In Chicago:

I'm back in Chicago for my last quarter ever! Spring break was pretty uneventful, but it was good to see people and relax.

Not sure what I'm taking yet, but I should have a pretty good idea by tomorrow. It's going to be a busy quarter, what with college bowl stuff and job interviews (I have two in Maryland. How dumb is it that I can't combine them? But no, I'm going to have to go there twice).

So yeah. Not taking anything that's too hard. Should I just go the Pass/Fail route?

Ah, good syntax:

While I've been home, I've been reading various pretty lowbrow suspense/mystery novels (Andrew Greeley? yep. Jack Higgins? yep). In one of them I came across the phrase "most extremist Protestant group" to describe the (fictitious) Red Hand of Ulster. Discuss.

Dinner with D-- and T--:

Me: I'm going to find a bathroom.
T: I've got to pee too (makes no move to get up).
Me: Are you going to come?
T: I'm going to see if I can make it home.
Me: What's wrong with you?
T: I like to challenge myself.

My cousin once said that my mother never saw a toilet she could walk past, so I don't understand T's motivation here. At all.

Aah, freedom:

Sudeep, Amanda, and I have been enjoying the freedom that comes from having NO classes to study for. Thursday was drinks and dinner, Friday we went to an Indian place all the way at the end of the Green Line (ah, back to the suburbs), Saturday I cleaned and went to the Point to celebrate the warm weather (60!) and went to dinner later, and today Sudeep and I went to the Bourgeois Pig up in Lincoln Park, then to Crate and Barrell and Sams (again).

It's hard to go from break mode to classes mode. I could really love a life where on the weekends, I can go spend two hours reading fiction and drinking tea, out to dinner almost every night, warm afternoons just sitting in the park...

Of course, if this were my normal life I'd be fat, broke, and flunking out of school, but it's fun while it lasts.

Finished and celebrated:

This quarter finally rolled over and died yesterday. Thank God. So I went to Sam's to buy wine, then to Cafe Ba-ba-reeba for Sangria with two former roommates and some other people, then came back here to have a delicious dinner cooked by Amanda. And three bottles of wine for three people sounds about right.

I am starting to feel like a lush though. Lots of wine, Sangria two nights in a row (and more about the Colombian place later), I don't know. I'm using the "it's the end of the quarter" excuse, but it really shouldn't continue.

On asking a gym teacher for a recommendation:

"I felt such a rapport with you, when you were tellig me to lift more...I'm going to work at Bally's."

I think maybe you had to be there.

Why I hate St. Patrick's Day:

I know, I'm a terrible person for this, but I honestly don't care. I'm not wearing green today. I'm not going to Finn MacCool's or fado to drink green beer. I didn't go to a parade. I'm not eating fricking corned beef and cabbage.

St. Patrick's Day is primarily an Irish-American holiday, celebrated by a bunch of guys who are 1/8 Irish-American and have never been to Ireland. And there's nothing wrong with being one of those people, but that doesn't mean you should go around wearing "Kiss Me, I'm Irish" buttons either. You're not.

St. Patrick's Day is an excuse for these guys to go around reinforcing stereotypes of Irish men as maudlin drunks, who get in their cups and sing songs about the injustice of the British and the valor of the IRA. That's actually all they ever do in Ireland, you know. Drink and go to Mass and blow up British tanks. Right.

You don't get to be Irish one day a year. Either you're Irish and you deal with what that means every day, or you're not and you don't. You don't get to sing "Come out you Black and Tans" unless you actually know who the Black and Tans were and what they did and why they're so universally hated in Ireland. Irish songs and being Irish means being a part of a long history, some bad, some good. Like all history. But you can't just be a part of it when you want to. Basically, if you can't understand it, that's fune, but either learn about Irish history or shut up about it.

I emailed my friend Donal who lives outside Dublin to see if he was doing anything special today. His answer, "well, it's a public holiday, so I'm sleeping in and going hiking in the afternoon." No pubs, no big corned beef dinner, nothing.

Easter is the day to celebrate being Irish. "Tell me father why are you so sad on this fine Easter morn, when Irish men are proud and glad of the land where they are born." On Easter, we celebrate bravery and freedom and people who died for what they believed in. We can celebrate Joseph Plunkett, Tom Clark, Sean MacDiarmida, and the rest. We can remember the dark cells on the long corridors in Kilmainham, the couple getting married in the hours before one was killed, O'Rahilly lying in a pool of his own blood fighting an action he disapproved of, the crosses in Kilmainham courtyard. We can think of those who died earlier and later for their country, of Mick Collins and Kevin Barry, of Robert Emmet. We can celebrate in the Irish way, with food and drink and talk. It's sort of like a wake.

On Easter I can be proud of being Irish, proud of who I am and who my parents are. I can't feel that way seeing a bunch of drunk guys in green plastic hats on the Red Line.

Done with finals and other miscellany:

Yayy! I took my last final this morning. It was really short. It's probably the only final I've ever taken on which I would have done better if I'd showed up 45 minutes late for it, because I would have either slept more or studied more. And I only really needed an hour anyway.

I got a problem set back today with the following comment: "Although dealing with syntax errors, you were able to do a good job!" I'm not sure whether that's good or not.

Meh. I see some grading and definitely a nap in my future.

Psychology of finals:

In the middle of finals week, I often speculate about what would happen if I didn't take a final, even for classes that I actually didn't mind taking. So we get conversations like,:

"Well, it can't be worth that much. There was a midterm and homework and doesn't participation count?"
"Yeah, but you probably still have to show up."
"What if I were taking it Pass/Fail?"
"You still need a C, right? You'd still have to go to the final."
"Dammit. Are you sure? I mean, what could it be? Like 30%?"
"You'd still have to go."

Why do I do this? I'm not actually going not to show up for a final. Maybe this speculation just makes me feel like I have an out, if the studying really doesn't happen, it's OK. It's also kind of fun, to imagine sending the cat to take a final.

"But how would he get there? He'd get lost."
"Maybe you could just shove him in the door and run away."
"Would he need a note or something on his collar? So they would know he was supposed to take the final."
"Or maybe you could stick a pencil behind his ear."

On social promotion:

The NYT has an article on ending social promotion in NY schools. I'm not a big fan of social promotions, but one sentiment in the article struck me as false.

"Ending social promotion makes a statement that mediocrity is no longer acceptable," [chief of Chicago schools Arne Duncan] said. "I think that's a critically important statement for urban school districts."

Why should mediocrity not be acceptable? The fact is, that every kid that graduates from Chicago Public Schools isn't necessarily going to go to Harvard or go to college at all. Honestly, if striving for mediocrity means that every graduate of a public high school can read at least a tenth grade level, and can do basic algebra and geometry, is that really such a bad thing?

I'm not advocating that schools end programs for gifted students or AP classes or anything like that. But ending social promotion doesn't claim that mediocrity isn't acceptable; it claims that failure will not be tolerated. And that's fine, and a good goal and all that. But that's all it means.

And I sort of feel like, by definition, mediocrity will exist. It's the state of most people. We can raise the bar, but the higher bar will still just be mediocre. Most people aren't going to be that far from the average, and that's fine and normal and the definition of average.

Anyway, I really need to go study for an exam right now, because for all my talk about mediocrity being OK, I'd rather not get a C in this class. Ah, hypocrisy...

Homework, redux:

It turns out that the person who turned in her first homework assignment this week added the class late and actually turned in a bunch of assignments. Now, I don't know what questions were assigned or what week each of the sections she gave me belongs to. And she can't have added the class after fifth week, which was five and a half weeks ago. I understand that it can be difficult to get caught up, but five and a half weeks? I don't know if I'm going to grade it or not. I don't even know if I can grade it.

Finals=stress:

It's finals week here. My first one is in two hours. Weblogging might be a bit light this week, though it seems that I log more when I have stuff I should be doing. It's all about the procrastination, really.

Homework?:

So, if you were only going to turn in one problem set, would it be the one due on the day of the final? I got the first problem set of the quarter from someone in my calc class and I was just wondering if this made sense to anyone else.

What makes a bad test?:

Susan over at Gnostical Turpitude has posted about bad test questions, and I started thinking about bad exams as a whole.

I've taken a bunch of bad exams. Susan mentioned one, which featured the scintillating prompt "Describe the trajectory of western civilization from 1789," which was definitely vague and probably outside the scope of the class. It did, however, lead to interesting questions of "can you graph this?" "Western civ would have to be a function, right?" "What would you plot versus time, awesomeness?" "Maybe you can do a whole bunch of graphs." "One of which would have to be awesomeness versus time, right?" I originally believed that western civ would have to follow a geodesic but was convinced that there were outside forces acting on it (including, but not limited to, space aliens). I was taking general relativity at the same time I was taking western civ, so I really wanted to write down Einstein's equations and go home.

Of course, I am nowhere near cool enough to actually draw a graph on my exam, so I instead talked about something boring. That question isn't bad because it leads to the geeky speculation above, but rather because it's ridiculously vague for a prompt in a two-hour long final, which probably featured some other questions. I mean, it would be ridiculously vague for a series of books, and I thought about referring my professor to Will and Ariel Durant.

This is, however, the only writing essay prompt that I can remember. I've probably taken about 4 in-class finals that featured some essays and two takehomes. The takehomes I remember far better, but all of them were pretty good questions, even if I was annoyed by them because I hadn't done much of the reading.

I've taken a handful of bad math exams, too. One year, the man teaching our class used a set of notes available from the person who'd taught the class last year's website. Also available on the website, though not immediately obvious from the link, was the final from the year before. Either two or three questions from this final were on the final for our year.

Another math exam featured 60%(?) of the points available from T/F questions. which meant that there was little to no partial credit available on the majority of the test. Another had only problems that required some sort of little trick to solve, rather than just understanding the material (and one or two problems like this is fine, but I believe that the whole test shouldn't be that way).

A bio final wasn't exactly bad so much as the TA had done all of the problems in discussion and ultimately we decided that there wasn't anything else they could ask, so we didn't have to study. An analysis midterm which was entirely on material from the previous class which had been taught by a different professor and had been six months before was kind of bad. Oh and a music final where we had to tell the difference between Scarlatti and Corelli based on about ten bars made me really sad.

I can't remember any other finals that I've taken that were terrible because of the questions or the format rather than terrible because I didn't know the material (algebraic topology, one quarter in particular of Byzantine history) or because they were just really hard (GR, group theory). Anybody have any other funny exam stories?

Banville's The Untouchable:

I just finished reading this today, and it's very good. It's about Victor Maskell, who is a fictionalised version of one of the Cambridge spies (aaprently Anthony Blunt, though I've never actually heard of him). Maskell spied for the Soviets in the late thirties and while a member of British intelligence during the war. The book is set probably in the 80s, and it covers the time after he is publicly uncovered as a Russian spy. I really recommend it for anyone who likes spy novels, even though it's far from typical for the genre.

Anyways, some quotes:

On mathematics:

The discipline held a deep appeal for me. Its procedures had the mark of an arcane ritual, another secret doctrine like that which I was soon to discover in Marxism. I relished the though of being privy to a specialised language which even in its most rarified form is an exact--well, plausible--expression of empirical reality. Mathematics speaks the world...

and

Kitsch is to art as physics is to mathematics--its technology.

On Soviet views of the English:

Accustomed to tsardom, old style and new, they could not understand that our sceptred ruler does not rule, but is only a sort of surrogate parent of the nation, and not for a moment to be taken seriously. At the end of the war, when Labour got in, I suspect Moscow believed it would be only a matter of time before the royal family, little princesses and all, would be taken to the Palace basement and put up against the wall.

On similarities between the Russians and the Irish:

I too came of an extreme and instinctual race...we shared the bleak romanticism of our two very different races, the legacy of dispossession, and, especially, the lively anticipation of eventual revenge, which, when it came to politics, could be made to pass for optism.

and

Another IRA bomb on Oxford Street tonight. No one killed, but a glorious amount of damage and disruption. How determined they are. All that rage, that race-hatred. We should have been like that. We should have had no mercy, no qualms. We would have brought down a whole world.

On leaving London:

"I shall miss London," Hartmann said. "Kensington Gore, the Brompton Road, Tooting Bec--is there really a place called Tooting Bec? And Beauchamp Place, which only yesterday I at last learned how to pronounce in the correct way. Such a waste, all this valuable knowledge."

On Americans:

[I]t was not just the American individual that won my admiration...but the American system itself, so demanding, so merciless, undeluded as to the fundamental murderousness and venality of humankind and at the same time so grimly, unflaggingly optimistic.

and

Mytchett said that where Americans are concerned, one mustn't on any account bring up matters of race, homosexuality, or Communism, and Boy said, "What you're telling me is not to make a pass at Paul Robeson."

On betrayal:

"What you're asking me to do is to betray my friends," I said. "I won't do that."
"You've betrayed everything else." Still smiling, still gently avuncular.
"But what you mean by everything," I said, "is nothing to me. To be capable of betraying something, you must first believe in it."

Jeffrey-related awesomeness:

On the way back from dinner last night, Susan and I were giving Jared a hard time about his unfortunate liking of James Taylor. Susan asked anyone who didn't like James Taylor to raise his hand. A random guy sitting next to me with balloons and a Payless bag raised his. Pretty awesome.

Poor McCoy:

My roommate's boyfriend (ex?) has been here for the last few days. He plays the guitar and sings. McCoy disapproves. So this morning he was running back and forth down the hallway with his tail puffed up to three times its normal size. I mostly laughed at him, though I did feel a little bad.

Long distance grieving:

It's so hard when someone you love is hurting, in some ways harder than when you are hurting. You can see it in her eyes, and hear it in her voice, and you can't do anything. You try to say the right words, but what are the right words anyway? You say "I'm so sorry" or "what can I do?" but these are just tired platitudes anyway. You want to find the magic words that will help make it hurt a little bit less, but you can't. You hug her, and somehow the touch makes it a tiny bit better, you think, but you don't really know. And then you feel bad, because it's not really your loss, and why should you be taking it so hard?

As hard as this is, it's even harder when she's far away. When you can't touch her, when you hear the voice that can barely hold back tears on the telephone, when you spend hours hesitating over one email, because you're afraid of typing the wrong thing. You just feel useless; after all, you can't help the person you love when she needs you.

I feel guilty. Guilty for not being as affected by the death as my mother. Guilty for not being able to help her, for not being there for her. Guilty for being 1000 miles away, guilty for not really knowing why I'm crying. I knew this women, and loved her, but she didn't have much of a role in my life. Her loss is really my mother's loss, sad as I am about her death.

I'm sorry, mom. I wish I were there now in Atlanta, that I could go to the funeral, that I could hug you, and find the right words to say. But I'm not, and even if I were, I can never find the right words anyway.

Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine.
Et lux perpetuam luceat eis.
Kyrie eleison.
Christe eleison.

"They" isn't singular:

Will Baude posted a defense of using they as a singular adjective, citing Shakespeare and Jane Austen as culprits in this regard. It's still wrong. "They" is plural, as evidenced by the fact that you use a plural verb with it. Period. "They" is not the third person singular; that is "he" or "she." It is a shame that English lacks a gender-neutral third person singular, but it does. Creating one wouldn't even necessarily be a bad thing, but it should be singular. That means it should take a singular verb, so "they" doesn't qualify. In eleventh grade, I was told to pick either "he" or "she" and use it exclusively in my papers instead of "they." Now, unless the person is almost certainly male (as in the case of the unknown author of Njal's Saga in the paper I just finished), I use "she."

"They" can't do double duty either. Number is a ternary construction. There are either zero people, one person, or some number of people, and this "or" is exclusive. I can't be both one person and many people since the two concepts are mutually exclusive. In English, really the verb determines the number. For regular verbs, there are only two choices; either there's an -s on the end or there isn't. If it's third person and there isn't an -s on the end, the subject is plural. After all, you told me it was plural because you picked a plural verb. And I've read that that means that we should say "you is" instead of "you are." Um, no. Try conjugating the verb "to be" sometime. Just because English conjugations are generally kind of simple doesn't mean that they don't exist.

And I know using "they" as a third person singular is more accepted in Britain, and anyone who reads this blog know I have some British spelling ticks (caused mainly by my complete inability to write a cursive z in elementary school and the fact that traveling just looks wrong to me, combined with weird backwards dating that are the result of German or some sort of weird leftover childhood Europe thing), but I don't turn in papers with "civilise" or "travelling" in them. I edit out my (incorrect) usage ticks when I'm writing academically because, you know, I go to school in America.

It's true that you hear and see "they" used as third person singular a lot. Doesn't make it right. People use it's as a possessive, too, but it isn't. Something that is fundamentally wrong isn't made right by lots and lots of uses.

If you aren't convinced that it's wrong, think of it like the first or second person singular. Perfectly fine in conversations and non-serious writing. Out of place in an academic paper.

And that may be why it's more OK in Austen or Shakespeare, since they aren't writing academic papers. Or maybe it can be explained away since they are British, and, you know, writing a long time ago. Just because Shakespeare used it doesn't mean it's OK in modern academic papers. You know, like contractions and weird constructions. Find me a reputable modern scholar who uses "they" as a singular in a published paper, since otherwise you're comparing apples to oranges.

"They" is not a third person singular. Once you add the plural verb, it's plural. It's fine in your everyday speech, but it isn't OK in an academic paper and Will's instructor was right to lay the smack-down.

(Though reading this post, the number of "they is" constructions that I've used makes a plausible case for they with a *singular* verb. It would sound terrible, though.)

(Also, I know that all the instances of "they" where I am talking about the word should be in italics, but that's too many keystrokes in HTML. Not happening).

drink and sleep:

I am such a cheap drunk when I am exhausted. A shot and a half of limoncello and I'm ready to fall into bed and go to sleep. Speaking of that,...

Anatomy of a paper:

23:44:

Well. I've written a pretty detailed outline, but it looks like I have too much stuff. Two-ish pages of the actual paper written, which is pretty incoherent. I think the draft will take less time than the editing. Time to make tea.

Currently procrastinating by: reading American Idol boards over on TWoP.
Currently listening to: Pink Floyd, Echoes
Amount of Diet Coke consumption: 24 ounces

00:12:

I made the tea too strong, and probably brewed it too long. Oh well. I'm leaving the teapot out. Maybe food will make me more motivated. No progress on the paper, but I've discovered what happened on AI last night. The funny part of all this is, I've never watched AI. Like not even part of a show. I think I'm going to go make a peanut butter sandwich.

00:35:

That peanut butter was good. Definitely a good choice, there. Writing about illegitmacy in Christian Iceland. Listen to this story: Amundi the blind was the illegitimate son of Hoskuld Njalsson and was, shockingly enough, blind. Hoskuld was murdered by Lyting, who paid compensation to Hoskuld's father and brothers. Amundi asked Lyting for compensation, too, and Lyting refused, saying that Amundi didn't count because he was illegitimate. Amundi asked God for help, and God restored his sight, so he went back into Lyting's booth "and hit him in the head with his axe so that it sank all the way to the back edge." Then he went blind again.

Currently procrastinating by: Reading "Get Fuzzy" and wondering if that is actually what McCoy is thinking.
Currently listening to: "Shine on You Crazy Diamond," all 17 minutes of it.
Amount of Diet Coke consumption: 28 ounces

01:03:

Working on divorce now. Yes, a divorce from school for me. I shouldn't be this tired, really. It's not that late, and I've gotten some sleep for the past few nights. But I've started typing song lyrics that I'm hearing instead of words. I think I'll work another couple of hours and then try to get a little sleep at least. I've already begun on the sleep-deprived cold thing too. I've added a sweater and some fuzzy socks to my oh-so-attractive must-write-a-paper ensemble.

Currently procrastinating by: Writing incoherent emails to Will.
Currently listening to: tmbg, Then:The Earlier Years
Amount of Diet Coke consumption: 30 ounces

01:47:

I feel a little bit better. Divorce is more or less done, and I'm much of the way through illegitimacy (and usually I bitch about Word's reliance on AutoCorrect and AutoFormat, but I am completely unable to spell illegitimacy, so it was useful here). The current plan: finish up the ill-word, finish up consent in marriage, and write about a page on inheritance. By then it'll probably be about 3:30, so I can sleep till 7:30, get up and attempt to put in some transitions (which are entirely missing now) and even go to class in the morning. Then I have till 3 to do any editing and write an intro/conclusion. It should be OK, right? This is the wimpiest all-nighter ever, so I'm changing the name of this post.

02:11:

Maybe Roger Waters should have higher standards. His utopia includes "no one kills the children anymore," "maniacs/ don't blow holes/ in bandsmen by remote control," and "no one ever disappears, you never hear their standard issue kicking in your door." Not that these aren't worthy goals, but it seems like if you were inventing a utopia, you'd go a bit farther. Though I suppose Lennon doesn't either; "Imagine" is all about ending hunger and war and not making people happy. A little bit at a time, maybe? Man I am ridiculously tired. I thought that the hour and half long nap that was physics would have made me feel better, but apparently not.

03:34:

Seven-ish pages written. I have to sleep. Setting alarm for 6:30.

07:02:

Three hours of sleep and four snooze cycles later, I'm back awak. I feel a surprising amount better, even though I'm never sure how much good three hours of sleep does. Anyway, I need to write about two more pages, then I can start editting, since my papers almost always get longer with editting. Particularly this one, which completely lacks any transitions.

07:37:

I bought a six-pack of 24-ounce bottles of Diet Coke at Mr. G's. Did you even know such things existed? It's definitely getting me through now. I thought about eating, but I feel kind of nauseous and the last thing I want to do is start throwing up now. So Diet Coke it is! I think part of the reason that I was so tired last night has to do with the apartment. After about nine at night, it's usually pretty dark. I'm at the other end of the apartment from my roommates, so basically I look down the hallway and it looks completely dark. That makes it feel like it's later than it actually is, and my body decides "man, it's late now. need sleep." Or maybe I'm just old.

Currently procrastinating by: Googling the best restauranter ever, William Restrepo.
Currently listening to: Dire Straits
Amount of Diet Coke consumption: 37 ounces

08:20:

Working on a conclusion now, though that doesn't mean I'm terribly close to being finished. Up to eight and a half pages. One of my roommates is making tea and the kettle has been whistling right outside the door for the last three minutes or so. I mean, Jesus, if you can't hear the kettle in your room, you can stay in the kitchen until the water boils. It's not like it takes that long, and listening to a kettle whistle for three minutes is really annoying. And I know I could go and get her.

08:50:

McCoy keeps rolling around in my bathtub. I'm not really sure what's up with that. I mean, if I were a cat, I would try to stay the hell away from bathtubs, and he often seems to be trying to turn on the taps. Stupid cat.


Currently procrastinating by: Playing with McCoy
Currently listening to: XTC, Skylarking
Amount of Diet Coke consumption: 46 ounces

09:07:

Printing draft one of hopefully three. One round of edits before class at 11:30, one during, one after. Hopefully that will be enough. This is definitely the closest that I've come to a deadline on a paper. It won't really be done, and that's entirely my fault. I have to stop procrastinating.

10:21:

Edits made, need to be entered into Word. Interesting comments: "Dude, I'm qualifying a lot of crap here," "Put some fricking exposition here," "sentence awkward," "crappy!!" "stop it!" and "(Is it?)" as well as more traditional comments. Yeah. This is a bit bad. Just a bit. It's funny that this is the least sleep I've had for school-related reasons since first year and it's for a paper for a class I don't even really care about. How does that work again?

11:00:

OK, changes entered and I'm about to head off to class. I wish I didn't have to go, but I have to return some problem sets and pick up some more, and since it's their last class, I really should do this. After class, two and a half hours to finish. This'll be down to the wire.

12:39:

Fuck. I forgot to upload my paper to FTP, so I had the choice of either typing it all over again or coming home. It cost me close to half an hour. Now I absolutely need to fix footnotes and bibliography and write and intro before doing anything more stylistically. I just wish all this were over.

13:25:

OK, bibliography is done. Footnotes are fixed. Intro is written. I have a little over an hour to fix the major stylistic problems of this paper. It could be worse, since at least I will have something to turn in. That always makes me happy. I've decided that the major problem that I'm having is that I'm not really doing what I'm supposed to be doing (analyzing modern research in the light of a historical source) so much as just writing about a historical source. Oh, well, that's too late to fix, so whenever I talk about the modern scholarship, it sounds sort of tacked on.

14:30:

Yay, paper is printing now. Plenty of time to walk to class. I imagine there are lots and lots of mistakes, because of the combination of my tiredness and the minimal amount of editting this paper saw. Who wants to go get drunk tonight?

17:11:

Well, it's turned in. And I have the unsettling thought that I left a couple of those notes to myself (you know the type: "This is sort of crap" and "Write something about what's-her-name? Gudrun? here") in the final draft. I hope not; that would be a little embarrassing. The first draft I printed still actually had the title of "Title," but I did catch that one. Ah, well, it's done and all that. Booze tonight!

The book list:

Well, I know everyone else did this months ago, but I wasn't quite so in need of procrastination then, so here goes. Bold means that I've read it. Any suggestions?

1. Ulysses, James Joyce
2. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
3. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
4. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
5. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
6. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
7. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
8. Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler
9. Sons and Lovers, D. H. Lawrence
10. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
11. Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry
12. The Way of All Flesh, Samuel Butler
13. 1984, George Orwell
14. I, Claudius, Robert Graves
15. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
16. An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser
17. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
18. Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
19. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
20. Native Son, Richard Wright
21. Henderson the Rain King, Saul Bellow
22. Appointment in Samarra, John O' Hara
23. U.S.A. (trilogy), John Dos Passos
24. Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson
25. A Passage to India, E. M. Forster
26. The Wings of the Dove, Henry James
27. The Ambassadors, Henry James
28. Tender Is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald
29. The Studs Lonigan Trilogy, James T. Farrell
30. The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
31. Animal Farm, George Orwell
32. The Golden Bowl, Henry James
33. Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser
34. A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh
35. As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
36. All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren
37. The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder
38. Howards End, E. M. Forster
39. Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin
40. The Heart of the Matter, Graham Greene
41. Lord of the Flies, William Golding
42. Deliverance, James Dickey
43. A Dance to the Music of Time (series), Anthony Powell
44. Point Counter Point, Aldous Huxley
45. The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
46. The Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad
47. Nostromo, Joseph Conrad
48. The Rainbow, D. H. Lawrence
49. Women in Love, D. H. Lawrence
50. Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
51. The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer
52. Portnoy's Complaint, Philip Roth
53. Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov
54. Light in August, William Faulkner
55. On the Road, Jack Kerouac
56. The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett
57. Parade's End, Ford Madox Ford
58. The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
59. Zuleika Dobson, Max Beerbohm
60. The Moviegoer, Walker Percy
61. Death Comes to the Archbishop, Willa Cather
62. From Here to Eternity, James Jones
63. The Wapshot Chronicles, John Cheever
64. The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger
65. A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
66. Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham
67. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
68. Main Street, Sinclair Lewis
69. The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
70. The Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell
71. A High Wind in Jamaica, Richard Hughes
72. A House for Ms. Biswas, V. S. Naipaul
73. The Day of the Locust, Nathaniel West
74. A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
75. Scoop, Evelyn Waugh
76. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark
77. Finnegans Wake, James Joyce
78. Kim, Rudyard Kipling
79. A Room With a View, E. M. Forster
80. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
81. The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow
82. Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegner
83. A Bend in the River, V. S. Naipaul
84. The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen
85. Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad
86. Ragtime, E. L. Doctorow
87. The Old Wives' Tale, Arnold Bennett
88. The Call of the Wild, Jack London
89. Loving, Henry Green
90. Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie
91. Tobacco Road, Erskine Caldwell
92. Ironweed, William Kennedy
93. The Magus, John Fowles
94. Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
95. Under the Net, Iris Murdoch
96. Sophie's Choice, William Styron
97. The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles
98. The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain
99. The Ginger Man, J. P. Donleavy
100. The Magnificent Ambersons, Booth Tarkington

Cait's coming to Chicago!:

And in honor, an old picture:



Also, unfortunately with the computer crash, I lost all the Ireland pictures and the pictures of the first flat. Which means, unfortunately, that you won't get to see the picture of me washing my hair in the sink after (was it four days?) without hot water. I luckily didn't lose anything of the pictures from the last trip.

Annoying people:

Me: "I didn't exactly dislike him."
Will: "Whoa, wait a minute. I have documentary evidence that you wanted to stick a pencil in his eye. And if that's what you do to people you don't dislike, I'd hate to see what you'd do to someone you actually hated."
M: Well, he annoyed me. I didn't actually think he was a bad person. And I didn't actually do it."

I imagine M-- knows who we're talking about, and maybe Amanda. Probably no one else.

I have to write this Goddamned paper. It's quarter of ten...

Njal's saga and paper-writing:

So the paper that I've been completely unable to write for the last day now is on Njal's Saga, an Icelandic family saga. It's really interesting, particularly in the ways that it differs from other Icelandic sagas. Njal and his friend Gunnar don't like killing, and I don't think Njal himself ever kills anyone. He knows all about the law, though (and apparently every police car in Iceland has this quote from Njal's saga on it: "The land is built on the law"). In a way, this sort of implies a change in the Icelandic Weltanschauung; from Egil, who enjoys killing, we get Njal, the man of peace who uses the law to push for peace. Of course, it wouldn't be a saga if there wasn't any bloodshed, and the law doesn't really work. Does this mean that the law will never be enough, that there will always be killing and bloodfeuds? I don't think that's what the saga is saying, rather that it takes time for the law to be fully integrated into Icelandic society. There have to be more men like Njal and Gunnar and fewer like Njal's sons before this can happen.

Interestingly enough, Seamus Heaney believes that one must read the Icelandic sagas to understand the situation in the north of Ireland. I disagree. I think the difference between the blood-feuds in the Icelandic sagas and the Troubles has to do with the personal nature of the killing in the sagas. It's true that both the pIRA and Protestant groups use revenge killings, but usually the revenge is taken on a random Catholic/Protestant/police officer rather than a specific person. It all feels very clinical, really, almost as if there's a number of people who must be killed for a revenge to be complete. So for the death of some fool in the wrong place at the wrong time probably for all the wrong reasons, a small bomb somewhere, three dead and seven injured. For a child, killed because he went to the wrong school, maybe two simultaneous bombs, five dead and thirteen injured. And so on. In the sagas, though, the people who are killed are killed because of who they are, who they are related to, and who they killed. I see this as a fundamental difference; the concept of revenge killing seems fairly universal. So I'm not sure that one can get much insight into the situation in the north of Ireland from the sagas.

Skeevy psych studies:

I'm at Reynolds now, and there are some girls trying to get people to sign up for this really sketchy "psychology study." Basically, it is unpaid and advertises itself as a chance to meet people of the opposite sex. Yeah, psych study, dating service, whatever. Anyway, they said to someone that they knew: "Hey, do you know any girls who need boyfriends?" Skee-vy.

It must be almost finals:

when I start thinking about what I've eaten today and realise that it's an apple and some Bosco sticks. And a whole lotta Diet Coke. I don't usually have an eating disorder; it's just stress that does this to me. Oh, well. Code is done, at least, and I even randomly decided to TeX a paragraph because it looked so ugly in Word.

Stuff left to do:

• Mathematica code (heat diffusion; density of the universe)
  
• Grade last problem set
  
• Get grades in order
  
• Paper on Christianization of Scandinavia
  
• Vikings final
  
• Latin final
  
• LabView code (4-function calculator)
  
• Fill out security clearance forms
  
• Read Vinland sagas
  
• CLEAN!
  

Heat diffusion:

I seem to have pretty good luck when I ask people random physics questions on here, so here goes. I'm working on a problem in Mathematica, and essentially I've got a gel in a thermal bath. I'm raising the temperature on the bath and looking at the heat diffusion in the gel. Since I know nothing about heat diffusion, I'm not sure whether the answer I'm getting makes physical sense. If I keep raising the temperature over say 12 hours and I'm looking at the dispersion of the temperatures over the gel, would it make sense for this dispersion to level off at some (nonzero) number after a couple of hours? That's definitely what I'm getting, but I don't trust my coding at all and I can't rely on physical intuition because I don't really get what's happening. Any insights? Leave a comment or email me, please (kathleen-at-uchicago-edu). Thanks!

Back in the MacLab:

I've decided that the MacLab is how I imagine Purgatory, though I think that Dante would probably disapprove. It's too warm and too crowded and there's no sunlight or windows. And often coding feels like Sisyphus' punishment (though I admit I am mixing my cultural ideas of afterlives here). I push and I push and just when I get the damn rock to the top, it rolls back down the other side, and I realise that I have to write yet another do-loop in Mathematica. Still, though, the MacLab isn't bad enough to be hell; at least I have email.

But after tomorrow, the only reason I will ever have to come back here is to get free printing.

Buses and subways:

Now it seems like whenever I go downtown, I take the bus. To 600 N. Michigan, I'm definitely going to take the Jeffrey (and by Jeffrey, I mean the 6, not the bus currently called the Jeffrey). But to North and Wells, too, Will and I decided to take the 6 to the 22 rather than the 55 to the Red Line. Last year, I always took the Jeffrey, but it was more convenient to catch from where I lived. This year, it's probably about 3/4 of a mile to walk to the Jeffrey rather than 2 blocks to the Garfield, and I still usually take the Jeffrey.

I think the more you learn a city, the more you learn that buses are often faster and almost always more convenient than subways. Our first month in London, we took only the Tube. You know exactly where to get on and off, the maps are far less confusing, and it seemed to make more sense. It was only later that we learned that often something that was two Tube lines away could be reached by riding on a single bus. Particularly living off of Oxford Street, which had more buses than the city of Atlanta driving down it at any given time, it began to make more and more sense to take the bus. There were still times that wasn't true. Going to Westminster was usually faster on the Tube, as was going to the East End. And God knows I didn't learn a tenth of the available bus routes in the city.

Chicago was sort of the same way. My first year, the only buses I took were the 55 to get to the subway, whatever the bus is that goes to Devon since there was no train out there, and once the 6. Since then, though, I've learned about a lot of very useful buses, that are often so much better than trying to ride the train. The bus down North to Wicker Park. The bus that goes to UIC from the Loop. And always, the joy that is the 6, express to the Loop and back, running often and stopping many places in Hyde Park.

It's hard at the beginning. You spend time looking for a gnome graveyard to figure out where to get off the bus since you've only been there by train before. At least once you forget your stop and end up somewhere you probably never wanted to go. You misread the number and get on a bus that goes miles from where you wanted to go. You discover the bus you're trying to take stopped running two hours earlier. But soon enough you learn how to get wherever you wanted to go, with a minimum of effort and, often, money. And in the meantime, you get to see neighborhoods and people you never would have seen otherwise.

John Banville says that "to take possession of a city of which you are not a native, you must first of all fall in love there." This is perhaps true, but figuring out the bus system is a good start.

Them's good eating:

I definitely had a good weekend food-wise, at least. Friday, Will and I (after an embarrassingly long time when we couldn't figure out anything to do) went to Las Pinatas up in Old Town. Mmm, margaritas and Mexican food. Last night, I met a bunch of people downtown and we went to Reza's, which was also really good. And I got to eat baby animals, which is always fun.

From now till the end of the quarter, though, my finances dictate lots of peanut butter. I guess I can pretend I'm in London.

Forms, forms, forms:

I finally finished filling out all the security clearance forms. They claim that filling out the forms and collecting all the information should only take 90 minutes, which might be more true if I hadn't lived in 10 places and worked for seven different companies (for 12 time periods, which were all treated differently) since I turned 18. Which is a bit ridiculous, I admit.

The thought of not having to move for a very long time is so tempting. Please let me get a job that I like, just for that.

God, does no one use Telnet anymore:

Two people next to me in the MacLab were arguing about how to use Telnet (after they opened terminal, they just tried to type their password in). I finally got bored and told them how to do it, also saying that email didn't work there either. Before, one of them was talking about how she had used telnet "once," but didn't really know how it worked and the other hadn't used it at all.

But how sad is that. Literally the first thing that I learned to do on a Mac that was different from on a PC was use telnet. These kids today with their Webmail and their Eudora don't learn Telnet anymore.

It's really too bad. Pine is roughly 8 million times faster than Webmail, FTP is by far the best way of not losing your files, and there are so many things you can do on the UNIX server than on webmail. I spent an entire summer using basically nothing but pine, sftp, pico, and pdflatex. Try doing that with webmail.

Whatever. I guess I should attempt to educate people rather than just bitching about it. Does anyone want to start a UofC for SSH RSO with me?

A bit more on single sex schools:

I discovered this link, which claims that the way to "use a single sex approach in a coed classroom" is to have textbooks that focus more on women's achievements. What? The author gives no reason that this will actually solve the problem that he acknowledges, ie that boys get more attention in classes than girls. He uses data that shows that women in single sex colleges are more likely to go into math/science/medicine than their counterparts in coed colleges, but has no evidence that shows that these girls are more likely to learn more about historical achievements of women, much ess any evidence that shows a correlation.

And the fact is that historically men have had more influence on history, science, and math, and I don't believe that students should learn less about important events/theorems from history because they are learning more about the role of comparatively unimportant women. I mean, social history can include more of women's roles, assuming the information is there, but I think high school history is more or less political/economic/military (and maybe that's a bad thing-- I know I vastly prefer social history to military history). So maybe a restructuring of high school history curricula might not be a bad thing, but if all that the author is advocating is talking less about Newton and more about Noether, or less about Caesar and more about Calpurnia, I find that vaguely insulting.

Look, there's no reason to pretend that there was any sort of gender equality in the past. There wasn't. We should accept that and move on, not try to rewrite history so that it looks like women were at all proportionally represented.

Wow:

Something I was doing in Mathematica appeared to work the first time. I'm very suspicious. I mean, considering the problems I'm having with the other thing I'm doing in Mathematica, really, what are the odds of that? The graphs do actually look OK, though, and all the things I've been displaying make it look pretty good.

Email is down:

And has been down for the last several hours. If you want to email me, please do so at marillionkm@yahoo.com. If you emailed me after about 1:30, I probably didn't get your email.

A note to people on marketplace:

Antique does not equal old. If you're selling it for $5, it's not antique.

Single Sex Schools:

The Bush administration is pushing for them, and I'm kind of on the fence about them. My high school debate partner and I(*) used essentially what Bush is pushing as our plan senior year, so I've read a decent amount of literature on both sides.

I think if they're run exactly properly they can be a very good thing. All the data shows that girls in classes with boys tend not to speak up, not to want to show that they're smart (of course there are exceptions. But overall, more boys than girls participate in classes. It probably has something to do with how girls are more likely to be taught to be nonconfrontational and more likely to feel societal pressure not to be intelligent). And boys in classes with girls tend to be more show-offy and less focussed on learning.

The evidence seems to show that high school students in single sex classes do better than those in coed classes, and students in single-sex high schools do better than those in single sex classes in coed schools. When I was debating this four years ago, there were on the order of six single sex public schools in the country, and studies done on them gave some data. When compared to students with similar socioeconomic backgrounds, students in single-sex schools did better. Now this is a bit problematic because I think that generally the single-sex schools were opt-in, so they tended to attract students with committed parents, who are statistically more likely to succeed (hence the success of M-to-M or VTP students in Atlanta). But still, the numbers are fairly compelling.

But there are drawbacks. Any program of this sort is going to lead to more bussing. I had friends in high school who spent close to two hours on the bus every morning and afternoon, and our county wasn't even that big. I also don't entirely believe in spending limited school funding on busses rather than on teachers or supplies, despite the fact that I personally had a great experience in a magnet school.

Another more intrinsic problem is that of stigmatisation, which was the main answer we got to our plan. Since one imagines that legally a school district will have to provide coed options (and making these schools opt-in will decrease the problem of "separate but equal" addressed in the NYT). Particularly if such programs exist only for one sex, will this make the students who attend single sex classes be called dumb? special ed? whatever?

Do these programs continue to affect students once they enter a coed environment? The studies I've seen at least dealt with number of students going to college rather success once in college. Given that more girls than boys attend college (and that girls' high school grades tend to be better than boys'), are we just creating a problem that doesn't exist? Maybe girls just learn differently than boys. In my own experience (completely anecdotal), girls are significantly less likely to monopolise class discussions than boys, but do contribute something to class discussions. Even in math or science classes, girls (with a few notable exceptions) are less likely to engage the professor (not that that's necessarily a bad thing-- see Susan's "Hum: a discussion class. Calculus: not a freaking discussion class"). But then it's unclear that this is a problem. I don't think my grades have been hurt by my silence in my math lectures (they have been hurt by my lack of attendance to math lectures, since clearly I missed the part that in the syllabus that attendance to a class where the professor insults my intelligence by reading the textbook aloud was mandatory. Oh wait, it wasn't there. Not that I'm bitter or anything). And I don't really feel that my grades have been hurt because I don't talk terribly much in discussion classes. I mean, I contribute a couple of times a class period (more in Civ when it was clear that no one had done the reading and I felt bad for the professor). And it seems OK. So do programs designed to increase girls' engagement with their classes actually correlate with real world success?

I'm unsure. And presently, single sex schools sound expensive. So I'm voting no. But if anyone has any more data/studies/info on this, I'd love to read it. Ihadn't thought about this in years, but it's actually a pretty interesting question. Sorry this post is basically a lot of asides strung together. I've been filling out forms and reading sagas all day, and I think my brain actually died.

(*) This actually was the source of the dumbest argument I ever heard in a debate round. My partner and I (both female) read a card saying that girls get sexually harassed/ assaulted in high school. One member of the all-male team facing us responded to this with the "they were asking for it argument." The judge was so pissed, and how bad does it look for two guys to do that to two girls?

More maintainance:

Sorry, in that flurry of updating, I forgot to fix the permalinks. They work now. I just have to set the directory permissions each time, which is kind of annoying. Does anyone know how to change the default permissions for a folder in unix? The problem is that the archives are not in my public_html folder, but in the archives folder which is contained in the public folder but doesn't default at a+rx. It's annoying.

Not one but TWO pics:


The alte Rathaus in Vienna, all decked out for Christmas. That's actually an advent calendar in building's windows. Every year, one of central Europe's distinctive Christmas markets, an outdoor combination of festival and shopping featuring punch, music, handmade goods, and lots of food, is held out front.


Cait and Elina enjoying some of the punch at the Kristkindlmarkt in Vienna.

Soave Tamellini 2001 ($9.99, Binny's Express):

This is another Italian white, a little fruity but not very much. It's not really dry either. It's kind of sweet to drink with many dinners, but not sweet enough for a desert wine and a bit too strong to drink alone. That's the problem I had with this wine. I bought it because it had good reviews, and I liked it, but I honestly didn't like it WITH anything. Wine can't exist in a vacuum, and I thought the almost olive-y taste combined with the sweetness made this wine not suitable for any dinner I tried it with. Admittedly, that was edamame and grilled cheese, and it might be OK with real food, but I don't think so. I thought about it with chicken, and I think if the chicken was sort of sweet (maybe with an orange sauce or something) it would probably be pretty good. I don't think so for fish or pork.

That's a problem for me. I need wine that will go with many things, and this didn't. It doesn't really do me a lot of good, though if you're planning a dinner party with something that this wine goes with, it might be the wine for you.

The never updated webpage:

Has finally been updated. Basically, that involved removing almost all the content. I have so much more space now though. It rocks. Expect more pictures here (or there? do people have slow connections and want me to post links instead?)

I have learned something:

Never to assume someone else hates a class that you hate. Two years ago, in the really slow elevator in Goodspeed and made the mistake of talking to someone I didn't really know about how terrible a class was (and yes, even at the time I knew I should have phrased it better-- how terrible I thought the class was or how much I hated the class). His response: I really like this class.

This time, when someone in the current class that I don't like asked me whether there was homework due tomorrow, all I said was no. Though admittedly, if he didn't know, this class probably isn't exactly his favorite either.