Double the fun! Two blog entries in one day!

Deep Political Musings

I registered to vote in Missouri. I've never voted before. They sent me a little card today telling me I could vote in the primaries. You don't have to be registered with a party, so I can just go in there and pick one. There are Democrats, Republicans, and Libertarians. As to Libertarians and all third parties in general, I have nothing but respect for their ambitious trouble-making and all their wild and crazy and completely unrealistic ideals, and I could be persuaded to vote for one of them in real elections. For the purposes of a primary, however, I have no idea how to distinguish one Libertarian from another.

Of course, in theory, the only real primary is the one for the Democrats. After hours of serious research into the Democratic candidates, I made the amazing discovery that I can watch parts of the Daily Show online for free (and, also, that all of the Democrats are silly or boring for one reason or another). I decided that if I was going to pick one, it would be Clark. Apparently, though, he has no real chance of winning, so voting for him might not be that important either.

So that leads me to my third option, which I have just been learning about now: the Republicans. I am intrigued. Who knew there was a Republican primary? In fact, there are at least three people on the ballot. There is Blake Ashby, from University City, who seems to wish the Republicans were Libertarians. And there is Bill Wyatt from California, who is opposed to the war, and whose website reads "I [Heart] Power" in big letters across the top. I guess I don't quite understand how it works. Do people actually show up to vote for the president? It wouldn't have occurred to me that this was necessary. So if your average person thinks like me, won't the only people who show up vote for the crazy people? But even if this occurred, I don't think the Republicans would let them be the candidate. So somehow the people who run these things must have a way to ignore the voters. So, in summary, I have come to the conclusion that it doesn't matter which party I choose and which person I pick from that party, because they are all crazy, or are silly, or boring, or are already the president and likely to be the president for a few more years, regardless of anything that happens in the primary between the crazy and silly and boring people. So I don't know who I'm going to vote for and I don't really care, but I'm going to vote because I'm a good little citizen and my vote counts.
- posted by Darcey @ 10:27 PM

 
Bicycle Go Bye-Bye

My bike is not where I left it, locked on the bike rack in the basement garage in my building. All semester long, I left the bike outside, where anybody had access to it, in the alley, where nobody would have noticed suspicious activity, and it just sat there. Then before Christmas, it got cold, and I had no use for the bike, and I moved it inside. So I haven't really seen it for almost 2 months. It could have gone missing the day after I moved it inside. So either some weird kid in my building stole my bike, or somebody has been in the building that shouldn't have been. These both seem so strange that I have this silly feeling I've just misplaced the bike, taken it somewhere and forgotten. But that doesn't make any sense. I also debated the possibility that my bicycle had been some sort of two-wheeler version of towed by some apartment authority. But of course that makes even less sense. I also wondered if I left the bike outside in the cold too long before moving it in. At the time, the lock was a little bit frozen, and it was hard to move the numbers in the combination, so maybe this left the lock somehow more vulnerable. (I had a habit of leaving the combination set on "0000" to make sure that I'd thoroughly mixed up the numbers away from my combination. With the numbers frozen, I might not have gone to all that trouble, but as long as I mixed them a little, I don't really see why that would make a difference.) I also didn't have my bike registered by WUPD and I didn't remove a tire when locking it up, as I noticed several other bikes did. But none of that explains how anyone got access to the basement. Anyway, it's gone now. And after I finally went to all the trouble this year to bring it to school, I even had it tuned up with new tires...

In other news, from home: After just a few short weeks, our new little driver managed to take out his first mailbox! I'd just like to take a moment to congratulate him here.
- posted by Darcey @ 2:58 PM

 
Pointless Ramblings to Avoid Doing Something Better

I was not especially looking forward to having to take a finance class this semester, because I don't really understand that much about the stock market and really don't care, but a lot of business students do and know things the professor might assume I know too. But the class is turning out all right. I like the professor. I was trying to figure out what makes him seem different from other b-school professors, and in all honesty, I think the fact that English is his first language is a major factor. Whether or not its fair, his ability to communicate clearly just makes him seem more friendly and approachable. I counted only three other native English speaking business school professors that I've had, including the British one (who had an accent, but a cool one, not a hard to understand one) and Professor Gordinier, though he doesn't really count because he was not friendly and approachable for many other more intimidating reasons, such as his affinity for guns. But with other professors, I have often had genuine difficulty understanding them. I remember noting this specifically on one of the first days of my marketing class last year, when he was trying to tell us a story about IBM, and my honest best guess about what he was talking about was that IBM was the "margarita" in the industry and wanted to produce a "sugar" computer. This was puzzling, for obvious reasons. Wouldn't the industry margarita prefer a salt computer?

I'm sorry. I have digressed, badly. I was talking about how finance wasn't that bad. (Just so you know, though, I did figure out later that a margarita was a market leader, and though I still don't know for sure, I think a sugar computer is a super computer.) So, anyway, my professor is nice and the class is actually painstakingly simple. The professor and textbook assumes that we have very limited knowledge of basic math, and there is a footnote in the book that begins by explaining (I'm serious here) what "IOU" is short for. Ordinarily, I would not appreciate a class that insults my intelligence (though few classes at Wash U do that), but since I'm not particularly interested in the class, it's just fine. It's also a sharp contrast to my computer science class. Today she decided that she wanted to make her point in an easier to understand way, that way being to find limits, because calculus is always the first thing to do when you want to make something simpler. So she went up to the board and started writing a lot of equations, finishing up with one that we could "easily" find the answer to just by using Hopital's rule, as though we could all recite this off the top of our heads. I didn't have faintest idea what Hopital's rule is, but I did have an oddly clear memory of the day we learned it in 12th grade. I was sitting in the middle of the room, in front of one of the Goodwin twins, who, despite six years of being in the same classes, I never learned to tell apart. Someone had managed to sidetrack the teacher for several minutes with a discussion about the proper French pronunciation of "Hopital" (not properly accented here, sorry). At this point in my computer science lecture, I became frustrated because I couldn't think of my 12th grade math teacher's name, which was annoying because she was a nice person for a math teacher. This was the profound question I pondered for the rest of the lecture, and I think this effort proved much more rewarding than the professor's trivial little discussion about evaluating the speed of algorithms: it was Mrs. Weber. Okay, that's all.
- posted by Darcey @ 10:58 PM

 
I Got $50 (and then I spent a whole lot more)

One day last semester, I was eating lunch in the quad, minding my own business, which usually consists of smearing mustard all over my face while trying to hold a sandwich and prevent the newspaper from blowing away at the same time. Then a strange girl stuck a survey in my lap. Feeling generous that day, I filled it out and even left my phone number as it requested. Then a few weeks later, I received a call from someone saying they were doing a follow up survey, where they asked me the same questions as before, only awkwardly over the phone. Since I had given them my number, I felt obliged to answer the questions, where otherwise I would usually have abruptly hung up. Then a few weeks later over break I received a voicemail message saying I had won a $50 Galleria gift certificate in a drawing for filling out the survey. And I was happy, and when I got back to school, I called up my voicemail to play the message to hear the number to get the certificate. But the message had deleted itself. And I was sad. But then the lady called again and left another message to remind me. To make an already long story not a whole lot longer, there were a lot more messages left between the two of us until today, when I finally got the gift certificate!

Of course, this week I have also spent several hundred dollars at the evil bookstore for books that we all know nobody really needs. Three of my classes wanted me to buy $100-something textbooks that are only technically supposed to be bought wrapped up new with a CD. Ironically, the textbook for the only one of these three classes for which we are actually going to use the CD was out of stock, and I had to buy a used version without the CD. I also managed to snare an illicit international softcover edition of another one off the internet. I hear other people speak of copying an entire book and then returning it to the bookstore, and these stories intrigue me, but I'm really much too lazy for that. If I had any backbone, I wouldn't buy them at all and would still do just fine in the class, but I won't actually do that either, so I should probably stop complaining. I had fairly cheap classes last semester. So to complain about a slightly different topic involving books, my writing class requires eight books, and apparently we have to read about half of one for every class and then respond to it. The actual paper writing work for the class doesn't seem that bad, but I have a feeling this busywork is going to be annoying, since it already was for just the second class. Plus, the class is called argumentation, so there are a lot of people in it who like to argue, and turn the most innocent of questions into painful discussions about controversial political issues. I like the professor all right (I've had her before), but I don't think this is going to turn into my favorite class. My writing classe are not going so great this year.

Anyway, I had my first TA help hours this morning. As expected, no one showed up, except for two people who seemed to think the help session was required or that there was going to be some sort of organized activity. I corrected them and they left. I spent the time typing up something else for the class, although I think I will count that as a separate hour on my time sheet, because I could have just as easily spent the time doing homework I will have to do later and I see no real ethical problem in taking $7 from the business school. I could also complain about my electric bill, but I think that's enough cynicism about money for today, because it has turned out to be a lovely day outside and I have a gift certificate and I am happy.
- posted by Darcey @ 3:07 PM

 
My Christmas Vacation, Part II

To the best of my recollection, I have done nothing over the past couple of weeks. Perhaps that's what made those weeks so wonderful. I'm sure these days were full of amusing though insignificant anecdotes that I could have shared here, but that would have required effort, and laziness was so much more fun. So, alas, I did not write them here, and my attention span is not long enough to recall them now, so they are lost to you forever. I pity you.

So instead, I will tell you about my trip home. It was originally scheduled for Saturday. My mother and my grandmother were going to bring me out and mess around here for the weekend, because they like to do that. That was before my mother and I (my mother especially) became football fans. You see, by all accounts in the local news media, which I hold to be the highest source of journalistic quality and reliability, the only thing of the slightest significance that has occurred anywhere in the world over the past few weeks has been the Colts playoff run. So obviously we could not miss the game Sunday, and this trip would have interfered with that, as it would leave my mother in the car and me alone in St. Louis with no avid Colts fans to enjoy the game with. The trip obviously had to be postponed until Monday. Despite our intense efforts to stay home and dig through drawers to locate blue t-shirts, the Colts were, of course, mercilessly slaughtered, as we had expected.

So I came home today with my grandmother and her friend, since my mother had to work. We went to the grocery store, where I spent a lot of my grandmother's money buying what would be enough food to last the rest of the year if only it didn't have that silly tendency to spoil after a few months. Then I had to be at the b-school at four for my first meeting about my new TA job. Getting the groceries into the freezer and getting me to the meeting at 4required quite a bit of rushing around, so when I got to the b-school I decided to stop in the restroom quickly and make sure I looked semi-presentable. I took my hair brush out of my purse and set my purse on the edge of the sink. Then the open purse fell in the sink - the sink with the automatic faucet. Then the cell phone and the check in the purse got wet. Then the late girl with the messy hair was displeased. I have often stated that I do not approve of automatic things in bathrooms. When it's time for such things to do what they do, you can't get them to work no matter how hard you try, but when they should be sitting still and shutting up, they start causing all sorts of ruckus. What purpose does this serve? If the purpose is to conserve water, it fails miserably as far as I can tell.

But anyway, I had a TA meeting. I got a free textbook. Unfortunately, it was for a class I've already taken. I volunteered to cover the office hours at 10 on Friday, since that will be the earliest I have to get up all week. Plus, I can think of no non-apocalyptic scenario in which a student would voluntarily show up at the b-school at 10 AM on a Friday simply to ask questions, so I figure I won't have to do anything. As the meeting wore on, I became increasingly concerned - even more than I had been before the meeting - that the professor had not mentioned paying me, and I left her room feeling quite depressed about all the work I had just taken on for apparently nothing in return. (There were only 3 TAs - I thought there would be more for this class, so there is also more tedious grading involved than I expected.) Then she remembered to ask us if we knew about timesheets and had registered in the office. This made me feel much better. I found out later that I was not the only one who had such a concern.

And then there was dinner and other things I could discuss, but as I said, laziness is much more fun, and so I think I better go get my eleven hours of sleep in.
- posted by Darcey @ 11:31 PM