Prepoceros

The beach + contact lenses = DISCOMFORT.

Saline solution and filthy saltwater spray are only distant cousins.

Today, April 25, 2006, is Free Cone Day at my neighborhood Ben & Jerry’s. And at your neighborhood Ben & Jerry’s. And at EVERYONE’S neighborhood Ben & Jerry’s. It’s global, baby.

All afternoon long, from noon to 8pm, you can walk into any Ben & Jerry’s in the world, and they’ll give you free ice cream. Free. Ice cream. And if you want more, you can GO BACK FOR SECONDS. It’s like Christmas and Easter and Earth Day all rolled into one.

Hard to believe it’s been a whole year. I could’ve sworn I blogged last year’s Free Cone Day, but I can’t find it. Weird. I remember it being delicious.

…but there’s something about 3:00 in the morning that makes me want to go to bed.

I was planning to turn in at midnight tonight, thinking that maybe I would, I dunno, GO TO SCHOOL tomorrow or something crazy like that. I used to go to school all the time and rarely missed a class*, but that stellar record has slowly gone to shit over the last few weeks.

This past week has been particularly bad. Teaching LSAT stresses me out: (1) my students are all older than I am and expect more out of the class and their instructor than SAT students do, (2) this is only my third class, so the rules and methods don’t roll off my tongue yet, and I don’t have a ready answer for every question a student might ask, (3) they just changed the books on us, so some of the material I’m prepping is brand new. There’s a steep learning curve, basically, but I do it because I love it. The more I teach it, the easier and less stressful it will become. But right now it’s crazymonkey hard.

When I’m running late in the morning, I can easily convince myself that I *need* to skip school to prep my next LSAT class. Once I’ve made up my mind to stay home, however, I sit around in my pajamas and eat chocolate icing, waiting for the last possible minute before I start prepping, when I’ll be sure to do an inadequate job. So that’s been going well.

Anyway, planned to go to bed at midnight, but wasn’t tired, so innocently stumbled over to YouTube and lost myself in two or three solid hours’ worth of videos. Not long ones, either—most were about 2.5 minutes long, and you’d really really never guess what they were. Really. If you *did* guess, then we might as well get married tomorrow because you know me far too well.

No, it wasn’t porn, nor was it a TV show (though I did drown my sorrows in several episodes of America’s Next Top Model yesterday). I’ll share sometime, but it deserves its own post—I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned this to anyone, except maybe in passing. Oooh, secrets.

But really, I should go to bed now. My only class tomorrow, at 11:30, is the one class I’m in danger of not making an A+** in. Serious danger, actually: I’m at a B+ right now, and I certainly don’t have enough prior knowledge of Women in the Ancient World to pass the final on instinct alone. Boo. Get your ass in gear, lazybutt.

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* Except Logic. No attendance grade, so I only show up for the tests. Hasn’t been a problem so far.

** Not that there is such a thing, as far as official grades go. I wish.

Attention, high schoolers* everywhere: The post below is a phenomenal example of what can happen when you start without a clear sense of purpose, a common mistake students make on their SAT essays.

I got a new couch today (thanks to my mom, who drove all the way down here to sit around my apartment all afternoon while I was out teaching and let the delivery people in). It’s big and red and fabulous. I also got a $500 coffee table with a piddly little scratch across the top for 99 bucks. Dump at the dump at the dump dump dump!

Sammy approves of both couch and table, though my mom says he cracked his head mightily on the latter while trying to leap onto the former and sat around dazed for a minute or two. Poor thing. He’s not so good with the leaping and the looking beforehand. The repeated blunt trauma to the head probably doesn’t help, either—it’s a vicious cycle.

I got home around 5:30 and did absolutely nothing with great vim and vigor for the next five hours, then suddenly fell into a wretched mood. Sometimes I get really scared, and I just want someone to hold me and tell me it’ll be ok…but there’s only Sammy. Half the time he doesn’t even understand that I’m sad and trots off to go chew his bone in another room. I thought dogs were supposed to be good readers of emotion—what part of “sobbing heap” don’t you understand?! Kidding. I love my puppy. He’s awesome.

Anyway, I distracted myself by researching grad schools, in the hope that it would give me some clue as to what I want to major in. It turns out that most of the programs I looked at only required a Bachelor’s in something, with maybe some advanced coursework in your graduate field of study. So, really, my undergrad major doesn’t matter for poo. I have mixed feelings on this—it’s nice to be able to keep my options open, but I’d also like a little guidance.

This is my first serious foray into grad school research, so I don’t know how to tell the high-caliber programs from the shoddy. One thing that seems apparent is that the best programs (some of those at Rice, for instance) make no mention at all of a recommended GPA or test scores. At the other end of the spectrum, if you have a 3.0 and a 470 (that’s 50th percentile) on the GRE Verbal, the Linguistics department at UT-Arlington will AUTOMATICALLY ADMIT you. Um, no thanks.

Right now I’m only looking at schools nearby–within maybe six hours of here. That includes a good part of Texas (Dallas or Austin, but not Lubbock or El Paso) and Louisiana (New Orleans, Baton Rouge).

Of course, I’m probably not going anywhere for another two years (I might be able to graduate in a year if I only did a Math major, but what’s the fun in that?), so this is all still wild speculation. When I withdrew from Mudd, I think I subconsciously assumed that I’d never make it to grad school, but now that I think about it…why the hell not? I’ve been dreaming of grad school ever since I found out such a thing existed. Sure, things have turned out a little differently than I thought they would when I was in high school, but even if I can’t get into the *best* programs any more, there must still be some worthwhile schools that’ll take me.

I’ll be a Ph.D. someday, just you wait. In Physics. Or Linguistics. Or Classics. Or Mathematics. Or something else. Or all of the above.

I’m going to stay in school forever and it’s going to be wonderful. And then I will be very, very poor and it will be less wonderful. And then I’ll die. Or maybe I’ll die before then. Either way, all of this is meaningless. Which is horrible. See? The obsession. It’s everywhere—as soon as I think about my future, BAM! I’m reminded of my impending death and the emptiness of existence.

Blah blah blah. Whine whine whine. Complaint about the late hour and how I always do this. Emote emote emote. Pity pity pity. Look at me, I’m becoming a nihilist. Everyone loves a nihilist—always so upbeat and optimistic, spreading good cheer and butterfly sprinkles wherever she goes. More whining. Sammy just farted, and I can smell it all the way across the room. Damn, that’s rank. What did you eat, dog?

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* No, I’m not so vain as to think high schoolers read this, much less come here looking for test-prep tips. I’m being facetious. Did you know that an obsolete meaning of facetious is “gay and witty”? I’m not sure how that differs from “characterized by pleasantry and levity,” but who am I to challenge the illustrious Messrs. Merriam and Webster?

I like statistics. A lot. Give me a big ol’ table of raw data to stare at and I’m good for the afternoon.

So when I stumbled across the NameVoyager earlier this evening, I couldn’t help but be enthralled. Not only are the data (popularity of baby names from the 1880s to 2004) themselves interesting, the visualization is perhaps the most fascinating representation of a dataset that I’ve ever seen.

I can’t explain it well—you’ll have to go try it for yourself. (But wait until you have a free hour or two.) Click on one of the bars, or start typing a name into the box at the top and see what happens. Mouseover the names that pop up to see their relative popularity in each decade.

Before you’ve explored too deeply, though, you can play a little game I made up. Yes? You want to play? Smart move. It’s fun, I promise.

Ok, here’s the deal: without peeking at the pretty name charts, write down your guesses for the top 10 girls’ names and the top 10 boys’ names for the decade in which you were born. Think of your kindergarten class, your soccer team, the people you work with—anyone who’s about your age. Spelling matters (e.g., John and Jon are different names).

Now go look up all those names and note their actual rank (again, for the decade of your birth). Your score is the sum of these ranks. A perfect score would be 55 in either gender, or 110 combined. The order you list the names doesn’t matter.

This scoring method, as I’ve learned the hard way, is highly sensitive to outliers. One dud in the 50s can blow the whole thing. But these are the arbitrary rules of my made-up game, so that’s the way it’s gonna be.

I’ve hidden my own answers below the fold (no peeking!) so as not to spoil your fun. So go on, get out your pen and paper, back of an envelope, shirtsleeve, whatever. You know you want to. The score to beat (mine) is 147 (6 correct) for girls and 180 (4 correct) for boys.

(more…)

Sometime during the winter I must have forgotten what a thunderstorm was, because I woke up this morning and was all What’s all this water about? And the trees. Why are they flopping all over the place like silly floppy things?

But I suppose I’ll have to reacquaint myself. I’ve never had a dog during thunderstorm season, nor have I ever lived in a place that didn’t have sidewalks through grassy areas in the way that this place doesn’t—it looks like we’ve got some muddy walks ahead of us.

Lucky for me, Sam isn’t the sort of dog who’s afraid of thunderstorms. At all. He thinks the storm is nifty, and he doesn’t understand why we’re not going outside to pee on it RIGHT NOW. On the other hand, thunderstorms apparently make the yippy dog upstairs ANGRY. But the whooshing pretty much drowns her out, so it’s not so bad.

Funny story: the combination of wind swirling around and rain blowing against my building sounds exactly like an oncoming train. Great. So the official “tornado about to tear shit up” signal is no longer “train noise” but “two train noises, the ordinary one plus another that’s louder and scarier.” My building does look pretty sturdy, but I counteract that by sleeping under a window, so the distinction is kind of important.

Oh wow. The storm’s dying down, but there was this random huge thunderclap just now that set off at least three car alarms outside my window. Man, that’s terrible. Cacophonous. If you were one of my tutoring students, you’d be breaking cacophonous into its roots right now.

My internet connection actually died fifteen minutes ago (as I was about to check the online weather report), so I’ll have to post this later. Since I’m awake anyway, I guess I’ll go finish my Latin homework. No, this isn’t the same assignment that was due a week ago*. We probably have a quiz today, too. On something. Syllabus is online, can’t check it. Whatevs.

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* Yes it is.

Question: How long will a new pair of those iconic white earbuds survive in my apartment before being chewed to bits?

It was my fault. I got up to go potty and left the computer chair less than one puppy-length from the desk. Sorry, earbuds. But hey, now I at least get to see what your insides look like, which is kinda cool. Almost as cool as having working earbuds.

While procrastinating on preparing my LSAT class for tomorrow evening*, I was puttering around on YouTube and found this gem: Myspace - THE MOVIE!

It’s a movie. About Myspace. Made by some kids who are definitely younger AND far more talented than I am. I don’t “do” Myspace**, but I think I still got most of the jokes. I think the rule is, though, that if you have to *say* you got the jokes, you probably missed most of them. Whatever, I’m totally hip and you know it.

Best line: “You’re so good at eating pizza!” (in the Tom skit)

I visited the websites in the credits (this was an hour-long process—don’t click those links if you were about to go do chores or something), and it looks like these guys have been at this for a while. They’re kinda funny, and HELLA GOOD with the movie-making. I’m impressed.

Video-editing is one of those things I have a vague desire to be good at but will probably never*** get around to learning. Also included in this category are modern dance, photography, and playing the drums.

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* During which I’ll be teaching for THREE AND A HALF HOURS. Solid. Okay, with two five-minute breaks. But still. Leading a class by myself for two hundred minutes will be exhausting. Did I mention that the average age of the students in my class is probably thirty-something? Yeah. The grown-ups ask the hard questions, too. And they don’t want to get out early. Don’t get me wrong, it’s wonderful to teach people who actually want to be there and care about what they’re learning, but being peppy and knowledgeable and in control from 6:00 to 9:30 is absolutely draining.

** The fact that 95% of the layouts people put up on their Myspace pages make me want to throw up tells me I’m too old. Or too classy. We’ll go with that—I’m too classy for Myspace. I mean, sure, I have an account, but all it does is point here. Because Prepoceros is all about class.

*** Which reminds me—you’re lucky I found that video when I did, because you were about to get a lovely post on death and life expectancy that I spent most of my 40-minute drive home composing. (My iPod didn’t actually come today—long boring story.)

Seriously, if I don’t find another obsession really fucking soon, I’m getting some sort of professional help for this fear-of-death thing. In case you were wondering, spending most of your energy banging your head against a problem that *cannot be solved* and plunging yourself into the depths of despair 15 or 20 times a day (I kept a tally on my hand today—yes, I’m a dork) really takes a lot of the fun out of life. I know that sounds dramatic, but…gah. I would rather be obsessed with Tom Cruise. Or Star Wars. Or foot fungus. Ok, maybe not foot fungus. Maybe. But I think death sucks more than foot fungus.

Oh look, you got like a fifth of that post anyway. You’re welcome, internet.

I rarely get headaches*, but this is the second one I’ve had in two weeks. The last was followed shortly by a weird cold that induced a week-long, hacking, phlegmy cough and made me lose my voice for two days. I’d really rather not go through that again—I should be exempt or something. Immune! That’s the word.

I took some drugs about twenty minutes ago and am waiting for them to kick in. I hope it wasn’t the kind of pill that has caffeine in it, but I can’t tell—the pills in the bottle don’t look like the picture on the outside. Nothing weird, I got the bottle from my parents. I’m sure they just refilled the Tylenol bottle with Aleve or something. Whatever it is, it’s made my headaches go away before…

In unrelated news, I just signed the FedEx door tag for my iPod, and it might just be the prettiest signature ever to flow from my pen. I want to cut it out and frame it. My best guess is that it’s the smoothness and softness of the sticker paper the signature line is on. If it would always make my handwriting that lovely, I’d write on sticker paper every day.

Now that I think about it, I think the pain is fading a little. I think** I’ll try sleeping now. Modern medicine is basically my favorite thing ever. I want to give it a hug and maybe bake it cookies. Chocolate chip, natch—only the best for my buddy modern medicine.

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* Those of you who get headaches more often than once every few months probably have little sympathy for me, and that’s okay. My good head karma is balanced by other things—bad skin karma, maybe, or bad left shoulder karma.

** I used “I think” three times in one line. I bet that’s annoying.

I went to bed four and a half hours ago. A few minutes ago I woke up feeling wide awake and incredibly well-rested. I figured it was probably around noon, and I was actually a little worried about Sammy, who only stretched and yawned when I got up instead of bouncing around whining to go out.

WHY CAN’T I DO THIS ON SCHOOL DAYS?