The current boy-toy and I rock. Apparently we both slept all day, skipped all of our classes, and bought video games and ponies, respectively. I understand that some of you who read this really don't approve of that, but it was nice to know that I wasn't alone in my decadence.

Good post here mentioning Spires, the campus literary magazine. Relevant passage:

"i've also realized that half of the people on the spires staff are complete poetry snobs and really have no idea what they're talking about. if they don't like one word choice in a submission, it's out. GET OVER YOURSELVES."

Amen.

In other news, I should stop getting into meaningless tiffs with people I don't respect. I always seem to need a steady stream of enemies to vanquish with words...

"Same old song...just a drop of water, in an endless sea. All we do crumbles to the ground, though we refuse to see...Dust in the wind—all we are is dust in the wind..."

I've long meant to realize this project of mine transcribing entries from my old notebooks into online text. That way if anything were to happen to the original notebooks, I'd still have a record preserved, however clumsily. The ideal would still be to scan each page and save them it as an image, but I don't have the hours worth of access to a scanner necessary for such an undertaking, and right now it's not that important. Hence text.

The reason any of this is important at all is that these marbled composition notebooks hold a lot of what's necessary to understand my rapid evolution after I attended MSA, as well as the development of my current "voice" in writing. It probably sounds childish and self-important of me, but sometimes I have to remind myself that yes, I really did make a conscious decision to take up scholarly attitudes and thought-patterns at and after the academy. The foundations were there beforehand, but there was so much to soak up in that three-week stay at MSA that for a long time afterward I could scarce even remember most of the year leading up to it...it just didn't seem important after that.

Over this Thanksgiving "break" I found another old notebook, one not so full of the bounty of quotes, scribbles, and erudite writings as the latter two, but still an illustrative one—it was from sophomore year, chronicling things I'd largely forgotten doing, much less writing about. At that point in high school I was starting to turn my life around from freshman year, but it wasn't until MSA that it all got pulled together.

Now, sure, I'm speaking in vague terms, but I think those of you who knew me at the time will know more of what I'm speaking about. I'd describe it more adequately, but frankly I've worn out the language I used to use to describe it to myself, and these days it sounds overly idealistic. Hence I think less preambling and more transcription may clarify things a bit.

I also found copies of the old Ad Astras over break, as mentioned in my last post. I'm still pretty sure that only ten total issues ever got published before the ICKEE Society was veritably swept away in the wake of the drama girls' overwhelming narcissism and the "geek chic" success of Proxima, the new literary magazine established our senior year. As far as Ad Astra goes, though, I've got issues II, III, VI, VII, VIII, IX, and X. Lookin' at 'em, the poetry is as bad as ever, but the variety in the first few issues shows that at first, the ICKEE Society had lofty ambitions to display art, stories, poetry, etc. It was quite an awesome undertaking.

After Thanksgiving dinner I found all my old copies of Ad Astra. The thing really did deteriorate in quality over the 10 or so years it was in existence—but yeah, as soon as my brother saw 'em, he decided that he's been charged with a divine mission, namely to bring back the good name of the ICKEE Society...I told him to talk to the mysterious Pfingsten. [chuckles] All the silly mystique therein is fun, though I also let him in on the big secret of ICKEE, namely that those who create it have never been any more masterful or in possession of any more gnosis than anyone else at that school—they're pretending, just like everyone else. I think he knew that, though.

I'd like to take this opportunity to beg those reading never to take me down to the Bass Pro Shop or Main Street in St. Charles unless I specifically ask to be taken there, and even then, to please question my judgment, especially if it's around Christmastime. Got dragged there today, and single shop was jam-packed with inane Christmas kitsch, stuff that no one in their right mind should ever buy, like these intolerable bear figurines and other "country" or "homey" artsy-craftsy crap.

Please shoot me if I ever buy any of that. I understand how people end up with that stuff, even if they're not particularly into faux-Colonial furnishings—someone buys them some, thinking it's the cutest thing ever! (it's not cute) and then they feel obligated to display it somewhere, perhaps on the mantle...then other people see that crap, assume you like it, and buy you even more of it. Nonetheless, I'm planning to never have to display any of that, so do me a favor and never buy me any. No country potpourri, no goddamned potpourri candles, even—none of that shit. Sure, I appreciate true country stuff, when someone has a real farm, etc. This, however, is smarmy, sentimental suburban soccer-mom shit. I'm just not interested.

I finished the list of things still to be fixed on Jablog. It's huge. See it here, as I don't feel like taking up a huge amount of space by posting it. I've been doing too much of that re-posting stuff, putting up disparate comments and emails. Sure, the stuff's relevant, and it's a part of my life, but I know it's not that exciting. Plus, reading that much italicized text would be a pain for anyone.

In other news, my sprocket necklace is magnetized from contact with pony feet. Life is good.

It's currently 1:38 a.m. on a Wednesday. Do you know how nice it is for me to not have to worry about Latin being due in the morning or about whether people here want to sleep? With all due respect, it's very nice not to have the suitemates breathing down my neck for a couple of days.

In high school, as some of you know, I was pretty much cut off from the world every night and on weekends, as I didn't have a computer, much less the Internet, and I was hardly ever allowed to go out. Considering how much effort it took to be able to actually go somewhere for even a brief time, I stopped trying to go places after awhile. (Save me the pity—you'll see that it was useful.) I'd spend a whole lot of time in the basement wasting time—I didn't have a computer, so I'd procrastinate by doing productive things like reading books, copying down quotes like a penitent scribe, and writing down my thoughts in my notebooks.

I avoided my family and didn't really bother to talk on the phone but for late at night, as most of my conversations were monitored during the day. Hence for long periods of time I'd be alone in the basement with my thoughts, books, and the homework I was putting off. I'd check out stacks of books and CDs from the library and embark upon vast projects reading the books and copying the relevant quotes into notebooks, all while listening to the new CDs and/or the radio, eventually copying the CD to tape if it was good enough...

I'd stay at the library whenever I could until 5 minutes to closing doing things online and searching the catalog for things to read or listen to, stay in the school library learning the mysterious ways of Pfingsten, or in the basement with my physics teacher doing a whole lot of nothing, or just stay at school until after 10 p.m. finishing a stacked set of three activities in a row. When I got home, though, after avoiding it for so long, I'd set myself to writing and reading. That, not the Internet, was my escape.

I procrastinated just as badly as I do now, only instead of staring at the screen until my eyes got blurry, I'd stay up 'til 1 a.m. reading Orson Scott Card, Ayn Rand, or Richard Bach, then type out my paper on a typewriter, chicken-pecking at the keys, as my hands weren't strong enough to actually touch type on the out-of-adjustment typewriters we had around. I learned the intricacies of typewriter ribbons and Wite-Out.

Surely I'm romanticizing the whole thing, but compared to the way I am now, I was erudite! I actually had ideals...and sure, those have been dashed on the rocks of college largely due to my own foibles, but still—what a wonderful thing to have ideals! And to be alone with my thoughts—glorious! I became so accustomed to having my space over the long years at home, and all this continual invasion of my existence, the relentless wash of people here, is driving me nuts. There's always someone in the suite—last year I relished being alone for those few weekends when my roommate wasn't here. This year, even if one suitemate is gone (most often the engineer), the other two are still here.

Now, obviously, I chose these guys to live with, and it's working out well. But space...glorious space...and the freedom to play Evanescence's Origin over and over again and fall asleep listening to Ayumi Hamasaki at 2 a.m. with no shirt on and the thermostat at a toasty 75 degrees, then wake myself up the next morning after my shower by singing along to loud rock music, keeping cool without a shirt. (Screw those of you who don't relish the image—that happens to be my long-cherished routine.) My inability to do these things is nowhere near as oppressive as the rampant drunkenness and falseness I lived with last year was (how does one get so blessed as I was, to inhabit a floor with about 50 people who're absolutely intolerable?), but nonetheless, it takes its toll.

I have to do something about the turn my intellectual life's taken for the worse. Sure, I'm being productive in new ways, taking care of various forums and learning the intricacies of the online realm (a benefit of being cached by Google, for instance, is that if you screw up your page, you've got a window of time in which the search engine will still have the old version for you to copy it from), but I've gotta think about where I'm headed with all this. I'm learning things, to be sure, but I've gotta get some guidance on this rocket headed sunward.

"Soshite aruite iku...hitori aruite miru kara...kimi no inaku natta michi demo—hikari terashite ikeru you ni." "Will you believe in me tonight? Am I the star beneath the stairs? Am I the ghost upon the stage? Am I already there?"

Yesterday I was checking things online when I came upon this post from a '92 MSA alumna asking what scholars thought about weighted classes at their high schools:

"I teach at Lebanon High School and we are thinking about weighting classes for the next school year and I was wondering what former MoScholars have to say about this. I know that as an alum of the 92 academy, I understand the importance of upper-level academics.

If you wouldn't mind please answer the following questions:

Where did you go to high school?

Did you have weighted classes?
If so, what classes were weighted?
If so, were your classes on a 5 or 11 pt. scale?
What were some advantages/disadvantages of having weighted classes?

If not, would you have liked weighted classes at your school? Why? Why not?
What were some advantages/disadvantages to having weighted classes?

Thanks for your time."

I figured my torturous experiences with my high school's system qualified me to say at least a little something about it, so I put in my two cents:

"I'm currently a sophomore at university. My high school had weighted 'honors' classes, and I thought it was OK. There were some benefits and some problems.

It definitely helped my GPA when an A in an honors class was worth 5 points, and I agree with Ryan that it's nice to get something more for an A in a harder class, esp. when some students take nothing more challenging than PE and office aide hours and get straight A's.

That said, though, big problems can arise when talented and intelligent students who have aspirations of attending good universities, thus needing the best GPA possible, want to express their talents, too, through art and music, yet fear having a lower GPA than their peers who take nothing but difficult 'academic' classes. My high school, for instance, didn't have honors band classes, but one could get honors credit for orchestra (only strings) and choir. Was that fair? We didn't think so, but our band director had better things to do with his time (e.g. finding music for us to play, fundraising, leading the band, disciplining students) than filling out forms so his advanced classes like Jazz Band could be considered 'honors' classes just like the corresponding elite orchestra and choir groups. I can't really blame him for not wanting to take time out of his already jam-packed schedule just to fill out those forms, as the majority of students really didn't care if a class was an honors course or not.

Further, most universities and scholarship selection committees don't want a weighted GPA. When it comes time to be selected for things like National Merit Scholarships, they want your unweighted GPA. That means that if finding that total isn't automated—it wasn't at my high school—the counselors have to figure that out by hand, possibly making mistakes along the way. In the end, all honors classes do is help differentiate students within a given high school class, allowing the relative difficulty of one's class schedule to factor into calculations of class rank. High class rank is definitely something that universities look at...but by no means is it that important in and of itself.

So if you really want to set up a system whereby A's in harder classes get, say, a 5.0 on an overall 4.0 scale, you're going to want to make sure a few things are implemented better than they were at my high school:

1. Make sure the computer systems in place to keep track of grades can give both the weighted and unweighted GPAs if necessary. This wouldn't be that hard to build into a system if one were even a slightly competent programmer.

2. Set clear criteria for designating courses honors/weighted so that you don't have too many honors courses (even in ideal situations, in most public schools only the top few percent of a grade will even be interested in the classes) and so that you don't have too few to satisfy student interest. Think logically.

3. Think about setting different kinds of criteria for 'subjective' classes like art and music, because while these might not fit strictly academic criteria for honors/weighted classes, it's still important that students who wish to pursue these things aren't penalized. Then again, if you have small programs in music or art, with few classes offered, it might not make a difference in your school—though in that case I'd feel bad for the students who have so few options.

4. Don't make the forms that much of a hassle to fill out for a class to be designated honors/weighted. Many teachers, especially those who have a lot of responsibilities beyond just teaching the curriculum, just won't want to deal with it.

5. Make sure scheduling works out for those few students who want to take the courses. If there aren't that many honors classes, and there aren't that many students who will want to take them—which is inevitable—scheduling must be made logical. Scheduling the only honors calculus course at the same time as the only honors English course (just for example) is not a good idea. Similarly, if there are only a few AP courses, those would probably be weighted/honors designated, and most upper-level students would be interested in them—so you really must make it so that students can take all or most of them without bizarre scheduling contortions.

Hopefully this was instructive. If you want any more information, feel free to email me. I'm always glad to help people get things going more smoothly than my high school managed to."

I think that's a pretty accurate assessment of the problems with my high school's system that should be corrected in any other implementation, though I might not have put it as succinctly as I could've. I probably could've said "think logically" fewer times. Then again, I wrote that standing at a computer terminal in the basement of a building before Christianity class, so for the lack of time I think it's pretty well put. I wanted to mirror Aubrey's concerns about students interested arts/electives not getting due credit for their exertions while counteracting Ryan's unabashedly pro-weighting response, which I think really glossed over the problems such a system could have:

"I'm a senior at Festus High School, and we have weighted classes. Our weighted classes are college algebra, trigonometry, calculus, Spanish 3 and 4, French 3 and 4, the advanced English classes, advanced physics, and advanced chemistry. Our classes are done on an 11 point scale. Weighting classes is a great idea, because otherwise someone could take easy P.E., art, and shop classes, get A's in all of them, and have a better GPA than someone who is taking challenging courses that might be making B's. Weighting classes gives students an incentive to take the tougher courses."

Well, yeah. That's the obvious answer. Anyway, if Lebanon High School adopts such a system of weighting, hopefully they'll take our comments into account. Yay for changing things for the better.

A note: Michelle Branch, despite being overproduced, really makes catchy music—she apparently learned somewhere along the way that including a melancholy wash of harmonized, jangly guitar and voices is the way to go. This latest album of hers, Hotel Paper, is quite satisfying to listen to, if not any great obscure masterpiece.

What I don't understand is why it was necessary for the Top Care workers to have 3 huge 4- by 4-foot lawnmowers all roaring within 15 feet of each other as I came walking up to the dorm this afternoon. It was like a friggin' monster truck rally or something: "Let's see how much noise we can make, how much dust we can kick up, and how damned annoying we can be." The lawnmowers in question are your industrial-strength, so-tough-the-paint-is-wearing-off kind, massive, insectile things that look like they'd mangle your arm if you so much as went near them. They aren't pleasant in the least, unlike your typical brand of droning suburban bagging mowers.. Those are nice to hear on a warm day, when you can smell fertilizer seeping into the groundwater and cars whizzing by on the street with their windows cracked wide enough to let out a bit of tinny music. The Top Care lawnmowers spread fear in their wake, screaming massacre like ringwraiths...

As I was walking back from Argumentation today, I noticed three or four of those awful SUVs they're making nowadays. I didn't see any Azteks, but there were a few that were quite similar—boxy, overgrown hatchback-type things. I got this great urge to just wave frantically at every SUV driver who went by driving one, pointing at their vehicle's tires as though it had a flat. Then, when whoever it was would roll down their window, I'd smile sweetly and call out, "Oh, I just wanted to let you know that your car is ugly. I figured you should know that. Have a great day, OK?" I'd wave happily as she or he burned rubber getting away, massaging his or her upper-middle-class ego. I'd also relish doing that to some BMW driver, too, perhaps to someone driving one of those boxy, '50s-looking BMWs.

Y'know, Thanksgiving break, just like Fall Break before it, is a lie. It's not a break. When you've got classes until Tuesday afternoon, meaning "break" proper doesn't even start until Wednesday, that gives you little more than a five-day weekend. That's nothing new, folks. That's hardly time enough to do all these adventures people plan without making a horrible, rushed time out of it. People travel vast distances, spending all this money, all for what? To see their families for sometimes no more than 48 hours, only to leave again?

While I understand that many people are closer to their families than I am, it still seems like such a waste of time and money. Plus, it's not really a break at all when you have to spend a good fourth of it or more getting rides to the airport, waiting for the plane to get there, getting on the plane, sitting on the plane 'til it reaches your destination, etc. Then, when you get back, you realize—just as you realize every break—that you didn't do nearly as much work as you thought you would and that now you have to cram all the work into a little one- or two-day window of time.

Sure, sure, you justify it to yourself, saying, "Well, but it was a really awesome time—yeah, I had to spend all that time in the airport, where the weird guy almost threw up on my shoes, and yeah, Aunt Martha was a real bitch again, like always...but...family! Yay!" Guess what? That's cognitive dissonance at work. You put a lot of time and effort into planning your little jaunt, so to realize how pointless and boring it was would be a huge letdown to your entire world view. I understand that, but don't expect me to praise you for being self-deluding.

Further, unless you were wonderfully organized and caught up before you left for break, you're still going to have to deal with all the stuff you left behind as soon as you get back. Personally, I'm glad I don't have the pressure to go home—I live in the area, for one thing, and for another, I don't get along well with my father. Hence it's all well and good if I don't bother to head home, leaving me free to finish the three-plus major papers, annotated bibliography, symposium research, etc. that're due after break. We all know I'm not going to get nearly as much done as I should, but at least I'm going to sit here a good bit of time browbeating myself about the work I'm not doing, rather than pretending to be having a good time while sitting miserable in some airport or, worse, in a bouncing car on a major interstate in the snow...

It's strange to think that I only have about 25 classes left here if I don't take summer-school courses again. A minimum of six of those are for my major, a few more for my minor, and then the rest are just subject to my whims and the vicissitudes of the cluster system (which isn't really all that bad, you pansies). I'm halfway done, then, having already taken 25 classes—that is, if you count this semester's classes and the two courses I took about half of and dropped.

What I find interesting is that while one of my roommates was in the Arts & Sciences office waiting to meet with a dean (her four-year advisor) about a week ago, she overheard two dean types talking about the kiosks here. Apparently it's a well-known fact that students hate the kiosks and that they make the university look bad by making it look as though technology here is piddly and limited. The deans said that apparently the only people who liked the kiosks at all were parents. The thing about that is, I think the only reason the parents tell the administration they like them is that 1. many parents are technologically challenged, effete snobs who are still amazed by Flash movies and 2. they hope that by complimenting the administration, their Johnny or Susie will have a better chance at getting kudos from the university. These are the women who walk around with their arms permanently bent at the elbow, their hands hanging limp, à la Peg Bundy.

In other news, the saga of the hub continues. I already got back on by forcing my IP, thanks to a friend's networking expertise, so I was pretty content with things. I got an IM from the op, though, saying I could get back on if I was quiet about it, more or less. He hadn't OKed it with anyone, but he'd lifted the ban on my IP. I had to chuckle at that, as the IP and nick bans really did a whole lot of nothing once I figured out how to circumvent them. I didn't bother to reply, as what to say? "I already got back on the hub a week ago...so...thanks?"

Then a friend IMed me yesterday reminding me of the op's "pardon," noting that now she's an op on the l33t hub. Heh. That's pretty cool for her, but I'm not that excited by Direct Connect anymore—I can't get whole albums on there, the quality of files isn't particularly great, and all in all, it's just not that novel after the past few semesters of it. I like the power involved in being able to control whether other students have access to things, but it gets old, esp. as the current main hub owner is pretty bombastic and tyrannical. This results from the underlying drug culture they're trying so desperately to protect, as they all have a vested interest in keeping that alive—but I really don't care.

The editor-in-chief posted a medium-sized rant about why gay marriage should be allowed in the United States a day or so ago. He makes a point, sure, but it's a pretty well-worn one. My response addressed a bit of the problem with his approach, and, yea, the approaches of many. They just can't see how there could be a barrier to changing the definition of a "civil ceremony" like marriage. There's a big barrier, though, and that's the fact that the majority of people in this country—including our congressmen—go with their conscience (or at least what they consider to be their conscience) in casting their votes:

"I'm not going to address everything, but one part of this strikes me as questionable. You say, '[M]arriage is not a religious institution, but is a legal, civil contract between two adults.' In many, if not most cases, it's both.

You see, in the eyes of the state, yes, marriage is a legal contract that gives both parties entering into it certain rights and privileges in the eyes of the law. That's important, to be sure, as when, for example, someone is in the hospital and two parties, the person's parent and the person's partner, are vying for control over that person's future health and well-being. This can be especially crucial in cases where the person is in a coma or other state that renders them incapable of making their own decisions about medical care. In such cases almost anyone would most likely want the person who is closer to them and who knows them best, which is probably their spouse or life partner/lover/whatever you'd like to call them, to be in charge of making such decisions. Current laws deny homosexual partners that right, and yes, it's a definite problem for those citizens, I agree.

That said, however, I think there's an important barrier to be surmounted that I don't think you've addressed. You have to take into account that marriage is also a sacrament or highly valued tradition in many religions, especially within the Judaism/Christianity/Islam group of related religions, whose variants compose the vast majority of religion practiced in the Western world. More people are religious than you might think—60-plus percent of U.S. citizens attend church regularly and claim church affiliation. That's not something to be dismissed lightly. Might doesn't make right, but numbers make a key difference here. This is why:

We like to conceive of the United States government as an abstract, constitutionally governed entity that has no obligation to aid any given religion. Indeed, were the government to prefer a given religion over any other, that would be unconstitutional. The only obligation the government has with regard to religion is to merely not impinge upon their freedom of worship.

Yet the very prevalence of these religions means that for most of the individuals who compose our nice abstract government, the issue of marriage is not an abstract one at all, but a matter of their personal faith. While we'd like to think that our statesmen are nicely objective when it comes to voting, the truth is that they often go with their conscience, especially when they're seeing thousands of bills cross their desks during a given session of Congress. We can't completely get rid of religion's impact on our government when our very statesmen are acting (and voting) on the basis of mandates handed down by religious systems of morality. These individuals aren't likely to act against their conscience in voting, and it would also be unconstitutional to ban anyone with religious affiliation from participating in government, which is a major part of why GLBTQ marriages probably won't become standard for a long time to come.

I mean, who wants to be responsible for bringing about the next Sodom and Gomorrah?

(Note: Just to be sure, I'll reiterate this. I'm not saying that this means the majority is right. What I am saying is that the prevalence of religion makes it a lot more difficult to get laws allowing gay marriage on the books. I think you underestimate the power of religion in our society.)"

Yeah. I think I've got a point, kids.

I begin to feel vaguely queasy about the whole pony thing, but nonetheless, they still are damned cute.

Edit: Something very amusing: I just walked by the other room and saw one roommate, headphones on and oblivious, looking at pictures of My Little Ponies online. I quickly snuck back to my room, grabbed my camera, and tiptoed back to take pictures of this...but they didn't come out, thanks to it being my crappy digital camera. Ah well. I've definitely started something with all this. Our suite now has a total of 12 ponies, only half of which are mine.

So when I complain about things to A., he keeps telling me to "go to my happy place" and "think about the ponies," and came up with this really cool image that I'm going to try to make in Photoshop, namely the knife pony. It's just a pony, running around and slashing people up with the knife it carries deftly in its mouth. The knife could even be an übercool double-sided knife, much like Darth Maul's lightsaber, for extra slashing action. If you couldn't tell, I'm pretty psyched about this new development in ponies.

The other thing I keep meaning to make in Photoshop is this image of a sorority-girl centaur, complete with the requisite tight black polyester-nylon–blend flares or tight cotton-blend khaki flares over a big horse ass, with one of those huge overly-wide "hippie" belts connected to a saddle. Its torso will be covered (just barely) by a too-tight baby t-shirt or tank top, and it'll have huge clomping platform loafers with 3-plus-inch heels where the hooves ought to be. That's what these chicks remind me of—they look like horses, what with the push-up bras that accentuate their busts and their huge freshman 15 butts stuffed into too-tight flares that make their legs look horse-like, going back and then bending forward right below the knee in the shape of a short-topped number "7" the way horse legs do. They clomp about, whining [sic] and neighing loudly at other sorority types...

Third equine item of the day: last night I got two of my roommates to play ponies with me. Yes, yes, I know, I'm absolutely nuts. But I decided to gallop a pony into their room and have it say hello to all of 'em, and pretty soon we'd all grabbed our ponies and were having them say dialogue from various books, including a couple Lord of the Rings series books and (my contribution) Machiavelli's The Prince. Eventually one decided that perhaps we should just have our ponies talk to each other, rather than reading the words of others, so we put on accents and high-pitched voices and had our ponies get to know each other. Eventually they heard a voice come from thin air, that of our third roommate, and concluded that she must be a god, so they pranced about on one roommate's green-blanketed bed (a nice meadow for 'em, really) and talked about the god and linguistics and other sophisticated topics ponies probably weren't meant to know about. Despite how silly it sounds, it was pretty fun. Whenever Roommate No. 3 gets pictures put up, I'll steal 'em and perhaps post a few.

Enough with the horses and ponies, though. I keep complaining about how the people in my Argumentation class never take notes and veritably refuse to answer questions posed, sitting instead in stony silence. I finally got annoyed enough by it that I actually mentioned it to the professor after class. He acknowledged that it was problematic, but didn't seem to see any way around it. Yesterday's class, however, was definitely interesting, with discussion centering around Susan Sontag's New Yorker article from just after 9/11 and Deborah Tannen's article "Public Discourse Or Shouting Match?" I think he got the point, bringing in something more people would actually want to talk about, although the annoying girls, Kelly and Meredith, still said a whole lot of nothing all 1.5 hours of class.

Another suggestion of mine recently implemented was the revolutionary idea I suggested awhile back to the head of the computer lab: How about we set the computers not to save AutoComplete data? A couple of weeks ago they fixed that, so now the computers save nothing by default. Another victory for me, eh?

In other news, I got to experience a reporter's shoddy reporting methods firsthand, as one sent out this email to the current president of Campus Girl Scouts:

"Subject: fwd: GIRL SCOUTS!!! assignment sheet

my editor seems extra excited about this story =) get back to me as soon as you can.

* has anyone signed up to join your group? (if so i need contact info for them for quotes)

* when is your first girl scouting activity?

* will you guys be getting badges?

* will you sell me tag-a-longs? thin-mints?

* is the group OSA recognised?

* what's your motivation for starting up the org. on campus?

* what's your own scouting history?

* and probably most importantly ... is this the REAL girl scouts?

THANK YOU!!"

Ugh. The questions are hackneyed, stereotyped, with a feature-y bent. That approach is supposed to make it "interesting" and "palatable" to a general audience that's "too cool" for Girl Scouts, seeing it as a decadent, 1950s let's-bake-brownies-and-talk-about-boys group. That approach, therefore, really just deprecates the whole Campus Girl Scout endeavor. Also, it makes the reporter herself look bad when she assumes that students' general intelligence and attention levels are so low that they won't be interested in a story about Girl Scouts unless it involves cookies and badges and a low turnout.

Further, the email itself doesn't look at all professional, as it appears that she simply hit "forward" when her editor sent her the assignment, filling in the blanks with questions. Not only that, but the grammar is questionable and the punctuation nonexistent. This is how our paper gets a bad name—reporters like this. (This girl happens to also be one of my former roommate's current suitemates, and she's one of the reporters who had s/he pronoun reference problems in her articles...)

So that's the email she sent out. After the club president answered her questions—showing a considerable amount of patience on her part, might I add, given the insinuations they bore—the reporter sent this email to all the current Campus Girl Scouts members, again simply hitting forward, leaving all the previous emails attached (hence how I had occasion to see the one she sent out to the president, as well as the president's response):

"hey everyone - i'm writing an article for the newspaper about the campus girl scouts and [the president] gave me your names because you had shown interest in being part of the organization. if any of you would like, please respond back with:

- your reason for joining

- what you hope to get out of your involvement with campus girl scouts

- your class

please respond asap - i need quotes by thursday!!

thanks,

[the reporter]"

Now, sure, as a young group just starting out, it's always good to get coverage, but that doesn't mean we're starving for attention or that she's granting us any favors by covering the story. "I need quotes by Thursday!!" is not a tactful way of covering a story. It's not even a thorough way of covering a story. This is the one of the major problems with her approach—instead of shaping the article around information we could give her, she does the standard PR thing, approaching the group head for the "real" information, then asking group members for sound bites. We're simply more quotes to tack onto the end of the article, so much chattel to be used as she wishes. This is not how reporting is supposed to be done.

Things like this make me see why the paper's editor is against email interviews—when done improperly like this, email casts an aura of disrepute about the proceedings. I still think that when done properly, emails can be far more accurate and inclusive than in-person interviews, as one doesn't have to painfully transcribe a conversation, only to discard most of it, nor is there the possibility of getting brushed off like there is with in-person interviews. Email goes neatly from the inbox to the Word document, and many, like myself, communicate far more effectively through the written word, especially many of the academic types we interview. Yet this is ridiculous.

Luckily, I didn't have to reply with some hastily constructed answer, as I work for the paper. Reporters are greatly discouraged from interviewing fellow staff members—another strike against this chick. She really should have checked that before clicking "forward." Here's my reply:

"Hi,
I'd definitely respond about Campus Girl Scouts, but I'm a fellow staff member of the paper, and as you know, we try to avoid having staff members interviewed by other staff members for articles. Ask your editor, though - if s/he says it's fine, I may respond to your questions.

Thanks,
[Me]
Copy Chief"

Of course, that was really just me baiting her—if her editor had said she could interview me, I'd have brought this to the editor-in-chief's attention immediately. As it is, I still think I'm going to forward this set of emails to him for his perusal, as much as it might set back my cause (promoting email interviews) in the short term. This can't go on.

Another fun email I received just yesterday was a 455K behemoth from Southpaw, the liberal newsletter here on campus. (Technically it's a newspaper, but they only print once a semester, and it's not in tabloid form, but rather in the form of a stapled booklet. Hence it's closer to a newsletter than a paper.) I deleted it without looking at it, as I needed to save my inbox, then immediately sent off a reply complaining:

"Please do NOT send out unsolicited 455K emails anymore. That's completely unacceptable. If I can't leave for an hour without having my inbox annihilated by some behemoth email you get it into your head to send out to everyone on the list, there's something wrong. You can send out an email asking that everyone who wants your 455K email reply and then you'll send it to them, but otherwise, that's completely uncalled for."

They responded rather inappropriately (though predictably) with this curt missive, saying that they'd do me a favor and take me off the list for the good of all:

"We're sorry for any inconvenience we may have caused you, we've been having some trouble with this account. We usually send out emails to all those who signed up at the activities fair and other events, like the Dems meeting, where we passed around a sign-up sheet. We will remove you from the list to avoid any further inconveniences.

-Southpaw Board"

I knew they were going to do that. I didn't specifically ask to be taken off their list, and they know it. Yes, I know, who needs treacherous dogs like me on the list, anyway? They probably think I'm spying on them, that I'm going to steal their secrets and publish them. To a certain extent they may be correct, as I certainly do watch the list emails for bits worthy of mention. I'm not a spy, however, and I signed up at the activities fair just like the others did. There are dozens of people on that list, and considering the trouble they have getting the paper out even once per semester, I doubt many of them show up to meetings, either. This "trouble" they're having with their account is probably about as legitimate as the "trouble" the newspaper had with its email list last summer. In any case, my reply:

"Well, I didn't ask to be removed from the list. I like reading the emails. If you want to exclude me from the list, so be it, but don't couch it as something I asked for. I did sign up at the activities fair, and though I haven't been to a meeting, I'm keeping the option open.

;)

Please don't remove me from the list. I just asked that you don't send out huge files unsolicited to list members. I'm sure I'm not the only one who was inconvenienced by this."

I know this string of replies is probably getting tiresome, so I'll spare you the commentary and give you their final reply:

"Sorry again and we'll keep you on the list. There have been a few interesting developments this week that led us to writing large emails to the group and, as you know, it's definately not the norm. We're acutally working on developing a website and discussion board to avoid large group emails in the future. We're accepting submissions for the final issue of the semseter (deadline dec 1.) If you're interested in writing or production work for this issue, please let us know.

-Southpaw Board"

Finally. Problem solved, progress made, and we all get to move on. It took so much work to get to that point...

I was searching for university-related blogs today, and instead happened upon this, a thread started in the forums at Free Republic bashing Shawn Redden and explaining why he was banned from the site. Apparently someone on there used an article of his as an example of unclear thinking of one sort or another, and he wrote back a biting email denouncing the site and its denizens and asking them to remove his works from their site.

The first post in the thread contains the text of his email and a brief explanation, after which follow 299 posts bashing Redden, the newspaper, the university, and various spelling errors. I posted a fairly well-received response, post #301, after reading the entire thread and coming to the conclusion that someone needed to rebut their arguments against the newspaper:

"'Lo FReepers. I'm the current copy chief of the newspaper here at the university, and I, too, recognize that the paper isn't the best that it could be. I would, however, like to address some of the things that've been said so far in this thread. I've seen a lot of assumptions made about the newspaper, the university, and our stance on Shawn Redden (a male, by the way), and while some of those assumptions are completely correct, others are far from the truth.

Here's the deal: we students don't like reading Shawn Redden's drivel any more than you do. Just reading through the hundreds of posts in this thread, I've learned a lot more about the guy's motivations, so now I feel even more justified in having written this letter to the editor (of my own paper, yes) a while back telling Redden to, in short, shut up:

[my letter to the editor here]

This was published in an issue a while back, and apparently acquaintances have taken to mocking him, asking him things like, "Are those noodles you're eating fascist noodles, Shawn?"

In any case, here's the deal with the newspaper. Yes, it's somewhat of a crappy college rag. Despite our $350,000/year budget, incorporated status, and paid editorial staff, we still hardly meet bottom-barrel standards. This year we increased the number of times the paper is published, but it still only comes out three times a week. When I visited this university during my senior year of high school, I picked up a copy of the paper, leafed through it, then copy-edited it then and there. (Believe me, it used to be worse.) I decided that when I came here, I'd try to make the paper better. I started writing for the paper last fall, and since then I've moved up through the ranks of contributing reporter, staff reporter, and copy editor to occupy the position of copy chief (a new position this year, actually, created so that I could have leeway to critique the paper and rip it apart each production night). I work hard to get the paper even in as good of shape as you see it now.

I'm not, however, responsible for the website that many of you have had occasion to visit. I apologize—that actually used to look good and load better than it does now, in contrast to the improvement seen in the rest of the paper's endeavors.

A few more things: 1. We're not under the umbrella of the university, so your tax dollars don't fund us. I'm pretty sure we subsist on advertising revenues, though I could be wrong. In any case, we've been an independent corporation since 1995, though our offices are still on campus in a space that's traditionally been ours. 2. The university is in St. Louis, Mo., not the Pacific Northwest. 3. I'm also pretty sure that authors retain the copyright to their works. The newspaper retains the right to edit submissions for content, etc., so perhaps in their edited form submissions might be considered the paper's property, but otherwise we can do what we want with our articles. 4. We at the paper don't particularly like Redden—but we respect his right to foam at the mouth and rant pointlessly if he wants. That and the opinion section is article-starved.

As copy chief, I'm trying to make the paper better, but for better or worse, the paper will only be as good as its writers are. At best, it's still a college newspaper. There's no getting around that. For some reason we've got a particularly awful crop of writers at the moment, and we're top-heavy, with too many good writers simply occupying berths in editorial positions. So it goes, for now.

I realize that not all of you care about the paper aside from the fact that we provide space for Shawn Redden's rants, but I wanted to clarify those few issues. Thanks for reading."

That was fun. Replies thus far include:

"This alum of the Wash U. law school thanks you for your post."

"Hello.

Thank you for your post! I hope you didn't get the idea that we paint everybody there at the university with the same broad brush we used to lambaste Shawn. I think we all know he's a bit farther out than most folks there."

"Very well written! It appears that the paper does have something going for it. A little thing you may want to pass on to Herr Redden in regards to:

Who are these "corrupt, hypocritical, religious fundamentalist, crypto-fascist war profiteers"?

Please remind him to include neanderthal in his description of conservatives.

We worked hard to earn that title and I'm a little hurt that he can't be bothered to throw one more little adjective in there.

Thanks!

I think I definitely made more of an effort to maintain consciousness last year. My roommate made fun of me when all I did was sit in front of my computer, so to avoid their stares I'd just leave and find something else to do. I felt like my roommate would make fun of me if I sang along with my music, so I made an extra effort to sing whenever possible when I wasn't in the room. This year I started out just fine, coming off summer...sweet summer. Lately, though, I just avoid. "The best way to avoid responsibility is to say 'I've got responsibilities,'" said R. Bach—and he was right.

Unconsciousness, as I call it, has come back to visit, hot on the heels of inertia. After all, it takes a hell of a lot less effort to stay inertial, sitting here in my vaulted frame of reference. I'm not altogether certain I could muster the effort to do many real things, anyway, what with the toil and struggle of staying up late for the newspaper and still getting up for 9 a.m. Latin—yet this way lies inertia and unconsciousness. "Where go? What do? Sleep," advises Kerouac.

The escape into oblivion is nice, and really, it becomes necessary when I've got so much work I'm neglecting. If I didn't escape, how could I face myself? Then again, the oblivion contributes to this whole cycle. Alas, paying attention to things takes effort, hence it's a lot more efficient to just sit here and take things as they come rather than starting real things in real life.

So much of my life right now is molded by old unconsciousness, come back to bite me hello when I'm least expecting it. Some of my friends, I think, could just be warm and unconscious and happy in their dark basements messing with the computer, playing video games, and cuddling forever. It's dangerously seductive, that life. To live like they do is to live outside of convention, as outside things no longer matter. Food, computer, darkness, warmth...what else is necessary? Well, it's fleeting, neh? The self is mutable in that sort of atmosphere—which is part of its appeal, no doubt—but then what?

"Water hyacinth—named by a poet—imitation of life. Like a koi in a frozen pond, like a goldfish in a bowl...I don't want to hear you cry..." "You want the greatest thing, the greatest thing since bread came sliced. You've got it all, you've got it sized, like a friday fashion show teenager freezing in the corner, trying to look like you don't try..." "I'll save a prayer for you, so lost and longing to be dragged through dirty streets, wrapped up in clean white sheets...and if you think they'll watch you now, well, you should know they won't..." "Rain falls on everyone, the same old rain...and I'm just trying to walk with you between the raindrops..."