walkingshadow (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
walkingshadow) wrote2005-02-03 05:45 pm
walkingshadow) wrote2005-02-03 05:45 pm
I believe in peace, bitch
Let's take a minute to seethe at the roommates. I don't think any of them are about right now, but I came home to find that one of them (that would be N. or T.) had plugged an air-freshener into one of the kitchen outlets, between the stove and the garbage can. Isn't that nice? It has been smelling like food gone off in there. Do you think it ever occurred to them to, like, take the garbage out? *kicks things* Four weeks we've all been living here and no one but me has ever emptied the garbage. Jules has taken it down to the dumpster once or twice when I've tied it off and left it by the door to be tripped over. This will be the week where I just don't do it. I can't wait to see how long it sits.
Also they leave lights on all the time. I understand that 1) not everybody likes going around in a dark house and 2) I have some compulsions about which lights in the house should be on and when, but they mostly spend their evenings in their rooms with their doors closed, and they need to learn how to turn the light off in the kitchen when they're done in there. And the light over the sinks by the bathroom. And in the hallway. The end result is I go around all the time flicking lights off, and I bet they find it reeaally obnoxious. I really don't care.
Last night I napped for three hours and I woke up at about nine-thirty to N. and T. talking in the hallway. I wonder if nobody realizes just how loud your voices are from the hallway into the bedrooms. So I got to listen to their entire conversation as I laid in the darkness and blinked myself awake, though I seriously could have done without it. Not only was it boring, it was like . . . two monologues running concurrently. Every time they said something it was about themselves; N. said something about herself, and the only way T. could respond to it (and vice-versa) was to relate it to herself. Every time. Towards the end T.'s relationship with her boyfriend started dominating the conversation entirely: they fight all the time, and he sounds like a stubborn, possessive jerk, but she's also pretty stubborn (because like always attracts like, though in a relationship people will often adopt complementary roles —Karney, Social Psych), and she also came out with "and yeah, I like to be taken care of—I'm a girl, what girl wouldn't like to be pampered and taken care of?" and she couldn't see me, but I flung up an arm in the darkness and waved it around. Useless people. Nothing people.
N. is still nice, and she's friendly, but she's not very sharp. She studies all the time—she's been studying from day one—and that's cool, whatever, but then I hear she isn't doing so hot in her classes. Like, she either failed or did really badly on the tests she just took. They're chemistry and biology, true, but. How do you study so much and then not do well? I get away with minimal studying (or not studying at all) largely because I've got a really good memory, and because I'm smart and can put things together, and because at the end of the day I just test well. But you're here, so you're not a total idiot, and you put all this work in, and these are the subjects you like, so you obviously have the motivation, so how do you still not get it?
She's taking LIN 3010 (Intro to Linguistics) and I was very excited about that for her, but it seems like the instructor (a grad student I don't know) is terrible and so is her book. She's asked me for help a couple of times, and I'm happy to help; one day they were drawing syntactic trees, and there were example sentences with embedded clauses, and I was like, have you guys even gone over this in class? And it seems the homework philosophy in this class is that you do the reading, you do the homework, and then you go over it. Which just . . . doesn't sound very productive. N. also got badly turned around on morphology terminology, namely isolating vs. agglutinating and inflection. I tried to explain, as I thought I knew, that isolating and agglutinating formed opposite poles of a spectrum describing the overall morphological habits of a language (each word is made of only one morpheme, or each word is composed of several morphemes all tacked on to a base), but that inflection was a kind of morphology, contrasted with derivation. I had to explain what I meant by "kind." I thought that was fine, and then I read her book, which tries to detail a three-way differentiation between isolation, agglutination, and inflection, and I just couldn't (and can't) make sense of that. N. followed up on that with the instructor at least twice, trying to get a clear explanation, and came back to me last night saying she'd been told "agglutinating" meant there was a one-to-one morpheme-to-meaning relationship, and "inflection" meant each morpheme had more than one meaning. And I was like, if that's what she tells you and that's what the book tells you, go with that—but I've never heard anything like that, and I would say it's wrong. (Is it wrong? Am I wrong? *doubts everything*)
I love the weekends. They're usually not around.
Today I had leftover pizza for breakfast (heated in the oven, not cold; I never understood the appeal) and was three minutes late to LAH. The Mexican Revolution! Not nearly as boring as I feared, but a little disjointed. At least there was a map.
I walked across the street to Goering's after class to purchase books for that class and spent the next hour and a half browsing the store. It's not a very big store and it sells mostly textbooks for the humanities and arts departments plus regular fiction, non-fiction, and reference, and I made it through every title. I came away with the three books I needed plus Essays of E. B. White (one of my favorite books in the world), and Night Battle, a book of poems by William Logan, one of my former seminar professors. See if I don't trot him out in April.
It had rained while I'd been inside and I never knew. It didn't even drizzle on the walk back, though I slid a little in the puddles and my glasses got flecked if I walked under a tree while the wind blew. A notice from the Housing Department was waiting for me in my mailbox, warning me that my payment would be due next Wednesday whether my financial aid came through or I had to take on a couple of contract killings to get the money together. So tomorrow is the day I must go to Potsdam and say "can we make a god-forsaken thesis together?" and if not, pick something else from the Schedule of Courses with closed eyes and a single click of the mouse. And register for it. Next week I will run around making sure money goes just where it should go, and nobody gets evicted.
Also they leave lights on all the time. I understand that 1) not everybody likes going around in a dark house and 2) I have some compulsions about which lights in the house should be on and when, but they mostly spend their evenings in their rooms with their doors closed, and they need to learn how to turn the light off in the kitchen when they're done in there. And the light over the sinks by the bathroom. And in the hallway. The end result is I go around all the time flicking lights off, and I bet they find it reeaally obnoxious. I really don't care.
Last night I napped for three hours and I woke up at about nine-thirty to N. and T. talking in the hallway. I wonder if nobody realizes just how loud your voices are from the hallway into the bedrooms. So I got to listen to their entire conversation as I laid in the darkness and blinked myself awake, though I seriously could have done without it. Not only was it boring, it was like . . . two monologues running concurrently. Every time they said something it was about themselves; N. said something about herself, and the only way T. could respond to it (and vice-versa) was to relate it to herself. Every time. Towards the end T.'s relationship with her boyfriend started dominating the conversation entirely: they fight all the time, and he sounds like a stubborn, possessive jerk, but she's also pretty stubborn (because like always attracts like, though in a relationship people will often adopt complementary roles —Karney, Social Psych), and she also came out with "and yeah, I like to be taken care of—I'm a girl, what girl wouldn't like to be pampered and taken care of?" and she couldn't see me, but I flung up an arm in the darkness and waved it around. Useless people. Nothing people.
N. is still nice, and she's friendly, but she's not very sharp. She studies all the time—she's been studying from day one—and that's cool, whatever, but then I hear she isn't doing so hot in her classes. Like, she either failed or did really badly on the tests she just took. They're chemistry and biology, true, but. How do you study so much and then not do well? I get away with minimal studying (or not studying at all) largely because I've got a really good memory, and because I'm smart and can put things together, and because at the end of the day I just test well. But you're here, so you're not a total idiot, and you put all this work in, and these are the subjects you like, so you obviously have the motivation, so how do you still not get it?
She's taking LIN 3010 (Intro to Linguistics) and I was very excited about that for her, but it seems like the instructor (a grad student I don't know) is terrible and so is her book. She's asked me for help a couple of times, and I'm happy to help; one day they were drawing syntactic trees, and there were example sentences with embedded clauses, and I was like, have you guys even gone over this in class? And it seems the homework philosophy in this class is that you do the reading, you do the homework, and then you go over it. Which just . . . doesn't sound very productive. N. also got badly turned around on morphology terminology, namely isolating vs. agglutinating and inflection. I tried to explain, as I thought I knew, that isolating and agglutinating formed opposite poles of a spectrum describing the overall morphological habits of a language (each word is made of only one morpheme, or each word is composed of several morphemes all tacked on to a base), but that inflection was a kind of morphology, contrasted with derivation. I had to explain what I meant by "kind." I thought that was fine, and then I read her book, which tries to detail a three-way differentiation between isolation, agglutination, and inflection, and I just couldn't (and can't) make sense of that. N. followed up on that with the instructor at least twice, trying to get a clear explanation, and came back to me last night saying she'd been told "agglutinating" meant there was a one-to-one morpheme-to-meaning relationship, and "inflection" meant each morpheme had more than one meaning. And I was like, if that's what she tells you and that's what the book tells you, go with that—but I've never heard anything like that, and I would say it's wrong. (Is it wrong? Am I wrong? *doubts everything*)
I love the weekends. They're usually not around.
Today I had leftover pizza for breakfast (heated in the oven, not cold; I never understood the appeal) and was three minutes late to LAH. The Mexican Revolution! Not nearly as boring as I feared, but a little disjointed. At least there was a map.
I walked across the street to Goering's after class to purchase books for that class and spent the next hour and a half browsing the store. It's not a very big store and it sells mostly textbooks for the humanities and arts departments plus regular fiction, non-fiction, and reference, and I made it through every title. I came away with the three books I needed plus Essays of E. B. White (one of my favorite books in the world), and Night Battle, a book of poems by William Logan, one of my former seminar professors. See if I don't trot him out in April.
It had rained while I'd been inside and I never knew. It didn't even drizzle on the walk back, though I slid a little in the puddles and my glasses got flecked if I walked under a tree while the wind blew. A notice from the Housing Department was waiting for me in my mailbox, warning me that my payment would be due next Wednesday whether my financial aid came through or I had to take on a couple of contract killings to get the money together. So tomorrow is the day I must go to Potsdam and say "can we make a god-forsaken thesis together?" and if not, pick something else from the Schedule of Courses with closed eyes and a single click of the mouse. And register for it. Next week I will run around making sure money goes just where it should go, and nobody gets evicted.