Survey!!!

OMG It's been so long!

Soooo... hey. How's it going?

Help a girl out and take my little surveys?

Link the First is Part 1:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ZSZC8ZR

Link the Second is Part 2:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ZT9XSQC

Thanks!


...and I promise, there will be more to come, my lovelies. More, more, more!

Snobbery, Woe is You

My roommate, who is definitely not a snob unless a person fails to punctuate a sentence properly (wherein she swoops in with her Red Pen of Death and lays waste to perpetrators of grammatical misdeeds with the kind of ferocity commonly associated with piranhas, wolverines, and parochial school first-grade teachers), is as offended by snobbery as I am.
But what is a snob?
A snob, according to Wikipedia (an online encyclopedia reviled by snobs everywhere, but particularly loathed by academic snobs-- and with reason. If you chose to look up 'City of Portland, OR' just a few months back, you may have seen the entry stating that Portland was full of 'boner-having men'. While this may be true, there is no way to verify that, indeed, all Portland men are 'boner-having') is:

A. A person with an exaggerated respect for high social position who dislikes people or activities regarded as lower-class.
B. A person who believes that their tastes in a particular area are superior to those of other people: "a wine snob".

I mention snobbery because I've recently been subjected to a greater than usual amount of it. This is, apparently, par for the course in grad school. Snobs abound and are in constant competition with one another. Who is the hardest working snob? Which snob has the most degrees/ jobs/ fellowships? Which snob has visited the most foreign countries/ speaks the most languages/ has the most hobbies at which they excel on top of everything else they do better than you? Which snob suffers the hardest in their quest to out-snob all the other snobs?

Everyone is guilty of a wee touch of snobbery now and then, and that's okay. It's really all about trying to get other people to embrace your superiority as a fellow, yet superior, human being, and that's okay, too.
What offends me about snobbery is its inevitable accompaniment to 1) false modesty, 2) "sympathizing" with people that have not been dealt the same fantastic hand in life (and showing disingenuous confusion over the fact that other people don't have all their ducks in a neat little row. After all, life is easy! Isn't it for you?), and 3) generally being a pompous, overinflated butthead that won't shut up about the Wonder that is Them.

I'd like to show them the Wonder side of a wooden bat. Harrumph...

Anyway! Here are some internet pictures of snobs for your viewing pleasure;

I knitted my own beret out of rhubarb fibers on Saturday, right after co-founding a vegan shoe store and running a half-marathon. And what did YOU do?

That was a puppy I hit in my Escalade on my way to a dinner honoring my philanthropic deeds? Oh, well. It would've died anyway!

Yes, yes, they're both ladies, I realize that. Most of the snobs I run into aren't. They tend to run more toward the dudely persuasion and actually look a lot more like this guy:

This guy is, like, sooooo smart. See how his skull is actually squishy in places? That's his brain straining to outgrow its bounds.

Gaaaaah! A snob, a real snob, loves the sound of his own voice more than any other sound known to humanity. And he is sooooooooooo smart, and he really just wants to share his wisdom, and sometimes his penis, with you and all other females within wisdom-and-penis sharing distance.
But the thing is, Mr. Snob Man, I don't want your wisdom. I don't want to sit here nodding politely while you rattle off all the ways in which you have excelled at everything you've ever tried to do despite being subjected to Adversity (that B- you got in chemistry class in high school because the teacher was jealous of how amazing you were). I don't care! Let me drink in peace!

Snobs stress me the fuck out. And that, really, is the crux of this blog entry.

Carry on.

The chapter in which the house cats discover the hallway linen cupboard and move in

Blog Blog Blog Blog Blog!!!

It's been awhile, internet humans. Awhile, and a time full of much paper writing, spreadsheet filling, meeting attending, exercising (yes, exercising) and generally "adult" forms of productivity. There are other "adult" forms of productivity, such as baby-makin', that I did not pursue with the same vim and vigor as I did those spreadsheets, but let me tell you, those spreadsheets are fucking gorgeous.

In other news, our multitudinous cats "discovered" the linen cupboard in our, for lack of a better term, "hallway". (It's not a hallway. It's, well... it's a room that connects other rooms to each other. It is a room unto itself, but it is also a corner. It's its own room and it's own corner its own room while simultaneously being both a hallway and not a hallway. Is that possible? Does our hallway defy the very laws of physics just by existing? What are you, hallway-that-is-not-a-hallway?)
The cats looooooove this cupboard, and by love I mean they meow frantically at the cupboard door (which is at human eye level, so I guess they are actually meowing 'to' the cupboard as it is out of kitty range) until someone wanders by to open the cupboard and lift them up and put them inside, or say "Scram, cat!", or accidentally step on top of them because it is four-fucking-am-shut-the-fuck-up-cat-I-am-going-to-eat-you-for-breakfast-but-first-I-need-to-pee.

Anyway, one day, between bouts of spreadsheet-ing, two of the cats were meowing to the cupboard. I decided to give them what they wanted.

Rufus and Desi, in the cupboard in the hallway in the house in the city, chillin'.

They seemed to enjoy their newfound home, and indeed, settled right in and got comfortable in that way the only cats seem to be able to manage. There's a phrase for it; 'power-lounging.'

Here's a few more shots of the cats doing what they do best.

Still life with roll of tape.

Those are his pants now.

You've probably made the unfounded assumption that I spend a lot of my time hanging around with and taking pictures of cats. Whatever. Who are you to judge, assumer-of-things? Look at what you're doing right now! Looking at pictures of cats! Ha ha ha ha ha! Without people like me taking perhaps too many pictures of cats and posting them on the internet, what would people like you do? Have stimulating social lives away from the screen, sans cat pictures?!? Pursue meaningful interests and make the world a better place?!?

Probably. But that's not the way things are.

This is the way things are:

Death by Gate.

It's a seriously dangerous world out there, and you're really better off just staying inside, on your couch, curled up the in fetal position, looking at pictures of other people's cats on the internet. It's too dangerous outside. You might die. I'm glad you're here instead.

Spread that (Excel) sheet open wide and let me (Access) it

Ooooooh, God! Databases! Give it to the database! Give it!



That is all.
Clearly, I have been hip deep in databases. Entering and entering. Again, and again, and again!
Soon I'll get to crawl away, exhausted, hurting, bloodied, yet triumphant.
The database will be thoroughly impregnated with information when I'm done with it.
Yeah...

Insufficient Bloggi-ness, Isolationism, and Other Things Left Unsaid

First off, allow me to apologize for my lack of blogging stamina through March. Between school, interning and honing my social aptitude to a razor sharp edge, an edge liberally whetted with the Booze of Courage before being scraped against the Stone of Social Judgment, I.... I'm almost afraid to say it... allowed my blog to slip by the wayside. I am Soooooo Sorry.

Now that's settled, let's move on to the important stuff.

...er...

Well, what's happened in the greater world lately? A great deal of the usual frightening bullshit, stirred up with some unusual frightening bullshit.

The usual:
- Bad Things in Other Countries. There's always a lot of this. If you happen to not live in one of these Other Countries, though, it's pretty easy to ignore, change the channel, flip the page, and forget all about. And why wouldn't it be? You see, there are a lot of people to be worried about in the world. If the un-cited statistics getting flung about on facebook are anywhere close to accurate, approximately 50% of the world population is malnourished. That means that roughly 3.5 billion people don't have enough nutrient rich food to eat, while many of the other 3.5 billion have too much to eat. That's not okay; that's Bad. It's also repeated all the time, like a mantra, over and over again, and just like a mantra, it starts to lose its meaning and impact after the 10,000th hearing. It gets downgraded from Crisis to Accepted Fact of Life. It certainly doesn't help that it is so very easy to disassociate ourselves from humans in remote places. Distance does not make the heart grow fonder, at least not for strangers in strange lands.
-Bad Things in Our Country. A little tougher to ignore, but tornadoes touching down in Alabama and wasting whole cities generally don't touch down in Oregon. Alabama is over 2000 miles away. Alabama is about 500 miles further away than Mexico. For a little perspective, if you were to drive from Helsinki, Finland, to Athens, Greece, you'd end up covering roughly the same distance. You would also drive through Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Serbia, and Bulgaria on your way to Athens, stopping only to get abducted by international terrorists and traded to an American Embassy for your weight in fish. That's a buffer zone of eight whole countries. Eight whole countries, with their own governments, cultures, languages, foods, average skin tones, etc. The fact that the United States is really big does in part explain our tendency toward isolationism; that isolationism factors in between states, though, not just between us and Finland. It's just as easy for Alabama to say "Fuck Oregon" as it is for them to say "Fuck Mexico" and "Fuck Finland, those fuckers." And they're probably saying it right now. You know how they are.
But wait; that's just it. You don't know how they are, because Alabama may as well be located on the dark side of the moon as far as Oregon is concerned.

Here is a picture of some friendly Alabamans. You can see how exotically weird and different they are.

Anyway, when bad things happen in Alabama, we only feel it here because of the media. Some of us may also have Alabama relatives, but not many. Alabama is whole worlds away.

And what about the unusual frightening bullshit?

Well, folks, this is the stuff that actually directly affects us. Say, creepy new government legislation. When it comes to legislation, Alabama isn't as far away from Oregon as Finland is from Greece. It may as well be right next door. States are not individual and independent countries, however much some of them would like to be. We are interactive and interdependent. The kind of crap being played out in Texas (for instance, the total defunding of Planned Parenthood) can, actually, play out here as well. All the progressive chatter happening in Portland doesn't extend beyond the city limits. Progressivism, like a tenacious fungus, does continue to thrive in moist places like Eugene, but can't seem to handle the dry air of central and eastern Oregon. And that is really, really, really, too bad. Portland and Eugene may be perfectly happy circle jerking each other (sustainably, of course) and scoffing at all the rural Neanderthals, but without a little more urban-rural interface, that's all it will ever be. It's nice that Portland has roof gardens; why doesn't Pendleton have roof gardens? The quick answer; because all those rednecks just don't know what's good fer 'em. The honest answer; nobody has gotten off their duff and tried it yet. And hey, Pendleton might need some persuading. Ideally this persuasion would be divorced from the raging stupidity of politics and left wing vs. right wing, but so fucking what? 

Anyway... if we continue to stay holed up in our safe little liberal enclaves, our fears that "the crazies are taking over" will be realized, but only because we ourselves were too scared and too lazy to counteract the crazy in person. In Person. As in, talking to the neighbors. As in, openly questioning things we perceive to be wrong and hurtful. As in, being able and willing to accept the fact that we may not be friends with the neighbors, the neighbors might remind us daily that we're going to hell, the neighbors might be shocked and scandalized by interracial or gay marriage, the neighbors might have more guns in the house than books... but they are still our neighbors, and we still have to live with them. Alabama is next door to Oregon, after all. We can't tuck our heads in the sand on social issues. We have to *gasp* communicate with people we don't necessarily agree with. Ack!

 The Neighbors.

But that all takes work. And it's spring break. Par-tay!

A Textbook Conundrum

They're really, really heavy. My book entitled Human Resource Management in Government weighs in at about six pounds all on its lonesome. It also has whole chapters in it devoted to "designing effective performance appraisal systems", which somehow add to the weight of the book. And that was for last term.
Right now, the whole "school" thing is a little daunting.
Not that I'm complaining. Things could be worse. Have often been significantly worse. In fact, things are pretty good right now.
There is, however, a cloud of foreboding hanging over the horizon of Spring Term, and its name is Harris.
I have heard nothing, nothing, good about this person, her teaching, her treatment of students, her attitude. I have heard that, 1) She is an inconsistent grader who hands out harsh grades like candy, 2) She picks favorites, 3) Other students change their schedules to avoid taking classes with this instructor, 4) Other students change programs to avoid taking classes with this instructor, 5) She demonizes students in her classes in front of other students, 6) Students that attempt to contest the bad grades she hands out find her unwilling to talk and unavailable.
Harris also happens to be my adviser, by the way, and advised me, waaaaaay back before I started speaking to other students, to take two of her classes in one term. Next term. Spring term.
Why was this crap so much less scary down at Southern? Bah!

Cute Animals on the Internet

I loooooove animals. Furry animals, scaly animals, feathery animals, animals animals animals!
Here are some pictures of animals:

Here's some more:

And more! More animals!

And last but not least, Animal!

Aaarrgh!

Do you feel better? I sure do. Go animals!