Do horses even exist in the wild anymore? If so, where?

Time and time again I realize what a wonderful thing it is that Yahoo! Mail doesn't include, right next to the link to one's inbox, a little link that says "Empty Inbox." Stuff like that gives me hope.

As far as I'm concerned, W.I.L.D. is like high school or junior-high dances: At first, you go for the experience of going. You hope that people you know will show up. But eventually you figure out that 1. it's always a crappy experience, 2. none of your friends ever show up, 3. the music is always bad, and 4. the people who have fun there have fun for a reason—they're all too drunk to know where they are.

In this case, it's been rainy and freezing cold for three W.I.L.D.s in a row now, the bands/"artists" have sucked for three in a row, and although I like free pizza, that's not necessarily a valid reason to go...

An update for the curious among you: I have met the enemy, and it is the eyes of other people.

Not really—that's a line attributed to Ben Franklin, and I didn't really meet the enemy, I met a chick who's quite another thing entirely, namely awesome. That and resourceful—she found my site, then emailed me:

"Good stuff, but I was a little dismayed at the fact that you hadn't posted since you "discovered" me. I'm interested to know if I am evil, etc :)"

In a word, no. She didn't even seem to mind that I pointed out flawed words used in the experiment she was running, including "hoove, "larch," "vult," "toile," and "shat" as nonwords, despite the fact that they're all either actual words in English, foreign words (e.g. "vult"—Latin for "he/she/it wills it," as in the phrase "Deus vult"), or words that are close enough to being real words in English that they'd give a normal reader pause.

I wonder how many politicians actually write their own speeches, esp. among the higher-profile ones.

The phrase "to post" is beginning to seem self-evident to me, obviously meaning "to write a new post in my blog". The rest of the world, though, isn't necessarily so clear on that. Grf. I'm becoming part of the blog culture—hopefully, though, I'm not going to get politicians knocking at my door. Some magazines now even publish "politically relevant" snippets of blogs, which I'm not a fan of. By granting those people attention of that sort, they're just making it so that politicians everywhere perk up their ears, thinking, "If only I can conquer the 'blogosphere.'" Hence blogging becomes just another tool, another piece of the political machinery the pundits can use to "keep it real." Yech.

It's also occurred to me lately (again—it's occurred to me before, but now the thoughts are being shown correct in real-life testing) that the way I write in this blog is more reflective of my internal way of speaking to myself than any other mode of communication on my part. Hence I curse more in here than I ever do in normal conversation, am more critical of people/things/everything than in normal conversation, and express more of the vagaries of my personal writing shorthand than I would were I writing for class or even for clarity in person-to-person conversation/chat. This is about all the disclaimer I'm going to give, however, as that's simply how I write to myself. Though I'm well aware that I have an ever-growing audience, I need to write like that to maintain the verity of this little endeavor, lest I stray into a more impersonal mode of speaking/writing.

I probably sound bitter/biting/critical/evil/sarcastic at times, and that's as it should be. Few get to hear the gears creaking in my mind quite so clearly as those who read this or engage in meaningful conversation with me on a regular basis.

This from the RIAA website:

"WASHINGTON (September 8, 2003) -The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) announced today that its member companies have filed the first wave of what could ultimately be thousands of civil lawsuits against major offenders who have been illegally distributing substantial amounts (averaging more than 1,000 copyrighted music files each) of copyrighted music on peer- to-peer networks."

My question: how can "more than 1,000" be an average of any kind? An average, by definition, exists between two given points...hence "averaging between such-and-such and such-and-such number." What they probably meant to say was "generally sharing more than 1,000...files each." They don't really give other people the benefit of the doubt, though, so I don't think that courtesy is extended to them.

'Tis not for me to judge, but truly, if such things happen, there must be a special place reserved in hell for Hilary Rosen and her cronies...

Good one, RIAA.

I think a goal in life should be to not have to say, "Oh, I have that shirt, too!" Worse, though, is when someone says, "Oh, I used to have that shirt...no, really, it's cute." Heh. This is why one should shop at places that're off the beaten path—not to mention just doing things in general that are off the beaten path.

Ah, glorious Greek Week. This is the time when one can immediately discern many of the campus' users and abusers from more pleasant folk simply by noting the ugly, colorful shirts they wear that loudly proclaim, "It's not easy being Greek."

I found one of those shirts, a bright yellow-orange one, lying on a path outside the dorm last night. I laid it atop of one of those concrete bollards before going to copy edit, figuring that if it were still there when I got back, I'd take it. (If someone's paying so little attention that they drop a new shirt, I reason, they probably don't care too much about it. Either that or they're a negligent, neglectful person in general, in which case they don't deserve to live. I kid...) A few hours, much copy editing, and some time spent in Rutledge later, it was still there, and now it's mine. Ah, the things I could do with it.

Also, again with overhearing things that I didn't think real people actually said to one another in common parlance: On the path to the student center, I witnessed some guy loudly greeting his friend with, "'Sup, fucker?!" Why calling a friend "fucker" is necessary, I don't know. I guess he got tired of the more tame "man," "dude," or even the satirical "yo."

So I'm sitting here, trying to work on embedding links in an earlier post, and this guy who works here first comes around and just slams the chair next to me into the table, not seeming to notice that it's loud, then does the same thing with the rest of the chairs that haven't been pushed in here across the computer lab. He then sits down across this divider from me and starts going on and on and on to the guy next to him about a sandwich he got and whether it was a 6-inch sandwich or not, and something about cheese steaks and how great those are. After that, he starts talking about pro wrestling and how, "If you can't beat 'em, go with 'em...if you can't beat 'em, go with 'em," repeating that glorious gem of wisdom and probably nodding. Thankfully I couldn't see him past the ugly, time-stained Dell monitor he was sitting behind.

Soon he's going on and on about someone who's "leavin' on Sunday...so-and-so's gotta do blah blah on Sunday...catchin' up..." in this horrible old-man voice he's got on him, despite being rather young.

I hate people, especially the kind of people you find in the computer lab. I'm here because I figured I could waste some time posting before going over to get luncha—I can afford the leisure, 'cause I don't have class again until 2 p.m. today. So yeah, I'm quiet, don't bother other people, don't talk to random people over people's heads like so many in this lab do...Shut up! No one cares about your paper! It's not interesting, and you don't really find it interesting to talk about—you just want to show off the fact that you can cobble together random facts at the last minute and sound all impressive "debating" stuff. But you're not debating anything, as a debate implies two sides. What you're doing is comparing notes, comparing facts, and showing off that you know about something that no one's at all interested in and that you'll forget long before you get out of here.

You know the tone of voice that the guy's boss in Office Space talks in? "We-ell...you know, we can't do that..." That ingratiating simper? This is where these kids start to develop it. It's the business-school mentality that pervades even the natural sciences here—gotta sound like an expert, gotta sound old and jaded, gotta be the "go-to" guy, the guy who knows it all. That's right, kid, roll your voice in your throat. You'll need that practice for when you're older.

"I dunno, I'm gonna take off..."

"Do you have Praxis today? I have a seminar from 7 to 10 tonight...need to write my paper..."

"I'm gonna fail blah blah..."

"Yeah, I know, [me too], but nobody knows anything about this shit anyway, only about 50 people in this school something something..."

"Alright, dude, I'll see ya around..."

"Alright...later, man."

Yay for stupid, gross generalizations. Yay for that goddamned electric stapler that's louder than the chair that guy slammed into the table next to me.

I had this dream where it was a Friday or Saturday night and I was hanging out with some MSAers my age and younger along with, for some reason, Paul Zee-Cheng. Paul and I were unfolding this giant chess mat over on the IM fields so we could play giant human checkers. For some reason, I just knew I had to hurry up so I could get somewhere, and at one point I looked at my or someone else's watch (I don't have a wristwatch here with me in real life) and realized it was about 1 a.m. I'd told them a minute before that, "Oh, I'd probably better get going, you know, I need to sleep for awhile before this newspaper training session," and they were disappointed that I was leaving. So when I heard that it was 1 a.m. already, I said I'd just stay there and stay up, since the training session was at 2 a.m....
"Strange, the things y'notice when the walls're closin' in&mash;the walls're closin' in on me today..."

Ah, the reasons C. Samudra Haddad is both wonderful and mysterious at once: Exposition class site.

Rebecca found the curt, biting little exchange we had yesterday on the way to see Lost in Translation noteworthy. As she says,
"We went out spur-of-the-moment last night to see Lost in Translation, which made me cry...and which I liked very much. To get there, we drove all around Forest Park first, arrived late but before the beginning, and experienced a hint of how bad things could get if she and I ever decided to be angry with one another. I hate being late, and was tired. She is tired of being sick, and also tired. I was careless with tone-of-voice, and she snapped right back at me. I was a bit taken aback for a moment. Her roommate knows my moods, but most people here are surprised or confused when I wear myself to the fringes of my temper and become curt and grim."

Heh. I wasn't so much tired of being sick as I was of driving in a huge circle trying to get back to where I knew we were going all along, seeing as we went the wrong way at first. Since none of us had ever been to the theater before, I was worried about making it there before the movie started. It's an art-house theater, after all, and so I didn't know how long the previews would last.

That, and it's fun to snap back once in awhile. People don't really expect that of me anymore...I'm too nice these days.

Shall I change my font size? As one wise blogger once said, a general rule of layouts is that you'll get sick of your own layout long before others do. That's probably about right in this case.