a five year mission
By james | August 11, 2007
I’ve moved. I’m officially a graduate student now — started classes, even, although abruptly and without much warning.
Classes should start the twentieth of July, and indeed that’s what it says on my schedule of classes. But the head of the department woke me up with a call Wednesday morning.
“I think there’s been some sort of communications foul-up”, says he. “We start our math-econ boot camp up two weeks before classes start.”
“Two — two weeks? So — when does it start?”
“Monday.”
“Mo-monday? Which Monday?”
“This past Monday.”
It was an embarrassing performance on my part, really; I wake up incapable of rational thought. A few months ago I couldn’t figure out how to snooze my alarm clock — I remember the confusion, the haze, the blasting radio — so I went cro-magnon and ripped the damned thing from the wall. It’s never been the same since.
Anyway. I started classes. It’s a lucky thing indeed that I possess a mathematics degree and a lenient instructor, for I have been permitted to skip Thursday’s and Friday’s work and have the entire class count on how I perform the second week. Most of my classmates have economics baccalaureate degrees, a counterintuitive liability in the pursuit of further economics degrees.
But me? A math degree? It’s hard to believe even now; I don’t know much mathematics. I mean, yeah — I can do calculus and a little analysis. But I slept through topology, didn’t take any algebra, despised probability, and know nothing about complex analysis (which is the good stuff). Sometimes I wonder what it is, in fact, that I did learn, besides what every engineering student forces himself to slog through so’s he can build bridges or something.
And I’m the guy who gets summa cum laude, departmental honors, and more than my mother makes just to attend grad school classes! The world has no justice.
Nevertheless, the stuff we’re doing in this boot camp … yeah, I could probably do it in my sleep. This is good, because I’d planned to sleep for the next week, and I’ll be damned if I let one measly class keep me from it.
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mrs tackett was a big fat bitch
By james | May 4, 2007
Well, she was.
No denial from me — I was a strange little kid. While most adults treated me well and may even have found my precocious weirdness cute, in hindsight there were a few who must have found me terribly offensive. Chief among them was Mrs Tackett, my second grade arithmetic teacher, way back in — oh — 1989 or 1990.
She was a fat grape of a woman — she wore a dark purple jumpsuit all the time — with big white hair and long, thick fingernails. Every week she set aside time for show and tell, bizarre for an arithmetic class, but it wasted time she’d otherwise have to spend teaching. Once I went up in front of the class to share that I found it uncomfortable when book characters said or did embarrassing things.
Picking out the irony is left as an exercise for the reader.
When she finished early, she’d let us have a few minutes to play with the toys lying about her room. There were some blocks, I think, a few pop-up books and some board games. Some of it must have been math-related, but I can’t imagine what — the teachers taught more than one subject and I don’t recall anything being off limits.
Anyway. I liked her. Why? Who the fuck knows — children are capricious. I just did.
During play time, once, most of the games were taken; my classmates had begun to play but I had already become something of a loner. I walked to the front of the room to lean over a crate of books and read the title of whatever Tackett had assigned to her reading class.
Get that? I leaned over. (This is important.) Didn’t touch anything, didn’t move anything; I was reading the title of a book; the play time had just started.
She walked up behind me and spanked me hard on the ass. I looked at her; she pointed her index finger in my face and said “Don’t you dare cry!”. So I didn’t. She didn’t explain herself; I didn’t realize I could complain. Why had a teacher I liked been such an asshole?
My seven-year-old brain couldn’t fathom it, but now I know better; just because you like someone doesn’t mean they like you. And they can be royal fucking assholes about it.
The incident turned out to be a formative what-the-fuck moment for me. Though it’s clear now that she disliked me, and why, I haven’t a clue what her reasons were for spanking me at that particular moment. I was doing nothing remotely against the rules; fuck — I was such a goody-little-two-shoes at the time that I would sooner have died than break a rule. I’d go back and ask her, but she’s certainly retired by now — hopefully painfully sick in a nursing home somewhere, mind and body failing, forgotten by all of her students but the ones who despise her.
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failure is an option
By james | May 2, 2007
Did everything I was supposed to do today. Take that, lethargy, you grandma-felching son of a bitch. Even called the flamboyantly gregarious realtor. And got off the phone with her in less than five minutes! This is a fucking record. That’s breaking the three minute mile, motherfuckers.
B in applied math. B! A few more Bs and there goes my fucking summa cum laude. Fuck.
But at least an A in health!
Paraphrasing: “Which method of drug use hits the bloodstream the fastest?” Well, surely not intravenously! ‘Cause that’s not what the word fucking means, right? “What’s the most common use of morphine?” OH PAIN RELIEF. Relief! Tuesday night brought relief from the most insipid boring useless piece of shit class I’ve ever had the misfortune of spending ten hours on over a semester. Not as sweet as heroin, but as sweet as oxycontin, maybe.
Well … an A is an A, I guess. Free lunch?
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kills flicks and teas
By james | May 1, 2007
Three finals down.
Senior-itis, Colleen tells me — an aversion, bordering on phobia, to studying — studying at least what classes demand; I’ve found other things that I’m not graded in to study. I suppose this is what you call late-onset senior-itis, since it’ll have been six fucking years and I haven’t had it before now. Damn it.
I sure as hell hope it’s not that, because I’ve signed my soul away to five fucking years of graduate study. I can’t imagine I’ll be able to deal with this soul-crushing lethargy for ten more semesters — once you’ve peered into the abyss, the abyss peering back, yada yada yada, whatever the fuck. Cthulian.
What have I found to study? For once it’s something that’s mildly useful: econometrics. Mainly curve-fitting, ordinary least squares, all voodoo bullshit, but it seems to work somehow, and it’s fun anyway. That and Haskell. Oh — you can’t expect me to be totally practical all of a sudden.
I’m tired or I’d write more.
(What the fuck is it with MarsEdit mysteriously putting invisible characters in my post? Tells me it’s malformed and can’t be sent — view the html source — and sure as fuck there’s a square with an x through it, right between “Haskell” and “.”. Fuck you, MarsEdit, you and Brent Simmons, that sexy man who made NetNewsWire too.)
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wants, needs, desires
By james | April 26, 2007
Time better spent studying I waste — traditionally — on figuring out what scores I need to obtain on final exams. Now I have a facility to share it with the world! All values rounded up to the next percentage point.
Intermediate Macroeconomics
A: 88% B: 60% C: 31% D: 2%
Biology -- or: I thought I was done with
high-school health a decade ago
A: 81% B: 41% C: 1% D: 0%
Advanced Calculus II -- elementary analysis
A: 67% B: 37% C: 7% D: 0%
Applied Math -- god*damn* I wish I'd paid
better attention in calc III
A: 101% B: 64% C: 28% D: 0%
Operations Research
A: 72% B: 32% C: 0% D: 0%
There is some guesswork involved in each of those scores. The necessary macro scores will be somewhat more lenient than the above; the teacher has stated her intent to curve, and given soft curves throughout the semester, but nothing you could put in numbers.
There may have been some curving in biology. Frankly, it doesn’t matter and I don’t care.
My analysis teacher has been kinda shifty about the grading; one sixth of the grade was meant to be homework, of which he gave essentially none. He was noncommittal about how he would deal with that, but mentioned the possibility of giving 100% to everyone, so I assume that.
My applied math grade is pretty much an educated guess; I made a more optimistic guess below. It is a guess because I cannot find my old tests or most of my old homeworks. Where did they go? I have no fucking clue! I put everything in one folder for every class! I can’t imagine why I’d take out old tests and put them somewhere mysterious. Nevertheless, the guess should be reasonably accurate; I have a good idea of how I did on the homeworks and guessed lower than I know I scored on the tests.
The operations research scores assume 100% on the project I just did (more on that shiznit later). This may seem laughably sanguine, but the teacher likes me, everything works, and frankly, he doesn’t seem like he gives two shits to rub together about the class.
The long and short of all this inane bullshit is that — in the four courses necessary for graduation — all I have to do for a D is show up and draw pretty pictures on the final exams. I may need some convincing not to do just that.
Breaking news.
Found an old test and some old homeworks for applied math. Recalculated scores: almost completely unchanged, except now I need 64% to get a B instead of 65%. Hooray.
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one more thing
By james | April 23, 2007
Given all of the below — and my lack of interest in mathematics — and my poor mathematical performance earlier in life — it’s most bizarre of all that my degree will be in math. And I’m actually better at it than most of my classmates.
Hah! Nothing I do makes any sense.
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terrified of all things
By james | April 23, 2007
Pants too tight. Forty-sixes, maybe, or forty-fours. The chest of drawers I’m using now is too small, so my jeans are folded in a pile on the floor; this pair lay on top. I can’t imagine when last I wore them. Occurs to me I need to lose weight.
(You think? The sarcastic part of me says. 300 Spartans can hold off the Persian army, but 300 pounds — alas! — is capable of no such great feat.)
What else occurs to me — I’m attending graduate school in the autumn. I haven’t said so on this blog, so the null set of people who read it won’t have any clue why I’m moving away. Looking back on what you may (generously) call my intellectual development, it’s all really sort of surreal. I started college with every intention of becoming a professional philosopher.
You read that right. Philosopher. I even named my new cat after it: Sophia. My only introduction to philosophy had been in the compellingly-written and often flat-out wrong essays of novelist Ayn Rand. As is not terribly infrequent for alienated teenage boys, I tended to take her words wholesale and unsalted; what may be sort of odd is that I never actually read any of her fiction.
It bored me. (This may have saved me — who knows?)
Fast forward a while: a fellow what calls himself Scott Ryan wrote a few essays and a book that convinced me, if nothing else, that Rand was a philosophical incompetent. But in fact I owe quite a lot of my current ideas to Ryan — my idealism for one — and my libertarianism for another; through him I was introduced to Rothbard and von Mises. And their writings, in turn, pushed me toward economics.
I can’t say I’ve shaken off all my Randroidism. She had no idea what she was talking about in her metaphysics, she didn’t understand what epistemology even was; but I think ethically her arguments are almost 100% correct, even if there are holes in her exposition of them. I firmly believe that any really compelling ethical theory will be egoistic. I’m also an atheist, but I suppose I was one of those well before I read anything she wrote.
I’m starting to ramble.
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while i’m in a blogging mood
By james | April 20, 2007
Why the hell is there no good usenet reader for OS X?
Okay, yes, there’s Unison. But Unison is — in addition to being ugly and expensive — slow; getting new messages from a busy group (like comp.lang.python) takes forever. It also messes up the column spacing in the message list view whenever I reszie the window. Boo to you, Unison.
(Edit: I should also note that Unison doesn’t work on a network drive, which means I can’t use it at school. Not an issue, um, two weeks from now.)
Thunderbird? No; Mozilla apps are frighteningly slow, at least on my machine. It’s not a bad reader, though.
What else is there? A bunch of readers that accommodate binary posters/downloaders, which I don’t make it a habit of doing. Um. Halime’s not bad, but it’s not been under development for nearly four years.
Xnntp is probably the best of the alternatives to Unison, and it’s free. It’s a little unintuitive and doesn’t let me customize the fonts in the way I’d like (why force you to use fixed-width fonts for the message view? Why force the same font size for messages and the message list?). It also integrates with Spotlight.
Might be using that from now on.
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a large contingent
By james | April 20, 2007
When my family ran out of money — for the upteenth time — my father, though in many ways not a practical man, impressed upon me the value of contingencies. Backups. If all your plans fail, one after another, layer upon layer removed from a concentric Russian doll — it’s okay. There’s always something underneath to try, dwarfish and suboptimal.
As I tend (heh) to be someone who assumes the worst, imagining up contingency plans becomes a sort of pastime bordering on obsessive ritual. But as the number of things that could go wrong increases, planning for the worst becomes more and more difficult — there are more and more failure combinations — more and more things to take into account — and it becomes very easy to give up and assume nothing can be done.
I suppose this is wrong-headed.
Anyway. We have to move to Greensboro this summer (reflecting-sounds-as-of-underground-spirits). Colleen will have only had her job for a few months, and won’t have one when we move; I’ll be a student with a piddly $18k stipend. We won’t be able to buy a house, so we’ll have to rent. No problem, right?
There are five problems. Annoying, furry problems: Eleanor, Sophia, Murray, Anya, and Princess (whom I had no hand in naming). Do you know of an apartment that’ll take five pets, one of which is a sixty pound Chow mix?
Oh yeah, that’s right. It doesn’t exist. I’d rather cut off my ball sack with a rusty nail clipper than give up any one of my animals. (Yes, even you, Anya. Grudgingly.) What do you do?
Contingency. Need a contingency. Okay: if we can’t find a place, I can go alone without a pet. But what if we sell the house? Okay. We can leave the animals with someone for a while. With whom? Not with my mother, as my sister is horribly allergic. Not with my brother, who has a small house, a wife who dislikes pets, and (by then) a newborn girl. Not with Colleen’s family, whom I wouldn’t trust my pets to any sooner than I would a random homeless veteran licking his lips at Chinese food tonight.
Okay. What else? Uh. Hrm.
Called places yesterday. “Two pet limit.” Over and over again. Do you know any place that would take our animals? No, sorry. Argh.
Colleen just called me a few moments ago; she knows I’ve been worried about this. She’s spoken with some property agent or something who tells us he’ll have no problem finding us a place in our price range with our five annoying accommodations. Might be too good to be true; it’s in my nature to suspect.
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eyeballing it
By james | April 19, 2007
Finals are coming up. Sometimes it’s difficult to decide how much time to allocate toward studying for a particular final.
In my applied math course there are 550 total points available. Coming into the final, which is worth 150 points, I have about 350 points. To get an A in the course I need 96% on the final; to get a B I need 63%. A C requires 23% and I pass for showing up.
(Sometimes it’s not.)
And — hey — I get an A in Health just for breathing. Well, essentially. (What does AIDS stand for? a) Aardvark’s Interest Dies Slowly; b) Aaron Is a Dead Spelling; c) Ascot Is Deficient Sportswear d) none of the above)
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