Prepoceros

To the Harvey Mudd College class of 2006:

Congratulations! I hope the weather behaved today, and that y’all weren’t too exhausted from your theses/clinic presentations/other amazing things/packing to enjoy it properly.

I was reading some of the email discussions on the class list, and it looks like they moved graduation somewhere else on the 5C’s? And that Prof. Platt was the commencement speaker? I hope all the 50th anniversary hullaballoo didn’t get in the way too much.

But seriously, wow. It’s hard to believe you guys are really really graduating. Frosh orientation feels like it was an eternity ago. Congratulations on sticking it out—you all have my deep, heartfelt respect and awe. You are amazing, hard-working, BRILLIANT people, and I know you’ll go on to do all sorts of fabulous things in grad school, the “real world,” or wherever else you’re headed after this. I’ll be looking for your names on the Nobel Prize and Fields Medal rosters of 2046*.

Sorry if I’m being cheesy, but those diplomas are, like, certificates of awesomeness. Sure, it might be annoying to explain to the thirty-thousandth person that no, you didn’t say “Harvard Med,” and it’s actually a small, high-caliber math and science school just east of LA, yes, like CalTech but better. But to people who know what Mudd’s all about, y’all are ROCK STARS.

I had vague plans to drive out to Claremont this weekend to watch the ceremony and to say hi and bye to everyone before y’all scattered to all corners of the globe, but that plan never made it out of the “wishful thinking” stage. I’m sorry I missed it, but I was thinking of y’all today**. Got a song stuck in my head…

There’s a college way up north that’s made for you and me
H-A-R, V-E-Y, M-U-double-D
Harvey Mudd (HARVEY MUDD!), Harvey Mudd (HARVEY MUDD!)
Forever let us hold our slide rules high (HIGH! HIGH! HIGH!)
Calculus and Newton’s laws and relativity . . . SUCK!
H-A-R, V-E-Y, M-U-double-D

Woo grads!

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* More like 2021 for the Fields, because of the age limit. But you get the idea.

** As I worked for nine hours. On Mother’s Day—what’s up with that?

In 2005 I read ten books. Ten. In a year. That’s less than one per month. This might be so-so for the average adult American*, but for me it’s pretty pathetic.

Not that I’m some speedreading superstar, but I can read. I like to read. I read voraciously when I was younger, and I credit much of the knowledge and love-of-learning I have today to those early bookworm tendencies. Nowadays I seldom set foot inside a library, and I usually only buy books as gifts. I do read every day, but it’s all news and articles and short essays, and all online. Stupid interweb, why are you so distracting with your flashy lights and attention-span-killing, always-on entertainment?

But wait, it gets worse. I read a book today. Turns out it’s the SECOND book I’ve read so far this year. It’s May. That’s pathetic.

Who am I? What have I become?

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* I’ve been trying to find good statistics on this, but so far nothing solid enough to link to. There seems to be overwhelming evidence, though, that book-reading falls off dramatically starting around fourth grade. So maybe I’m not alone. Still, it’s sad.

Yesterday was…intense. Intense in a good way, though. I can almost never get myself to focus on anything, much less anything intellectually challenging, for more than ten minutes at a time. It was refreshing to actually WORK on something, for a change.

I left the apartment around 10:30 and settled into a comfy chair at Starbucks (with a cupcake, naturally) at 11:00. I had done literally no work on this research paper besides checking books out at the library, so I spent the next five hours reading and taking notes.

When I got hungry for real food I relocated to Panera and whipped out my laptop to start typing. The beginning was slow going, but I had half of the paper (1235 words) written by 9:45 (they close at 9:00), at which point the clean-up guy suggested he and I become “study buddies,” so I decided it was time to leave.

On the way home I stopped at Sonic for a root beer float, marking the first time I have ever deliberately ingested caffeine in an attempt to stay awake. Turns out I sacrificed my “morals” for no good reason, as it didn’t do shit. I started writing again at 12:35 and only got through two more pages in the next 3.5 hours.

Three-ish hours of sleep, a rush job on the last three pages, and some content-editing and stupidity-checking help from my Latin-teacher-friend* Wendy later, I submitted the “finished” draft at 10:20 before dashing off to the 11:00 final.

I was absolutely unprepared for the final and should have failed it, but due to an incredibly fortunate series of events**, I probably passed with something B-ish. Today was my day to be a lucky sumbitch, apparently.

As for the paper itself, you might expect that a semester-end paper researched and written in 24 hours would be half-assed and sloppily written. In fact…it was half-assed and sloppily written. The best thing I can say about it is that it’s nine pages long. I haven’t read it since I turned it in, but my gut says B-/C+.

Given the B+ I got on the midterm, I’ll probably end up with a low B in the course. In the short term, I’m thrilled not to be failing. In the long term…good god. If you’d told my 15-year-old, 4.06 GPA/1600 SAT self that in six years I’d be glad to sneak by with a B- in a class at UH in which I probably deserved a D, I would have completely lost my shit.

So…I don’t know. I feel like I had some profound conclusion to draw from that, but right now I’m dog-tired. I have a Latin final tomorrow at 11:00, and I’ve slept three hours out of the last 37, so it’s bedtime for Bonzo.

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* I think this should properly be punctuated “Latin teacher-friend,” but to me that just looks like it’s referring to my friend-who’s-a-teacher, who happens to be from Brazil. Pity this isn’t German, or else I could just smush the words together and not have to deal with these silly hyphen rules.

** It’s a good story. I’ll probably tell you once I catch up on sleep.

So there’s this paper.

It’s worth 25% of my grade in Women in the Ancient World. Eight pages. Due thirty hours from now, when the final begins. (I should also study for that.)

I checked the course website 5 minutes ago and found out that we’re supposed to get our topics pre-approved. It’s a little late for that now, so I’ll write about something ’safe’ and hope that flies.

I haven’t nailed down a topic yet. Something about women’s roles in religious rituals and/or funerals—those are the sorts of books I checked out from the library, anyway.

Tomorrow I’m packing up my books and my computer, leaving the apartment, and not coming back until I have an essay. The hardest part will be getting my ass in gear before noon.

It’s a good thing I don’t have time to be angry right now.

Sorry I haven’t posted much of substance these last few days. I’ve been in a fairly wretched mood lately, compounded by sleep dep. I’ve been doing most of my journaling in my “dead tree blog” so that you all won’t have to slog through all my depressing, self-centered, repetitive, existentialist whining.

But it’s difficult to despair when there are such wonderful things in the world as laughing babies.

When I’m sitting at the computer (i.e., when I’m home but not in bed), Sam often likes to squeeze himself under the desk to curl up at my feet.

He was down there a little while ago, sleeping (or so I thought), when I heard the most terrible yelp. I really can’t describe how awful the noise was—this was clearly a very small dog in a great deal of pain. Before I could see what had happened, there was a shuffling of computer cables as Sam bolted out into the bedroom and sat eyeing the desk warily from the doorway. Ears down, eyes wide—I’ve never seen him look so pitiful.

After some snuggles and reassuring ear scratches, I crawled under the desk to check things out, and sure enough, the power cord to my laptop was slobbery and mangled. Poor baby.

He didn’t seem to have suffered any lasting injury, so I patched the cord*, and we had a serious talk about how some things are not good for chewing and to be safe why don’t we just stick to the stuffed camelsheeps and ropes and rawhides Mommy buys us at Petsmart and not bother shredding any shoes or papers or USB cables** we find lying around. Okay?

But seriously, I’m a terrible mother. If I can’t even keep my dog from electrocuting himself, what hope will my kids have of surviving toddlerhood? People-puppies have teeth AND opposable thumbs! With which to grab knives and paperclips and other metal objects I’m sure to leave strewn across the floor! Gah!

We’ll just have to live next door to an emergency room, I suppose. The constant wailing of sirens outside my bedroom window will be a grating reminder of my failure as a parent. I’m so sorry, Sammy, and MiKayla and little Aiden***. Mommy loves you very much, but sometimes she’s too lazy to discipline you properly and lets you learn by trial and error instead. I’m sorry I’m sorry.

Yikes. Poor Sammy-son.

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* I don’t have band-aids, stamps, chocolate, a flashlight, toothpicks, batteries, an iron, rubber bands, milk, OR a stapler in my apartment, but by god I’ve got electrical tape.

** Chewed the cord right in half without even bothering to open the package. Dog owes me twenty bucks.

*** Don’t worry, none of my children will have trendy names like these. I’ll endow them instead with solid, time-tested, no-nonsense names like Agamemnon, Maximilien, Phidippides, and Anastasia.

I found this in my inbox this morning:

Subject: Information for new UH graduates

Dear Natalie,

On behalf of the Houston Alumni Organization’s 16,000 members, welcome to the Cougar alumni family! In one short week, you will no longer be a student at the University of Houston, but you’ll always be a Cougar.

[Give us all your money, etc.]

So I show up with 74 hours of credit, take one semester of classes from a random smattering of departments, and come out on the other side with a diploma? I don’t know what y’all are whining about—this “college” thing is cake.

This morning I ate food off of a plate. As in, I went to the kitchen, assembled a plate of food (bagel chips with cream cheese), and brought it back to the computer to eat. I realize this hardly sounds civilized, but when you consider that nearly everything I’ve eaten in the last few weeks has come directly from a paper bag, icing tub, or baking sheet, bagel chips on a plate is a twelve-course banquet at the Waldorf.

For dinner I drove past Sonic all the way home, where I ate food THAT I COOKED MYSELF. This is also a recent development. I used to cook, sort of, but I’ve gotten lazy and let it fall by the wayside. Granted, I’m pretty sure I cooked this food sometime in 2005 (it was soup that had been in the freezer a while), but it still counts. It had like five kinds of vegetables in it.

Despite all that, I still sit here at this ridiculous hour. Being ridiculous. Ridiculously. Hence the question mark. You know how when you stay up really late, all of a sudden you get this “second wind,” and you feel like you could go on for another whole day? That was two hours ago. Now I keep falling asleep on my knee*.

Ok, really going to bed now. Early morning is usually my favorite time of day, but if I haven’t slept yet, it’s depressing because I know I’m about to snooze away half the day. Boo for unstructured free time, acting as a nasty force-multiplier on my lack of willpower.

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* I’m sitting with one bent leg pulled up to my chest, and my forehead finds itself irresistably drawn to my patella.

P.S. Thanks for all the comments on the dildo post—y’all rock!

[If you’re a young child, you should probably cover your ears. Eyes. Whatever . . . look! Over there!]

I solemnly swear that I will drop out of school to become a hobo and/or work at Burger King before I take another Women’s Studies class.

Though I dislike the social sciences generally, I recognize the right of Women’s/Black/Queer/etc. Studies departments to exist, as well as their potential to benefit academia and society as a whole. All I ask is that I not be personally involved in the process. If my Women in the Ancient World class this semester is typical of the breed, Women’s Studies courses are fascinating in theory but downright annoying in practice.

Much of this stems from the demographics, I think. My class included three brave men and twenty or twenty-five women. I would often walk in late (surprised?) and be nearly bowled over by waves of estrogen as I opened the door. Cliche? Yes. True? Also yes.

In case you’re new to the world, women like to talk. Women especially like to talk about sex. In this class, EVERYTHING was about sex. While one could make the case that everything in history really *is* about sex, there were actually a few completely unsexy topics in the course I would have liked to learn about. Of course we skimmed through those parts of the book, only to have the lecture grind to a halt at the first mention of a penis or a lesbian or a uterus, at which point the class would spend ten minutes giggling and shrieking over the scandalousness of it all.

I understand that sex, gender, and sexuality are important, prevalent topics in women’s history, and I find them fascinating and enjoy discussing them, but I could do without the slumber-party atmosphere. I’m sorry, are we in sixth grade?

The flames were fanned by two or three women I like to call the Instigators. An Instigator’s duties are twofold: (1) she must call attention to the lewdest, most erotic passages or phrases in the reading, and (2) once we’re on the subject, she must shout out the most scandalous thing she can think of, repeating and adding emphasis as necessary, until the majority of the class collapses into paroxysms of titillation.

Once the crowd has been Instigated, what was formerly a reasonably orderly discussion devolves into a free-for-all shouting match. There is no listening, no back-and-forth, only shock-value and squealing. We won’t get back on topic for fifteen or twenty minutes.

Case in point: On Thursday we read a primary source passage condemning abortion*, and one Instigator seized the opportunity to share with the class that in the town where her parents live, A THIRD-GRADER IS PREGNANT WITH HER FATHER’S TWINS (emphasis hers), and there’s much debate over whether anyone can force her to abort. Jesus Marvolo Christ, people. Unless I’m in the wrong room, this class is *not* titled Women in 21st-Century Texas, and that story is consequently *not* appropriate.

The result was predictably chaotic: at least ten girls simultaneously creamed their jeans trying to shout over each other about incest and pelvic bones and early-onset puberty. The “discussion” had made no progress when class ended ten minutes later. Barf.

I’m not a lame old fuddy-duddy (Erection! Tampon**! Masturbation! See? Not squeamish.), but crap like this makes me ashamed of my gender-mates. They can be such girls sometimes.

I miss the natural sciences—there was much less squealing in physics. There, the worst I had to contend with were know-it-all, unshaven boys*** who enjoyed foisting their knowledge and “wit” on the rest of the world. Right now it seems the lesser of two evils. Oy.

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* No less controversial two thousand years ago than it is today. Plus ça change…

** You might think tampons would never be discussed in a class which purports to study cultures which existed two milennia millennia before their invention. You might be very, very wrong.

*** The gender ratio when I was at Mudd was something like 2:1. That’s a lot of not-showering. (Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of nice, clean, friendly guys at Mudd. And many of the scruffy-looking ones are nice once you get to know them. But some are icky through and through.)