There's a bit of Fitzgerald that I'd like you to read so you see the temperament we're up against here:

"...But here's a neighbor on my right,
An Eager Ass, considered bright;
Asker of questions.... How he'll stand,
With earnest air and fidgy hand,
After this hour, telling you
He sat all night and burrowed through
Your book.... Oh, you'll be coy and he
Will simulate precosity,
And pedants both, you'll smile and smirk,
And leer, and hasten back to work....

'Twas this day week, sir, you returned
A theme of mine, from which I learned
(Through various comment on the side
Which you had scrawled) that I defied
The highest rules of criticism
For cheap and careless witticism....
'Are you quite sure that this could be?'
And
'Shaw is no authority!'
But Eager Ass, with what he's sent,
Plays havoc with your best per cent..."

Used to be I'd use this piece of the larger poem to describe people like Schotts or Kyle, with their desperate attempts at mau-mauing the rest of class while schmoozing with the teachers. I read the book junior year, after all, when I was in the throes of MSA withdrawal, and the comparison between the Eager Ass and those two seemed quite obvious to me.

Right now, though, it seems to me that the description can be applied quite well to one local Eager Ass himself. As we've seen before, he's such an ardent champion of the University's cause that he'll jump on anyone who dares speak ill of it in the slightest. Today's provocation? A post on the LiveJournal community about how the tulips in a picture that's in a coffee table book about the university seem like they might have been added with computer editing. The poster wasn't making a definite, hard-and-fast claim, but merely speculating about the possibility that such editing had occurred and asking whether anyone else had noticed:

"Go to the bookstore and look at a copy. Open the book to the big picture with the text that says, "In praise of Wayman Crow..." It's towards the front. Someone tell me...are those computer-generated tulips? Because they look unnaturally shiny and the lighting on them is...wrong. I'm going to go with yes, but...what do you think?"

Enter the Eager Ass, university PR man and lapdog, who manages to drop names while showing, yet again, just how deep in the university's pockets he is:

"I know a lot of the pictures look too good to be real, but everything is. The dean's wife actually wrote the book, and when I was over at their house, she told me about a lot of the book, and I know she worked very hard to get some amazing pics."

Perhaps I just want to believe that the Eager Ass is a kiss-ass, gullible git because his style irritates me, or because I'm innately suspicious of university spokesmen and PR people. Perhaps I'm overly sensitive right now due to hormones or some other subconscious influence. He's quite proud of his position as a PR guy, though, what with being a tour guide and an RA and generally doing all he can to ensure he's in good graces with the administration, so it's hard to deny that that probably has an influence on his thinking.

If there's a party line, it seems, he'll disseminate it. While surely people like him are working hard to ensure that our degrees are worth more by vigorously promoting the university's interests, I still can't help but want to see past that to the reality I know lies behind what they're saying. I think it's great that someone noticed something amiss in the carefully constructed façade we've got going here, and it annoys me when students like the Eager Ass, who are paid by the university to wax positive about the place, end up believing everything the administrators spoon-feed them as divinely given truth. Cognitive dissonance may well be at work here, Mr. Psych Major, whether you want to believe it or not.

Wow. So I was selling Girl Scout cookies today until 1 p.m., and afterwards I got one of the cases of cookies together that were left over to carry back home. I walked out the south door of the student center, then realized that something wasn't balanced right in the box, so I set it on the railing along the walkway there for a second, fixed stuff, then picked it up again. When I started walking again, I looked up to see a Middle Eastern man looking like a professor paused in front of me. He looked puzzled, then asked "Where's your bike?" I was a bit taken aback, as I had no idea who this was, but I was still in somewhat of an anything goes conversational mode from selling cookies to people, so I pointed over to the west of the building and said, "It's over on the other side of the building." He asked why I wasn't riding it, and I held up the box in my arms, noting that I couldn't really carry it while riding the bike, at which point he asked what the box was for, and I told him Girl Scout cookies, which I was selling for Campus Girl Scouts.

He thought that was a good thing, and then he offered his hand, saying he was [insert name here, I forgot], a cardiologist here at the university (or Barnes?) in a very thick accent. I told him my name, and he asked what I do here. I said I was studying psych and English, upon which he asked, "Psychic English?" "Oh no, psychology," I said, and he said, "So if I ever need some help with something in psychology, you can help me with that?" "Well, maybe, maybe..." I replied, and he laughed, saying, "You say that with a lot of confidence, yeah?" and I worried that I'd perhaps disappointed him.

Then he said that he'd seen me riding my bike and thought it was amazing, that I'd looked like I was meditating or something, like an angel (hereupon he lifted his arms in a flying kind of way), and that I (or it?) was very beautiful, and if I ever needed anything, he could help. I said, "Well thank you," and I smiled, and he repeated the flying gesture and smiled a lot, then offered his hand again, saying, "I will see you again."

So...that was somethin'. I never really thought I looked particularly angelic or meditational riding my bike, and today I thought I looked strikingly non-angelic, since I hadn't showered, thus had my hair tied back, and was wearing my big gray senior sweatshirt and my black-and-white plaid pajama pants. Perhaps he saw me riding yesterday, when I had showered and had my long blonde hair flowing out behind me in the wind? I was wearing my sweatshirt yesterday, too, though. Anyway, it was interesting. A lot of different thoughts ran through my head while talking to this guy: He has kinda bad teeth...I wonder if he's a stalker...He seems very nice, though...This seems a little serendipitous, or like it should be serendipitous, though I can't see how...Do I really seem like I'm meditating while I ride my bike?...Maybe he's mistaken me for someone else...but I do have a bike...What was his name again?...etc.

Interesting, neh?

Know what I find quite annoying? ("No, tell us. Or don't. Just quit asking rhetorical questions. They're pointless and stupid. Get on with it, then.") I keep seeing people cite studies whose results point to the idea that people who get more than eight hours of sleep a night are more likely to die than people who don't, using such study results to try and tell me I shouldn't sleep so much or that my sleeping so much means that I obviously have some health problem, that I'll consequently die from. The problems with using such studies to try and prove anything are manifold:

1. Such a study would obviously be correlational. That means that there's no direct causal link between sleeping more and dying sooner.

2. Besides the study just being correlational, there are many things that could serve as confounds here. Here's a somewhat involved example: Say someone's doing a lot of manual labor, perhaps as a construction worker. That just might make it necessary for him to sleep more at night in order to recuperate fully from the day's work. Perhaps he drinks a bit before bed or takes a sleeping pill/antihistamine, too, to ease the pain of a day's hard work and help him get to sleep. These things might make it so that guy sleeps more than eight hours—and then the guy might die the next day when he's got a hangover and a crane drops a ton of sand on his head. Voila—excess sleep and death are now both characteristic of this subject's existence.

Should this guy happen to be in the study, say to pick up a bit of extra cash, he's just become another statistic in the correlation between death and excess sleep—yet his sleeping patterns weren't what caused his death. His sleeping patterns were the result of several factors, namely A. being tired from manual labor, B. taking a sleeping pill/antihistamine, which could, the next day, have impaired his judgment, making him more likely to be involved in a fatal accident, and C. drinking alcohol, which, depending on how much he drinks, might have decreased his life expectancy anyway, and which certainly may have decreased his judgment capabilities. You see all the potential problems here?

Then you have other possible confounds, like depression, alcoholism, substance abuse, sleeping disorders, etc., any and all of which might constellate in a given subject to create a condition where s/he'd simultaneously be at higher risk for death and have a greater need for sleep, or at least have drastic changes in his/her sleeping cycle, yet the risk for death and sleep cycle changes wouldn't necessarily have any causal relation.

3. Some people simply need to sleep more, or sleep at different hours, than the mythical "average" subject. (Tangent: To take a point from Peter Ho Davies' story about "the great detective," the most apt murder victim to use for the "perfect crime," an untraceable crime, would be a guy who is average in every way—and that would surely drive up the chances of dying in general, should a criminal exist who would want to commit an untraceable, pointless crime.) The very measurement of an "average" amount of sleep implies that there are people who fall above and below this value.

Now, of course, a given study may have taken these confounds into consideration when recruiting volunteers, or may have at least written them into the results if their volunteer selection wasn't that discerning—but even if that's the case, quoting such studies out of hand to make a thin point about my sleeping habits (or anyone else's habits, for that matter) is rather pointless.

To some extent I think blogs have become so popular with young people not because they're so new but because they often require nearly no effort to set up. (Not a new idea, but one that occurred to me just now.) In that sense, my elitist self balks at the idea of using a blog instead of just manually updating my site as is...but thinking practically, the ability to easily update is probably what keeps me doing it at all. [shrugs] I think I got past balking at having a blog early on, though, hence why I've mainly focused on just customizing and updating and maintaining the thing, rather than taking time to wonder why it even exists at all.

I found a wonderful thing last night as I was getting ready for bed, namely YahooPOPs!, a program that lets you use local mail clients like Thunderbird, Outlook, etc. (anything that supports POP3) to download Yahoo! Mail messages from free accounts, which technically don't provide POP3 support anymore. (I found the program in a list of "The 46 Best-ever Freeware Utilities," most of which I'm proud to say I use or have at least downloaded installers for.) Hence now I'm accomplishing one of my long-term goals, namely backing up my email, in a fraction of the time it would've taken me otherwise. This may well mean I can finally save my account from the 99-percent-full, brink-of-disaster status it's been hovering at for the past year or so. Thank God for SourceForge.

Setting up YahooPOPs! was a bit tedious at first, as I was attempting to use it with Outlook Express, which I hate with a fiery, burning passion and which doesn't really work. After that I tried Mozilla Mail, since I already had it installed, but it didn't work either. The YahooPOPs! help forum noted that Thunderbird works, so I finally acquiesced and downloaded the thing...and it works perfectly. Bah. (So yes, kids, I'm now using yet another Mozilla/Firefox product. It gets me wondering what they're going to do about Thunderbird's name—will they keep it avian, or make it into something fox-related?)

Since then I downloaded all the emails from a smaller account to test it, as I heard reports of Yahoo! accounts being shut down temporarily after people used the program. It worked, though, and my account wasn't shut down, so I'm currently in the process of downloading 1,000 emails from my main account.

I wonder if I really have exactly 1,000 emails, though. How probable is that?

Edit: I really didn't have exactly 1,000 emails. I have 797 in my inbox and 745 in a personal folder. The value for the maximum number of emails to download, however, was set to 1,000, hence the program's attempts at downloading that many emails. Attempting to do so actually led to my Yahoo! account being suspended for about 45 minutes, as did other attempts at various times throughout the day to download 99 emails, which is supposed to be the maximum number you can download without tipping off Yahoo!'s filters to the fact that you're downloading email via POP3.

Another note: While I'm personally really bored with Bush-bashing cartoons and the like, I have to admit that their popularity has probably given opportunities to thousands of starving cartoonists who'd otherwise have been faced with four-plus years of drawing Gore cartoons for uninterested audiences. At least the prodigious backlash against Bush is fueling one sector of the economy, albeit a small one.

Things I'd like to be able to do with this blog in the future:

-add a right-hand sidebar which would be invisible to visitors viewing this site through the frame but which would provide more interesting stuff for those who simply reach this through Jablog

-add a referrer script/referrer links and/or recent playlist from AudioScrobbler (in right-hand sidebar)

-have the access graphs actually be able to display modes other than just the past 30 days

-somehow create a JTL- or RSS-powered "friends" page, à la LiveJournal (that's one of the few features I do like about that service) that's perhaps something along the lines of Planet Jablog, only in a page, rather than a separate account altogether (not that I don't have my share of extra accounts I could put to use for that purpose)

-create some sort of biographical page (linked in right-hand sidebar) for those not lucky enough to be viewing this blog through the frame

-work on fixing those templates that don't seem to work quite right, specifically All Business.

It would be wonderful if I could find a working referrer script. That would really be fantastic. So far I've checked out scripts from LGF, Textism, Stephen's Web, and Waxy, with little to no success. If anyone knows of a good way for me to post links to referrers, let me know, 'cause this has been driving me nuts for the better part of this week.

A thread on the MSA Invision board just reminded me of just how much the whole MSA thing changed my life. Perhaps it's just a resting-on-my-laurels sort of joy, but thinking about the academy really does make me feel something like joyous. [looks at new vixen boots, thinks about MSA, and is gloriously happy in a way that can probably only occur at about 4 a.m.]
"You've got to get yourself together—you've got stuck in a moment, and you can't get out of it. Don't say that later will be better—you've got stuck in a moment, and you can't get out of it..."

Sometimes I just get on these manic jags where all I can bring myself to do is click at stuff for hours. It used to be that I'd call these jags "surfing," but now it's like I'm just searching for something to be there. Perhaps that's still surfing, but it feels more compulsive these days. (Then again, it's 2:29 a.m. and I'm editing a blog post—what can I say about compulsion?) I suppose it's yet another way of seeking gratification—finding a site that just resonates with whatever it is I'm thinking is a great feeling, somewhat akin to logging into Yahoo! and having new mail.

I've gotten into this cycle of online checking, which sounds somewhat OCD-ish, but I'm not sure it's a real problem. It's not necessarily as irrational as some other compulsions I could have, like continually checking to see if the stove/oven has spontaneously ignited itself or developed gas leaks. My checking has a slight basis in reality, at least—if you check the same stuff enough, especially things with dynamic content like message boards, blogs, and email inboxes, you're bound to get a hit at some point.

As I understand it, computers and the Internet really don't have as much importance in most people's lives as they do in mine—but how much easier would things be if you could, with a bit of finagling, manage to pull up information amounting to a dossier of sorts on whoever you wanted? It's another fulfillment thing, I suppose, wanting to feel like I'm just so clever for being able to divine secrets no one else can. [shrugs] More questing for gnosis, perhaps.

I suppose it's rather disconcerting to know that people can find you if they so choose, though, as that's a bit counter to the anonymity that's held up as being somewhat core to the whole Internet endeavor. Look at the title of this very blog, for instance—my very paranoia at being found altogether too easily after these past few years of near-constant Internet connection and linking led me to dub everything "B27." (Which was an utterly futile effort, really, since Google's indexing is still largely based upon incoming links and the movements of angels through the ether. Most of the current links to me, at least, still have my name plastered all over 'em, so as I don't know what the angels are doing, I'm apparently not getting much out of this name-changing endeavor besides the catchy name.)

I'd still like it a lot, though, if I could use the Internet to find out, say, what happened to that one guy who used to be in such-and-such class with me in such-and-such year, or where that chick went when she graduated the year before me and moved to such-and-such place. The Internet's promise is paradoxical, as others have surely mentioned before—we're promised both ultimate anonymity and ultimate access to information. I'm guessing this is only an apparent paradox, as these quantities surely move in utterly different planes, but it still leaves me in a bit of a quandary. I'd like to be "known," to be (in)famous in some sense, and the Internet seems to be a good way to achieve such status—but the costs of such infamy are as of yet unknown. Once one is known, there're problems of audience and censorship, among other things. It's far easier to remain utterly anonymous as one of the 50,000 people with poorly coded, derelict, and abandoned AOL Homesites than to get attention. One of the few proven ways to remain relatively anonymous online, y'know, so long as you're not a name-brand pundit, is to just stay off the Internet altogether.

Then again, once these things are done, all these piddly details take on lesser significance. My name has been out there for a good four years now—it's really too late to do anything about that. I think I used to take more care with my name, though, than I have in the past however-long. (The "past however-long" being a term that largely refers to the period of time spanning from approximately September 15th, 2003, until now.) I just wonder what the cost will be of recklessly maintaining this online bastion.

While it's inconvenient for me, perhaps the people I can't find records on are verily better off.

"Goodbye to you...goodbye to everything that I knew...You were the one I loved, the one thing that I tried to hold onto..."

Y'know, I wonder if I'll have a future with people in it if I don't end up living in Missouri. I think about going to the coasts for graduate school, to places like Stanford, Amherst (either of the two colleges known as Amherst), CalTech, USC, or Boston University—but if I end up there for graduate school, I may well end up staying there for a long time. Yesterday it occurred to me that despite all these grandiose ideas I have about escaping the gray Midwestern winters and finding a better place to live, I may well be severing ties with most of the good friends I have if I leave.

I may end up living a fairly unpopulated existence. I've already shown a real reluctance to get to know many people at this here university, which is in Missouri, and I don't see that changing very much in the future. I just don't like people that much, y'know?

The upshot of all this? I'm not sure. It occurs to me that I might be happy living in Columbia in that not-so-far-off someday. As far as I can recall, I don't have any truly bad memories of the place. I'm generally happy when I'm there. The city itself is beautiful. Of course, I may love the place so much simply because everything I've experienced there happens to have been pleasant. [shrugs] It might be the answer, though.

We'll see.

I woke up literally rolling over to kiss my pillow, then got online only to find that some Missouri Republicans mailing list with my name on it had clogged my inbox, then noticed that a guy had responded to my request for various items on Freecycle by telling me to go to the library if I wanted books. Wonderful.

A side note: Starting next Monday, Campus Girl Scouts will be selling Girl Scout cookies every day in the student center from 11 a.m.–1 p.m. If you want cookies, tell me and give me money and I'll get you some. I'm taking orders...

Went on an adventure with R. to the computer lab, where I found a printout of the "Ode to Collegiate Alchoholism" [sic]. Reading that brilliant piece of prose, I walked into a closed glass door on the way out of the lab, then, a few minutes later, got out of an elevator exclaiming, "Where are we?" upon seeing people waiting outside the elevator on the fourth (my) floor. [shakes head] Yeah...just reading the thing apparently was enough to make my IQ drop a good 10 points.