1. Went to a meeting about Assessment. The speaker did my absolute least favorite thing: she handed out copies of her PowerPoint presentation and essentially read from it. Do these morons think we can't read? She didn't have a whole lot (like, any) she added over and above the presentation; that could have been mailed to us, and then I could have slept this morning. Insult to injury: there really wasn't anything in this presentation I hadn't heard before anyway. I had to drag my ass out of bed on a Friday morning to follow along with someone reading a presentation of information I already knew. Makes me friggin' furious.
It was supposed to last from 9-11:30; at 9:45, I got up and left. That's the second thing this week I've left early. I never would have done that before maybe a year ago; I'd have been very dutiful and sat still and listened to the whole thing. I'm beginning to feel like I'm 42; life is short (no, I am not ill). I don't have to sit through everything anymore. If you are sucking time away from me, in many situations, I'm entitled to reclaim some portion of that time. If I let my life get away from me, that's nobody's fault but mine; nobody's going to protect my time but me.
2. Went on a signature-gathering campaign for the Arthur class; failed in three of the four attempts, so I have to go to that campus again some day this week and try again. Frustrating.
3. Finished another issue of The New Yorker and read this month's Harper's. There was a piece of journalism in the latter in comic form that's sort of haunting me; it deals with our training of the Iraqi troops. Essentially, we are (or we were; announcements earlier this week may indicate this has stopped) subjecting Iraqi troops to U.S. Marine training. Now I'll tell you the truth; I'm not overly fond of military training methods. However, I understand that part of the goal is the utter destruction of the spoiled, pampered American teenager and his or her transformation into someone worth knowing (and therefore being; yeah, that's an extreme wording, but I think the training has extreme intent). While I think the training is often Draconian and cruel, I also think there's a level of consent from the trainees; nobody likes Marine training, but most people have some sense ahead of time what's going to happen, and recruits tolerate it because this is the path to Marinedom, which is a desirable thing.
However, in Iraq, we're giving that same training to men who did not sign up to be U.S. Marines. They signed up to be in the Iraqi military or police force, which are very different balls of wax. Many of them have been removed from their family, who do not know where they are. Now they are being yelled at (and these rants consist of quite vulgar, humiliating things) in a language they do not understand by people who are supposed to represent freedom and democracy.
Way to capture hearts and minds.
Under those circumstances, training which is extreme but probably acceptable for American young people is at least a form of torture and probably a violation of the Geneva Convention. If this is the training that has been ended, I would fully support that.
But that begs the next question: this is the only way we know how to train a military, and it's not appropriate culturally, nor is it doing us any favors on the international front.
So now what?
When the Viet Nam comparisons started being raised (which was before we'd even invaded), I said to several people, "No, Viet Nam isn't entirely the right comparison. A better comparison is going to end up being Korea, I'm afraid; if we don't have grandchildren there, it will be because we were expelled in a civil war that resulted in an American bloodbath."
So now we're ending these extreme training measures for the Iraqi nationals, which I think is entirely appropriate, and Congress has passed a law (which will of course not be enforced, but the law passed, nonetheless) requiring that we leave Iraq by October. Those two things don't go together. Even if we continue training, all indications are that we're years from leaving.
Forgive my juxtaposition of the ridiculous (computer games) and the sublime (and the lives of American service members), but I don't think anyone in power has played many simulations like Civilization. Rule number one of Civ: if you're going to declare war, you can't be a Democracy, because Democracies won't tolerate war for very long at all. Never mind motivation or support for the cause; unless the fate of the free world itself is in peril (as it was in WWII), you'd better have a damned blessed good reason for keeping our sons and daughters and neighbors and nieces and nephews and parents and spouses and co-workers away from home. Extending their tours is exactly the wrong move in a 21st century Democracy. Making them pay for medical treatment for injuries incurred in the line of duty is exactly the wrong move in a 21st century Democracy. Providing them with substandard medical treatment in a dilapidated facility...well, you get the idea. They should have friggin' Cedars Sinai and Johns Hopkins, and the people who sent them should have to go to Walter Reed.
I'm sorry; I really didn't intend to go political. Some of the images in the Harper's piece, though, are haunting me. (And I'll try not to say "friggin'" anymore.)
4. Our next NetFlix movie, The Whales of August, came today. My Co-Vivant has wanted me to see this for some time, so we watched it this evening. Interesting movie, very sweet and understated; Lillian Gish, Bette Davis, Vincent Price, Ann Sothern. The acting style is different from I'm accustomed to; it's almost a style suited for silents, as if it were being acted in the sepia tones of the first flashback scene, but it's effective in this particular movie.
What else did we watch tonight...E.R. (I talked about that last week. There have been some episodes over the last few years that, to be honest, we have watched in fast forward with the captioning on and read. It hasn't been that bad this season.) 30 Rock. We started some comic, but we couldn't finish him. (If a comedian's act starts, "God knows I love ya, white people, but...", he's really going to have to make us laugh for us to finish that half hour. A few have. Tonight's didn't.)
I guess we just need to decide as a culture whether we're going to notice difference or not. We're vacillating on this right now; sometimes "Everybody's just the same inside; we all need the same things, and appearance is irrelevant," and sometimes "Everybody's differences are what make us special, and we need to celebrate those." I'm not entirely convinced those are mutually exclusive, but we haven't worked it out. Are we supposed to assimilate or separate? A hundred years ago, that was easy; with a few exceptions, the goal was assimilation. The inherent arrogance in that assumption isn't missed.
On the other hand, every semester, I have I can't tell you how many students who are brilliant but frankly aren't allowed to do well in school because doing too well would be perceived by friends and sometimes even family as "turning white," which is the cardinal sin. I think that's a hugely racist assumption; it boils down to, "Success on those terms makes you someone we can't accept"--but no alternative terms have been presented, so success is largely unattainable. There was one comedian who had a big chunk of her act devoted to "The Fake Bitch"--essentially, this major component of her comedy was based on her ability to code-switch, to switch back and forth between the language she needed to use in the office place and the language that she needed to use in her home neighborhood.
When classes read Rodriguez's "Aria," most of them are just confused--So why couldn't this family speak both English and Spanish to each other? Why did one have to be entirely removed? Why did they let someone else dictate that to them? And it's all but impossible to get them to see Rodriguez's ambivalence; the essay, like most other things for beginning college students, is either all black ("This family was robbed of its cultural identity!) or white ("Look how successful he is! He benefited from this!") No gray ("Yes, the kids benefited--but at what cost?")
So no, I don't think we have this worked out yet. (Oh, geeze, the war and race in the same day. I must be too tired to self-censor.)
I also skimmed more in the Oppenheimer. My colleague who introduced the book said the St. John part seemed to be the most problematic, and it's after the Kangaroo Court, so I'm actually going to read that part; I've skimmed to there.
5. Got another 20% of most of my Pogo badges done. There's one badge in which I'm supposed to win a lot of Pool games. I'm not good at the Pogo pool games.
6. Got my Human Paladin to level 22 in World of Warcraft.
7. The BigFishGame looked like another three-matchy, so I didn't bother. I was able to win the last round of The Apprentice. I also tested a game for a beta program I'm in. I'll talk about that one when it's released.
8. No cleany things today, but I brought home lunch after my campus foray and made dinner, so that oughtta count for something.
Saturday, April 28, 2007
Friday, April 27, 2007
4/26: What I Accomplished Today
1. Graded two sets of papers. Prepped for tonight's class. Taught tonight's class.
Had a situation in which an online student was rude to me, so I was rude back, and then I realized that was really dumb so I apologized, and then the student apologized to me and gave me what I needed in the first place, so now it's all good.
2. Printed out all the paperwork on my Arthur course so I can get it signed tomorrow when I'm on that campus.
3. Finished an issue of The New Yorker. There was an article about bipolar disorder in children; it turns out that some of the onslaught of over-diagnosed ADD and ADHD may have been bipolar (not all, and now bipolar is also be over-diagnosed, but that may be part of the issue, anyway). When I was in California over 10 years ago, I taught for a few years at a newly-formed private elementary school (long, not terribly interesting story; I suppose we'll probably get there eventually), and because we were new and had no reputation, we had a tendancy to get quite a few children who simply couldn't succeed in a public school classroom of 35 or 40 kids; not all, of course, and all of the children were just delightful, don't get me wrong, but we had a higher-than-average concentration of students with learning disabilities, and quite a few of our students were on Ritalin and various other medications (we had a joke that the receptionist, who was normally in charge of meds distribution, almost needed an assistant to staff the desk and answer the phone, because meds distribution was close to a full-time job).
Anyway, it was clear to me, as a reasonably observant, reasonably caring adult that some of these children were helped by their medicine, but others didn't seem to be; there was one boy whom we almost thought was just keeping dopy so he'd let his mother sleep (she worked nights). Right before he was to take another pill, as the morning one was wearing off, he was a bright, charming, friendly, enthusiastic little boy; most of the day, he was a zombie.
The saddest situation from my perspective was a little kindergarten girl who just--I'm going to say she just wasn't right when school started. I taught computers and music, which were usually the two most popular times of the day, and this little girl just couldn't be bothered. We'd be sitting in a circle singing a song, or taking turns strumming the guitar, or doing activity songs, and she'd just give a goofy little smile, flash her underpants at, eventually, everyone around the circle, and then giggle. Sometimes she'd just get up, walk around the circle, and start patting us all on the head as she walked around behind us. If I smiled and asked her to sit again and sing with us, she'd sit for a minute, but the concept of participating in the activity the rest of the group was doing seemed rather odd to her. (And don't get me wrong; I do not think lack of group participation in and of itself is necessarily a bad thing. But most kids want to play along at least some of the )
She had the same problems in computers. Usually each child had a certain game to play until a certain goal was reached (for the kindergarteners, this would usually be maybe a ten- or 15-minute goal), and then they'd have the rest of the half hour to play; frankly, I think that was as important in different ways as using the computer to demonstrate successful mastery of counting or phonics or patterns. For most of the kids, the activity I asked them to do at first was pretty fun, and then their own play was even better. This little girl would start the game, but then she'd wander off and start walking around the others, or sit and point, or just act goofy. I'd usually try to find finagle way to get her to finish the activity so she got her playtime, too, but it was a challenge; I couldn't always do it, and it isn't fair to everyone else if she gets to play without meeting the goal if they had to meet the goal. (I know, I think I sound like somebody's really quaint great-aunt, too, but nobody's more concerned about justice than kindergarteners, and it's cruel to mess with them on that front so soon.)
But about February or so of kindergarten, she was added to the meds list; she was given some Ritalin. And oh my gosh, the child we had for the rest of that year was such fun! She was smart and attentive. She raised her hand for everything. She participated and even asked if she could lead the activity. She had a wonderful sense of humor, and was sophisticated enough to sort of play with that with adults. She was usually the first done with her goal, and before she'd begin her own playtime, she'd often try to help those around her--in such a way that didn't irritate them or send up a flag for me that I needed to sit her back down and focus her back on herself before she got decked. She was just a dream child. I sit here 13 years later and smile about that little girl at the end of that year.
And then over the summer, her mother told us, she had some sort of medicine crash.
I don't know what that means; I just know the bright-eyed, funny little girl was gone, and the fruit loop who replaced her was worse than the merely silly twit who had gone before (don't get me wrong; once she was medicated, it was easy to see how the little girl was related to the silly twit). Prior to medication, she'd been in La-la Land, but she hadn't hurt anyone, but aside from being very mildly disruptive, sort of like a fly you occasionally had to brush away, she didn't actively bother or hurt anyone. Now she was not only flashing constantly, but she was directing it at the other kids more pointedly and was louder about it and had several whole new techniques for just being AT people all the time.
The most frustrating part is that occasionally there'd be a flash in her eyes, and you just knew for a microsecond that that fun, sweet, bright little girl was still in there and couldn't find the way out, and we couldn't find a way in to get her. I don't know how many times her meds were changed that year, but to no avail; we never got her back. That was a long time ago (oh, geeze, if she's not a graduating senior this year, she started college), and I'm still having trouble not crying with frustration at knowing she was capable of learning and playing and having friends, and she seemed to want to do these things, but we weren't able to get to her, to help her, to lead her out ("educare: to lead out").
One of the several reasons my foray into elementary education couldn't be sustained.
I don't know if she was a misdiagnosed bipolar child, but I can't rule that out.
Aside from that magazine, I skimmed about 100 pages in the Oppenheimer. The HUAC nightmare has begun.
5. We watched Letterman on the Regis & Kelly show; it was Philbin's first day back after his heart surgery. Letterman's act was fun; he never, ever does anybody else's show, so we knew this had to be important to him. At one point, he and Regis were comparing the scars on their legs where the arteries had been harvested. Even celebrities can have pasty pencil legs--and it's okay. (I think I'd have been disturbed if either of them hadn't had pasty pencil legs.)
We also watched My Name is Earl on Tivo. Again, I think we watched some other stuff, but I don't remember what it was, so it can't have been that interesting.
6. Got another 20% done on my Pogo badges.
7. Got my Human Paladin to level 21 in World of Warcraft.
A few years ago, at my previous job, I was promoted at one point from being a phone tech support rep to being a supervisor. A lot of the people who worked at this call center played a lot of role-playing games. When I was promoted, all the existing supervisors and managers were sent a weblink by somebody on the floor that was supposed to determine our alignment. I had played some other games (notably Pool of Radiance and several of the Might and Magic games) that dealt with alignment, but I took the quiz. Somebody was sort of keeping track of my doing this and sort of hollered out, "So what's your alignment?"
And one of the tech leads, without looking up or breaking stride, said, "Oh, she doesn't have to take that test. She is obviously Neutral Good." And he was right; I was, in fact, Neutral Good.
For each word, there are three choices for a total of nine possible alignments. The choices for the first word are Lawful, Neutral, and Chaotic. "Lawful" indicates a strict adherance to rules for rules' sake; from my perspective, it's rigid and often self-righteous, but of course, that's largely because this isn't my point of view. "Chaotic" means "charge in and think later"; again from my perspective, it's that teenage tendancy that what we have is so bad that anarchy must be better (anarchy often seems like a good idea, particularly to the young, until it's your best friend who's murdered, your iPod that's commandeered, and your sister who's raped). Neutral is somewhere in between, obviously: you don't follow rules for the sake of following rules, but you don't intentionally violate them just for the sake of violating them. It's essentially a response to authority or order. (I do not seek authority, but when it's given to me, I don't usually reject it unless I don't think I can wear it lightly, like a cloak that's neither crushing me nor blowing away.)
The choices for the other word are "good," "neutral" (again), and "evil." I think this one is fairly self-explanatory. I attempt to use my powers for good.
World of Warcraft doesn't actually have an alignment setting (well, I suppose most "good" people will be Alignment, and most "evil" will be Horde). Interestingly, from my very limited perspective (and I haven't played any Horde yet, although I suspect I'll play a set when I get my Alliance set fully leveled), it looks to me like the Alliance players are often Chaotic, and the Horde are often Lawful, which seems counterintuitive to me. I think there's sometimes a certain smugness in "I fight for the side of goodness and light," and so it's been my observation that they often don't take time to strategize or think things through; they just sort of charge in and assume All Will Work Out For the Best; we are good and pure and wholesome, and Destiny will not permit us, her favorite children, to lose. In my limited exposure, it looks Horde players will actually stop and plan and think, so they tend to have a higher success rate.
8. The BigFishGame for today didn't look like anything, so I didn't download it. Instead, I used my April BigFish credit to buy the stupid Apprentice game; I really enjoyed it, and after two days, I was still thinking about how much I enjoyed it, so it made sense to buy it. I've finished the nine challenges and gotten to the final round, but so far, I've been defeated twice. I'll get it eventually with time and practice. The last round would actually be a very good game for the Diner Dash people to investigate to get ideas for #4. I play that pretty well if I do say so myself (the last I looked, my story mode score is still in the top 200 at the Playfirst site), and the Apprentice's last round is a brutal, brutal challenge. It's really fun; when you can coordinate time-management games like that, I find the experience almost Zen-like, and I'm on an adrenaline high for a little while afterwards.
9. Put a water on the counter.
When I got home from work today, I saw that there was a thing on the counter I wasn't familiar with. As I investigated, I saw that it was eight pint cartons, like milk cartons, all shrink-wrapped together; I guessed, correctly, that this was probably a Costco item. I couldn't figure it out, though; we don't drink anywhere near that much milk, and Costco milk is too big to go into pint bottles. I asked my Co-Vivant, "What are these little cartons?"
And she said, perfectly sensibly, "Hash browns."
I live in world where you can buy eight pints of hash browns in cartons. I'm not convinced that's right.
Had a situation in which an online student was rude to me, so I was rude back, and then I realized that was really dumb so I apologized, and then the student apologized to me and gave me what I needed in the first place, so now it's all good.
2. Printed out all the paperwork on my Arthur course so I can get it signed tomorrow when I'm on that campus.
3. Finished an issue of The New Yorker. There was an article about bipolar disorder in children; it turns out that some of the onslaught of over-diagnosed ADD and ADHD may have been bipolar (not all, and now bipolar is also be over-diagnosed, but that may be part of the issue, anyway). When I was in California over 10 years ago, I taught for a few years at a newly-formed private elementary school (long, not terribly interesting story; I suppose we'll probably get there eventually), and because we were new and had no reputation, we had a tendancy to get quite a few children who simply couldn't succeed in a public school classroom of 35 or 40 kids; not all, of course, and all of the children were just delightful, don't get me wrong, but we had a higher-than-average concentration of students with learning disabilities, and quite a few of our students were on Ritalin and various other medications (we had a joke that the receptionist, who was normally in charge of meds distribution, almost needed an assistant to staff the desk and answer the phone, because meds distribution was close to a full-time job).
Anyway, it was clear to me, as a reasonably observant, reasonably caring adult that some of these children were helped by their medicine, but others didn't seem to be; there was one boy whom we almost thought was just keeping dopy so he'd let his mother sleep (she worked nights). Right before he was to take another pill, as the morning one was wearing off, he was a bright, charming, friendly, enthusiastic little boy; most of the day, he was a zombie.
The saddest situation from my perspective was a little kindergarten girl who just--I'm going to say she just wasn't right when school started. I taught computers and music, which were usually the two most popular times of the day, and this little girl just couldn't be bothered. We'd be sitting in a circle singing a song, or taking turns strumming the guitar, or doing activity songs, and she'd just give a goofy little smile, flash her underpants at, eventually, everyone around the circle, and then giggle. Sometimes she'd just get up, walk around the circle, and start patting us all on the head as she walked around behind us. If I smiled and asked her to sit again and sing with us, she'd sit for a minute, but the concept of participating in the activity the rest of the group was doing seemed rather odd to her. (And don't get me wrong; I do not think lack of group participation in and of itself is necessarily a bad thing. But most kids want to play along at least some of the )
She had the same problems in computers. Usually each child had a certain game to play until a certain goal was reached (for the kindergarteners, this would usually be maybe a ten- or 15-minute goal), and then they'd have the rest of the half hour to play; frankly, I think that was as important in different ways as using the computer to demonstrate successful mastery of counting or phonics or patterns. For most of the kids, the activity I asked them to do at first was pretty fun, and then their own play was even better. This little girl would start the game, but then she'd wander off and start walking around the others, or sit and point, or just act goofy. I'd usually try to find finagle way to get her to finish the activity so she got her playtime, too, but it was a challenge; I couldn't always do it, and it isn't fair to everyone else if she gets to play without meeting the goal if they had to meet the goal. (I know, I think I sound like somebody's really quaint great-aunt, too, but nobody's more concerned about justice than kindergarteners, and it's cruel to mess with them on that front so soon.)
But about February or so of kindergarten, she was added to the meds list; she was given some Ritalin. And oh my gosh, the child we had for the rest of that year was such fun! She was smart and attentive. She raised her hand for everything. She participated and even asked if she could lead the activity. She had a wonderful sense of humor, and was sophisticated enough to sort of play with that with adults. She was usually the first done with her goal, and before she'd begin her own playtime, she'd often try to help those around her--in such a way that didn't irritate them or send up a flag for me that I needed to sit her back down and focus her back on herself before she got decked. She was just a dream child. I sit here 13 years later and smile about that little girl at the end of that year.
And then over the summer, her mother told us, she had some sort of medicine crash.
I don't know what that means; I just know the bright-eyed, funny little girl was gone, and the fruit loop who replaced her was worse than the merely silly twit who had gone before (don't get me wrong; once she was medicated, it was easy to see how the little girl was related to the silly twit). Prior to medication, she'd been in La-la Land, but she hadn't hurt anyone, but aside from being very mildly disruptive, sort of like a fly you occasionally had to brush away, she didn't actively bother or hurt anyone. Now she was not only flashing constantly, but she was directing it at the other kids more pointedly and was louder about it and had several whole new techniques for just being AT people all the time.
The most frustrating part is that occasionally there'd be a flash in her eyes, and you just knew for a microsecond that that fun, sweet, bright little girl was still in there and couldn't find the way out, and we couldn't find a way in to get her. I don't know how many times her meds were changed that year, but to no avail; we never got her back. That was a long time ago (oh, geeze, if she's not a graduating senior this year, she started college), and I'm still having trouble not crying with frustration at knowing she was capable of learning and playing and having friends, and she seemed to want to do these things, but we weren't able to get to her, to help her, to lead her out ("educare: to lead out").
One of the several reasons my foray into elementary education couldn't be sustained.
I don't know if she was a misdiagnosed bipolar child, but I can't rule that out.
Aside from that magazine, I skimmed about 100 pages in the Oppenheimer. The HUAC nightmare has begun.
5. We watched Letterman on the Regis & Kelly show; it was Philbin's first day back after his heart surgery. Letterman's act was fun; he never, ever does anybody else's show, so we knew this had to be important to him. At one point, he and Regis were comparing the scars on their legs where the arteries had been harvested. Even celebrities can have pasty pencil legs--and it's okay. (I think I'd have been disturbed if either of them hadn't had pasty pencil legs.)
We also watched My Name is Earl on Tivo. Again, I think we watched some other stuff, but I don't remember what it was, so it can't have been that interesting.
6. Got another 20% done on my Pogo badges.
7. Got my Human Paladin to level 21 in World of Warcraft.
A few years ago, at my previous job, I was promoted at one point from being a phone tech support rep to being a supervisor. A lot of the people who worked at this call center played a lot of role-playing games. When I was promoted, all the existing supervisors and managers were sent a weblink by somebody on the floor that was supposed to determine our alignment. I had played some other games (notably Pool of Radiance and several of the Might and Magic games) that dealt with alignment, but I took the quiz. Somebody was sort of keeping track of my doing this and sort of hollered out, "So what's your alignment?"
And one of the tech leads, without looking up or breaking stride, said, "Oh, she doesn't have to take that test. She is obviously Neutral Good." And he was right; I was, in fact, Neutral Good.
For each word, there are three choices for a total of nine possible alignments. The choices for the first word are Lawful, Neutral, and Chaotic. "Lawful" indicates a strict adherance to rules for rules' sake; from my perspective, it's rigid and often self-righteous, but of course, that's largely because this isn't my point of view. "Chaotic" means "charge in and think later"; again from my perspective, it's that teenage tendancy that what we have is so bad that anarchy must be better (anarchy often seems like a good idea, particularly to the young, until it's your best friend who's murdered, your iPod that's commandeered, and your sister who's raped). Neutral is somewhere in between, obviously: you don't follow rules for the sake of following rules, but you don't intentionally violate them just for the sake of violating them. It's essentially a response to authority or order. (I do not seek authority, but when it's given to me, I don't usually reject it unless I don't think I can wear it lightly, like a cloak that's neither crushing me nor blowing away.)
The choices for the other word are "good," "neutral" (again), and "evil." I think this one is fairly self-explanatory. I attempt to use my powers for good.
World of Warcraft doesn't actually have an alignment setting (well, I suppose most "good" people will be Alignment, and most "evil" will be Horde). Interestingly, from my very limited perspective (and I haven't played any Horde yet, although I suspect I'll play a set when I get my Alliance set fully leveled), it looks to me like the Alliance players are often Chaotic, and the Horde are often Lawful, which seems counterintuitive to me. I think there's sometimes a certain smugness in "I fight for the side of goodness and light," and so it's been my observation that they often don't take time to strategize or think things through; they just sort of charge in and assume All Will Work Out For the Best; we are good and pure and wholesome, and Destiny will not permit us, her favorite children, to lose. In my limited exposure, it looks Horde players will actually stop and plan and think, so they tend to have a higher success rate.
8. The BigFishGame for today didn't look like anything, so I didn't download it. Instead, I used my April BigFish credit to buy the stupid Apprentice game; I really enjoyed it, and after two days, I was still thinking about how much I enjoyed it, so it made sense to buy it. I've finished the nine challenges and gotten to the final round, but so far, I've been defeated twice. I'll get it eventually with time and practice. The last round would actually be a very good game for the Diner Dash people to investigate to get ideas for #4. I play that pretty well if I do say so myself (the last I looked, my story mode score is still in the top 200 at the Playfirst site), and the Apprentice's last round is a brutal, brutal challenge. It's really fun; when you can coordinate time-management games like that, I find the experience almost Zen-like, and I'm on an adrenaline high for a little while afterwards.
9. Put a water on the counter.
When I got home from work today, I saw that there was a thing on the counter I wasn't familiar with. As I investigated, I saw that it was eight pint cartons, like milk cartons, all shrink-wrapped together; I guessed, correctly, that this was probably a Costco item. I couldn't figure it out, though; we don't drink anywhere near that much milk, and Costco milk is too big to go into pint bottles. I asked my Co-Vivant, "What are these little cartons?"
And she said, perfectly sensibly, "Hash browns."
I live in world where you can buy eight pints of hash browns in cartons. I'm not convinced that's right.
Thursday, April 26, 2007
4/25: What I Accomplished Today
1. Went to Literary Society. The lunch was nice, and several people from book group were there, so that was fun. My colleague who sometimes does the introductions introduced today's speaker, and her introduction was a concise analysis that captured some of the nuance and paradox of Oppenheimer in fewer than five minutes.
The speaker wasn't good, though. He seemed very personable, and based on comments he made, I suspect he is a good teacher. However, he summarized the book--the book we all had at our houses. The book most of us had at least made a start on. Hint for authors: if you're asked to speak at one of the Literary Society functions, don't summarize your book. Assume your audience has read it, and if we haven't, make us want to. Why in the world am I going to want to read a book when I've already heard the good parts? I thought this was a very irritating lack of audience awareness.
The other problem: he ran long. Most of the speakers take 30-40 minutes and then take questions for another five or 10 minutes. He was at 40 minutes and going strong, and I needed to go to work, but I hated to leave in the middle. Eventually, though, my bladder, impatience, and work ethic won out, and I left.
2. Graded two sets of papers, graded two classes of online work, prepped tonight's class, taught tonight's class.
On work days, I put that, and it seems almost like a throwaway. For this to make sense, however, you have to know that, particularly near the end of the semester, this is the most time-consuming thing I will do all day; today, this took a total of six hours.
You may have noticed (probably not, but maybe) that, on the weekend, this tagline was absent. Unless I am desperately, desperately behind, I do not bring work home. First of all, I'm entitled to a personal life. When I was in school, we had a cousin who was an English teacher, and it seemed like every time we asked if she wanted to go somewhere, she couldn't because she had a million papers to grade. I have a million papers to grade, too, but I keep double the office hours I have to so I can finish them at work. When I'm home, I get to relax and enjoy being home.
The other reason I try not to bring papers home is that my Co-Vivant wants to help. She has some regard for teachers and thinks everyone should try to help them--but the way she helps me is by offering to grade papers. "Is that the person's name? That's a stupid name. Just on the basis of that name, you can't give that student higher than a C." "This person is in college and has penmanship that poor? Flunk 'em." This is funny, sometimes, but it doesn't get the work done any faster.
We don't have any animals anymore (they were all old; the last three died within about a year of each other two years ago), but when we had animals, I tried not to bring papers home because one of the cats would eat paper. Once, she did nibble on a gradesheet until one of us noticed what she was doing and rescued it before it was demolished. Then I had to go to the English department secretary and show her the paper and say, "You're not going to believe this, but my cat ate my homework." She took my gradesheet and showed it to the department chair, and they both laughed very hard for a very long time. It was only mostly embarrassing.
3. Verified my book orders for the Fall semester.
4. Reading. I'm probably not going to read the entire Oppenheimer, but I've decided I'll at least skim through the rest of it, not because the co-author's talk was so inspiring, but because the Oppie's personality is interesting. I'll probably skip the part about his trial; I find kangaroo courts so frustrating and un-American and...nauseating that I really can't stomach the thought of going over the material yet again. I had a friend who would say I was burying my head in the sand by refusing to admit the reality of what happened; I would say that I'm well aware of what happened, having read several other books and articles and seen several documentaries about it. I would counter that I'm not burying my head in the sand; I'm not making myself sniff that particular pile of feces again. So I skimmed a little more of that; we've just dropped the Bombs.
5. The woman who normally backs up the placements had a family event today, so I did the placement backup.
6. We watched Nova tonight; it was about the promises and shortcomings of solar energy. We're both interested in putting up solar panels, but we're not in a position to do that yet.
7. Started the new Pogo badges; got about a fifth into two of them. The personal challenge, the badge that came up in the 2005 badge book, requires me to win games of billiards; I'm not good at winning Pogo billiards. That could be a long one.
8. Started working on my level 20 Paladin in World of Warcraft. Shifting from a higher-level to a lower-level character is tough the first day or so because you can't just breeze in and do the things you could the day before. It's also a little frustrating because I've leveled the dwarf and gnome to 25, and both draenei, so now I'm starting the human portion of my character list. My human paladin is just lame until I remember how to play her; she can't zip in like a warrior, and she has no ranged abilities except that she happens to be an engineer and usually has some explosives. Pulling (separating one or two evil critters, a manageable fight, from a larger group) is hard when you don't have any range (she doesn't have a bow, a crossbow, a gun, a throwing axe, or a wand with which she can deal damage at a distance).
Okay, enough WOW whining; tomorrow or the day after, I'll have a better feel of how to play a paladin again, and then it should be fine.
9. Today's BigFishGame is one of those dumb-ass Missing Object puzzles. I liked Travelogue 360: Paris because I thought the hint system was innovative, but other than that one, I think all of these games are just goofy. Not my cup of tea.
10. Trying to remember if I did anything useful around the house today. It seems like there was something I did when I got up this morning, but now I don't remember what it was.
The speaker wasn't good, though. He seemed very personable, and based on comments he made, I suspect he is a good teacher. However, he summarized the book--the book we all had at our houses. The book most of us had at least made a start on. Hint for authors: if you're asked to speak at one of the Literary Society functions, don't summarize your book. Assume your audience has read it, and if we haven't, make us want to. Why in the world am I going to want to read a book when I've already heard the good parts? I thought this was a very irritating lack of audience awareness.
The other problem: he ran long. Most of the speakers take 30-40 minutes and then take questions for another five or 10 minutes. He was at 40 minutes and going strong, and I needed to go to work, but I hated to leave in the middle. Eventually, though, my bladder, impatience, and work ethic won out, and I left.
2. Graded two sets of papers, graded two classes of online work, prepped tonight's class, taught tonight's class.
On work days, I put that, and it seems almost like a throwaway. For this to make sense, however, you have to know that, particularly near the end of the semester, this is the most time-consuming thing I will do all day; today, this took a total of six hours.
You may have noticed (probably not, but maybe) that, on the weekend, this tagline was absent. Unless I am desperately, desperately behind, I do not bring work home. First of all, I'm entitled to a personal life. When I was in school, we had a cousin who was an English teacher, and it seemed like every time we asked if she wanted to go somewhere, she couldn't because she had a million papers to grade. I have a million papers to grade, too, but I keep double the office hours I have to so I can finish them at work. When I'm home, I get to relax and enjoy being home.
The other reason I try not to bring papers home is that my Co-Vivant wants to help. She has some regard for teachers and thinks everyone should try to help them--but the way she helps me is by offering to grade papers. "Is that the person's name? That's a stupid name. Just on the basis of that name, you can't give that student higher than a C." "This person is in college and has penmanship that poor? Flunk 'em." This is funny, sometimes, but it doesn't get the work done any faster.
We don't have any animals anymore (they were all old; the last three died within about a year of each other two years ago), but when we had animals, I tried not to bring papers home because one of the cats would eat paper. Once, she did nibble on a gradesheet until one of us noticed what she was doing and rescued it before it was demolished. Then I had to go to the English department secretary and show her the paper and say, "You're not going to believe this, but my cat ate my homework." She took my gradesheet and showed it to the department chair, and they both laughed very hard for a very long time. It was only mostly embarrassing.
3. Verified my book orders for the Fall semester.
4. Reading. I'm probably not going to read the entire Oppenheimer, but I've decided I'll at least skim through the rest of it, not because the co-author's talk was so inspiring, but because the Oppie's personality is interesting. I'll probably skip the part about his trial; I find kangaroo courts so frustrating and un-American and...nauseating that I really can't stomach the thought of going over the material yet again. I had a friend who would say I was burying my head in the sand by refusing to admit the reality of what happened; I would say that I'm well aware of what happened, having read several other books and articles and seen several documentaries about it. I would counter that I'm not burying my head in the sand; I'm not making myself sniff that particular pile of feces again. So I skimmed a little more of that; we've just dropped the Bombs.
5. The woman who normally backs up the placements had a family event today, so I did the placement backup.
6. We watched Nova tonight; it was about the promises and shortcomings of solar energy. We're both interested in putting up solar panels, but we're not in a position to do that yet.
7. Started the new Pogo badges; got about a fifth into two of them. The personal challenge, the badge that came up in the 2005 badge book, requires me to win games of billiards; I'm not good at winning Pogo billiards. That could be a long one.
8. Started working on my level 20 Paladin in World of Warcraft. Shifting from a higher-level to a lower-level character is tough the first day or so because you can't just breeze in and do the things you could the day before. It's also a little frustrating because I've leveled the dwarf and gnome to 25, and both draenei, so now I'm starting the human portion of my character list. My human paladin is just lame until I remember how to play her; she can't zip in like a warrior, and she has no ranged abilities except that she happens to be an engineer and usually has some explosives. Pulling (separating one or two evil critters, a manageable fight, from a larger group) is hard when you don't have any range (she doesn't have a bow, a crossbow, a gun, a throwing axe, or a wand with which she can deal damage at a distance).
Okay, enough WOW whining; tomorrow or the day after, I'll have a better feel of how to play a paladin again, and then it should be fine.
9. Today's BigFishGame is one of those dumb-ass Missing Object puzzles. I liked Travelogue 360: Paris because I thought the hint system was innovative, but other than that one, I think all of these games are just goofy. Not my cup of tea.
10. Trying to remember if I did anything useful around the house today. It seems like there was something I did when I got up this morning, but now I don't remember what it was.
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
4/24: What I Accomplished Today
1. Went to a meeting about a possible CCCC presentation for next year in New Orleans.
2. Graded two sets of papers, prepped tonight's class, taught tonight's class.
3. Finished the paperwork on the Arthur course and mailed all the necessary forms to the people who need them (our library department for supplemental materials, our registrar to verify unique course number, the chairs of every public college in the state to determine transferability).
4. Wrote my paragraph of the CCCC presentation and mailed it to the other people for review and revision.
5. Read. I caught up on my Entertainment Weeklys and read the new Wired and Bookmark. I'm a few weeks behind on my New Yorkers, so I read three of those, bringing me up to the first week in April, so that was good progress. I'm almost halfway through the Oppenheimer biography as well. We'll see if one of the authors, who speaks at tomorrow's luncheon of the Literary Society, inspires me to finish this book. If he doesn't, I'm not going to. My Co-Vivant had also finished several weeks of Sunday papers, so I read the comics and the magazines because those are my job.
6. Watched a few perfectly average comics on Comedy Central and a few episodes of Mad About You. Co-vivant watched Daily Show and Letterman while I read.
7. Played a little Pogo; worked on two Premium badges. Tomorrow is new badge day. I like new badge day.
8. Finally got my blessed World of Warcraft Draenei Warrior to level 25! Hurray!
Here's how this works: I have nine characters, one of each class; between them, I also have at least one of each profession. Right now, I have five characters at level 20 and four at 25. As each one gets to 25, then I move on to the next level 20 and take it to 25, and then the next, and so on; when they're all 25, I'll take the next to 30, and then when she gets to 30 I'll take the second level 25 to 30, and so on. My inner accountant loves WOW; there are statistics to keep track of, and quite a few things to make sure you have fully trained, and a gamillion different resources (armor, weapons, quest items, profession items) you obtain and have to decide how best to deploy.
I think in large part this is why I play games: I really enjoy resource allocation. Almost every game I play a lot involves resource allocation. The Sims: you've got limited time and money, the character has certain things it wants, and you have certain things in mind for this character that may or may not square with its goals for itself. You have to use that limited time and money to help it meet a reasonable percentage of its own goals and your own. Civilization, Age of Empires, other buildy games--obvious resource allocation. ("Do I build a citadel, or do I use the resources to make my cavalry faster, or should I train more farmers?")
The other day, I asked my co-vivant if she could think of any games that weren't resource allocation.
"Baseball," she said.
"You have a limited number of players with given strengths and weaknesses. You are playing opponents with limited strengths and weaknesses. You have a given playing field and limited equipment to use on that playing field. How is that not resource allocation?"
"Freeze tag."
"You have a certain speed and agility. So do the people you're playing with. You all have varying knowledge of the terrain. Sometimes the game is won or lost because you know you're not as fast as Kenny, but you know the yard better."
"Monopoly."
"Limited capital, limited access to spaces depending on who lands where."
"Gee, why would you think like that? Doesn't that suck all the fun out of the game? 'I'm not just playin' a game and having good, clean, silly fun; I'm allocating resources!'"
I think resource allocation is fun.
9. This one surprised me. Checked out the BigFishGame for the day, and it's a Donald Trump Apprentice in L.A. thing. I don't like Donald Trump. I don't like The Apprentice; I've never been able to get through an entire episode because it all looks really petty and mean-spirited. I wasn't even going to download it, but then something looked intriguing in one of the screenshots, and I figured, "Oh, just download it; if you don't like it, nobody's forcing you to play it."
I finished the whole hour and was disappointed I couldn't play longer; I may actually have to buy this one.
Essentially, it's a series of interesting twists on what Big Fish calls Time Management games: Diner Dash, Back to the Bakery, Believe in Santa; there are a gabillion of them, and I probably own most of them because I love these suckers. I got through the first three challenges, and much to my surprise, there were aspects of these levels I hadn't seen before (the rental shop where you have to get out all the orders you can, have the big burly guy blow up the inflatables, have the wiry guy get the surfboards, and restock the returned rental items was really manic and therefore fun).
I know it's a license so he'll end up with some piddly-poo percentage if I buy this, and I don't like the idea of some of my hard-earned money going to the pompous jerk with the marmoset on his head, but I enjoyed this game.
10. Took out the box of recycling (with the paper stuff) and the bucket of recycling (with the cans, bottles, and plastic stuff). Changed the toilet paper roll in the front bathroom. (Yes, I know how utterly useless and piddly this makes me look. However, I want things documented so I can't be accused of "never doing things." The funny part is that both my Co-Vivant and I are going to think that my documentation of such things proves us right. I get that.)
I appear to have used the word "piddly" twice within two paragraphs. Actually, that makes three in three paragraphs.
In the Wired I read today, there was a headline that said something like "Five things you don't know about [some woman I'd never heard of, so her name could have counted for one of the five things and her picture another]. I thought that was an interesting premise, so I said to my Co-Vivant, "If anybody asks you to tell them something about me that nobody else knows, you can tell them that I can say 'I would like an ice cream cone' in three languages." (Why do I care about somebody's aunt putting a blue pencil in my red shoe? I wanted to learn at least one sentence I could actually use, and after due consideration, I picked this one.) Of course, she hadn't seen the magazine, so this just seemed to come out of nowhere, which amused her.
2. Graded two sets of papers, prepped tonight's class, taught tonight's class.
3. Finished the paperwork on the Arthur course and mailed all the necessary forms to the people who need them (our library department for supplemental materials, our registrar to verify unique course number, the chairs of every public college in the state to determine transferability).
4. Wrote my paragraph of the CCCC presentation and mailed it to the other people for review and revision.
5. Read. I caught up on my Entertainment Weeklys and read the new Wired and Bookmark. I'm a few weeks behind on my New Yorkers, so I read three of those, bringing me up to the first week in April, so that was good progress. I'm almost halfway through the Oppenheimer biography as well. We'll see if one of the authors, who speaks at tomorrow's luncheon of the Literary Society, inspires me to finish this book. If he doesn't, I'm not going to. My Co-Vivant had also finished several weeks of Sunday papers, so I read the comics and the magazines because those are my job.
6. Watched a few perfectly average comics on Comedy Central and a few episodes of Mad About You. Co-vivant watched Daily Show and Letterman while I read.
7. Played a little Pogo; worked on two Premium badges. Tomorrow is new badge day. I like new badge day.
8. Finally got my blessed World of Warcraft Draenei Warrior to level 25! Hurray!
Here's how this works: I have nine characters, one of each class; between them, I also have at least one of each profession. Right now, I have five characters at level 20 and four at 25. As each one gets to 25, then I move on to the next level 20 and take it to 25, and then the next, and so on; when they're all 25, I'll take the next to 30, and then when she gets to 30 I'll take the second level 25 to 30, and so on. My inner accountant loves WOW; there are statistics to keep track of, and quite a few things to make sure you have fully trained, and a gamillion different resources (armor, weapons, quest items, profession items) you obtain and have to decide how best to deploy.
I think in large part this is why I play games: I really enjoy resource allocation. Almost every game I play a lot involves resource allocation. The Sims: you've got limited time and money, the character has certain things it wants, and you have certain things in mind for this character that may or may not square with its goals for itself. You have to use that limited time and money to help it meet a reasonable percentage of its own goals and your own. Civilization, Age of Empires, other buildy games--obvious resource allocation. ("Do I build a citadel, or do I use the resources to make my cavalry faster, or should I train more farmers?")
The other day, I asked my co-vivant if she could think of any games that weren't resource allocation.
"Baseball," she said.
"You have a limited number of players with given strengths and weaknesses. You are playing opponents with limited strengths and weaknesses. You have a given playing field and limited equipment to use on that playing field. How is that not resource allocation?"
"Freeze tag."
"You have a certain speed and agility. So do the people you're playing with. You all have varying knowledge of the terrain. Sometimes the game is won or lost because you know you're not as fast as Kenny, but you know the yard better."
"Monopoly."
"Limited capital, limited access to spaces depending on who lands where."
"Gee, why would you think like that? Doesn't that suck all the fun out of the game? 'I'm not just playin' a game and having good, clean, silly fun; I'm allocating resources!'"
I think resource allocation is fun.
9. This one surprised me. Checked out the BigFishGame for the day, and it's a Donald Trump Apprentice in L.A. thing. I don't like Donald Trump. I don't like The Apprentice; I've never been able to get through an entire episode because it all looks really petty and mean-spirited. I wasn't even going to download it, but then something looked intriguing in one of the screenshots, and I figured, "Oh, just download it; if you don't like it, nobody's forcing you to play it."
I finished the whole hour and was disappointed I couldn't play longer; I may actually have to buy this one.
Essentially, it's a series of interesting twists on what Big Fish calls Time Management games: Diner Dash, Back to the Bakery, Believe in Santa; there are a gabillion of them, and I probably own most of them because I love these suckers. I got through the first three challenges, and much to my surprise, there were aspects of these levels I hadn't seen before (the rental shop where you have to get out all the orders you can, have the big burly guy blow up the inflatables, have the wiry guy get the surfboards, and restock the returned rental items was really manic and therefore fun).
I know it's a license so he'll end up with some piddly-poo percentage if I buy this, and I don't like the idea of some of my hard-earned money going to the pompous jerk with the marmoset on his head, but I enjoyed this game.
10. Took out the box of recycling (with the paper stuff) and the bucket of recycling (with the cans, bottles, and plastic stuff). Changed the toilet paper roll in the front bathroom. (Yes, I know how utterly useless and piddly this makes me look. However, I want things documented so I can't be accused of "never doing things." The funny part is that both my Co-Vivant and I are going to think that my documentation of such things proves us right. I get that.)
I appear to have used the word "piddly" twice within two paragraphs. Actually, that makes three in three paragraphs.
In the Wired I read today, there was a headline that said something like "Five things you don't know about [some woman I'd never heard of, so her name could have counted for one of the five things and her picture another]. I thought that was an interesting premise, so I said to my Co-Vivant, "If anybody asks you to tell them something about me that nobody else knows, you can tell them that I can say 'I would like an ice cream cone' in three languages." (Why do I care about somebody's aunt putting a blue pencil in my red shoe? I wanted to learn at least one sentence I could actually use, and after due consideration, I picked this one.) Of course, she hadn't seen the magazine, so this just seemed to come out of nowhere, which amused her.
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
4/23: What I Accomplished Today
1. Met with the computer guy about setting up my business website. Good news: I can probably do it. Better news: I can probably do it myself, so I will save myself hundreds of dollars that I'd have to pay someone else. Bad news: I can do it myself. I can have what I want if I'm willing to do the work myself. Is there a scarier answer than that?
2. Graded two sets of papers. Prepped and taught my class. MLA format day. The fact that it is my responsibility to teach MLA format makes it obvious to me that I was very, very evil in a previous life.
3. Met with the head of the Curriculum committee about what I'd need to do to have my Arthurian Literature course appear in the 2008 catalog. In order to make deadline, I need to get the syllabus sent to all the department chairs in the state tomorrow, but some of the books I needed to do this were at home, so I wrote a draft syllabus when I got home.
4. No Pogo badges today; I was scheduling Christien des Troyes and von Eschenburg instead. (I have the weekly ones done anyway.)
5. We watched some perfectly average stand-up comedians on One-Night Stand and Premium Blend. We also watched a Mad About You.
6. Tried to get my 24 Draenei Warrior to level 25 today, but I'm just too tired. I should be able to do it in less than an hour tomorrow, though.
7. The BigFishGame for today is called Rainbow and appears to feature a variety of color-matchy games. It is labeled "Fun for the whole family." My personal observation is that this frequently means it will be an enormous snooze for a 42-year-old, so I will not be playing this one.
8. Took out the trash, including changing the bag. Put a new water on the counter. I have decided these things need to be documented so I am not accused of never doing them.
There are a few shows we Tivo on the back (old) TiVo because either they're against other things we watch in the front room (like The Simpsons) or we'd rather watch them in the back as we fall asleep, like Ellen. Last night's Simpsons had Marge & Bart playing a World of Warcraft/Evercrack-like game. A few weeks ago, a friend gave us a copy of the World of Warcraft South Park, which I was really looking forward to, but we've apparently misplaced it. I hope it turns up.
It seems like I had a topic I was going to talk about for just a minute tonight, but I'm tired and can't remember what it was.
2. Graded two sets of papers. Prepped and taught my class. MLA format day. The fact that it is my responsibility to teach MLA format makes it obvious to me that I was very, very evil in a previous life.
3. Met with the head of the Curriculum committee about what I'd need to do to have my Arthurian Literature course appear in the 2008 catalog. In order to make deadline, I need to get the syllabus sent to all the department chairs in the state tomorrow, but some of the books I needed to do this were at home, so I wrote a draft syllabus when I got home.
4. No Pogo badges today; I was scheduling Christien des Troyes and von Eschenburg instead. (I have the weekly ones done anyway.)
5. We watched some perfectly average stand-up comedians on One-Night Stand and Premium Blend. We also watched a Mad About You.
6. Tried to get my 24 Draenei Warrior to level 25 today, but I'm just too tired. I should be able to do it in less than an hour tomorrow, though.
7. The BigFishGame for today is called Rainbow and appears to feature a variety of color-matchy games. It is labeled "Fun for the whole family." My personal observation is that this frequently means it will be an enormous snooze for a 42-year-old, so I will not be playing this one.
8. Took out the trash, including changing the bag. Put a new water on the counter. I have decided these things need to be documented so I am not accused of never doing them.
There are a few shows we Tivo on the back (old) TiVo because either they're against other things we watch in the front room (like The Simpsons) or we'd rather watch them in the back as we fall asleep, like Ellen. Last night's Simpsons had Marge & Bart playing a World of Warcraft/Evercrack-like game. A few weeks ago, a friend gave us a copy of the World of Warcraft South Park, which I was really looking forward to, but we've apparently misplaced it. I hope it turns up.
It seems like I had a topic I was going to talk about for just a minute tonight, but I'm tired and can't remember what it was.
Monday, April 23, 2007
4/22: What I Accomplished Today
1. We won Puzzle Day today! Any family can get together for Sunday brunch; we made a contest out of it. (I suggested to my co-vivant that we have T-shirts made that say, "We're not just a family; we're a crossword puzzle league!") This week, all three teams tied on the main New York Times crossword puzzle (this week, we were all perfect! Yahoo!) and we tied with the Fellas on the second puzzle, so it went to the third puzzle, and we'd finished it, and they hadn't. so we won. The losing team puts in $3, and the team that comes in second puts in $2, and every now and then, we have enough money to have a nice meal in a restaurant for all eight or nine of us.
2. Finished two Pogo badges, which got me the Spring Superbadge.
3. Watched ER. Is there a more depressing show on television? I don't even know why we still watch this, except we worry about Abby. Maybe Sam and Neela sometimes. Everyone else is a jerk. Morris is a jerk. Luka is a misogynist jerk; I don't know what Abby sees in him, and I didn't know what Sam saw in him. Stupid, stupid Abby to have a baby with a jerk. Pratt is a jerk; his name is appropriate. Gates is a huge jerk. Ray is a mild jerk; he's the best of this lot, and he'd be okay, I think, with Neela, but right now, he's still a jerk. Frank is a jerk, challenged daughter or no. Kerry was a jerk, but at least she was a jerk we knew. Occasionally someone tries to rehabilitate him- or herself, but it never takes or lasts for very long, and before you know it, the person is a jerk again. In retrospect, I see that most of the jerks I have listed are men; I thought Lewis ended up being a jerk, too.
Has anything positive on this show happened since...jeeze, I can't think of the last one. Joe was born, but he was very sick. Ella was born, but her father was dead in fewer than six months, so it was hard to be too excited about that. Green was in remission at his wedding, but we still suspected the cancer was coming back. I can't think of the last happy thing that happened on this joyless show. We've tried to stop watching it because we've agreed it's just one abysmally depressing thing after another, but then something happens and we end up watching just one or two more episodes.
We also watched this week's Best Week Ever. This is just the right amount of information on pop culture. Heaven forbid we actually watch American Idol or Survivor or a ballroom dancing show or any show featuring that odd man with the large clock on his chest, but I suppose we should know the names briefly.
For Earth Day, we Tivo'd the entire run of The Planet Earth; Ellen showed some clips on her show, and it looked interesting and beautifully photographed. However, we won't be able to get them all watched in a timely fashion, so we also spent part of the evening moving these to DVD-R so we can watch them as we have time.
4. Finished the current issue of The Week, and read more in the Oppenheimer biography. We're at Los Alamos finally, but instead of focusing on either the research or the people, which I would find interesting, the whole thing I read today focused on the continuing investigation of Oppie's left-wing connections, including the suicide of his former fiancee Jean Tatlock. When the book talks about people or research, I find it really good, but as I've mentioned, the focus of the research is on his CP connections, and that horse is being beaten into the ground. This isn't a biography I'd have chosen to read for myself, and I probably won't finish it, but I'll get as far as I can before the luncheon on Wednesday.
5. Made a sketchy mock-up of my business website for my meeting tomorrow.
6. Got my Draenei warrior to level 24.
7. Played a few minutes of today's/yesterday's BigFishGames new game, Ice Cream Tycoon. I usually really enjoy business sims, but this was just a guessing game; there are ten types of ice cream, and you have to guess with no clues what ice cream will be most popular in what neighborhood. Oh, my gosh. I couldn't finish Day Two because it was just too boring.
Today's new game, Crazy Eggs, looks like a pretty run-of-the-mill three-matchy; not even gonna bother downloading it.
Tomorrow begins the last two weeks of the term before finals; intense, unpleasant weeks, but I suppose if I only find my job unpleasant four or five weeks out of the year, that isn't so bad. I think I have four or five meetings this week and two or three meetings next week. This is also the second most unpleasant grading week because this is the last week I can guarantee students rewrites. Blech. Mebbe I shoulda been a plumber.
Something happened at one of last week's meetings that's been on my mind. We were talking about having a seminar in Convocation Week about the way our program meshes with another program at our institution, but the other program is rather antiquated and has refused to work with us when we have offered to meet with them about helping their program articulate with ours (most of their students will eventually need to take our classes). Somebody suggested that the workshop be called "Bridging the Gap from Nowhere," which was very funny and clever and we had the laugh, but then people were talking as though we were actually going to call it that. I said, "Now wait; what are we calling 'nothing'? In we insult them in front of the whole institution in a program name, why are they going to want to work with us?" And someone else said begrudgingly, "Oh, you're right; we have to go with the P.C. version and call it something else."
Now I'm as irritated by P.C. as anyone; I don't think "Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder" (or, heaven forfend, PTSD) is a better name than the starkly evocative "shell shock," and I don't think "African-American" is better than "Black." (I had a friend tell me once, "You know, we've both been to Africa the same number of times, which is zero, so let's just stick with what I am, which is darker than you are." I'm also bothered by modifying people's Americanism. I don't think amount of melanin makes people a different type of American, and if everyone who isn't Caucasian has a modifier, the implication is that Caucasians are the 'standard' Americans.) However, I don't think this seminar name was about P.C.; this was audience awareness, simple common sense in acknowledging the rhetorical situation. We teach English, for pity's sake; if we give a workshop a name that alienates the people at the receiving end, how we can do a good job teaching audience awareness to our students?
I also get irritated when people confuse P.C. with Courtesy. There were times 10 or 15 years ago when there was a good chance, when I left my home, that somebody was going to snarl, "Fat dyke" at me over the course of the day. This chance is considerably lower now. I do not think people are thinking to themselves, "I would normally call that substantial masculine-looking lady a Fat Dyke, but that wouldn't be P.C." I think that people have become more aware over the intervening years that isn't kind to call someone a Fat Dyke, and most people were (or at least claim to have been) raised by our mammas not to be rude once we understand that something is rude.
So yes, I'm impatient with P.C.--but I'm more impatient when it's confused with common sense or courtesy.
I reread last night's post this afternoon, and I left out several words. I always tell my students to read their paragraphs out loud so they don't do that, and I had, in fact, read some of the paragraphs out loud, but not all of them, and it came back to bite me. I've read this one out loud, so I hope it's better.
2. Finished two Pogo badges, which got me the Spring Superbadge.
3. Watched ER. Is there a more depressing show on television? I don't even know why we still watch this, except we worry about Abby. Maybe Sam and Neela sometimes. Everyone else is a jerk. Morris is a jerk. Luka is a misogynist jerk; I don't know what Abby sees in him, and I didn't know what Sam saw in him. Stupid, stupid Abby to have a baby with a jerk. Pratt is a jerk; his name is appropriate. Gates is a huge jerk. Ray is a mild jerk; he's the best of this lot, and he'd be okay, I think, with Neela, but right now, he's still a jerk. Frank is a jerk, challenged daughter or no. Kerry was a jerk, but at least she was a jerk we knew. Occasionally someone tries to rehabilitate him- or herself, but it never takes or lasts for very long, and before you know it, the person is a jerk again. In retrospect, I see that most of the jerks I have listed are men; I thought Lewis ended up being a jerk, too.
Has anything positive on this show happened since...jeeze, I can't think of the last one. Joe was born, but he was very sick. Ella was born, but her father was dead in fewer than six months, so it was hard to be too excited about that. Green was in remission at his wedding, but we still suspected the cancer was coming back. I can't think of the last happy thing that happened on this joyless show. We've tried to stop watching it because we've agreed it's just one abysmally depressing thing after another, but then something happens and we end up watching just one or two more episodes.
We also watched this week's Best Week Ever. This is just the right amount of information on pop culture. Heaven forbid we actually watch American Idol or Survivor or a ballroom dancing show or any show featuring that odd man with the large clock on his chest, but I suppose we should know the names briefly.
For Earth Day, we Tivo'd the entire run of The Planet Earth; Ellen showed some clips on her show, and it looked interesting and beautifully photographed. However, we won't be able to get them all watched in a timely fashion, so we also spent part of the evening moving these to DVD-R so we can watch them as we have time.
4. Finished the current issue of The Week, and read more in the Oppenheimer biography. We're at Los Alamos finally, but instead of focusing on either the research or the people, which I would find interesting, the whole thing I read today focused on the continuing investigation of Oppie's left-wing connections, including the suicide of his former fiancee Jean Tatlock. When the book talks about people or research, I find it really good, but as I've mentioned, the focus of the research is on his CP connections, and that horse is being beaten into the ground. This isn't a biography I'd have chosen to read for myself, and I probably won't finish it, but I'll get as far as I can before the luncheon on Wednesday.
5. Made a sketchy mock-up of my business website for my meeting tomorrow.
6. Got my Draenei warrior to level 24.
7. Played a few minutes of today's/yesterday's BigFishGames new game, Ice Cream Tycoon. I usually really enjoy business sims, but this was just a guessing game; there are ten types of ice cream, and you have to guess with no clues what ice cream will be most popular in what neighborhood. Oh, my gosh. I couldn't finish Day Two because it was just too boring.
Today's new game, Crazy Eggs, looks like a pretty run-of-the-mill three-matchy; not even gonna bother downloading it.
Tomorrow begins the last two weeks of the term before finals; intense, unpleasant weeks, but I suppose if I only find my job unpleasant four or five weeks out of the year, that isn't so bad. I think I have four or five meetings this week and two or three meetings next week. This is also the second most unpleasant grading week because this is the last week I can guarantee students rewrites. Blech. Mebbe I shoulda been a plumber.
Something happened at one of last week's meetings that's been on my mind. We were talking about having a seminar in Convocation Week about the way our program meshes with another program at our institution, but the other program is rather antiquated and has refused to work with us when we have offered to meet with them about helping their program articulate with ours (most of their students will eventually need to take our classes). Somebody suggested that the workshop be called "Bridging the Gap from Nowhere," which was very funny and clever and we had the laugh, but then people were talking as though we were actually going to call it that. I said, "Now wait; what are we calling 'nothing'? In we insult them in front of the whole institution in a program name, why are they going to want to work with us?" And someone else said begrudgingly, "Oh, you're right; we have to go with the P.C. version and call it something else."
Now I'm as irritated by P.C. as anyone; I don't think "Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder" (or, heaven forfend, PTSD) is a better name than the starkly evocative "shell shock," and I don't think "African-American" is better than "Black." (I had a friend tell me once, "You know, we've both been to Africa the same number of times, which is zero, so let's just stick with what I am, which is darker than you are." I'm also bothered by modifying people's Americanism. I don't think amount of melanin makes people a different type of American, and if everyone who isn't Caucasian has a modifier, the implication is that Caucasians are the 'standard' Americans.) However, I don't think this seminar name was about P.C.; this was audience awareness, simple common sense in acknowledging the rhetorical situation. We teach English, for pity's sake; if we give a workshop a name that alienates the people at the receiving end, how we can do a good job teaching audience awareness to our students?
I also get irritated when people confuse P.C. with Courtesy. There were times 10 or 15 years ago when there was a good chance, when I left my home, that somebody was going to snarl, "Fat dyke" at me over the course of the day. This chance is considerably lower now. I do not think people are thinking to themselves, "I would normally call that substantial masculine-looking lady a Fat Dyke, but that wouldn't be P.C." I think that people have become more aware over the intervening years that isn't kind to call someone a Fat Dyke, and most people were (or at least claim to have been) raised by our mammas not to be rude once we understand that something is rude.
So yes, I'm impatient with P.C.--but I'm more impatient when it's confused with common sense or courtesy.
I reread last night's post this afternoon, and I left out several words. I always tell my students to read their paragraphs out loud so they don't do that, and I had, in fact, read some of the paragraphs out loud, but not all of them, and it came back to bite me. I've read this one out loud, so I hope it's better.
Sunday, April 22, 2007
4/21: What I Accomplished Today
1. Finished three Pogo badges; there's a four-badge Super Badge this week and next, so now I'm 3/4 of the way toward finishing it.
Pogo has two badges a week, and then a "wild card slot" that you can fill with any badge you wish from the previously offered ones. If you finish all the weekly badges in a year, you get a badge for the year. I have the 2003 and 2006 badges, and so far, I have all the 2007 badges. I am now working on the 2005 badge book. When I have finished it, I will do 2004. Then I will be caught up, and I do not know what I will do.
(It's not that I'm obsessive-compulsive; it's just that I'm obsessive-compulsive. Anal-retentive does, in fact, have a hyphen in it.)
2. We watched The Devil Wear Prada. Cute movie. Not an Oscar movie, but cute. I can see why Meryl was nominated; she took a cardboard cutout, flatter than Flat Stanley, and gave her redeeming social value.
I never used to like Meryl Streep; she seemed more an impersonator than an actor ("Now I'll do New Jersey for you. Now Australian. Now Austrian."), and everything was so earnest and serious. Even when she did comedy, it was the one in which she & Goldie Hawn were dead, which had some cute moments, but wasn't very good. Now, though, she's making some lighter films; from the interviews , acceptance speeches, and award banquets we've seen her at recently, she seems to be one of the few genuinely grounded and therefore potentially happy people in show business.
This was also our first movie from NetFlix. It froze in several spots. Our player has never done this before. We hope that was an anomaly.
The movie was interesting from a myth and ritual standpoint because of the age-old pattern: after a series of tests in which our hero[ine] performs with mixed results, she is finally set an impossible task on an impossible timeline--and she succeeds. (In mythology, it's almost the goal of the setter of the task to destroy the young person in question with this task. That was certainly the intent here.) She succeeds, however, and realizes she is turning into the task setter: the Fisher King is dead; long live the Fisher King. However, instead of regaining what is usually the hero's rightful position as the new ruler, she rebels against her transformation and returns to a path she sees as more properly hers.
Sorry; whenever I get like that, I usually need to play a few minutes of World of Warcraft.
(And this movie came out just as Ugly Betty would have been solidifying its first few episodes, and much of it seems to have drawn inspiration from this movie. I think Ugly Betty is a more positive statement; she refuses even to begin the Sell-Out path, and people eventually respect her for Who She Is rather than Who She is Willing To Become.)
3. After the movie, we watched Mad About You and Clatterford on Tivo. Mad About You is a favorite; for some reason, we never watched this show in first run, and the writing and acting are very sharp and nicely done. We also simply are Paul and Jamie, but we take turns as to which is being which. In today's episode, they were having one of those "nothing you say can possibly actually mean what it means at face value; what are you really saying?" conversations that we have at least once a week. They're funny afterwards, but at the time, you just want to yell swear words and say, "Honest to gosh, I really, really do mean that your shirt is cute. I was not implying anything about your weight today relative to your weight last week, nor am I making passive aggressive statements about your relationship with your mother. It's all good, and your shirt is cute."
I've heard several comments disappointed with Clatterford, the new Jennifer Saunders (it airs in the U.K. as Jam and Jerusalem) show. I think the disappointed were expecting the wrong show; they were expecting another Ab Fab. She's already done that; why would she do it again? (Yes, I know, that would have been really fun, too, in a different way.)
Clatterford is not Ab Fab. Better points of comparison would be either Calendar Girls or Last of the Summer Wine.
You may remember Calendar Girls; it was a Helen Mirren from a few years ago in which a Ladies' Guild group needs to raise money and decides to put out a topless calendar. This show is also about a Ladies' Guild, although with slightly different emphasis. If you know this movie, the original British title of the show makes sense, since there's a whole montage in which we see the women sing the hymn based on the Blake poem (it starts "and did those feet" and ends "on England's fair and verdant lands" or some such; I don't have the poem here at home. It was one of the hymns at Diana's funeral and was supposed to be one of her favorites); there are several references to "Jerusalem." The "jam" part is because these groups are often well known for making jams and jellies and blankets and other odd craft projects. (The women's group at the church in which I grew up often quilting bees and other craft-related socials.)
Last of the Summer Wine is not one of my favorite Britcoms on PBS on Saturday night. It's basically a show in which nothing happens--Seinfeld if the characters were 40 years older and, for the most part, not smart alecks. It has a huge ensemble cast, but the real star of the show, as far as I'm concerned, is Yorkshire; every episode usually has at least a full minute, all together, of gorgeous Yorkshire scenery.
Clatterford, in many ways, is 180 degrees from Ab Fab; it's essentially about the positive aspects of small town living (as the two works I mentioned above are). Yes, it can be claustrophobic, and one step out of line will set tongues a-wagging, possibly for decades--but on the other hand, it's harder to fall through the cracks if you're part of a mesh that strong. (That metaphor's mixed, but it's late. Bear with me.)
It's an ensemble cast, but I suspect the idea got sold because it was to be a Saunders/Lumley/French reunion. Ironically, they all have minor roles, although Saunders writes the show. Saunders plays the anti-Edina; instead of utter indifference to her children, she is attempting to live out her own fantasies through them, and the daughter, at least, couldn't be less interested. (Her never-seen son [echoes of Sage?] seems to be a celebrity in his own right.) Lumley, former Avenger, former model, former Patsy, plays a dottering crone. French is also the direct opposite of the Vicar of Dibley; instead of the astute caretaker, she's multiply-personalitied/whatever we're supposed to be calling this right now. While all of the performances on the show are very nice, French's is gorgeous. Turns out all three of these women can act.
In my favorite episode so far, the leader of the women's organization has learned their group is to be inspected. She is terrified; their attendance is down, the organization is eschewed by most (not all) of the town's younger women, and protocols aren't always followed. She calls an emergency meeting to help organize the meeting at night which will be inspected, but she is interrupted because an older gentleman in town, widower to a former Guild member, has been letting himself and his house go, and the women rally to clean his home and provide him with some food and other comforts. The obvious point: yes, of course the organization deserves to survive, and will survive--but to care for each other and friends, and not to fill a niche in a hierarchy or supply the high members with regalia and pomp. An American sitcom would have had a whole scene in which that point was beaten by 15 rocks, probably flung by a precocious child (because apparently everyone in America older than 28 is an idiot, to hear our television tell it).
Anyway, Clatterford's not what I thought it was going to be. And I'm glad.
4. Read more in the Oppenheimer biography. We're actually at Los Alamos now, so it's more interesting; he had been told he'd have to give up all his Communist and other leftist connections to lead the Manhattan Project, and he did. There are incidents here and there, but when they're the exception and not the litany, they're interesting. I'm still not convinced I'm going to finish it (I finish almost everything I read because I find most things interesting, but if I don't find something interesting, I grant myself dispensation and move on), but I'll get as far as I can by the luncheon on Wednesday and see whether I feel like reading further.
5. Got my draenei warrior to level 23. This including her finishing the Bloodmyst quests, so that was really cool. I also got her her first polearm. I couldn't be prouder.
6. I haven't played the BigFish Game for today yet; it looks like a business simulator, and I usually enjoy those. I've downloaded it. I'll see if I can get it played tomorrow.
Pogo has two badges a week, and then a "wild card slot" that you can fill with any badge you wish from the previously offered ones. If you finish all the weekly badges in a year, you get a badge for the year. I have the 2003 and 2006 badges, and so far, I have all the 2007 badges. I am now working on the 2005 badge book. When I have finished it, I will do 2004. Then I will be caught up, and I do not know what I will do.
(It's not that I'm obsessive-compulsive; it's just that I'm obsessive-compulsive. Anal-retentive does, in fact, have a hyphen in it.)
2. We watched The Devil Wear Prada. Cute movie. Not an Oscar movie, but cute. I can see why Meryl was nominated; she took a cardboard cutout, flatter than Flat Stanley, and gave her redeeming social value.
I never used to like Meryl Streep; she seemed more an impersonator than an actor ("Now I'll do New Jersey for you. Now Australian. Now Austrian."), and everything was so earnest and serious. Even when she did comedy, it was the one in which she & Goldie Hawn were dead, which had some cute moments, but wasn't very good. Now, though, she's making some lighter films; from the interviews , acceptance speeches, and award banquets we've seen her at recently, she seems to be one of the few genuinely grounded and therefore potentially happy people in show business.
This was also our first movie from NetFlix. It froze in several spots. Our player has never done this before. We hope that was an anomaly.
The movie was interesting from a myth and ritual standpoint because of the age-old pattern: after a series of tests in which our hero[ine] performs with mixed results, she is finally set an impossible task on an impossible timeline--and she succeeds. (In mythology, it's almost the goal of the setter of the task to destroy the young person in question with this task. That was certainly the intent here.) She succeeds, however, and realizes she is turning into the task setter: the Fisher King is dead; long live the Fisher King. However, instead of regaining what is usually the hero's rightful position as the new ruler, she rebels against her transformation and returns to a path she sees as more properly hers.
Sorry; whenever I get like that, I usually need to play a few minutes of World of Warcraft.
(And this movie came out just as Ugly Betty would have been solidifying its first few episodes, and much of it seems to have drawn inspiration from this movie. I think Ugly Betty is a more positive statement; she refuses even to begin the Sell-Out path, and people eventually respect her for Who She Is rather than Who She is Willing To Become.)
3. After the movie, we watched Mad About You and Clatterford on Tivo. Mad About You is a favorite; for some reason, we never watched this show in first run, and the writing and acting are very sharp and nicely done. We also simply are Paul and Jamie, but we take turns as to which is being which. In today's episode, they were having one of those "nothing you say can possibly actually mean what it means at face value; what are you really saying?" conversations that we have at least once a week. They're funny afterwards, but at the time, you just want to yell swear words and say, "Honest to gosh, I really, really do mean that your shirt is cute. I was not implying anything about your weight today relative to your weight last week, nor am I making passive aggressive statements about your relationship with your mother. It's all good, and your shirt is cute."
I've heard several comments disappointed with Clatterford, the new Jennifer Saunders (it airs in the U.K. as Jam and Jerusalem) show. I think the disappointed were expecting the wrong show; they were expecting another Ab Fab. She's already done that; why would she do it again? (Yes, I know, that would have been really fun, too, in a different way.)
Clatterford is not Ab Fab. Better points of comparison would be either Calendar Girls or Last of the Summer Wine.
You may remember Calendar Girls; it was a Helen Mirren from a few years ago in which a Ladies' Guild group needs to raise money and decides to put out a topless calendar. This show is also about a Ladies' Guild, although with slightly different emphasis. If you know this movie, the original British title of the show makes sense, since there's a whole montage in which we see the women sing the hymn based on the Blake poem (it starts "and did those feet" and ends "on England's fair and verdant lands" or some such; I don't have the poem here at home. It was one of the hymns at Diana's funeral and was supposed to be one of her favorites); there are several references to "Jerusalem." The "jam" part is because these groups are often well known for making jams and jellies and blankets and other odd craft projects. (The women's group at the church in which I grew up often quilting bees and other craft-related socials.)
Last of the Summer Wine is not one of my favorite Britcoms on PBS on Saturday night. It's basically a show in which nothing happens--Seinfeld if the characters were 40 years older and, for the most part, not smart alecks. It has a huge ensemble cast, but the real star of the show, as far as I'm concerned, is Yorkshire; every episode usually has at least a full minute, all together, of gorgeous Yorkshire scenery.
Clatterford, in many ways, is 180 degrees from Ab Fab; it's essentially about the positive aspects of small town living (as the two works I mentioned above are). Yes, it can be claustrophobic, and one step out of line will set tongues a-wagging, possibly for decades--but on the other hand, it's harder to fall through the cracks if you're part of a mesh that strong. (That metaphor's mixed, but it's late. Bear with me.)
It's an ensemble cast, but I suspect the idea got sold because it was to be a Saunders/Lumley/French reunion. Ironically, they all have minor roles, although Saunders writes the show. Saunders plays the anti-Edina; instead of utter indifference to her children, she is attempting to live out her own fantasies through them, and the daughter, at least, couldn't be less interested. (Her never-seen son [echoes of Sage?] seems to be a celebrity in his own right.) Lumley, former Avenger, former model, former Patsy, plays a dottering crone. French is also the direct opposite of the Vicar of Dibley; instead of the astute caretaker, she's multiply-personalitied/whatever we're supposed to be calling this right now. While all of the performances on the show are very nice, French's is gorgeous. Turns out all three of these women can act.
In my favorite episode so far, the leader of the women's organization has learned their group is to be inspected. She is terrified; their attendance is down, the organization is eschewed by most (not all) of the town's younger women, and protocols aren't always followed. She calls an emergency meeting to help organize the meeting at night which will be inspected, but she is interrupted because an older gentleman in town, widower to a former Guild member, has been letting himself and his house go, and the women rally to clean his home and provide him with some food and other comforts. The obvious point: yes, of course the organization deserves to survive, and will survive--but to care for each other and friends, and not to fill a niche in a hierarchy or supply the high members with regalia and pomp. An American sitcom would have had a whole scene in which that point was beaten by 15 rocks, probably flung by a precocious child (because apparently everyone in America older than 28 is an idiot, to hear our television tell it).
Anyway, Clatterford's not what I thought it was going to be. And I'm glad.
4. Read more in the Oppenheimer biography. We're actually at Los Alamos now, so it's more interesting; he had been told he'd have to give up all his Communist and other leftist connections to lead the Manhattan Project, and he did. There are incidents here and there, but when they're the exception and not the litany, they're interesting. I'm still not convinced I'm going to finish it (I finish almost everything I read because I find most things interesting, but if I don't find something interesting, I grant myself dispensation and move on), but I'll get as far as I can by the luncheon on Wednesday and see whether I feel like reading further.
5. Got my draenei warrior to level 23. This including her finishing the Bloodmyst quests, so that was really cool. I also got her her first polearm. I couldn't be prouder.
6. I haven't played the BigFish Game for today yet; it looks like a business simulator, and I usually enjoy those. I've downloaded it. I'll see if I can get it played tomorrow.
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