holding steady.™

first of all, let me take the opportunity to pose the following query:

to UF and its office of “orientation/preview/whatever-the-hell-it’s-called”:
how is it that it occurred to you guys to tell people all about the football team, and who Urban Meyer is/was, and who Timmy Tebow is/was, but you guys didn’t think it would be important to mention ANY of the cool work that’s done by your (i imagine) neighboring office, the office of multicultural and diversity affairs?

it’s pretty appalling that graduate students aren’t recruited more heavily to participate in some of the things these folks have going on. it’s also a shame that the only way i could find out was to actually go into the IBC (that’s the institute of black culture, one of those buildings next to chipotle that no one seems to know about) and pester a really great work-study into giving me a tour. that actually was followed up by a visit to the LGBT office, courtesy of that same work-study student.

all of that took me half an hour. i won’t even get into how, at a school this big, that should have taken all day. i will say that half an hour of effort, and i feel like my entire world has just opened up.

i just may end up liking it here after all…

1. there’s a lot of emailing that happens. a lot. it’s really easy to get drama started via email. it’s happened at least 3 times in the past five months.
2. college students NEVER visit during your office hours, unless it’s to get something out of you. i can appreciate that, having been a college student like seven minutes ago. but it’s really dreary to sit in a room for two hours, when you know that the chances of you interacting with another human being are slim.
3. ultimately, you go to grad school to improve the speed with which you can violate copyright protections. for proof, all one would need to do is go to the copying/scanning section in any university library. there will be at least one kid who is making copies/scanning with a look of trepidation across their face, like they’re worried Prentice Hall/Cambridge University Press cops are about to jump out from behind something and arrest them (these kids are undergrads). there will also be at least one person who is committing a variant on intellectual property infringement with a tired, somewhat dazed look on their face, but at an incredible speed. these are my people, these are grad students.

as of friday, there are some pretty big changes in the tentative plan i had for my life. but there is something about the unexpected that evokes a sense of the ethereal in you. plans falling through, other things working out, and all of it working out in a way that makes your mother happy…it’s all a bit confusing to take in, especially since my mother is so hard to please. but ultimately, it’s not about what you thought your life was going to be like. this is life, very rarely do things work out exactly the way you expect them to. but in the meantime, you have to make it a point to embrace “the new thing” with as much gusto as is reasonably expected. it’s all you can do. and at least that way, you’re disappointed less.

POL 586 EF, Monday/Wednesday, 12:20-13:35 – Conflicts in the Middle East & Africa

i’m actually a little scared. or maybe not scared, more like neurotically anticipatory. yeah, that sounds about right. this is the end of the first week of my last week as an undergrad. yeah, I have to take french in may, but whatever. doesn’t count. i’m gonna have to grow up at some point in the relatively near future. vomit.

REL 354 D, Tuesday/Thursday, 09:30-10:45 – Religion & Gender

i keep playing this game in my head, where I let myself get too far ahead, caught up in the future, concerned with “what’s coming next?!”

SOC 210 P, Tuesday/Thursday, 11:00-12:15 – Introduction to Social Research

this is the class I have currently checked out of to write this. so fucking dull. I maybe wrote like…five lines of notes. but I did check my email a lot.

GSC 103 R, Tuesday/Thursday, 14:00-15:15 – Evolution of the Modern Earth’s Environment

so in my geology class…it’s just like the greatest possible amalgamation of useless dregs. these are the scholars of the university of miami, and the half that don’t ooze stubborn pretentiousness/abercrombie-hollister-american eagle “vintage”-ness look decidedly homeless, complete with mildly dreaded hair and ratty clothing. read some more issues i’m having with that class here.

POL 500 SX, Tuesday, 15:30-18:10 – Ideals & Realities: Bioethics, Religion & Politics

I give up. I wanna fucking graduate already. only 112 days, 20 hours and 45 minutes to go…

so. i typically take notes in microsoft word, using the notebook layout.

this WAS something that i looked forward to when i finally switched to the mac. i thought the idea of taking notes, with an option for voice recording seemed really intuitive. and i’d never had much complaint with microsoft word (although the new format is something that STILL baffles me).

so, at the beginning of the semester, i created six notebook documents for each of my six classes. the first test came on the first day, three classes in a row, back to back. no problems, all was well. i thought that i was in for a really productive method of note-taking. the following week, i decided that i would test out voice-recording in one of my monday class that runs an hour and fifteen minutes. i had previously used it when i was in student government at UM, for senate meetings that drug on for usually about an hour. the program got buggy withing thirty minutes of my recording, and there were dramatic slugs in my performace. and before we even get into that, my machine is in pretty good condition. when i tried to end the recording, before i lost all my notes, there was a three minute lag and then i had to restart the program so i could finish my note-taking. the part of the lecture that had recorded had summarily disappeared.

the next day, i had one of my two once-a-week three hour classes for the first time, history of photography. i typed up my notes as usual, very little out of the ordinary. the next time i opened up microsoft word, actually the next ten times, my notes from that class also opened up. apparently there was an error. i really don’t know.

and then yesterday happened. i was typing notes in my international terrorism class. and then i hit the enter key and the tab key. and nothing. fucking. happened. eventually, it got its act together. but later, in my congressional representation class last night, i looked up and noticed that tabs and indents and bullets that had been created with the tab and enter keys were suddenly invisible. oh, they were there when i clicked the cursor on the line. but as i began typing again further down the page, they disappeared again.

i’m done. i quit this shit. i’ve already moved most of my word processing needs to pages, and the few times i have opened powerpoint presentations, i’ve done so in keynote. numbers is a pretty slick replacement for excel (see my review). basically, the only reason im keeping this shit on my computer is because of that unsure factor, where you just never know if you’ll need a program. also known as why i have 97 programs on my computer. tonight, i plan to convert ALL my current notes to omnioutliner pro. i’ll let you know how that works out.

i’ll have to put posting on my calendar, because, since school started last wednesday (not a coincidence that i haven’t posted since then), nothing that is not on my schedule gets done. rather, everything that’s on my schedule or my to-do list gets done, and nothing else.

point of fact: i’m already tired. and right now, i’m about to get lectured at about some truly boring shit. and a kid i asked about the syllabus for this particular class pretty much straight up ignored me. asswipe. more later.