I Am Going Overboard Again, As Usual

I decided to do this blog post because I found a quote that is too absolutely delicious NOT to post on my blog. Here it is, in all its glory:

"There is no opinion, however absurd, which men will not readily embrace as soon as they can be brought to the conviction that it is generally adopted."

-- Schopenhauer, Die Kunst Recht zu Behalten

This quote came from a book about global warming, of all things. Guess what I chose to do my research paper on? Yep. I always do choose the craziest things and argue on the least politically correct side. I chose to argue in favor of cholesterol and saturated fats last semester (I was greeted with incredulous stares from my classmates).

I'm only supposed to be writing an outline. Mrs. Howell says she doesn't need sentence outlines, but that's how I'm doing mine, since I tend to think more in sentences. Plus, I'm not terribly fond of sentence fragments ended by a period, though I do use them (sparsely) in my stories. So, a sentence-structured outline it is.

Oh, and did I mention that I am referencing everything in my outline to where I got it so I can find it again later with minimal hair-pulling and that I am going into extreme detail? And I'm only on my third point!

I am currently sitting surrounded by... let me stop to count them... nine books, not counting my own notebook. Three are science textbooks. Two others are books I read 'for fun'. (I have a very strange definition of what can be read 'for fun', including, among other things, philosophy and the random encyclopedia.) The remaining four books I checked out from Collier on Wednesday. I went up there looking for one book and got four: as it turned out, I simply found what can probably be termed 'the global warming section', which contained a very impressive amount of books. I grabbed four that looked interesting. Two are EXTREMELY scholarly (one is a study of the Little Ice Age), and one is absolutely amazing for my paper.

The remaining one looked so hilarious I HAD to check it out. It is entitled The Chilling Stars: A New Theory of Climate Change and apparently seeks to prove (I haven't read it yet) that cosmic rays, sub-atomic particles from exploded stars, and solar radiation are causing global warming. The book is purple with faint zodiac symbols and lines in the background, complete, oddly enough, with German captions of all things, with a sparkling Earth at the center of them all, set above a sunset-lit tree-filled landscape like some sort of unnatural Sun. The end effect is very New Age-y. I bet they were aiming for that, in the first place.

Anyway, I'm having great fun doing my outline. Seriously, this should not be so much fun. Mrs. Howell is probably going to get more than she bargained for. The outline is at 6 pages so far and I'm not quite halfway done. Did you know grain once grew in Greenland, or that the Romans once had vineyards in Northamptonshire, England? I didn't either. You can glean such fascinating tidbits from such seemingly boring books.

My research paper also includes the infamous ozone layer hole. Ozone is chemically O3, and toxic to breathe. It's a good thing it's up in the atmosphere. I also seem to recall, though can't find it anywhere for the life of me, that the nice smell we associate with bread baking is actually the smell of ozone. Go figure.

So, how are the rest of you doing with your research papers?

In Pace Christi,

Elyse

Stupidity killed the cat. Curiosity was framed for it.

-- Just another one of those random sayings floating around the Internet.

Not Much To Say (Again)

I do believe I have used 'Not Much To Say' as a blog post title before, but I'm too lazy to go look it up. If someone feels inclined to do so for whatever strange reasons of their own, be my guest.

At any rate, I am blogging because I apparently have nothing better to do. I have been in a blogging mood lately, shall we say. I just finished an essay for English tomorrow and am quite proud of myself, especially as I finished deciding what classes I would like to take in the fall. My apologies to all the dedicated faculty out there who teach the classes, but what took me so long was that I could not decide whether I would rather endure economics or geography. I decided on geography, as I rather like Wesleyan (the castle building, to all you people out there who can't find their way around campus) and think that geography is likely to be less confusing than economics.

I do hope I'm not the only person in German 201 in the fall. There's only three people in German 102 right now so I may be very lonely. I hope the class isn't called off. I need a second year of a foreign language for a bachelor of arts degree and I am NOT taking French (I am a Gaulophobe) or Spanish. Italian would be acceptable. Or Greek, even. Greek has cool-looking letters, even if they are SHAMEFULLY abused by all the sororities and fraternities on campus.

BUT I REALLY WANT LATIN! LATIN! LATIN! IT'S ONLY ONE OF THE MOST AMAZING LANGUAGES OF ALL TIME! ALL UNIVERSITIES ARE SUPPOSED TO HAVE LATIN, AREN'T THEY? SO WHERE IS IT?

I'd even settle for Old English... Hwaet we gar dena in gear dagum... I probably have that horrendously wrong... it's supposed to be the opening line of Beowulf.

I managed not to even get very sleepy in Calculus today! Dr. Stovall showed us excerpts from her study on converging and diverging series, which were at least neat to look at, even if they went over my head. I like Dr. Stovall. It will be sad in the fall when I am not taking calculus with her. Does she even teach calculus III? I should have looked that up.

Even more tragically, I won't have Mrs. Howell for English!!! I like her so much. I really wanted to follow her to her world literature class, but sadly it wasn't the honors world lit, and I probably need as many honors class hours as I can get.

On a related note, I had no clue they even OFFERED honors computer classes. I'm not real sure what you're supposed to do in computer classes, but as long as we're not supposed to program calculators to run off binomial series as my dad keeps telling me horror stories about, I should be okay... Let's hope they use Windows in there. I absolutely love my HP and the only troubles I have ever had with it have been due to operator error. Most of the UNA computers are HP's, I note. However, in the industrial hygiene lab (which I saw one day when we invaded, ran the IP people out to do our lab reports, and were subsequently ran out ourselves by the IP people who had returned with a vengeance,) have iMacs. They were white. With white keyboards. Or, should I say, FORMERLY white keyboards. Some of them were virtually BROWN with dirty fingerprints. Guess which kind I got?

Also, my mom has an iMac and I don't think anyone in our family likes it. I don't know how to use it myself (I never played around on it when we first got it, so I never learned how, and the rest of the family skipped most of the tutorials, I think- which is always, ALWAYS a bad idea), and anything named iWhatever intimidates me. Apple is not my friend. "They're user-friendly," said friendly users... yeah right.

I liked Windows XP better than Windows 7, since it was more logically laid out and I didn't have to click on or at least move my cursor over the little icons at the bottom to see all the windows of one type I had pulled up to move to a different one... Yeah, that's a big thing for me since I have been known to have about six different Word documents pulled up at one time and be rapidly flipping back and forth between them. At least my laptop doesn't go off into la-la land when I do that. The XP we have upstairs froze up when I did that. Elaine and I refer to it (not so affectionately) as, "that molasses-filled contraption".

HOWEVER! I can still find things in Windows 7. It just takes a little more time. When one of the computers in the language lab refused to spit the Rosetta Stone CD I was using back out, I simply went into My Computer, found the CD, and told it to eject. It ejected. I didn't panic. All was well.

By the way, I even have a favorite computer in the language lab by now. #10. Unfortunately, it is right under the air vent. You think with how much I complain about its meat-locker-like nature in there, I would consider moving to a different spot...

I am, however, a creature of habit. Once I do something one way, I will generally keep on doing it that way, despite minor inconveniences, until the advantages of doing it a different way smack me in the face saying, "DO IT THIS WAY! NOW!" Therefore, I will probably (and idiotically) continue sitting at computer #10 right under the air vent.

On a related note, I used to park further away in the Darby Drive parking lot. Everyone else, however, keeps parking closer and closer to Fiesta Mexicana or whatever that Mexican restaurant is called. (They're all called something like that, anyway.) Eventually, I gave up and starting parking closer. THEN a white truck began getting there insanely early in the mornings and taking my parking spot! Undeterred, I continued to park right next to him. Whoever he is, he has apparently switched to a larger dark blue truck. I am still unintimdated. He has also taken to parking a few spots down. Additionally, everyone else has taken to parking EVEN CLOSER to the Mexican restaurant. Seriously, people. It takes ten extra seconds to walk a bit farther. It's like the people who pass me (innocently going the speed limit of 45 mph), zoom ahead, and arrive a grand total of five seconds ahead of me at the next red light. It doesn't really serve any purpose.

*signals abrupt subject change* We had a chemistry test today. At least it wasn't as cold in Stevens. Dr. Gren's tests make you think more than Dr. Diaz's did. At least he's still giving us two bonus questions and putting the equations on the front for us (as he says he has a bad memory for them himself). *cue singsong voice* Thank you!

All right everyone, repeat with me: "I always feel like I'm forgetting something, so I never know if I've actually forgotten something or not." LOL, Dr. Gren. You are so quotable, do you know that? I will also miss you when this semester comes to an end. And Dr. Moeller. We love Dr. Moeller as well. On the day we were making alum, he warned us: "Please do not put any paper towels in the sink, as they will clog the drain and we do not want to flood the biology department... Again." Or the chain of polymers demonstration.

As an aside, a guy in chemistry lab is still harping about Harry Potter in it. One day he mentioned it and someone whistled Hedwig's Theme for the next fifteen minutes. That is not a lie. It's not like it's a bad tune, it's just it gets... very... old... and it remains in your head for the next 24 hours! This Tuesday, the guy said as we were coming in, "Welcome to Potions 101." He was informed the class was CH 112L. Undeterred, he announced, "Welcome to Potions 112."

Later, as another guy was theorizing about where they might be storing potentially flammable phosphorus, the guy declared, "In Professor Snape's private stores." The other guy gave him a look and said, "In a refrigerator."

Aaahh, yes. Someday we will look back on this and laugh until our guts were aching.

In Pace Christi,

Elyse

Truth sits upon the lips of dying men, and falsehood, while I lived, was far from mine.

-- Sohrab, Sohrab and Rustum

Sohrab and Rustum is an epic poem. I can't remember who it's by, but if you can take the extended similes and ornate language, it's a great read. I read it in 10th grade for world literature, and this quote, which I had written down somewhere because I liked it so much, came to my mind since Elaine read Sohrab and Rustum here recently. She, of course, hated it. (There are such profound differences in our respective literary, aesthetical, and musical tastes.)

At any rate, I loved Sohrab in it (I even named one of my own characters after him, but that's a completely different story), and I liked his personality, one of my main reasons being this very quote. I don't like lies, and I don't like liars. I'm not even very good at offering meaningless platitudes in place of lies. However, lest I go on a long philosophical rant, I shall cut it short here.

In Pace Christi,

Elyse

A Mini-Rant of My Own

I really don't see why anyone thinks the air-conditioning in the university buildings needs to be fixed! Seriously, people. If anything, it needs to be fixed so that it's not quite as cold! Yep, the air has officially been turned on. It will not be turned off until October, when the heat will be turned on and it will be 80 degrees in all the buildings. Until then, we are all trapped in the 60-degree meat lockers they call the campus buildings.

Hey, people in Cal 2, IS IT COLD ENOUGH FOR YOU YET???? You should have ABSOLUTELY no excuse to go opening doors and windows and shedding jackets while whining about how hot it is. Now, if you were to complain about how cold it is and open windows to alleviate the sub-arctic temperatures in the room, that's another thing entirely...

Put it this way, I sat down in the math building this morning and instantly wished I hadn't. I swear, it feels like I'm going to develop frostbite. I ended up leaning forward to keep the cold metal off my back.

Oh, joy... I'm going to the language lab tomorrow. The place is cold enough as it is. It's going to be its genuine meat-locker self tomorrow... oh, joy...

YES! I have joined the band-wagon of people who just can't wait until spring break! I want to be able to sleep in until 7:00 for once! If I sign up for another 8:00 class for fall semester, someone please beat me with the nearest large, heavy, blunt object until I regain use of my senses or fall unconscious, whichever comes first...

On an aside note, The Hunger Games Movie comes out Friday morning, bright and early (well, dark and early) at midnight. Come Friday morning proper, I will then be able to have a good laugh at all the people walking around like zombies due to sleep deprivation. ...On second thoughts, nah... they'll just play hooky.

That reminds me... I should find a way to see if I can put a little count-down thing on my blog to keep track of The Hobbit movie coming out! Now THERE'S a worthy goal. The Hobbit is, after all, going to be 2-hours-odd of pure filmed epicness, and definitely worth staying up late for. If it's a school night, however... meh.

In Pace Christi,

Elyse

He has made everything beautiful in its time, and He has put eternity into our hearts.

-- Ecclesiastes 3:11

Yes, I Know I Skipped Blogging Yesterday

I know I usually blog on Thursdays, if only to mock people's complaints on the back of the latest issue of the Flor-Ala. However, I didn't find the tweets yesterday to be very interesting. Mostly, everyone seemed to be complaining about the heat and speculating that the AC would be fixed only after spring break. Other than that, there were a few other random comments, one tweet of approval from a soon-to-be freshman, and a couple of comments expressing interest in the upcoming football season (yes, it's half a year away, but who cares? This is SEC country, baby), one of them being tagged #BobbyisBack.

Now, I really don't understand how the hashtag thing works. Apparently, it is indicated by an octothorpe, as I do believe the little pound symbols (#) are officially called. Apparently, it also indicates the subject of the tweet or something like that. Obviously, I am not on Twitter and do not understand how it works. I also do not understand how Facebook works. I really don't want to understand how either works, though, come to think of it.

THANK YOU TO THE FLOR-ALA PEOPLE ONCE AGAIN! Not only did we have a word search, a crossword, and a sudoku in the last issue, we also had a cryptoquote (which I tried my hand at, then gave up when I saw it would require serious effort), and whatever the other thing was called. Woohoo! Maybe it was just due to being a larger issue of the Flor-Ala (and it was rather annoying that the results of the SGA election weren't even put in there... maybe it was due to when the paper was published, but still), but the extra stuff was nice. Speaking of which, I did the cryptoquote in today's paper after the crossword got too infuriating. It was something by a Virginia Burden, and went along the lines of, "Cooperation is the conviction that nobody gets there unless everybody gets there." The secret to those things lies in looking for the most common letters and for patterns in the words in order to decode them.

Ah, it's a good thing when your bus drivers recognize you on sight. I say, "Good morning," to them every day when I get on, and I always tell them, "Thank you," whenever I get off. If I'm getting off at the Darby parking lot, I will also wish them a good day. It's just simple manners, I think, but perhaps it pays off... Hey, if the driver recognizes you coming across Harrison Plaza (and you're not in the mood to run like a lunatic through a swarm of people to try to catch the shuttle) and then loops back around the little turnabout-thing in order to pick you up... Yeah. Thank goodness for the nice bus drivers.

Maybe I should start learning their names... Perhaps they should wear little pins with their names on them like clerks do in Wal-Mart and places like that. That way, I wouldn't have to call them stuff like, "the veteran guy," and, "the nice black lady," and "the smiley old guy," in my head all the time. LOL, seriously, I call them that. I've noticed an interesting trend too- whenever I get on the smiley old guy's shuttle in the morning, I will almost always get on his shuttle going back to Darby as well. Weird, but that's how it works.

Chemistry was amusing today, too. Oh, Dr. Gren, we love you so much... We will all remember Le Chatelier's Principle for the rest of our lives due to the crowded elevator analogy and will also remember the noble gas law for the rest of our lives due to PIV NERT. (PV = nRT.) As for me, I will probably end up for the rest of my life quoting something you said the first day of the semester, because I feel like that a lot, too: "I always feel like I'm forgetting something, so I never know if I've ever actually forgotten something or not."

I'm guessing it's a week until the Hunger Games movie comes out. Oh, joy. I saw a girl reading one of the books before class one day. As for me, before chemistry I was proudly reading my copy of The Silmarillion. I am the only person I know who has ever attempted to read The Silmarillion and actually got past the first page. (The first page is rather intimidating...)

In Pace Christi,

Elyse

If you have a garden and (a) library, you have all you need.

-- Cicero

This was a cryptoquote in the Times Daily from last week. I do them occasionally. I was about to give up on this one when I noted that the author only had one name, so it had to be someone from a long time ago, and that the pattern of the name was something like this: TYTKSN. I thought, "Okay, what are the odds," decided that it was 'Cicero' and went with it. Well, whaddaya know. It was.

In Pace Christi,

Elyse

Now That I Have a Copy of the Flor-Ala...

Bwahaha. You didn't think I would let a whole week go by without snagging a copy of the Flor-Ala and commenting on it? You were wrong! Here I am, with said copy.

THANK YOU to all the Flor-Ala people for putting the crossword back in, as WELL as a word-search! You people are awesome. Thank you. I guess I should thank you for putting in a sudoku puzzle as well, but I really don't do sudoku. My mom and my dad and my sister do, however, so I will probably just turn over it to them when I get home. I did the crossword and the word-search however. Elaine will do word-searches, but I generally don't do them as I consider them too easy, really. Crosswords and the odd cryptoquote are more of my speed. Yes, the cryptoquote. I am such a nerd. But I (and the lovely search bar & thesaurus) completed the crossword today with only one hitch: okay, what is 'end for ball or bass'? I have 'o_n'. If anybody knows what that is, I'd like to know. I did think of 'own' but 'atwz' for 'the gamut' seems odd. Word 2010 insists there is no word remotely resembling 'at_z' in its dictionary. So, I could have 'site' for 'location' wrong, but, really, what other word would fit there?

You know what would be really cool...? A LATIN crossword. Oh, man, that would be so totally awesome.

WHY do all the people whose tweets get in the Flor-Ala tweet only complaints? Someone mentioned that Wesleyan Hall smells like a 50-year-old sewer. Now, I have next to no sense of smell myself, but even I don't freak out over it. Okay, so it smells old. And a bit like old people's soap (that's the only way I can describe it). But not really like a sewer... Bibb Graves, by the way, always has that warm, humid, mildew-y smell to me. And while I'm on the subject of Bibb Graves, what is with that new sculpture-thing in the vestibule/atrium/double door area/whatever you want to call it? It didn't even have a plaque stating who had donated it or what it was entitled... and you know these pieces of modern art (*coughs sarcastically*) always have some sort of innovative title.

Someone else seems to have agreed with me about the sidewalks proclaiming, "Go Greek!" at least...

I don't know if I'm even going to vote in the SGA elections. I don't know a thing about any of the candidates except for Robert Thompson, and that only because he's in my German class. Though last semester Ralph Akonalu (PLEASE tell me I haven't horribly misspelled this) was in my Calculus class. I was totally ignorant of it until I opened a Flor-Ala one week, saw a picture of him, and went, "Hey... he's in calculus..."

I probably shouldn't bring this up, but I'm not real sure what to do about the REAL elections today, either. Yeesh. Obviously, this is the first time I'll be able to vote. But I'm not in the mood to go on a rant, so I'm not going to say anything.

I know! I'll talk about more pleasant things. Totally ignoring the fact that that Hunger Games movie is coming out (which, despite being told repeatedly that it is the most wonderful thing since sliced bread, I have no intentions of watching or reading), it's not quite two weeks until spring break! There's that to look forward to. And on May 1st, The Serpent's Shadow by Rick Riordan comes out! And in the fall, The Mark of Athena (also by him) comes out! AND ON DECEMBER 14th THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY COMES OUT!!!!!!!

Okay... I usually don't go overboard with the exclamation marks as I consider exclamation-mark-abuse to be a hallmark of middle-schoolers, but I'll make an exception in the case of The Hobbit. Anything by Tolkien is Five-Stars Awesome automatically, so even if it's not The Lord of the Rings I will still go nuts over it. Have you seen the trailer? "Far over the misty mountains cold, to dungeons deep and caverns old... The pines were roaring on the height, the winds were moaning in the night. The fire rose red, the flames spread. The trees like torches blazed with light..."

That shows how pathetic I am. I have memorized the song from the trailer. I also know the names of almost all the leading actors (and there's about 15 of them, including Gandalf). Is that a bad thing? This is, of course, after knowing all the DWARVES' names by heart: "Bilbo, allow me to introduce Fili, Kili, Oin, Gloin, Balin, Dwalin, Bifur, Bofur, Bombur, Dori, Nori, Ori, and the leader of our company, Thorin Oakenshield."

No, I'm not at all embarrassed of my Tolkien obsession. Can you tell?

In Pace Christi,

Elyse

Time is the moving image of eternity.

-- Plato, Timaeus