"'Oh! Oh! Oh! That is so good!', said the callipygian Aldonza to her creator, Miguel de Cervantes, whose flowing dark hair billowed in the breeze as he ardently made love to her on the rough wood of the tavern table."

A friend and I (the friend wishes to remain anonymous) decided, in a very convoluted conversation, that we needed to find Miguel de Cervantes slash fiction that used the word 'callipygian'. Upon failing to find any, it was of course necessary to create some.

I'm boarding at Epsilon Theta for the summer, and I'm really enjoying it so far. It's a really nice house, and I generally like the way things are done. There are only a couple inconveniences -- my laptop isn't playing nice with the house's internet for some reason, and all my stuff is still in boxes in the front hall because I'm waiting for people to move out of my room before I move in.

Notably, it's almost impossible to find complete privacy in the house. Incomplete privacy can be found aplenty -- if you appear to be working or not feeling particularly social, people don't bother you. But basically the only places you have complete privacy are the bathrooms and in your bed at night (to some extent; the bedroom is communal). I was worried about that, but it actually seems to be beneficial, though I need more data before I can draw conclusions.

When other people are around, it's a lot harder for me to get into positive feedback loops of despair. Or, hmm, I still get into them but the gain is <1 instead of >1, so they dissipate quickly instead of building up. Partly through this apparent effect and partly through conscious effort, I'm more productive and more socially open (whee, let's play board games with people I don't actually know that well!).

We'll see how well this pattern holds up when I start getting stressed.

I have been very remiss in communicating with many friends. (Especially those not on Zephyr......)

Since I have recently been inspired to try and write more beautiful prose, I thought I'd also write more letters.

This is an open invite: comment with your address (comments screened), or email me it, and I'll send you something.

However much I may look back and think how easy it has been, it has not been easy. It has been a struggle. And it will continue to be a struggle.

No one should expect the improvement to be monotonic. It will be N steps forward, M steps back, with the values of N and M varying often.

Just because I felt like absolute shit today does not mean I have gone back to square one. I'm only oscillating.

I raise a tankard to self and sanity.

My laptop had been getting slow, had been hanging more often on ~routine tasks, had required more hard restarts than before. It's been two years since I got the thing. I figured I'd try reinstalling the OS and see if I couldn't make it all perky like it used to be.

Honestly, I didn't have much to complain about, and now I'm starting to think the OS reinstall was a bad idea. I basically made a lot of work for myself (backing up and then restoring all of my stuff) for not that much noticeable benefit. It still hangs (and still takes forever to bring up the Force Quit dialog), and mysteriously chokes when I'm trying to install some applications. Why, o cruel world?

So now I'm wondering what the real issue is. I think, originally, my laptop first started to get slow and hangy after I dropped it on the floor one time (although oddly enough, I had dropped it several times before then, from greater heights, with no noticeable effect). Now wondering what the best course of action would be. I guess it was only a matter of time before I had to deal with customer service.

I dreamed the other night that I failed 6.00. "How could that have happened, my pset grades must have been a lot worse than I thought, how did I manage to fail the final, isn't this required for course 20, what will happen if I try and convince them to let it slide because I know Python anyway, etc etc etc"

Just to make sure, I checked my grade report. All my grades are fine.

*laugh*

Augh, finals.
Augh, book exchange.
Augh, moving all my stuff.
Augh, other student-group-officer-transition things.

That is all.

Augh.

I'm getting back to CA the night of Fri 5/22, and leaving the morning of 6/12.

I do not yet have any fixed engagements, except I'll be busy on 6/10.

We should meet up.

...or, in my case, stainless steel rat.

Skipped Ring Delivery (meh, parties) and got it today in Lobby 10 with the absolute minimum of fanfare.

I don't have a camera, but if you're so inclined you can see the design at http://twentyeleven.mit.edu/ring/design.html

It fits on either my left middle or right ring fingers. Not entirely sure where to put it. For now I've put it on my left middle, because that way I get to look at the class shank, which I like. I might change my mind.

It's kind of... big and heavy, I suppose. Not so much that it's unsightly or anything, but it's kind of an adjustment. I'm used to my little silver triring (which I have taken off since it seems to be cracking). So it's weird that suddenly my left middle finger has all this extra inertia. Also, I can't play with the rat nearly as much as I could with my triring.

I've been getting a head start on consuming all my perishable food before I have to leave for 3 weeks. So I searched through the hall fridges looking for some lunch to make.

Obviously, the solution was a curry-paste-and-mozzarella-cheese omelette with hummus on top.

OM NOM NOMLETTE.

In other news, I think I'm getting better at this whole omelette-making thing.

In other other news, the tag "iron chef wtf" (which I stole word-for-word from saizai) finally makes sense now that I've actually seen an episode of Iron Chef.

I have been in this cubicle in the student center for nearly 10 hours, barring a few minutes to get lunch. Working with a group on our thermodynamics project. It's been an interesting experience. Pro tip: panicking does no good.

Have packed up and made notes necessary to continue doing work elsewhere (wrote down what's on the whiteboard). We're done generating results and now just a few bits of the paper need to be finished and then the whole thing edited. I have a meeting in ten minutes.

Oddly enough, I am not actually that tired or hungry.

My literature prof is a fan of looking up words in the dictionary and citing their definitions in papers. I think it's rather silly, but oh well. So I looked up "vermin" and "monster" using the oed command on Athena (MIT's Unix-like system)... and then wondered how to cite it. There are accepted citation formats for print dictionaries and online dictionaries, but there doesn't seem to be one for command-line dictionaries.

"Vermin". Defs. 1a and b. OED on Athena. Oxford University Press. <athena% oed vermin>

I have finally found a source material for which I am absolutely certain no standard MLA citation format exists.

Of course, if I cared, I could dig deep and find out where the oed command is sourcing from, and cite that. But it might be more important to, y'know, actually write the paper.

Slight rant warning.

Floor Pi's kitchen is a lot cleaner and better stocked than some other kitchens I've seen. It's certainly better than Next House's stove-in-the-basement-with-nothing-else. But people fail at keeping it clean. For crying out loud, if you spill tomato sauce on the counter, wipe it up! I'm willing to bet your kitchen at home doesn't have week-old tomato sauce spilled everywhere. And the messes on communal stuff (stoves, counters, etc) don't get cleaned up, I guess because people think they only have to take responsibility for their personal utensils. (Not that they do a great job of that, either.)

JoeG (house manager) has a blog, I am Fix-It, on which he occasionally posts relevant information about water shutdowns, renovations, and dorm-wide activities. It was fairly widely advertised when he started it, and I read everything posted on it. But it doesn't sound like many other people do -- several times I've seen emails to ec-discuss asking questions whose answers were announced in a timely manner on the blog.

Although, perhaps it's understandable that a lot of people don't read it, given that half of its content seems to be passive-aggressive rebukes of EC residents for being self-absorbed and incapable of cleaning up after themselves. There's quite a bit of truth to the assertions, but this is really not a viable way of communicating them to residents.

When you do something and leave a mess, you are not done until you've cleaned that shit up. Likewise, if your house manager is consistently irritated with your collective behavior, you don't breed resentment, you communicate and fix the issue and reach a compromise. What is people's problem with these concepts???

One of the reasons I'm thinking about ILGs is that they actually appear to care about their houses (and about their communities). It's expected that residents devote a non-negligible amount of time to cleaning and maintenance. Plus things like ET's van runs that aren't related to the physical house, but serve the community. It's a duty and an honor and it's normal. Not a one-time imposition that's disgusting and certainly never to be repeated, oh no. People around here seem to expect the kitchen to stay clean forever if they clean it once.

Now, whether it's worth it to try and change a place for the better, or to jump ship to somewhere that appears better but that I don't actually know all that well? Sigh. When I lived in Next House, I idealized EC. Now I'm on the point of giving up on it and idealizing someplace else. This won't ever end, will it.

Why am I *more* stressed/hosed in a week when I have *fewer* tests?

The second round of tests is upon us. Cry hosage and let slip the hounds of... something. This time, I have only four assessments (three tests and a paper) spread over two weeks, instead of five assessments in one week like it was last time. So I'm kind of confused about why I feel more stressed this time than last time.

It could be because there's still regular homework assignments going on (albeit somewhat fewer than in a normal two-week period), plus an APOc issue. These are time-consuming. I'm strongly tempted to (partially) punt the current thermo homework. Note to self: world will not end if I only half-complete one pset. First term of freshman year, I gave myself the rule that I was allowed to completely punt one pset per class per semester. I haven't quite been keeping track of my adherence to that rule since then, but I think I've approximately kept to it. I just have to keep remembering that punting one pset will not cause me to fail the course and fail at everything forever. Especially in thermo, where the two lowest homework grades are dropped. Sigh. Need to be less neurotic.

I've also applied for help in completing the APOc issue. This kills two birds with one stone. If people answer the call, I'll be able to fob off the laborious formatting work onto them, and at the same time I'll be propagating knowledge of how to do the APOc (necessary for clean officer transitions, and something I've been promising to do since the beginning of the semester).

Just spent day cleaning my room. There is now substantially less crap cluttering my floor, and the space under my bed and in my bookshelf is being used more efficiently. Also, I made spreadsheets of my books (not that many, actually) and my sheet music collection (surprisingly large!). You can see them in my Public. No, I'm not wasting time being OCD, what are you talking about?

Also, one for the record books: I am using my laptop at my desk for the first time in many moons! I even have a laptop stand! It's still far from ergonomically perfect, but we'll see how it works out. Since I got so used to using my bed as a laptop desk, I may just keep doing that and reserve the desk for working with pen and paper.

There's still quite a bit of reorganizing needs to be done, and I could stand to give away a lot of stuff, but it looks better already.

( Story cut for length )

Pro tip!

NOTE: The following procedure has been recommended by the PHLS to render kidney, and other, beans safe for consumption:

Soak in water for at least 5 hours.
Pour away the water.
Boil briskly in fresh water, with occasional stirring, for at least 10 minutes.
Undercooked beans may be more toxic than raw beans.

I haven't gotten up the motivation to go grocery shopping yet. So, with what I had lying around, I give you: Curry Pineapple Walnut Rice!

Put rice in a rice cooker. Add a decent dollop of curry powder/paste of choice. Add canned pineapple chunks (drain and rinse first; I neglected to do this, and it's overly sweet). Cook as normal. Stir in some walnuts after.

This is an interesting idea. The walnuts were an afterthought, but I think they really add a lot. Could use some onions and raisins and chickpeas, of course. It's very very easy, though (yay for automatic rice cookers!). We'll see what I do with it.

ETA: it's good with yogurt. (But don't add the yogurt till after you microwave it, if you're eating it the next day!)

Went to LCC3 this weekend. It was shiny in many ways. If you didn't go, you should check out the stuff under "Program, posters & slides" at right. What I found particularly interesting (all PDF links): Early Central Mountain Ordinal-Aspectual-Modal System, Alex and Sai's Gripping Language, the Rikchik gesture language, and Kelen Ceremonial Interlace Alphabet.

Focus this time seemed to be on orthographies and conlanging-in-art, rather than on more technical linguistic stuff. Not sure how I feel about that. Certainly the displays were beautiful and interesting.

Was good to see old friends and make new ones. Am now collaborating with some people on a project to develop a better vocabulary to describe smells. First steps: researching smell at the chemical and perceptual levels, and looking at various languages' existing smell terminology.

Also learning lojban. We'll see how that goes. It's very gratifying so far.

I used to use an iGoogle page for all my blog reading. It was fine while I read (1) relatively few things that (2) updated at a reasonable pace. I could tell what I'd read before because the link would be purple instead of blue.

But no longer. I've added a lot of blogs that update once per month, or >10 times per day, both of which are annoying to use with iGoogle. So, off to Google Reader.

There are some things I already like: you can rename feeds, and you can put them in multiple folders at once. (Why not just call them tags or categories or labels?? Folders is the completely wrong metaphor here!) We'll see how it works out.

ETA: next up will probably be moving all my email OFF gmail... sigh... does anyone know how to do this without my having to retag / refolder every single message??

I am done. I took four tests and wrote an essay this week (three tests since 5pm yesterday). I'm pretty sure I did decently on all of them -- the one grade I've gotten back already is good.

I am SO DONE!!!! \m/ \m/

It's good to know I can handle this level of psychological hosage. It's not that I had to spend untold hours working on stuff (no all-nighters), though I did spend a lot of time studying of course. Mostly, it's intimidating to have five large assessments in a week, and now that I've successfully handled this sort of week, perhaps I'll have an easier time handling ordinary weeks.

Plus, spending a week in "must tool all the time" state will probably be good for my baseline work ethic. For example, I've gotten used to using LeechBlock. I block most of my main time-sink websites 8:30am-5pm weekdays, 12-5pm weekends, and 2am-8am every night. As a result, rather than obsessively checking my RSS feeds and entertainment sites every hour because I'm a little bit bored, I go work (or socialize) -- and then when I do check my websites, it's a treat, and I don't even check them all anymore. (Granted, I sometimes cheat and use Safari to get to LJ when I'm not supposed to, but that takes effort, so I typically only do it when I have something particular to do.)