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ENTRIES ARE ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY. BEGIN READING AT THE TOP.
With the introductory stuff out of the way, we now go to work on the actual meat of the semester and hope that it doesn’t end up rotten and filled with tapeworms.
Tuesday, Jan. 25, 2005
10:16 a.m.
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Everyone seems to be falling into the same trap of not updating their journals very much during the semester, and I guess I'm no exception. In order to keep this from devolving into a series of once-a-week recap entries — which would leave no room for fun storytelling or "cunning waggery" — I think I might try something different for a while. Instead of just recounting what I've done for the last day or two or whatever, it might be better if I go a bit more free-form and just write about one interesting episode or something that it made me think of. This way you'll get more good meaty stuff that a journal's supposed to have without having to read so much about what time I woke up or what homework I did after dinner. (Unless, of course, I wake up at 4:15 a.m. or I do no homework after dinner for three days straight; those might be worth reporting!) So here's something about as un-factual as you can get: I've had some really strange dreams in the past two nights. Two night ago, I had a really long one that involved lots of driving and going to people's houses; the only part I actually remember coherently is that at one point I was in a car pretending to be passed out from being drunk (this has never happened in real life!) and someone from my software engineering class was trying to drag or carry me out of the car and into a house. Last night's dream was a little bit better in terms of story line and plot development. I was coming back from running somewhere in Cleveland Heights when I decided to stop at a little church somewhere near a train line. The inside was long and rectangular, like most churches I've been to, but the "front" of this one was actually at a point halfway along the long wall on the right. Facing this were several rows of plain benches where all the old people were sitting, and on both sides (running all the way to either end of the building) were little booths for families. (Think of crossing a phone booth with an office cubicle and you'll approximate the idea.) I overheard someone saying that mothers sometimes have to deal with their kids in church, so if they were in the little compartments they would be allowed to get up from their seats once during the mass. If anyone saw their feet on the floor twice something bad would happen to them. (It was a rather strict place, I remember thinking in my dream....) I somehow ended up inside one of the compartments. They were square, about the size of a few phone booths put together, and had a wooden bench on the sides that weren't the door or the back. As I was sitting in there, I could see through the colored plastic that made up the door that a girl was coming down along the row looking for an empty compartment to sit in. She'd opened the door of mine and had gotten halfway inside before she realized it was occupied, but after she'd gone that far she just came in and said hi. It turned out she was a student at the University of Rochester (a junior) who lived in Cleveland Heights. We were sitting there, talking right through the mass, until a man came up, unlocked the door of the compartment, and said in a disapproving voice "This must be the Emily family, huh?" The girl sitting next to me (who must have been Emily) knew the guy and started telling me about him, but eventually the scene somehow morphed into us sitting in adjacent rows of seats on the Red Line rapid. And yet I was alone when I got off at the Cedar stop and somehow I ended up on the far side of the road where all the buses pull in. Right in front of me, waiting for a bus to take them up to South Side, were Mark and Nicole. They were upset that a bus hadn't come in a long time, but when they saw me they figured that we all might as well walk back home. (South Side, of course, is no more than a quarter mile from where we were, and probably even less.) And that's all I can remember. I think my alarm started going off at this point or something, because I don't think there's any more and I don't think I would have remembered the whole thing this well if it hadn't been interrupted by me waking up. |
Wednesday, Jan. 26, 2005
11:58 p.m.
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Just got back from putting together this week's Observer, which I think is better than last week's in a number of ways. What I would like to talk about tonight, though, in keeping with my idea of free-form as explained in yesterday's entry, is to treat the topic Why People Think I'm Weird. 1. I don't use cell phones. Not only that, I never want to have one. Ever. This is something that I'm always explaining to people who offer to let me use their phones or somehow get me involved in a conversation about telecommunications. There are a few reasons why I won't use a cell phone, but the most personal one is that I really hate what they're doing to everyday life. When I worked as a grocery clerk back in high school (at the same Heinen's where I was over the recent winter break), one of my jobs was to load groceries into people's cars. Too many conversations went like this: Me: Hi, ma'am. Where would you like your groceries today?This, you might imagine, quickly gets annoying. I decided about that time that I don't ever want a part of this cell phone call-me-anytime insanity. At college, there are even stupider conversations, like this one that happened while I was riding a Greenie down Adelbert. Girl, gives quick jump, grabs phone, dials number: Hey! Lisa! We just saw you go by! What? I'm on the Greenie. We just passed you!!I put it to you that this is definitely not conversation worthy and is a waste of resources of every kind. 2. I like walking home late at night, even when it's cold. This is the link to the Observer stuff I mentioned at the beginning of the entry. I turned down a motorized ride home tonight in favor of taking a 15-minute walk in 20-degree weather, which I will do pretty much any week as long as it isn't raining or snowing, and sometimes even if it is snowing. I like having a chance to clear out after reading 20 legal-size pages of close type and arguing about hyphenations and semicolons for six hours. (Which, incidentally, are rather enjoyable pursuits for your average copy editor, but they want a bit of a cool-down time afterwards.) On a tangentially-related point, I'm also inclined to leave my car parked in the lot behind the building and take public transportation or walk to places in the city whenever I reasonably can. It seems more responsible that way. 3. I sometimes sound like I'm British or Canadian. This, as far as I can tell, has one root in the fact that I've studied French for eight years, another in the fact that I read British books a lot, and a third in the fact that one of my best friends here is in fact Canadian. In French, consonants that aren't pronounced at the end of a word are often linked to the following word and pronounced as part of it, especially if that following word starts with a vowel. I think I carry this over into English a bit. For example, most people I know would pronounce something like "wouldn't have" as wooden-uh or wooden-duhv; with me it's more likely to be wooden-tov with the t sounded as part of the following word. I've also taken to saying Canadian things like sore-ee for "sorry" and bore-oh for "borrow." But I know at least one other American who does this, so I don't feel that strange. There are, naturally, other reasons I could list here, but this entry is getting really long and I should probably go to bed. |
Friday, Jan. 28, 2005
5:03 p.m.
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It's kind of convenient that the week I decide to write more about thoughs and feelings and impressions and stuff like that is the same week that there's interesting discussions to give me source material. (My unfinished grad school applications may not feel the same way, but they're not the ones in charge of this here journal.) Last night I stopped working on my networks homework around 11:00 to talk with Mark and Brian out in the common room — we were eventually called back to reality by the fact that it was 1:40 a.m. We started out talking about school stuff in general, which led to high school, then middle school, and finally into the realm of elementary school and the world of the early '90s. I said that it would be kind of fun to get transported back to about 1992 for a week just to remember what it was like. Brian thought this was a bad idea. He likes to say that there are only three good things about the '80s: Michael Jackson, our class was born, and they ended, and apparently the early '90s were that much better. I had to disagree, and we were able to point out examples of better cartoons, memorable commercials, etc. that proved that things were actually pretty nice when we were nine years old. I haven't done my Nerds of Plexiglass running all week; today around 3:30 I was thinking about heading down to Veale to go running, but I was also thinking that I should wait until around 4:00 so I could play racquetball with people at 5 if anyone was showing up. I figured I could just wander out into the common room and talk to Mark and Nicole to use up the time until 4:00. This, as you might imagine on a Friday afternoon with nothing pressing to do, turned into a long discussion with Nicole about the SAGES program, linguistics, British English, etc. that was interrupted by Jeremy asking us to talk about "booze and loose women." That idea failed and broke up the discussion, but I didn't feel like going down to Veale any more; as the time stamp shows, I didn't even go for racquetball at 5:00. This is probably a really bad idea because I was actually starting to get somewhere with my running. Erin found something called a "sprint triathalon" that we can do south of Columbus in June, so I have between now and then to be able to swim 750 meters, bike 12 miles, and then run five kilometers all in one day and all one after the other. The tough part of this is probably going to be the swimming. I haven't actually put my naked face into the water in quite a number of years: the chlorene in swimming pools used to make my eyes sting when I was little, so I tried wearing goggles. Goggles leak without exception, so I moved up to those giant face mask things that cover your eyes and nose, and I got along with those just fine until a few years ago, when it was suddenly revealed to me that no one actually wears a hideous thing like that to go swimming unless they're snorkeling or deep-sea diving. So I just stopped going swimming. (Another thing that puts me off of the swimming bit is that I hate cold water, and my idea of "cold" is anything less than 80 degrees. Based on how long Erin estimates the event will take, my usual very gradual process of entering the water will take about twice as long as the swimming itself.) At least I've got something to work towards! |
Monday, Jan. 31, 2005
9:44 a.m.
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I think I've churned out more essays in the past weekend than I usually write in several years. This is of course in advance of tomorrow's application deadlines at both Case and Boston University. Throw in a trivia tournament and some movie-watching, and we've got ourselves a pretty full weekend. (And, since my one-week trial period of free-form entries ends today, I'm allowed to tell you about it in plain old chronological order!) The essay-writing began Friday night with the first of three required for the BU application; I think I got about two-thirds of it done. I spent most of Saturday at Buzzerpalooza, a high school trivia tournament that we host every year. I felt bad about not ever showing up to practices this year, so when Jeff sent out the e-mail about help for Buzzerpalooza I didn't think I should ignore it. I was supposed to be in Schmitt by 8:00, but it was actually more like 8:30 by the time I got there. I had my usual job of being in charge of setting up buzzers, being a bracket head, and then reading in the playoffs. When it was finally over, just after 6:00, Jeff proposed a trip to Tommy's for dinner, which was accepted by me, Sam, Esti, and a kid whose name I don't remember. The meal was quite enjoyable, and I found out that Sam is interested in some of the same things I am (linguistics and photography), but it seems like he's done a lot more with them than I ever have. There was no question of essay-writing by the time I finally got back around 8:00, especially since Paul, Eric, and Dan were coming over from the Den to watch the rest of "The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy" miniseries we'd started last week. That ended just in time for Saturday Night Live, which was heartily mocked by us as a rerun, and then led into talking and other randomness until I went to bed at 2 a.m. Jessica said yesterday that the rest of them stayed up until 4:00. So yesterday (Sunday) I woke up at 11:00, ate in Fribley with Brian, and then trekked off to the Observer office to train the guy who's supposed to take over doing the Athenian layout. He never showed up — it turns out he'd mistaken "Thwing" for "Fribley" in Scott's e-mail — so I ended up doing it with Scott until 2:30, when I left to get some work done. With the bridge out, I didn't think it was worth it to go back to my room and then out again for the 5:00 Observer meeting, so instead I went running at Veale and then came over to the Jennings lab in Olin to work on my essays until it was time to head back to Thwing. The three essays were finished around 10:45, and I officially submitted the Boston application at exactly 11:00:00 p.m., according to the confirmation e-mail that I got a few seconds later. Which brings us to this morning, because I still had to send the paper part via U.S. mail. To do this, I needed to get to the post office on East 101st Street before ASL class at 9:30 this morning. So I got up at 7:30, took a shower, ate breakfast, and ran out of my room at 8:45. I got to the post office a bit after 9:00, but it took more than 15 minutes to get everything taken care of, so I came out thinking I was going to be late for ASL unless a No. 6 bus came along the street while I was near a stop. Well, one did come by — on Euclid — just as I was coming out of the post office half a block away. I started walking back along the left side of the street waiting for a light to change when I was near an intersection so I could cross to the left. Just before E. 105th, another bus came by, but I was still on the wrong side of the street and missed it. After I crossed Adelbert I started running to try to make it to class on time, and I managed to get to the Hearing and Speech Center before the bells on the Baptist church rang 9:30. On the door of the center was a sign: "Class Cancelled 9:30 S. Prok." |
Tuesday, Feb. 1, 2005
4:22 p.m.
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The gradskülungsapplikationen are finally done! (Nicole, that pseudo-German word is for you if you read this.) I spent yesterday evening going back and forth between finishing my Case essay and doing my AI homework for the week. The first one got done, thank goodness, but I had to put my faith in partial credit for the second. Luckily, the homwork was rather long and difficult; Prof. Branicky spent like 15 minutes taking complaints about it at the beginning of class, so there are probably a lot of other people out there who fall into the same category as me. One of those is a fellow CS major called Justin Hibbits, who was in the registrar's office at the same time I was this afternoon and who saved me $5 on my application. We actually don't have to pay to send our grades from Yost to Olin, which is exactly what I was on the verge of doing when he stopped me. We went over to EECS Student Affairs together and got it straightened out, and after AI I printed out my DPR and turned that in instead of the transcript. That's probably about all I'll say for right now. I seriously need to stop writing such massive entries about the minutae of my existence, or I'm going to be dragged into court on the charge of boring someone to death. Yesterday's entry, which I wrote from the Jennings lab and am just posting now, is essentially 3 KB of fluff, making it just as long and just as unsubstantial as the essays I've been writing. (If there's any interest from the audience, I could be persuaded to post those off of my site somewhere. Let me know.) |
Friday, Feb. 4, 2005
2:20 p.m.
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Writing this from the Jennings lab while I'm waiting for my lunch to digest a bit before I go running at Veale. Not too much has happened since my last post, but in trying to keep these entries smaller I'm probably just going to end up writing more often. After last night's post, Mark and I went to the grocery store, and then I went into my room to work on my ASL homework. It was supposed to be a two-minute story to tell in front of the class today, and I couldn't get the thing to go above a minute 50 seconds. I'd rehearse it: 1:50. Add a sentence: still 1:50. Add some more words: 1:50 again. Eventually I gave up and wandered out into the common room, where Mark was watching a video of a Dutch pianist, whose name I saw written once during the film but don't exactly remember it. I think it was something like Victor Borge. He was quite funny, and a good part ofthe show was actually clips from the early days of his career in the '50s and '60s. One piece of music I especially liked was the 18th variation of Rachmaninoff's "Variations on a Theme of Paganini," which I immediately found on the network after the movie was over. If I've got enough free web space, maybe I'll post it here; in the meantime, a search for "Rachmaninoff" on find or CWRUbert will get it for you. This morning I got to sign language 10 minutes early to practice my story, but it turned out that Shirley was still sick and we had a sub. The sub was deaf, but spoke English well enough to talk to us. The story assignment got pushed back to Monday, and instead we did a quick review and played a game. ("I'm going on a picnic and I'm going to bring: oranges, her dog, sandwiches, apples, water, potato chips, a soccer ball, a blanket, a frisbee, Sue's boyfriend, bones, a TV, banana, money, tacos, a camera, sunglasses, a book, a car, and a swimsuit.") Theoretically I know the signs for all of these now. Networks was its standard non-exciting self, and cryptology was its usual interesting self. Then I had a fun lunch with Sonnie and Co. in Nord before coming over here. I actually won't be giving my story in ASL on Monday because I'm going to be in Chicago to visit Northwestern University. I applied there for journalism grad school, and since it's not too far away I figured I should take a trip out there and see what the campus is like. My car won't make it that far, so I'm basing the whole trip on public transportation. I can drive as far as the Amtrak station downtown, and then I'm leaving by train early early Sunday morning and getting to Chicago around 9 a.m. Then a free day to see what the city's like, ending at my hotel a few blocks away from the train station. I need to be at Northwestern by 9:00 Monday for the information session they're having, so I'll get up really early to take the subway and train from downtown Chicago to Evanston and then walk over to campus from there. Then it's back to the city in time to catch a 5:30 p.m. train back to Cleveland, which should — barring delays — deposit me back here by 1 a.m. Tuesday. |
Sunday, Feb. 6, 2005
1:24 p.m.
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Live from Chicago, it's Sunday afternoon! Not quite live, actually, because I can't transfer anything to the home.cwru web server without an FTP client, and the computer I'm on right now in the Chicago Public Library doesn't have one. Instead I'm going to have to send whatever posts I make to myself via e-mail and then post them all when I get back. Should make for some interesting reading if you want to avoid your homework for a few minutes. A short summary so far: Yesterday was supposed to be a day of homework, but that didn't work out so well. The main task was my AI programming assignment, but work on it was going really slowly and I had to stop work several times to eat dinner, make sure my car still worked, pack, etc. I eventually left my room at 1:45 a.m. last night (with the program still massively undone) and got to the Amtrak station about 20 minutes later. While I was waiting, a group of high-school-age kids sat down around me; one of them now belongs on the official Annoyance Role of Honor. He seemed to derive pleasure from getting my attention and then asking stupid and/or perverse questions. I got up and changed seats. When the train came, a bit after 3 a.m., we thankfully ended up on different cars. Coming into Chicago on the train, the city looked a lot like the bowels of eastern Cleveland, which was getting me nervous about walking around too much in it — especially since we came in from the south and my hotel is four blocks south of the Amtrak station here. Before I got out into the city, I unfortunately had another run-in with the annoying guy from the Cleveland station, who had ended up going to Chicago as well. We crossed paths again in the bathroom at Union Station. (One of the other guys he was with called out, "Hey, [name], it's your buddy!" so I turned around and left.) I wandered around the station a bit until they were gone, got myself some tea, and tried to work out what to do with the next five hours. Mme. Lathers mentioned last week that the Chicago Institute of Art has an excellent colllection of impressionist works, so that's where I decided to go first. As soon as I got out onto Adams Street, I realized I didn't really have to worry about feeling safe. There were groups of people walking around, clean streets, and nice-looking shops all around. The art museum was about 10 blocks from the station, so it didn't take me too long to get there. I also made a detour to the public library to see what time that opened. (At 1:00. This, I should point out, is four hours later than the Cleveland library.) I spent from about 10:20 until just before noon in the art museum. The impressionist stuff was really cool, so I was going to see about buying a print to take back with me, but they were all really expensive or too big to fit in my backpack. I continued east out of the museum over to Grant Park, which borders Lake Michigan. There were again people walking around all over the place — including at least one French family — so I stopped on a bench in Millenium Park and ate some of the food I brought with me. Then I continued east until I actually hit the jogging/biking trail along the lake and followed that north until I got bored. That was at 12:36, and I made it to the library just before it opened at 1:00. So things are going pretty well. I can check into my hotel at 3:00, so I'll probably spend some more time here before heading off in that direction. Then dinner somewhere downtown, and then some homework. Spatial Note: If you want to get a good graphical overview of where I am, try looking at the downtown map here, which shows a lot of the places I've been to so far. |
Monday, Feb. 7, 2005
11:25 a.m.
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Chicago Trip, Day Two.... Not too much more to tell about yesterday. I left the public library about 2:45 and got to my hotel just before 3:00. Jessica was telling me a week or so ago about her trip to Chicago back in high school, in which she found that the scary part of the city very obviously starts on one side of a certain street, but she couldn't remember the name. Field work (by me) concludes that this is probably Van Buren Street. On the north side is downtown, with tall buildings, nice shops, etc.; on the south side, there are liquor stores, Chinese take-out restaurants, and parking lots. My hotel was two or three blocks south of this line (on Harrison Street) between the freeway, the central Chicago post office, and one of those "Checks Cashed Here" places with glaring yellow and black signs. It was a nice hotel, at least, with a restaurant attached, and it didn't really matter that I didn't relish walking under I-290 back into downtown after dinner because I was too tired to do much. I fought with my AI and French homework for less than an hour, and then went to bed at 7:30 p.m. That meant I got a proper amount of catch-up sleep before my alarm went off at 5:30 this morning. I checked out at 7:00, got a few muffins from a shady Dunkin' Donuts on Van Buren, and then picked an elevated train ("el") station on the Loop to start my trip to Northwestern. It was about a 45-minute ride to the Davis Street station in Evanston, and a 15-minute walk to the south end of campus where the information session for the Medill School of Journalism was being held at 9 a.m. That ended at 10:15, and since we had an open invitation to sit in on any class for any amount of time, one of the other prospective students and I spent about 20 minutes standing at the back of New Media Storytelling, watching a professor teach non-computer students how to make Flash animations. The other student — who was originally from Argentina and was called Viviana — knew the campus a bit already, so she showed me how to get to the library, which is where I am right now. In the hope of keeping this entry from getting too much longer, I'll save any description of the campus and the area for after I get back; that will also give me time to wander around a bit more and take a campus tour through Undergraduate Admissions at 2:00. For now, since I noticed an Aladdin's on my way from the station this morning, I think it will be officially proclaimed lunchtime. |
Saturday, Feb. 12, 2005
10:59 a.m.
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Whoosh! Sorry about the lack of posting this week: I've been catching up on the homework and other stuff I missed because of the Chicago trip. I think I promised on Monday that I'd give a better description of Northwestern in my next entry, so I guess I'd better to that. The rest of the week has juts been a lot of homework and some Observer stuff, so I don't need to spend much time on that. So: Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Both very cool-looking places from what I saw of them. Evanston is like Saline, Michigan crossed with Shaker Heights: it's got a downtown area about five blocks on a side filled with shops and restaurants (kind of like Cedar-Fairmount, actually) and then lots and lots of streets with old Victorian houses on them. These streets run all the way to Lake Michigan, along which there's another park and a jogging/biking trail like the one in Chicago. I was walking in said park after my lunch at Aladdin's, and I came across a bit of path that looked like paved asphalt but actually turned out to be very smooth mud. End result: big smears of mud across my nice white shoes and my best pair of khaki pants! My immediate goal was to get to one of those bathroom-outhouses that parks usually have and try to wipe the mud off with some water and paper towels. No luck; both bathrooms that I found were locked. I eventually ended up finding a bathroom on the third floor of the journalism school building back on campus, but by then it was impossible to wipe the mud off. I had to change pants. I took the undergraduate campus tour at 2:00 even though the tour guide didn't know anything about the graduate programs, but I wanted to see the campus. The architecture is, overall, much nicer than what we've got here at Case... except for the library building, which I thought was one of the most hideous structures in existence. Think of a population of giant deformed Crawford Halls that decided to smash into each other and live by a nuclear power plant. Here is the only picture of the building(s) I could find on the Northwestern site — it doesn't quite get the idea across, and, since it was cloudy and rainy on the day I was there, the grey concrete looked more grey and industrial and less like the warm surface shown in the picture. Most of you have probably heard about the rest of my trip by now, so I think I'll save space by not writing much more about it. If there's something you really want to know, either track me down or send me an e-mail. I should, at least, wrap up with something: Visiting Grad Schools: Part I — Chicago Chicago is...
Northwestern University is...
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