not falling down

Weird, Weird Spam Alert:

eBay Auction Education --  elaeocarpus family

The mentality behind email marketing is so weird and convoluted now. I think spam is the new Dada.

Up until now, I’ve always used screen caps of the subject line when talking about spam, but I’ve switched to Crummy-style pre tags instead. The idea behind it originally was that a screen cap would lend credence and establish that I wasn’t making it up, but really, it’d be just as easy to fake it in PSP as it is in Notepad. Also I was kind of tired.

Speaking of tired, I realized the other day that I now prefer raisins in my cereal to marshmallows. What the hell am I supposed to do now? Retire?

Two hours of sleep last night, as I stupidly stayed up until three before I even realized that I still had to do my homework. I say “stupidly” because I wasn’t even staying up for any specific purpose–I just hung out with Michelle and Jessica and David, beatboxing and rhapsodizing about the Neptunes. That’s college, I guess, but then I thought I was supposed to get good at time management someday. Ha ha ha!

That wasn’t exactly the best night to skimp on sleep, either, as today was a big day: not only our biggest crowd at Chalk Circle, but my first ever show as the drummer for Grandma’s Genius! And it rocked! We’d practiced together on exactly one song, which we didn’t end up playing, and the PA was crap, which made for a frustrating beginning. As it turns out, though, once we got started we had a pretty flawless forty minutes. We’re good at this!

Then, just as we finished our last song (BNL, “Brian Wilson,” where I get to go crazy thundergod at the end), the first drops of rain started to fall… all over the band that had earlier refused to swap us time slots.

That’s right. God loves Grandma’s Genius more.

(Also, found while searching for Neptunes sites: Conch is their specialty!)

I can’t believe I left the same boring IdiotCam© up for a solid week. Bad creator! (Bad Jews! Bad Jews, Guster!)

Last night was the least stressful opening night I’ve ever been through, thanks largely to the way the stage is set up, I think. The musicians play behind what’s called a scrim at the back of the stage–a very loosely woven canvas that’s semitransparent straight onbut opaque from an angle. Because it makes the audience look fuzzy, it fosters the illusion that we’re behind some kind of two-way mirror and don’t have to worry about being watched. Even though I know consciously that the audience can see us just as well as we can see them, that still put me at ease enough to play as well as I ever have. This is neat!

It seemed to work pretty well for everyone else, too, and the music really sounded great. More credit for that goes to the writer than to us, but hey, he gets his bow too.

This is the big crunch week, in that I have no more free evenings to work until Sunday, and I’ve been struggling to keep up. I did finally get in an appointment to see my career counselor about a resume critique; we’d been having a little difficulty finding a time because, and I quote, “she’s got a mare due.” Only in Kentucky.

Anyway, she seemed to like my resume and my cover letter (the first one I’ve ever written!), so that felt good. It still bemuses me, though, how little one’s qualifications matter compared to the monumental importance of making them all fit on one page. My counselor’s a nice lady, but I honestly think she knows as much about line spacing and margins as she does about, y’know, jobs.

Another thing I’m behind on: sending out graduation announcements. Eek. I went to the library yesterday to copy pages out of my mother’s address book, which is kind of like a library in itself. There are sheaves of apocryphal driving directions, notes and updates, about five different styles of handwriting, and some entries that take up half a page alone because they’ve been crossed out and corrected so many times. It’s a fascinating object, and I feel like I should get a grant and do an archaeological dig on it.

Too many things on my head. Why is everyone getting sick? Should I bleach my hair again? And how the hell am I supposed to wrap up this entry?

Regarding Easter: I’ve talked to her, and she doesn’t want to talk about it very much, but she’s okay. It’s too late to file a report now, and she wouldn’t do it even if it weren’t. She doesn’t think he came, so the consequences might not be as bad as they could have been. I wish there were something else to do. There really isn’t. As is almost always the case.

I know it’s not a choice anyone but the victim can make, but the guess is that maybe eighty-five percent of rapes are never reported, and the fact is that every time a woman says “it was my own fault,” she’s ensuring that it’s going to happen to someone else.

The anger I felt Sunday has been subsumed, of course, by the need to do whatever was necessary for her. All I can do is talk if she wants to, and be there, and try unobtrusively to know where she is–though that’s more for my benefit than hers.

Living in Rodes has been a year of realizing what a maternal person I am, and this week I understood what happens to mothers when someone hurts one of their adopted children. It’s not just the rage: it’s the futile panic, and the impotence, and the deep-down hollow sickness. It’s the stupid, pointless guilt. And it’s the refusal to indulge any of that, because you have to do what matters first.

(This next part is more personal than I usually get on NFD. You can stop reading if you don’t feel like rolling your eyes.)

I don’t believe that most Catholic mantras hold power, in and of themselves; I scoff at the Prayer of Jabez. But. There’s a poem that’s also a prayer, by John Donne: “Batter my heart.”It’s a hard and painful thing, and I pray it, sometimes, when I worry about my faith. I did two weeks ago. I’ve been thinking about what’s happened since then, and… I always try to reconcile my faith with my belief in a rational world. But right now part of me is irrationally, spiritually terrified that somehow it works.

I got into UCLA and U of L; word about money is pending. Maybe Carnegie Mellon wasn’t a fluke. After my conversation with UK the other day, I got word from U of L that they didn’t have my scores either, and was I sure I had them sent? Sitting at my desk with a receipt showing scores and their names and codes, yes, I was quite sure indeed.

Hey, what a funny coincidence, I thought. That was the same receipt with IU and UW on it. The two schools I didn’t get into.

Hang on a bit.

You know, I never liked standardized tests, even though my ACT score essentially got me my scholarship here. I did fine, but I didn’t like taking them, I don’t like the assumed universality of the results, and I don’t like the way they screw with people’s heads. Now I’ve got another reason: they apparently don’t like to perform the services they promise.

On the advice of that same guy at UK, I complained to ETS, and got a response a couple of days later saying the scores had been sent again to UK and U of L. We’ll see, I guess. I mentioned UW and IU in my complaint, but I think they ignored that–I also mentioned that I’d already been declined there. I really do wonder if they ever got my scores, and whether they just got tired of waiting and turned me down instead of requesting that I send them again. I even thought about litigation, but at this point, what would it accomplish?

So basically what it comes down to, now, is UK, U of L, UCLA and CMU (Dartmouth hasn’t responded, but they don’t even have a financial aid program, and at this point it wouldn’t be worth the cost). Thoughts:

• UK: Nothing against anyone there, but I won’t go to UK if I have any other options, and I do, so I won’t. This might be my only chance to escape from central Kentucky, even if it’s only as far as Louisville, and I think I have to take it. Even more than I did in high school, I want out.

• UCLA: Obviously the program is first-rate, but I worry whether I’d be able to keep up. I’m a good student, but I’m not a great student, and I’m not a mathematician. If I do get some kind of aid–especially merit-based–would I be able to keep it? Also, the cost of living in Los Angeles would be a huge step up from here.
• CMU: Same worries as UCLA, but amplified; Carnegie is consistently ranked among the top three CS schools in the country. I really like everything I know about the school, but I have no wish to be ground under and stumble out after three years without a degree or a penny to my name. There’s also no aid whatsoever, and I’d have to wait to even apply for an assistantship, but Maria keeps telling me it’s possible to go without aid if you combine private and Stafford loans.
• U of L: I want to go to Louisville, plain and simple; if I can get money there it will be my solid first choice. I wonder, though, about whether I want to go there for the right reasons. I’ll have friends and a roommate there, and a Centre / U of L CS alum I wrote this weekend says it’s less academically challenging than Centre.

  Is it a safety program? Could that affect my career adversely? The fact is that I’d probably do fine in a slightly cushier environment; I’m a better programmer than most people in the department here, but my grades are around average. But how much will grades matter in the job market, compared to school name? If I’m going to invest this much time and (future) money, I don’t want to my Master’s to lose that job at Blizzard to the the whippersnapper Bachelor’s from NYU.

I’m putting off choosing for now on the excuse that I need to know more about money. I already turned down UC, my only sure scholarship, because the deadline was the 18th. That felt risky, but really it wasn’t. Going to U of L with even mild aid, for example, wouldn’t cost much more than what the UC scholarship wouldn’t have covered; the other schools would be financial burdens, but more than make up for them in name value.

I read a long excerpt at the University of Chicago Press site (found via Sumana) about choosing a grad school, and it gave me a lot to think about. They all support choosing the best school you can get into, but then say that being with a supportive faculty is better than working under chilly top researchers. They also cite the large number of postgrad students who don’t complete as evidence of the difficulty, and as a deterrent to people considering it casually. So is it better to choose a program in which you know you’ll do well over one with a great name that could kick you in the teeth? I don’t like the (arrogant, maybe) idea of being a big fish in a little pond, but then I don’t really know that I would be.

Questions, only questions. I’m one of those people who wants all the answers before I do anything big, and I don’t think I’ll get them this time.

Easter. A friend of mine was raped last night. Of course I can’t say who it was. Of course she’d already gone home and showered and changed by the time I heard, and of course she wouldn’t go to the hospital, because of course she was drunk and of course she thinks it’s her fault.

I hate that this happens. I hate being helpless. I hate him, I want to kill him, and it’s easy because I don’t even know who he is.

You do the Laramie Project and you do the Vagina Monologues and you try to tell the stories and you do everything you can to make people understand, and no one listens. Why can’t I make things better? Why doesn’t anything ever change?

Short entry panic! Staccato! Explosion! ASAP! Pronto!

Actually I just wanted to post this thing Jon sent me, the Least Ambiguous Headline Ever:

Finally got around to turning Lisa’s lion roar into wallpaper, assisted much by Lisa herself, if by “assisted” you mean “bitten.”

Lisa Lets Loose
1280 x 960
1024 x 768
800 x 600

My frighteningly talented roommate, David the Flora, gets to be on the Centre front page without even being a senior. All he had to do was, y’know, an enormous amount of difficult creative work. Cheater!

Hey! Remember that Ben Folds show I went to last fall? (I do.) The unspeakably mighty Nathan has secretly and subtly made available to us boots of that very same show, including the best song ever, where if you listen closely, you can hear Jon and Amanda and the weird guy with the choir hangup and me, singing our hearts out: