No Use For A Title

Not much to report, as usual. I've spent the last few hours off and on refreshing the online grade report thing to see what I got in my last two of five classes. The other three are A's, the last two will be A/B and B/C, respectively.

In other news, my brother got into a fight at school. Because he no longer lives in Cleveland, there was only time for 1-2 hits to be exchanged either way, and still they both get $100+ fines. I suppose the theory behind this mockery of justice* is that one's parents will be supremely unhappy with the fine, thus preventing anyone from becoming a bully, or from fighting back against such a being if one presented itself. Of course, that won't work on us**; we'll continue to defend ourselves against people like that.^

I believe him for once when he says that he didn't start it and tried not to get into a fight in the first place: his favorite cousin wasn't there (he wouldn't need backup, but they're both generally more prone to acting on bad ideas in the other's presence***), and there were 4 of them. Luckily, he isn't as strong as the aforementioned cousin, so we won't have to sprint him out of the state and enroll him in a new school district to avoid the ramifications inherent in collapsing someone's eye socket with a punch.^^ (I found that whole situation hilarious, myself.)



*[Warning: The Ramble Engine may go into overdrive for this note. You were warned.] When I was his age and my location, the schools just let us go when we felt like fighting, unless the teacher present (if any) had a vested interest in seeing someone get their ass kicked. In that case, they may have even jumped in; I recall a Biology teacher having to wear a cast for a pretty long time because of a hand injury he sustained in hitting a student. Repeatedly. Ah, the good old days.

Of course, that whole school was crazy, and even my crazy ass was unable to avoid getting into the mandatory 1-2 fights a year. They were almost always 1-on-1; if more people were present, they would either watch or pair off with someone else. (I have little experience fighting in Cleveland outside of school, so I imagine the dynamics were/are different.) The reason they didn't just jump and maul niggas is because everyone had a few people they could count on in such a situation. I wouldn't call it a gang, more like a group of people who would beat somebody's ass if they fucked with you. (See, not the same at all.)

Of course, with high school came segregation (between achievement levels, not races [there weren't enough of the local minority for that type anyway]), so I no longer found myself around the people who found violence to be a (regularly) necessary part of life. Plus, I was the token crazy white boy, so no one really messed with me anyway. We still staged fights occasionally, because that's just how crazy we were. Almost got into trouble for breaking a few tables.^^ Ah, nostalgia.

**And by "us" I mean members of my family, especially those outside the Cleveland area.

***Not going there.

^Preemptively, if necessary.

^^I think I mentioned that before.

hmm. My last exam for the semester starts tomorrow at 8:30. In the morning.

*takes a purposely labored breath, then sighs heavily*

I should probably pretend to study for that.

Given my current state and the short (10 items or less)** plan I wrote up just under a week ago, I'm on track to finish the last item in due order: IIRC, it was something like "collapse into a writhing mass of semi-humanity".

Almost there.

In other news, I'm going to try for a different internship this summer from the one I've done the last two or three years. Apparently the application requires a "Resume", whatever the hell that is.*

In a bit of meta-analysis, what does anyone else (i.e., anyone other than me, myself, and wholly-owned subsidiaries) think of having more footnotes on a page of text than actual text? If you think it can't happen, read something by Oliver Sacks. He's this crazy old guy (to me, this is not an insult. The "GOD IS A SOCK" guy would be one of my heroes, if I had heroes) we had to read from in my freshman seminar. I got him to sign one of his books that I have when he visited the campus, though he wrote something about me being a mathematician in it, if memory serves.*****

*I do know what it is, I just haven't created or updated one in about 5 years. Why? I'd mainly attribute it to not needing an updated one, but that's just because I'm too much of a lazy bastard to come up with any other reasons. Oh, there's one too.

**I would call it an Express Plan, but that is too evocative of grocery stores and financing activities in my twisted mind.***

***That isn't just imagery; every healthy and**** developed humanoid being's mind is twisted to allow a greater surface area.

****This would probably be better off as "and/or", but that would require an extended belaboring of the point, which makes me think of the time that one Senator ran out of filibuster material and started giving an oyster recipe.

*****It rarely does.

I'm posting this from the free wireless connection downtown (not the university one). According to this, it's only 11.0mbps, but I can't really tell any difference between it and the one at school, which is usually 54 for the wireless. (Dialup deadens the senses.)

In other sensory-deprivation news, I haven't been getting enough sleep lately. By that, I mean I haven't been getting enough sleep for me, which is bad. Over the last 3 or so* days, I've spent more time in final exams than I have sleeping.

I think part of it is me trying to convince myself that this is part of one of my projects: the one where I see how many handicaps I have to give myself before I become unable to do something, no matter how hard I try. I've never actually been able to find something I wasn't able to do if I tried hard enough (and, from what I understand, that is rare), unless you count trying to find something I can't do. But then you get into the whole "true/false/neither" issue that you get when someone tries to say "Can an omnipotent God create a rock he cannot lift?" It's not a question that can be answered, because the component of the question - the rock - does not exist. It'd be like me asking if my orange parakeet can squawk out the William Tell Overture. I don't have an orange parakeet. Or a parakeet. Or anything orange.***

*I'm losing the boundary between days. Usually this happens in the summer if I have nothing to do, but recently it started happening out of sheer...tiredness.

***Ok, any orange pets.

Yesterday was the last day of actual classes in my 5th of 8 semesters. I'm too lazy to check to see if I already mentioned it, so I will say that I was able to place out of the Statistics final. That leaves only 4 finals, another project I could do in a matter of hours*, and some crappy online homework problems. After that, I'm done until some time in January and thus can start spending more time on the really important things, the things I've been neglecting because of school.

Absolutely nothing.

*or hour, if I felt really hardcore one day.

hmm. I can't think of any coherent way to connect the thoughts I'm going to attempt to convey. Actually, I can't even remember all of them right now. Thus, I will simply ramble in the next paragraph or three, as is my way.*

This is the last week of actual classes for this semester. After this Friday it's just reading days and final exams. Luckily (?), I only have one exam a day. Unluckily (?), this means the latest one is, er, later.

I've also got a project paper due this Friday, and I haven't started the paper.

...or the project.

...or determined what the project should be about. But hey, I've always gotten away with that before, why mess with a winning formula?

Though there are some final exam weighting differences (ranging from about 25-40%), I only need a B on each of them to gets me some A's.**

In other news, I've been letting my hair grow out and I haven't shaved in a while. I'm going for that "pretending to be a bum" look. In this case, it may be a pretending to pretend to be a bum look, but that's way too much pretending for one role, even for me.

hmm, that reminds me of that old show, the Pretender. I realized a while back that the pretenders weren't really pretending to be doctors, or lawyers, or race car drivers, or rescue workers, or whatever else. They were pretending that that's all they could do, or what they were best at.

Or maybe that's just me looking for some way to relate to a television show.

Stranger things have happened.***

*I don't actually do this all the time. At least, I don't think I do.

**Yep, no English class this semester.

***That, as always, is a story for another day.****

****I wonder if I'll ever get around to addressing those stories for other days? I doubt it.