eduardo kingman

I saw this picture on a Bolivian blog (yeah, I'm all about working hard today) and it reminded me of Guayasamin (see below). I looked it up, and lo and behold, the painter is also Ecuadorian.















makes me feel like a huge jerk, but still, it's pretty cool.

as you might have already heard, Kerouac wrote On the Road on one long piece of paper. The scroll has arrived in Lowell (see the link to the right), where Kerouac was born. Come see it, then stop by my porch for a beer.

in other beat generation news, this was the quote of the day when I signed in to google:

My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed.

~Allen Ginsburg, who I previously thought would have been a cool professor to have

may!

In honor of May Day, I have several things to protest.

1. Pants. A wise man named Alec Baldwin once said to Canteen Boy, "You know what I hate? Underpants."

While I'm not the kind of girl that blogs about her preference in unmentionables, I'll tell you what I do hate: PANTS. and TIGHTS. and SHOES. I am so f-ing sick of wearing pants every day, and even sicker of having my precious few skirt-wearing occasions tainted by having to wear hosiery and shoes. Mother Nature messed up and gave me a taste of warm weather, apparently before she was ready to make a lasting commitment to it. It's f-ing MAY! My legs and feet are yearning to break free from the oppressive bonds of winter! I want to wear skirts and shorts and sandals! True, I've worn flip-flops pretty much every day since the middle of March, but it's not quite as enjoyable when I'm getting cold rainwater scum on my feet instead of a killer Reef Tan.


2. Stalking. There was a show on NPR yesterday about a football team at a big university (I can't remember where, and I can't seem to find it on the website, but this is fairly similar) that got in big trouble for... wait for it... drinking. As we all know, college students, especially athletes, never drink (well maybe they really don't at Division I schools, but the Trinity ones were pretty OK with it). Long story short, each member of the team signs a contract at the beginning of the year saying they will not use alcohol, drugs, etc., and violating the contract will get you thrown off the team.

Enter Facebook. Apparently, faculty and administrators at this school got access to some players' Facebook profiles, where they discovered a variety of clues revealing that the players had been misbehaving, like wall posts referring to parties involving people drinking something you'd never expect to rear its ugly head on a college campus - beer!

Now I'm not saying that these guys didn't break their contracts, and I'm not saying that they should get to flagrantly violate the promise they made. I'm definitely not saying that anyone should condone the amount of drinking that happens on most college campuses, although I do think these coaches and administrators are just lying to themselves if they think these guys aren't drinking. But this isn't even about the alcohol, or the fact that they are athletes, or even the fact they got caught and might get thrown off the team. It's the way they got caught that bothers me, because it reflects just how much access people have, and how much access people give, to private information.

First of all, these guys, and everyone else who uses Facebook etc. or writes a public blog, ought to know that anyone could read it. For some reason nobody actually thinks about it though. Just a few weeks ago I was shocked when I found out that people from school were reading my blog - it was kind of a wake-up call for me. I got paranoid and decided I wouldn't use people's names anymore, but really, that's not enough to keep me out of trouble if someone really wanted to mess with me.

Last night K_____ (see?) told me that she might be getting expelled from school for posting an assignment on LiveJournal. The assignment was to write a letter, just as a writing exercise, not a letter that would actually be mailed off, to a public official (she chose Deval Patrick). After she finished it she wanted a friend to proofread it but for some reason couldn't send it as an email attachment, so she posted it on her LiveJournal for him to read. The letter didn't include her name but did say which college she goes to. At the end of the assignment she wrote a message to her friend, saying "I pulled this out of my ass at 2am." Not very poetic, but anyways...

After she handed it in, she got a phone call from one of her professors, who was in tears, telling her that the school's web-monitoring person had found the letter and that the dean of her college wanted to meet with her and discuss it. She showed up and found herself in a room with every faculty member in the entire department, plus the Dean and some other administrators. She had to apologize to each one of them individually for tarnishing the college's reputation (as they put it), and now she just has to wait and find out whether that was good enough. If she gets expelled she won't get credit for the entire semester, and she'll have a tough time ever completing her degree because her program is only offered at two schools in the area (one of which she could not get into even before she began her 'criminal' career, and the other being her current school).

I don't think they have any right to expel her - what she did may have been wrong, kind of, but nothing that warrants getting expelled. She didn't have any intentions of actually sending it to Deval Patrick (or anyone else for that matter), and even if she did, who cares if she "pulled it out of her ass"? If the issue is the language, I'd argue that students' use of foul language has absolutely nothing to do with the schools they attend or the quality of their work. And we're talking about the content of what she actually said, it's just like the drinking - professors would be lying to themselves if they thought students didn't procrastinate and write papers at the last minute. They know it happens, and so does Deval Patrick.

More to the point, it's insane that they're considering the letter - because of the language or content of that last sentence - any kind of diatribe against her college. She said nothing about the school besides the fact that she attends it. Even if she did, what would happen if every student who complained about their school got expelled? These are very questionable grounds for expulsion, and a really slippery slope, which I hope they realize.



3. Poetry. This isn't actually a protest at all, just an awesome Leonard Cohen poem I found, called "The Only Poem." My LC obsession has cooled down recently, but he's still an f-ing genius. Stuff like this makes me wish I were born Canadian, Jewish, male...and, you know, a genius.

This is the only poem
I can read

I am the only one
can write it
I didn't kill myself
when things went wrong
I didn't turn
to drugs or teaching
I tried to sleep
but when I couldn't sleep
I learned to write
I learned to write
what might be read
one nights like this
by one like me

on tardiness and human suffering

so I originally wrote this haiku almost a year ago, but much like Moby Dick or War and Peace, it is (unfortunately) just as relevant today as it was the day it was written:

data collection
Satan invented grad school
I'll sleep when I'm dead

weirdly enough, I'd kill to be in the situation I was in when I wrote that back in May. At the time I thought things couldn't get worse, but I was oh so wrong. unbeknownst to me, I was actually ahead of the game - I had done at least ten interviews, I was reading green cleaning stuff every day and really staying on top of the policy developments. By some accounts, I was "overacheiving." Well, I sure showed them.

I basically took an extended vacation from my thesis all summer and then started a new, more dangerous period of thesis latency right after I defended my proposal. in, uh, november. thank GOD one of my professors, my beloved Uncle Bill, snapped me out of it a few weeks ago by giving me a fake assignment and holding me to the fake deadline. my other professor/thesis supervisor/boss/everything had tried to go the "no pressure, I know you are going to do a great job" route, but I found it way too eay to focus on all the other stuff we were working on.

it makes me a little nervous that I need to be lied to to get motivated to do things on time. it isn't just my thesis, or even just schoolwork. my boss tells me that our monthly newspaper deadline is the second Tuesday, when secretly it's Wednesday. my friends will occasionally tell me something starts at, say, 9 o'clock, hoping I'll make it there by 10. most of all, I lie to myself, or at least I try. all of my clocks are set fast, and not just a little. I even mix it up so as to trick myself as much as possible: the clock in my car is 33 minutes fast, my alarm clock is 25 minutes fast, and my Super Loud alarm clock (the one I keep 15 feet away from my bed, hoping in vain that it will get me out of bed, which it doesn't because I've learned to sleep through it) is 31 minutes fast. I am still consistently 5 minutes late to things like important appointments, usually about 15 minutes late to regular appointments, and I shudder to think what my average lateness to social events is.

but I digress (I think my tendency to digress, both in my own head and in person has a lot to do with why I can't do anything on time). see? I just digressed again! I think "anyhow" is one of the most common words in my everyday vernacular. Anyhow, the point here is that I suck at getting things done and I'm NEVER going to finish my thesis on time to graduate in June.

I have a few interviews scheduled, which is great, but I know myself too well to think I'll be able to transcribe everything and analyze it, or whatever, and get it all down and perfected in a month. It pisses me off to no end that I even have to write this thing. All the information is up here (picture me pointing at my head), so why do I have to write it down? I'm so f-ing sick of having to prove myself to the f-ing academic community. In the time it's taking me to write this thing, I could have organized 50 janitors, made 500 bottles of my special all-purpose green surface cleaner, and proselytized to 5000 consumers. I need to be out disseminating, not inside glued to my computer. It's making me very bitter, and I hate to become disillusioned with something I love so much.

So my first interview of this second round is tomorrow, and I'm hoping it will reenergize me and give me some of that momentum back. I need to go to bed now, or else I'll oversleep and be late. I know what you're thinking, I'm probably going to be late anyways. It might be true, but I can't plan on it...

a piss-poor day on the farm

This blog entry is really only of interest to true Anne Devotees. It's not going to be creative, it's not going to be funny, so if you're just being Anne-curious, look elsewhere because you're about to be bored out of your skull. Unless, of course, you have a passion for epic tales of woe that have nothing to do with love or human relationships, but rather focus on qualitative research methods. If that does describe you, you're weird.

Thesis proposal
Torn to little tiny shreds
One more albatross


For those of you who haven't already heard the three-hour psychotic tirade behind that haiku: today I was supposed to defend my reserach design proposal for my thesis... It didn't go quite as well as I had anticipated. I seriously thought my design was bulletproof and impervious to criticism, yet like I insinuated, it was torn apart. My professor found holes in my research question big enough to walk through. And of course the rest of the design, having been based on that central question, was totally invalidated. Phrases like "totally not feasible," "you're not an epidemiologist," "this is not a RESD thesis," and "you just can't really do this" were tossed around the room like so many spiny wiffle balls. It was not a good scene. I didn't know whether I wanted to cry or throw up or just scream "BUT WE DISCUSSED THIS!!! BUT I'VE BEEN WORKING WITH THE SAME RESEARCH QUESTION ALL SEMESTER AND ONLY NOW YOU'RE TELLING ME EXACTLY HOW BAD IT IS?"

Jesus Christ on a bike. I just couldn't help feeling like it was somehow personal. I feel like I got punched in the stomach repeatedly for an hour... I just f-ing HATE actually putting effort into things and having them suck. It just goes to show that my traditional formula of not putting any effort into schoolwork is actually the most effective.

I also f-ing hate the fact that I drank 3 cups of coffee at like midnight because I got a new coffeemaker and I just haaaad to try it out. This combination of seething anger, the resulting adrenaline, and being physically wired is just not helping me get to sleep. I have more pointless phone interviews to conduct tomorrow. Perhaps I should tell my interviewee, "Hey, its really nice of you to agree to talk to me, but unfortunately my research design is so lame that it's really useless for me to ask you any questions. Yeah, my whole thesis topic has ebola. Apparently. Thanks for your time!"

Why did I come to grad school? What in the good green earth was I thinking? I sucked at school before; I had no logical reason to believe that three years of waitressing would have given me that unstoppable impetus to learn that I had been lacking when I was in college...

I heard this amazingly beautiful John Lennon song today that I had never heard before, "Working Class Hero." According to John, "a working class hero is something to be." Please indulge my crisis of self/purpose in life and consider how this leads me to two possibilities:
1. I should go to New England Tractor Trailer School, get a real job, and get over myself.
-OR-
2. I am doing this for all the wrong reasons. I read a study or something that argues that people who go into social work, non-profits, social justice work, etc., do so out of a subconscious need to be taken care of themselves. That is, anyone who does something nice for someone else (but NOT as a means to an end - rather because they think they are just being nice and "caretaker-y") is actually hoping that someone will take care of them in return. I don't really know what to do with that theory, I just thought it was interesting to consider that maybe I don't actually want to help people - in which case I REALLY ought to just go to NETTS...

By way of ending
I know I'm totally nuts
It's something to be

a haiku for roo-roo

After all this time I just realized that was a haiku! Well here's one right back at you, outlining in a simple zen-like form why I haven't blogged lately:

Data collection
Satan invented grad school
I'll sleep when I'm dead

Paper-writing hell
Power Point Purgatory
Alliteration

I got a little carried away on that last one. Those were the days, though, writing haikus about thrust and fuselage in engineering class. Oh Joe Palladino, you made drag coeffiecients sound so HOT...

Back to my research design. This is officially Dark Night of My Soul Number One of the semester.