Tonight, trying to get to rehearsal, in the dark and the cold and the rain, I walked from Bearno’s to Bellarmine. The other side of Bellarmine.
Anyway, if you understand what that means and you’ve got a minute, I could use some chicken soup.
Category: Stress
Apparently there was a wave of layoffs and transfers this morning, but I wasn’t one of them. I feel like I dodged a bullet–it’s kind of a financial crunch right now, and I’m not exactly a crucial resource. Then again, there are people within ten feet of me who make my annual pay in a week, so I guess my value still outweighs my cost.
Yeek.
Update 1246 hrs: Okay, two weeks. Still.
Fever peaked at 102.3 Fahrenheit today. Proteins become denatured–ie brain damage can occur–at 103 (and I very nearly just spelled that “brane damage”).
Bleagh. Don’t really see myself doing the work thing tomorrow. Instead I’ll try to get an appointment with the reputedly horrible University Health Services and obtain antibiotics, as there’s a good chance it’s strep, so I’ll at least be noncontagious at some point on Tuesday. If I’ve touched you recently and you happen to suffer brain damage (“brean damange,” that time, what the fuck) in a few days, I apologize a lot.
“If that sketch was contagious, now I’d be contaged!”
–Ken Troklus
Incidentally, the reason I’m posting at 0230 hrs on a morning when I have no business being up is because I just got back from teching the Project Improv (scripted) show, PI Sketch, available for your viewing ONE NIGHT ONLY in about fourteen hours. Anybody who doesn’t mind a little raunch with their humor should get there between 1830 and 2000 hrs and stay until 2200, as there will be a carnival with a duck pond, and also rock songs and jokes. I’m running sound.
Unrelatedly, I’m sick. And use too many adverbs.
I normally don’t much like shopping the day after Thanksgiving, not so much because I mind crowds as because it’s the day Everybody’s Supposed To Go Shopping and I don’t like being manipulated by faceless corporations to engage in something that really shouldn’t involve faceless corporations so much.
As Maria and I did not previously own apartment-decorating paraphernalia, though, and as it was on sale, we went forth to Target and bought a horrifying amount of stuff, including a five-foot-or-something artificial tree (previous trees in my [non-Richmond] places of residence basically included Jon’s eighteen-inch tree, decorated with a Centre Debate 2000 button) and ordaments. We spent a LOT, just about everything I saved off the food budget this month by feeding my sister ramen noodles.
But we have shiny things now. And it’s snowing!
I’ve got student loans out that I need to have deferred (since I’m in grad school). There’s a six-month grace period, so I knew that November 24th was the Absolute Final Deadline for me to tell my loan provider my situation.
I’ve been freaking out at least once every other day since, oh, July, about these facts, and knowing that I really have to get around to them, but by the time I was in a position to do so that day, I’d forgotten, or there was something more important, or… you know. So today, with the specter of debtor’s prison breathing hot and heavy on my neck, I finally dug out the envelope labelled “LOAN STUFF” and pawed through it frantically. What if my response didn’t get through the mail in time? They’d extract the interest from my knees with a lead baton!
Turns out that the loans I have from Centre are provided by the same people as the loans I have at Louisville. They already know. I don’t have to do anything until 2009.
I’m an idiot, but hey, load off my back.
Today, Maria is taking all her exams for every class. On the same day. Most of these exams consist of looking at red-and-pink blobs with some white on them, and then answering questions like
Is this slide: (circle one or maybe two, we’re not telling)
- The maxillonervous mandiflore splay
- The mandillomaxous floresplay nerve (inverted)
- The florimandillous splayinerve max
- Dog puke (HA HA JUST KIDDING) (OR ARE WE)
- The pukiflorimous nervedog mandisplay
Now, pay attention. The standard reward for students who survive this kind of hell-day is that, to “make up” for not having classes at the same time as exams, they get extra classes and labs every day this week. So the students have a choice of beginning / upping amphetamine regimens, or collapsing and missing twice as much information as usual.
The University of Louisville Medical School
“We have to let them teach. We can’t let them practice on humans.”
Argh.
COMPUTER SCIENCE IS HARD.
I’m trying to grasp the math involved in Fermat’s Little Theorem as an end to understanding the proof of PRIMES Is In P, so okay, more precisely math is hard. So this is really the same complaint I’ve been making since fourth grade. I’m doing it in the interest of my CS education, though, so that’s really that about which I feel the need to complain.
See, grammar is easy.*
Anyway, I wasted like half an hour looking up that thing in the popup text over “Fermat’s Little Theorem,” so I guess I should get back to work.
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.