It’s November 7 and I just joined the CBLDF too. Child, you’re the revolution.
Category: Angst
The FCC got around to adopting the broadcast flag, and I (finally) got around to joining the EFF.
On the principle that I’ll try anything twice, I went to a hair-cutting establishment similar to where I got my last bad haircut and, shockingly, got exactly the same haircut.
Pros of this haircut:
- My hair doesn’t get in my ears anymore.
- I look–just the littlest, tiniest bit–like a badass.
Cons of this haircut:
- No I don’t.
- AND I DON’T HAVE ANY HAIR.
I learned something, though: watching in mute horror as great hunks of my head fell away, I discovered myself to be in possession of a lot of gray hair. I could seriously be all gray by the time I’m 30. You can’t tell in the Idiotcam©, because it’s almost all in the back. But as Mister Sadistic Barber drew his Nazi Razor (Nazor) over my skull again and again, the air around me was a dark snowstorm, filled with the pale detritus of eight years spent learning computer science.
Kentucky: home to Davy Crockett, birthplace to Abraham Lincoln.
Kentucky: where rests the body of Secretariat, greatest athlete of all time.
Kentucky: where you can work in an office building filled entirely with grownups and walk into a bathroom to find the stall-door assertion that “Tom is A Asshole.”
I smile habitually at people I don’t know, when making eye contact. When I’m tired or it’s raining, it’s like saying “Hey, yeah, you know, all in it together, hang tough.” Otherwise, it’s my version of “Hello! Don’t shoot.”
This morning at the bus stop:
| Harrassed-Looking Woman: |
“Excuse me. You got a cigarette?” |
| Me: | “No, I’m sorry.” |
| (HLW pauses, looks around, looks back) | |
| HLW: | “Makes you happy, doesn’t it? Makes you happy to refuse people.” |
| Me: | “No, I… don’t smoke.” |
| HLW: | “Then why you smiling like that? I’ll tell you why. It’s ’cause you’re an asshole.“ |
I’m sitting here at my computer and all of a sudden I start to feel the floor jump under my feet. What the hell? I’ve been living here two and a half months and I’ve never felt anything like this. I’m on the tenth floor of a solid-concrete building! And Kentucky doesn’t have baby earthquakes!
If I die in a pile of rubble or anything, somebody please take care of my piano.
Apparently only my boy friends have blogs.
Yo ho. I emerge from the shark-thick waters, knife in my teeth and a steely glint in my eye, having taken all three of my double-damned midterms in ONE DAY and lived to tell the scurvy tale. Yo ho.
And now, in lieu of booty, I go to Lexington. What reward holds Lexington, you ask? It holds Jon. It holds Monica. It will hold me and Ken and Maria, and most importantly, it will hold ANGIE APARO!
And I pulled another all-nighter (bringing our running total for this week up to–yes!–two) and I finished the whole thing this time, and it works, and it’s 18 pages of code and 10 pages of report in fourteen hours, and I am fuck yes proud of it.
Actually I’m mostly proud because last night, I learned Java. Like all of it. I’d never written anything besides a Hello World in the language before, and last night I sat down and implemented polymorphs and overrides and extensions like a fucking Sun cowboy. I’m thinking I probably won’t go to my last class of the day too often anymore, because it’s basically How To Do Java When You Only Know C++, and I think I just made that whole concept call me daddy.
It was a long night, but hell, I know a new language now. And although yes, I took a half-hour nap that turned into a one-hour nap and I was late for the class where I had to hand it in, I biked like a demon (on one hour of sleep) and got there without being too late at all. My professor didn’t seem to mind, at least. He’s bland, but he’s awfully nice.
Tonight I clean and nap and clean some more, preparing for my mother and sister to descend upon my apartment and find it wanting. Then tomorrow it’s Ian’s birthday. Happy birthday, Ian! I didn’t get you anything.