Showing posts with label studying. Show all posts
Showing posts with label studying. Show all posts

Thursday, September 23, 2010

fall back to stone

one work thing that stresses me out a little- i have a coworker friend (like, we enjoy each others' company at work but are not friendly outside of work, as it should be) who, over the past 3 or 4 years that we've worked together, somehow got the idea that i'm into old movies/kitsch/pop culture. i have never had the heart to tell him i'm not, or that i don't quite get his references. i was born in 1982. unless carol channing was a ninja turtle, i don't know who that is. when you mention charles nelson reilly, i think you mean this guy:

john c reilly


yesterday i had class, which was slightly annoying- the conservative person who announced she was conservative apropos of nothing once again displayed that she doesn't actually know that conservative as a word has meanings outside of politics, and the departmental slides our professor had to show us seemed... confusing? like, i copied them down but i have no idea what they were really about.

after work, i went to green line to try to do some reading- i was doing okay for awhile, but some older dude with a giant stack of newspapers came in and started... tearing the newspapers up? and rustling the newspapers. i know a coffee shop isn't my office and i could just read at home, but i think the ultimate thing you can just do at home is tear up some newspapers. i ended up going home again. i read about 100 pages, and then i gave up- i know that kind of sucks, but i'm just really not into this book. we have to turn in ten response papers over 13 weeks, and we can skip any 3 weeks we want, and i think i'm going to skip this week. i think i have a decent understanding of what he was trying to say, and i read all the other material, but i just couldn't get through that book.

sudan


it's weird because i love tedious histories, and i didn't know much about the history of sudan before, but there was just something that wasn't clicking for me with his interpretation of sudan's history. i ended up reading a few other sources about the history of sudan instead to better understand the conflict because i couldn't get through his. i'm bummed though, i hate not being prepared for class and i especially hate not finishing a book.

i also need to work on not being so easily distracted. the following things were all more interesting to me than studying last night:

- a video about how to put on a female condom, which was linked from
- a video of some ice skater guy skating to "sex bomb", which i found through
- a discussion about how "slow hand" by the pointer sisters is a gross song to sing with your sisters.
- a text message conversation with mouse about our favorite jiu jitsu people, which turned into a conversation about joe rogan?
- the wikipedia for troll dolls (called GONKS in the uk)
- looking at nail polish on amazon
- trying to untangle a knot in my hair by hand

homer tax


class tonight, and then... possibly trying to kill the lich king? our guild kind of petered out over the summer so most of us have never killed him, but there was talk of some of the wow dudes i actually like wanting to try it out tonight.

lich king


who knows, though? none of us really care and i don't think we have any tanks lined up. okay, back to work !

Friday, September 17, 2010

a race against the clock !

hayyyy. i have to start getting ready to go to the doctor at 10, so i have to MAKE THIS FAST ! my eye is getting progressively more swollen and itchy every day- like, it goes down by the end of the day with zyrtec eyedrops + zyrtec, but every day when i wake up it looks worse than the previous morning. today it's veryyyyyy swollen. if it's allergies, which everyone keeps saying it is, i'm obviously allergic to something in my room, because it gets horrible overnight. and maybe it's no coincidence that it's my left eye, and i sleep on my left side.

oculus


christina just said they might SWAB MY EYE ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

on wednesday, my writing class went okay- we were assigned a short paper to write over the weekend and another reading assignment, which should be fine, and we did group work, which was, as always, infuriating. the lady i got grouped with was super nice but she hadn't read huckleberry finn and hadn't done the reading for her class but was arguing with what i was saying based on what she thinks the book is about. buhhhhhhhh.

lasttttt night was my genocide class, and of course i loved it. we watched a christiane amanpour documentary for cnn called, scream bloody murder. it's available on youtube, and it's about the people who saw genocide happening and how no one listened to them. to break up the heartbreak and injustice, christiane interviewed everyone and seriously to every person was like, "would you say you... SCREAMED BLOODY MURDER?". also despite being so interesting, the last segment (part 14 if you're watching it on youtube) was pretty horrible and was about a hutu man apologizing to a tutsi woman for killing her family, conveniently leaving out the fact that the government required him to do so.

rwanda


i'm so, so excited about this class. it's going to be tough because there's a tonnnnn of reading and a tonnnnnnn of writing, but it's so interesting and the classroom discussions are great. i want to talk way too much in class though so i'm going to have to curb that so other people can talk and so i'm not the older student who dominates the conversation and demands the professor's attention (aka the person i hateddddddd when i was 18).

oh, so far, the worst thing about going back to school, by far, is christians in the classroom. i don't think that religious people realize how boring their religion is to other people and how alienating it is when they talk to a group of people from other cultures/countries/religious groups in a university setting about their faith like it's an absolute given and absolute truth. like, the only book you like is the bible cause you DON'T LIKE FICTION? cooooool. you don't worry too much about the problems with the genocide convention that hinder prevention, international intervention, etc. because the victims will go to heaven and god will judge the perpetrators? that's so interesting and also like, almost sociopathic. jesus is probably rolling over in his grave right now because you're using him as an excuse to not think critically about the world around you.

yawn


okay, gotta go get ready to go to the doctor. i'm gonna go to work afterward i think, if only because i left my school books at work.

this weekend: studying, studying, studying, going to target to get allergy pillow covers (if the doctor says this is allergies), making dinner with mouse tomorrow, studying, having vegetarian thanksgiving with jeanne and ryann on sunday? and also possibly meeting a kitten to adopt (i don't want to get my hopes up yet !)