Hornk.

Around 2:30 this morning, M and I both woke up at the same time.  The culprit?  On the floor next to me, a little furball was making the dreaded “hornk” sound.  M cut through my semi-intelligent babbling to tell me it was fine, just that cat throwing up again.  Thinking slowly, I grabbed a magazine off the nightstand and got it in front of the cat, right before detonation.  If I’d thought a little faster, I might have realized that its easier to clean up kitty presents from a hardwood floor that we don’t own than a magazine I was planning on reading the next day.

Five minutes later, I’m still a bit out of it and standing in the kitchen in my underwear, cutting the nasty spots out of the latest issue of the Economist over the trash can.  M is in the other room comforting the cat, having already taken care of the small amount of vomit that wasn’t soaking into my late night reading material.  Several thoughts went through my head:

- why am I getting cat vomit all over my hands to salvage a magazine I can either read online or get for free at the school library?

- the cat loves attention at night.  M is now paying much attention to the cat.  Let’s hope this doesn’t start any kind of association between throwing up on the floor and getting attention.

- why is M comforting the cat, who is fine, and not me, who is gagging in a futile attempt to save a magazine?  My guess is that at 2:30 in the morning, covered in magazine clippings and puke, I am not the most cuddly of individuals.

- is this what having a kid is like?  Randomly jerked from sleep to deal with vomit everywhere?  Actually, it kind of reminds me more of the frat house days….

Spring Break!

Its Tuesday of spring break week, and I thought I’d post a little update.  Its 10:45 at night, and I’m (obviously) at my computer taking a little break from the work I started at 8:30 this morning.  Bleah.  Typing for 14 hours, minus a break to wash, but not dry my laundry, seems to be missing something from what MTV says spring break should look like.  I keep looking, but I don’t see any fruity drinks with umbrellas or bikini girls.

I got offered another contract to do some econ work today.  I’m still debating taking it.  I’d hoped for a needed break to focus just on school for two months, but given financial circumstances, its hard to turn down a big chunk of money.  I feel like Sisyphus, only my rock is student loans and my mountain is…still a mountain I guess.  Its not a perfect metaphor.

I think I’m going to go make myself a drink…if I’m going to be working past midnight again, I might as well do it spring break style.  I think there is some orange-peach-mango* juice in the fridge that would work well with vodka.

*Ever read the ingredients on all of the 100% juice blends at the grocery store?  No matter what the box says, they are all mostly apple and white grape juice.  I guess apple-grape-orange-peach mango, or apple-grape-strawberry-kiwi just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

Lately…

I’m tired. Since August, I’ve been doing grad school full time and working nearly full time. I get up, I got to work at 8:30, I go to class, I sneak off to a computer lab on campus to do work, I got to class, I get home at 8:30 or 10:30. Weekends are for catching up on work and school, and occasionally doing those basic human things we all need to do, like laundry and sleeping. I’m tired. I’m tired of juggling mutually exclusive deadlines, not enjoying any downtime I take because I’m behind in everything, and putting off responsibilities of all kinds.

But enough bitching…Courtesy of a the new digital camera M and I bought after our apartment got robbed of $7 grand of stuff a few days before Christmas, here is life in our apartment.

Bah. Ok, pictures will have to wait until I can figure out how to make them smaller in wordpress. But they will come…

Sniffle

Something absolutely terrible has happened over the last two weeks.  I have developed allergies.

I’ve never been allergic to anything in my life.  I’ve never even gotten poison ivy, despite walking through patches of it in shorts.  Yet for some reason, I am suddenly terrible allergic to…something.  I am constantly sneezing, runny nose, itchy eyes, even kind of blurred vision at times (I never really understood that part of the Claritan commercial).  I started taking a claritan knock-off, but supposedly those wimpy little pills will take a few more days to kick in.  Also, the ones I’m taking expired 8 months ago, but I’m guessing their still ok.

Seriously, this had better be something highly seasonal in the air, or I’m moving to Antarctica.

Alright then

Been awhile, much craziness has been keeping me from doing…much of anything lately.  So….

Car is finally fixed, after 35 days of sitting at a garage in New York.  The joy of getting into my car was somewhat overshadowed by the realization that after driving a new car for a month, my 7 year old Saturn does indeed suck.

Em and I are moving into our apartment in four days.  The degree to which I am not yet ready to move is a bit staggering.  I never realized I had so many books, but the really amazing thing is the sheer volume of random crap I’ve managed to accumulate over the years.

Speaking of books, I have seven of them sitting on my nightstand, in my car and on my bookshelf that I have started recently but not finished.  I haven’t had the attention span to read anything require thought lately.  Its probably a combination of the usual summer brain rebellion, a lack of time, and the seductive calling of my super nintendo.

Tomorrow is the 4th of July, which means lots of fireworks.  I appreciate the well-done show, but not so much when the pryotechnicians attempt to stretch it out beyond the limits of their fireworks.  A well orchestrated combination of colors is enjoyable.  40 minutes of individual fireworks being lobbed up repeatedly, less so.

The Deer Hunter

I had big Memorial Day Weekend plans.  M and I were going to drive overnight on Friday to Vermont, where we would spend three days camping with my relatives and doing all sorts of camping related things, such as hiking, flea market-ing, cooking things over a fire and drinking various forms of alcohol, all while surrounded by the woods of southeastern Vermont and completely cut off from the outside world.

So its around 11 Friday night, and we’re motoring along through New York at about 70 mph when a deer decides to act out some suicidal tendencies on my car.   I caught a glimpse of the deer jumping into the left lane about a half second before impact, which gave me just enough time realize that I had nowhere to swerve.

When a deer hits your windshield, it makes eye contact.  And a surprising loud bang.  My poor car had its windshield smashed and most of its left side ripped up, all the way back to the bumper and including the roof.  M and I got off lucky, just a little flying glass and a slight expansion in my vocabulary.  A mildly deranged tow truck driver took us to a Best Western, which has surprisingly good waffles for their complimentary continental breakfast.  The next morning Enterprise did indeed pick us up, we cleaned out my car in case it had to be totaled, and we soldiered on to Vermont.  The rest of the drive was a beautiful trek through mountains, and we eventually made it to the campsite, 22 hours after we left Ohio.  My first greeter was an uncle passing me an open beer through the car window.

Footnotes:

It took a week for Nationwide to get someone to take a look at my car.  Despite my having arranged all of this before leaving it with them last Saturday.  Despite me paying half the cost of a rental car.  Despite my car body being crammed with sizeable amounts of now rotting pieces of New York’s finest road hazard.  Life may be coming at me fast, but I’m not sure they’re on my side.

On the plus side, my rental car is a 2007 Jetta.  Nice car, but the visibility in it is terrible, especially if you aren’t 5 foot 6.   I am completely taking advantage of the “unlimited mileage” segment of the Enterprise rental contract.  I’m not sure they expect someone who just wrecked their car to use the rental to drive 500 miles to Vermont and go tooling around on dirt roads.

Nothing was ever so sweet…

as getting sick in the middle of a two week stretch of finals, final papers and presentations.  I am in the middle of three finals, 4 final papers, 2 group projects, three presentations and a research project.  Overloading grad school, as mentioned previously, is stupid.  Things are somewhat confounded by the fact that I feel like I’m being dangled upside down under thirty feet of cold, mildly electrified water, ears messed up, unable to breathe, while annoying group members prod me with sticks.  I’m getting desperate here – I’ve taken every pill in the house I can find, jammed sprays up various holes in my body, eaten nothing but fruit, eaten nothing but Arby’s…and I hate taking medicine.  I had to leave a class last night 8 times in two hours because I couldn’t stop coughing.  I didn’t sleep last night because of pressure in my ears.  I have 4 (FOUR!) papers due today.

When this is all over, at 9:50 pm next Thursday, I am going to drink rum out of a hollowed out pineapple until I fall over.   At which point, if someone could be so kind as to bring me a straw….

Reflections of ourselves

Today has been one hell of a day. I keep trying to work my way out from under my impending deadlines, but my attention and thoughts are continuously drawn back to the shootings at Virginia Tech. Going through the morning news, I didn’t take too much notice of a headline mentioning a shooting death at a Virginia college, especially given the disturbing yet numbing regularity of shootings lately. As a society, we’re reaching a point where single shootings, regardless of the context, fade quickly from the news and our thoughts, even quicker when they occur far away (excepting, of course, instances where the victim is young, attractive and white).  I was shocked when the headline changed to 20 dead, dismayed watching the casualty count mounting as information trickled in and more victims died.

The role taken by the media in times of tragedy is often fascinating – they alternate expressing heartfelt sympathy and providing information with searching for ways to both justify and magnify what occurred. It is the desire for justification that seems most human for me; we all have an inherent desire to remove the specter random death and pain from our lives. Its deeply disturbing to be confronted with the reality that such acts can and do occur, and are largely beyond our control. The most prominent questions at the news conferences were not about who or how, they were about why.  A collective search for the sense behind a series of senseless acts, not only in terms of the killer’s motivations and mindset  but also in the response of authorities, and their perceived failure to prevent the murders. I think the desire the find incompetence on the part of those in power stems for our need to be reassured that further acts are preventable and that this one was caused human error, not random chance or the inherent impossibility of protecting everyone from everything.

Watching and reading the news coverage throughout the day, I was amazed at how quickly the incident was framed in terms of different people’s viewpoints. I hesitate to say agendas, even though a significant portion of the commentary immediately turned to gun control, with both sides posting arguments as to why their positions would have prevented the killings.  While I’m sure there was an element of pushing for political gain, my shock over what happen has stripped some of my cynicism and takes me back to the idea of people searching for security amidst chaos.  There will be elements of blaming a lack of gun control for enabling the killings, or a lack of concealed-carry permits for preventing anyone from shooting back, or overly permissive immigration policies for allowing the shooter in the country.  These arguments will be for political gain, yes, but also out of an unstated belief that senseless acts such as this are partially the fault of those preventing our idealized world from coming into being.

There is a great human need to find justification and reason in the chaos that can wash over our everyday lives.  The absense of reason in the face of tragedy breeds confusion and uncertainty, and as the dust settles we find not reason but the reflections of our own anger, prejudice and fear.

A big difference in graduate school…

is that some of the students are established professionals or life-long students.  For the most part, this is positive.  I’ve gotten to work on projects with an atmospheric scientist that did stints in Antarctica, people at the EPA, a director from the Cleveland Zoo, a couple lawyers, etc.  But there are also a few possessing the attitude that not only do they know more than the professors, but that because they are so established and smart, if they aren’t understanding something right away its the professor’s fault and they should proclaim this in a loud, interrupting fashion.

I’ve had idiots in my classes before, no-it-alls, hecklers, sleepers.  Hell, I’ve had (and on rare occasions been one of) the kids that sit in the back with 20 ounce bottles of soda and booze (the infamous “traveler”).  But none of those have made me as ready to jump over a desk and smack someone than the most problematic grad students.  Case in point would be last night, when a woman interrupted the professor at least a dozen times.  We were doing spatial network analysis, which for lack of motivation to describe it I’ll just describe as hard.  This student alternated between berating the professor for their lack of comprehension and interrupting to point out mistakes.  I’m sorry, but if you aren’t following the material, you have no place cutting off someone with a doctorate to inform everyone that the typical speed limit on residential roads in 25 mph, not 35.

As long as I’m bitching….I am in two ideologically opposite degree programs.  Environmental Studies and Economics.  Ying and Yang.  Treehuggers and greedy capitalists.  It amazes me the blind faith people have that their point of view is correct and anything opposing is ludicrous, as are the people holding that point of view.  If you ever want to get open-mouth stares, try explaining to an ecosystem science class that economic factors do protect the environment when used properly, or to an international trade class that the resource limits in combination with “Dutch Disease” can make trade bad for a developing economy.  Its quite amusing.

I feel better now.  I think I’ll eat some cereal.

Bah

I’m feeling rather frustrated with the aftereffects of my brain being broken (see previous post).  Not so much with the headaches as with the confusion/fuzzy thinking.  Thinking just…not so much hurts but it is very frustrating and not so much working at the moment.  I wouldn’t be more than mildly annoyed except that I’m kind of on the clock…In the next five days, I have 3 exams, a take home exam, a kinetics problem set, an economics problem set, two economics papers, a group presentation, a minor GIS (computer mapping) assignment and a whopping big GIS project due.  Which sucks, because I’m having trouble remembering things, concentrating, comprehending and, as of this morning, forming/finishing sentences while talking.  Whine. Whine. Whine.

On the plus side, I had food from my favorite Mexican restaurant last night.  And watched Half Nelson, which was a very good movie touching on a wide range of interesting issue I don’t really feel like thinking about at the moment.