"She wears way too much make-up. I mean, I don't see how she gets anything done with all the time she must spend putting on so much make-up."
It's Friday night, and I'm in the library. Again. I'm working through my reading for Contracts next week, and I'm relying on the white noise to drown out the roar from the fraternity next door to my building. The boys have hundreds of the logs used for building things like, oh I don't know, train tressles or something. They're moving these enormous rectangular logs into a shape to contain, I suppose, the great hills of sand that they've had delivered to their parking lot. Beach party for the weekend?
I need to get out of academic administration because this world of rules not mattering and deadlines being irrelevant is killing me. College students get to do whatever they want, or not do whatever they want, and the administration acts like whatever they did or didn't do isn't their fault, just like their enabling parents taught them. It's ironic that I'm quitting my job to go to law school.
"Why the Last Two Days Have Sucked"
I didn't feel like being nice to anyone yesterday. So they weren't nice back.
I packed a bag to go straight to the gym after work. Right before I left work to go to the gym, I realized that I didn't have my gym ID card. They said I could pay the $6 day pass fee when I called on the phone. I walked home to get the card.
I walked to the gym, and every single cardio machine was occupied and reserved for the next two hours. I walked back home and ran outside.
I needed to go sign my lease today, so I took the bus on my lunch hour. On a normal day, the bus in a college town is filled with greasy undergraduates who stink like last night's booze and cigarettes. On a rainy day, the bus in a college town is filled with greasy undergraduates who don't have umbrellas and so they smell like packs of wild dogs that rolled around in mud and then stood outside in the rain and then rolled around in feet.
The Huz also needed to sign the lease, so we met and had lunch. We tried a restaurant that we'd never been to before, and it was awful. I love ethnic food, and I've had and loved Moroccan food before. But this was not good food. Soup at a restaurant should not come from a can. Maybe that's just my belief, but it's a strong belief. And tahini? At a Moroccan restaurant? It should also not come from a can.
And then I rode the bus back to work. Remember the wild dog smell? It was still there in abundance, and this time they could not comprehend why they should move to the back of the bus. It's been a frustrating couple of days. I'm not really one for a hot and sunny day, but here in the depths of a dreary season, I could use the recommended 20 minutes of sunshine.
I work in an academic advising office at a university, and so all day long I interact with college students. One of the most frustrating parts of my job is dealing with students who are turning to my school as a last option. I have no idea how or why this is the case, but my school has the second-lowest GPA requirements for admission and graduation of any school on campus. Students who have screwed up in other schools come crawling over here because they can't get in anywhere else. Awesome, huh? That's not to say that there aren't students in my school that are passionate about the curriculum and goals of the school, but I'd say there are easily as many screwups as high achievers.
Yesterday, a student from another school came into my office to inquire about our majors, and with a little questioning, I was able to get out of him that he didn't want to continue with his current major because of the foreign language requirement. He didn't see any reason why he should be forced to learn another language. He said, "I already live in the best county in the world, so why would I want to learn anything else?"
I almost launched into a list of a hundred reasons why he would want to learn something else, but I held my tongue out of respect for his ignorance. He clearly valued it enough to share it around, and I didn't want to burst his safe little 'merica bubble. The truth is that I cannot WAIT to live abroad. We have plans, and plans involve finishing degrees and getting the hell out of here. People like that guy make me even more anxious to leave, but I suppose it's reassuring that I won't have to deal with people like him after I'm gone.
While I'm thinking about ridiculous things, here's something that struck me as so odd that I just had to take some pictures.
I hate it, but I also secretly love it. Maybe I just hate that I secretly love it.
One time in college I went on four dates with four different men in one week. I only remember one of the dates, and the only reason I remember it is because of the awesome awkwardness generated by our incompatability. Lesson to be learned: go on lots of dates because you will only remember 1/4 of them.
I'm feeling frustrated by the seemingly ever-declining quality of this country's higher education system. In my day-to-day interactions with college students, I'd say that maybe one student out of twenty is bright enough to calculate four times eight in under two minutes. Okay, that's not fair. They could probably do it in one minute. If they had a piece of paper and a calculator.
These kids are dull and slow, in both their thoughts and movements. They seem to have such trouble managing their personal and academic lives, and in the inevitable event that they screw up, their parents hop right on the phone to go to battle for the rectification of their children's preventable mistakes. Failed a test? Missed the deadline to withdraw from a course you're failing? Screwed up your schedule by not visiting an advisor? It's okay! Just have your mommy call and bitch until someone gives in!
Last week a father told me on the phone that if we didn't let his son drop a class (it was April 26, and the deadline to drop a class was March 7), that we would be responsible for ruining his son's and his family's lives. Yes, he missed a well-advertised deadline, but it's not his fault, you see. No one e-mailed him to tell him the deadline. No one held his hand when he crossed the street. No one told him a bedtime story or warmed up his bottle.
I've been feeling for a long time that the quality of an undergraduate education is declining, and I think that's in large part due to the fact that college is just what everyone does after high school now. If you don't go straight to college after high school, there's a murmur that something is wrong with you. Too many 18-year-olds don't want to go to school; they just want to get away from their parents and party. The institution that was created to increase the intellect of society seems to be losing grip on demonstrating to students what all this "higher education" business is about. I think a bachelor's degree is worth far less today than it was worth, say, 30 years ago, because college isn't the rigorous experience it should be, and it seems like just about anyone can get a degree nowadays.
Maybe I just spend too much time with an infuriating age group.
In college I took a literary journalism class. Literary journalism, in brief, combines primary research with stylistic writing. You have to go out and see and do and observe and record, but you also have to practice writing with style. Really good magazines are filled with literary journalism (GQ, The New Yorker).
I wrote a piece about an Indian man who owned a donut shop in a neighboring town. He had a Ph.D. in biochemistry, and he was the owner and proprietor of a small donut shop. So I'd go there and drink coffee and eat a donut and talk to him. After several visits, feeling like I had enough research to start writing, I wanted to take some photos of him. But I didn't want to have a posey-posey photo, so I snapped a few candidly. I took two of him interacting with a customer at the register. They were chatting while ringing the order up and I snapped one. Trying to remain inconspicuous, I'd take the picture quickly and bring the camera right down. I got another one as they finished the transaction. Camera up, click, camera down. The man left and I continued to mind my own business, until he came back in the shop. I glanced over my shoulder (sitting at the bar my back faced the glass window and the parking lot) to see the man's friend in his truck, and he'd seen me take the photos in a suspicious manner. The first man walked right up to me and asked me why I took his picture. It's difficult to explain to a paranoid person that what they feel is the absolute truth is only the truth as they see it. I'm a student. I'm writing a paper about this shop and the owner. I'm not going to publish the piece or the photos. The man was stern and intimidating, and I saw his friend writing down my license plate number. I still get nervous thinking about what could make those men feel so uncomfortable about having a photograph taken of them patronizing a donut shop.
I had a dream the other night about a guy I once dated, and the thought of our short-lived relationship still cracks me up, so I thought it warranted documentation here. When I was in college, I'd see this man around campus, and I always felt drawn to him. He was so tall (6'5"), had black longish hair, and had that effortlessly-cool intellectual look about him that it seems like only men can pull off. We ended up in a class together called Comparative Religious Ethics. I might mention that the professor of that class was the sexiest professor ever; needless to say, it was an entertaining semester.
This class was so unbelievably liberal arts, and each class was honestly filled with highly-intellectual thought and discussion. This guy, let's call him Steve Smith, was a philosophy major, and he might be the most intellectual man I ever knew. He always jumped right into the discussion and had interesting points. It became more that just an attraction to a stranger; I developed a little crush on Steve. Let me point out that I was 20, and I think Steve was 24. He also drove a scooter. One day after class as my friend and I looked very cool smoking cigarettes outside, Steve walked up and struck up a conversation. He was a confident, articulate man, and he asked me out by saying, "I'd really like to go out with you. I don't know, maybe we could get a cup of water or something."
There was a coffee and long walk date; there was a walk to the Cajun restaurant near his house date; there was a date where he made pesto for me. I was completely infatuated, and he was completely frustrated that I wasn't having sex with him after knowing him for a week. I mean, come on. It had been a whole week. Where was the sex? On our second date, to introduce the idea that we weren't going to have sex that night, I said, "We barely know each other," to which he reponded with a huge sigh and eye roll.
And then there was a phone call. We shouldn't see each other anymore. We want different things. He didn't believe in love. He believed in "living for the moment." He felt like "we think fundamentally different." He had learned all of this in 3 dates. I eventually realized that the difference was that he was a slut and I wasn't, but of course the whole thing broke my little heart. I probably cried. He would be forever referred to as Steve "we think fundamentally different" Smith.
In a coincidental turn of events, we both moved to the same city after graduating. He's pursuing a graduate degree at the university where I work. I occasionally see him around town, and I'm confident he doesn't recognize me (I had fiery red hair when I dated him, and now it's back to natural). The dream goes like this: he recognizes me in a random passing, says hello, and begins to remind me who he is, like, "You probably don't remember who I am." And I say, "Of course I remember you! You're Steve "we think fundamentally different" Smith! What about the sex?"
I never liked running. I've always balked at the prospect of that form of exercise, probably because I was never in good enough shape to enjoy it. A couple of months ago I decided to go for a run with my very athletic husband, and I was surprised that I had fun doing it and felt good after. But I busted something inside my knee and it hurt to walk for about three weeks. My knee is finally back to a dull ache rather than explosions of pain in each step, so I've been experimenting with the running. A couple of runs this week have left me feeling hurt-so-good sore, and I think the knee thing is from landing on that leg while it's overextended.
This morning a coworker of mine thought she might mention, woman-to-woman, that a rape had been reported on campus (I live in a college town and work at the university). At 10:30 on a Thursday night, two men grabbed a woman off the sidewalk, shoved her into their car, drove about 10 minutes to a parking lot where they both raped her, and then drove her back to where they first abducted her. My normal running path goes through a part of campus that's about a block from where they grabbed her. Today I feel incredibly stupid about last night, when I ran alone at 9:30 without a cell phone or anything sharp.
