty seconds.

I mean, really. I stayed out of class when I was like that. I'm cool with sniffles. Occasional restrained coughs. But when you're a distraction by your wheezing, coughing, and hacking, please. Please. Please. I'll give you my notes. Just stay home. We don't need any of that.