Prepoceros

I expected to get my LSAT score back on Monday, but it came in today. On this test, you could miss one question and still get a 180. I missed both of the questions I thought I might miss, plus two more through mistakes I made—not careless mistakes, but mistakes nonetheless. My score was a 175.

On (what was, IMO) the hardest Logical Reasoning question on the test, I stared at it for a good minute, put down a plausible guess and circled it, then came back at the end of the section to stare at it for three or four minutes more. Just as time ran out, I got a flash of insight into the problem and furiously erased and rebubbled my answer.

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I think 3D printers are about the niftiest gadgets in the world, but I had no idea they’d be here so soon. If it costs $5000 now, in a few years it’s bound to be half the size and down to $500, and then there’ll be a serious chance that I will own one. How cool would that be? Dude.

I remember, when I was little, often wishing I could just MAKE A THING in the exact shape I wanted, instead of trying to build it out of tape, toothpicks, and toilet paper rolls. I figured that sort of ability was within the capabilities of grown-ups and/or factories, but not first-graders. If there had been a 3D printer in my house, there would have been some serious thing-making going on, believe you me.

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To my Art History professor:

I know that it’s convenient to give sensible names to the image files you use on your tests, but are you aware that a test-taker can pull up those names by right-clicking on the images? When you write a question, for instance, that asks “Whose archaeological dig is this?” and the picture is titled Schliemann.jpg, that question becomes somewhat less difficult. I only found this technique helpful on four questions out of fifty, though, so it’s no crisis or anything, just funny.

You do seem to be in the habit of giving forehead-slapping hints* to most of your test and quiz questions, though, dragging students to the right answers by force, so maybe this was intentional.

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I’m sitting at the teahouse in a small room with four tables, each seating a single laptop user. The only access to the back room is through this one, so there’s a regular flow of traffic. One guy walking through stops and approaches the girl sitting across from me.

Guy: Hey, do you go to UH?
Girl, removing earbud: What?
Guy: Do you go to UH? Because you look familiar. I think I’ve seen you walking around campus.
Girl: Oh, yeah.
Guy: Are you taking summer classes?
Girl: Yeah.
[silence]
Guy: Okay, cool, cool. [walks off]

An hour later, Guy nervously pops back in.

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At the wifi-enabled teahouse in which I sit, there are several fish tanks. For the last three hours, I’ve been watching (via a large mirror on the wall in front of me) a man clean two of them behind me. Cleaning a fish tank isn’t something I’d ever given much thought to, as I’ve never had fish, but it’s a rather involved process. Hoses and filters and chemicals and lots of scrubbity-scrub.

At intervals, the fish’s apparent owner came out to chat with the guy about all sorts of fishy things: tank size, water temperature, all the different types of fish they’d owned, etc., and I was struck by the depth of cleaner-dude’s knowledge. To my untrained ears, it sounded as though he knew EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD EVER about fish.

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Still no internet. Friday morning, 8:00. Bring it, AT&T.

LSAT scores, I learned today, will be emailed July 2. Twiddle twiddle.

You know the LOLcats*, but are you dork enough to have seen LOLastronomy? I’m wishing there were more, as I rack my brains for a contribution of my own.

How is it the second half of June already? That’s, like, almost the middle of summer. Summer passes too quickly; I’m enjoying it as furiously as I can.

Last night John and I went out for Indian food. Mmmmmmm. Best leftovers in the world, IMO.

If you’d like a tour of my new apartment, I made my dad a video.

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* Check out the latest kitty. An apt time for a link, no?

I think my phone knows it’s about to be retired. As soon as I logged on to the T-Mobile site to scope out my options, before I gave it my information or bought anything, my wee phone decided it didn’t feel like calling people any more. Four bars, full battery. Oh, it would assure me that it was calling the numbers I dialed in, but there was only silence. You’ve had a good run, little phone, but your battery, it is less potent it used to be. Hey, at least I didn’t bash your screen in with my ass-bone.

I don’t trust bathroom doors with push-button locks. Every Starbucks has them.

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I’m taking eighteen hours right now. The upside of this is that five of my six classes are online, so I only have eight inflexible hours a week. That also means I have only eight hours to spend in the presence of my classmates.

I have no problem with most of the folks in my class. I like people, really, I do. But there are always those few, you know? Or at least those few behaviors, the ones that drive me batty. Like people coming in late*. People leaving early. People packing up their stuff, loudly, before the professor is done lecturing. People stopping a fast-paced lecture to ask question after question after question until we’re thirty miles off-topic. People talking amongst themselves during class. People’s phones ringing during class.

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My apartment hasn’t had internet since I moved in, and it won’t until the Friday after next. As a result, and much to Sam’s chagrin, I’ve been spending a lot of time away from home, at friends’ places or in cafés with free wireless. Fortunately for me, such establishments are thick on the ground around here.

This situation does make it somewhat difficult for me to be diligent about completing all the required assignments for my five online classes. They only started a week ago, and I’m already behind in a couple. Le sigh.

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Now that I’ve spent the last hour and change on an entirely different post, my wireless card has decided it doesn’t want to play with Linux any more. Wordpress usually saves my drafts automatically, but apparently it didn’t think that one was worth it.

All is not lost, no worries. I saved the post as a text file, but I don’t know* how to get it over here to the Windows side of things, i.e., the side that understands the wireless card’s deep emotional needs. Or however computer stuff communicates. Magical unicorn energy.

For now I would like to mention the Chocolate Raspberry Cream Cheese Muffin.

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