I’ve just about lost my patience with a number of things, so I thought I might as well pour them out with the disclaimer that I haven’t slept well recently, and really, all I want from the world at this point is a cupcake or a strawberry donut:
In no particular order
- People who call themselves “social media experts,” but their advice consists of telling people to use social media sites? Wasn’t that implied? Seriously.
- Business-y words (a lot of business-y things, actually). Marketing, branding, and a host of others. People use them without knowing what they mean, or proceed to use them in all of their conversations. It is possible to overuse certain aspects of the English language.
- Weak handshakes.
- People who think weak handshakes actually imply something about a person, other than that they have weak handshakes.
- The idea that a perception or first impression is absolute.
- Cobras. Why, do you actually like cobras?
- Young adult novels.
- Arrogance, especially arrogance as a result of authority, and especially especially arrogance without any privilege or authority.
- People who look down on other people for any reason and justify themselves in doing so
Those are some pretty generic complaints about society. But none of them bothers me quite as much as someone telling me my major is useless. I am, quite happily, a Classics major — and while it’s annoying having to explain what that is to people, most of whom assume something about literature or “learning languages,” and assume that that’s all there is to it. The reason I chose Classics is because it contains programs of language study and history and literature and anthropology/archaeology. Those are all fields I was interested in before I came to UT, and I was happy that what I loved doing before I got to UT was still viable, and more importantly, a denser subject than I knew it to be.
We’ve being doing this thing at my school called “Career Week” recently, in an effort to get students thinking about their future careers and what they want to do when they graduate. I think the intent is noble: the events publicize the fact that there are other options after college than getting a job immediately. As a result, I sat through a few panels for Classics majors (there aren’t many of us) and Plan II majors (it’s an interdisciplinary honors program/major — that’s the simplest explanation I can give). And I left them awestruck. Both panels told me, essentially, that Plan II and Classics were both augments, and that what I learned in them wouldn’t be directly applicable to any career. They were, essentially, bragging points — resume boosters.
Here’s my take. Plan II is better as a buffer, certainly. If you’re doing a Plan II major, chances are you’ll end up double majoring anyway, because you’ll be taking courses in a preferred field of study, and ideally come out of it with tons of credits. Then again, you could spend the whole time you’re in Plan II enjoying Plan II for what it is, and take courses in so many different areas of study that you can’t even keep them straight in your head. Even this is admirable, and that’s what I love about my honors program.
The thing is, Classics is an actual, full-fledged major. It is by no means an augment. It is something you do for four years. There is a structured, focused course of study, and your degree lends you a certain credibility in all sorts of fields. Incidentally, not even all of the advisors really know what a Classics major is, but it amounts to this: all of the advisors assume is that you won’t be one of the people who ends up going into academia — which is legitimate — but still, the point shouldn’t be to tell someone that their whole course of study won’t get them a “real” job, or to convince them that they have to start exploring all of their interests, in case they find an unusual talent for birdsong or making tiny, mechanical foxes that they want to do for the rest of their life. It’s like saying, “While you were too busy translating Latin, you forgot how much you loved microwaves, until this specific moment when you were making popcorn, and you dropped what you were doing (mostly the popcorn) and went to work for General Electric.” Who does that kind of story benefit? Certainly not those of us who love what we’re doing beyond belief.
I know that, when I graduate, I want to spend some time getting graduate degrees — hopefully a Ph.D., if I’m not burned out at that point. And then I want to do some combination of teaching and writing professionally. It’s really that simple. I won’t make a lot of money — I’m fine with that. If I get a job doing something I don’t like, I’m going to be miserable. Don’t tell me that my major will lead me straight to a desk job with TPS reports and water coolers. Because that’s my choice, and mine alone.
I always expect some radical shift in scenery when we cross a state border — the tall, thin trees of Georgia and Alabama and then, suddenly, in the space it takes to get through my entire Queen: Live at Wembley DVD (yes, I own it. Yes, it’s awesome), the Mississippi River is rolling along before us. Louisiana hits us with bright lights and casinos, an overuse of the “-eaux” spelling (for example, “Geaux” instead of “Go”, which I find embarrassingly superfluous). And after that, there’s no point in paying attention anymore, because Texas is a few miles ahead, and there’s nothing to see there that I haven’t already seen.
It disappoints me though, when states just fade into other states, when you cross a border and nothing changes — nothing noticeable. After some time, you might see mountains, which I always freak out about, but the sky doesn’t change colors. Weird animals don’t start popping up behind trees and chasing your car off of their ancestral land (Tennessee has a horrible problem with badgers cropping up in housing developments and chasing off the residents — I just thought you should know). There’s often little more than a welcome center (I’m keeping track of the good and bad ones — that was aimed at you, Alabama), a cluster of fast food places and gas stations, and then I-10 stretches out again like an endless road.
But I’m back! A week in Georgia, and a few days in Dallas, and tomorrow I’ll be back in Houston, hoping for fabled snow, and getting some work done at last. In the past week, I’ve read about six hundred pages (The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets by Eva Rice, and The Gathering by Anne Enright), which makes me incredibly happy. There’s nothing better than being able to immerse yourself in a book all day, to read late into the night, and wake up dreaming about the characters. Except when they’re characters in an Irish tragedy, like The Gathering. That was an odd dream.
I’ve made a few adjustments to my test redesign, viewable here. I’m not sure how I feel about a tabbed menu. I think I’ve run that river dry, and the more I try to come back to it, the more banal it feels. They’re not even very interesting tabs. What makes them pretty at all is the fact that I threw in some rgba — which I have been using all over the place now, because it’s so versatile and easy — and, well, there you have it.
Well, there I went again. Easing into the old, lazy routine and saying, “Oh well, one more week won’t do any harm.” Now, the rest of September wasn’t very bad. Nor was October, when I went to Austin City Limits and said, “Well, I can get used to this.” Wrong. In swooped November like some sort of winged mastadon, and stole me away to its horrible nest of tusk-toothed flying monsters to entertain the prehistoric demon spawn. Here’s what I’ve been working on that has kept me from doing anything productive with this site for the past three (THREE!) months. My humblest apologies. I do not speak Mastadon.
November — NaNoWriMo and everything else
I started NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) again, and I was determined to win. Two-three hours of my day gone instantly. But I WON IT! Incidentally, the most useful program I used was not some fancy-shmancy writing program (like DarkRoom, which I have always loved), but Google Docs. That’s right! A simple word processor. All that blank space in any other program would have made me have all sorts of allergic reactions (for example, to obligation and responsibility — I have these anyway, but they’re mostly infrequent). Aside from the wonky word count-alyzer, Google Docs was actually fantastic for my productivity. And I got some pretty sweet writing out of it. Here’s a snippet:
In a high corner of the old house, the widowed recluse spun her spider-silk and gossamer - or so the creaks and whispers of the floorboards suggested, and the fragile mist at the window. But her own footfalls were silent. The servants would have called her “Lady Arete,” but over time, she became merely Arete, the mad, old woman in the high, old room. She was attended by her own woman, the daughter of a once noble family of Madra, but over time, as she lost her sight and her beauty and her good graces, she fled in the widow’s company to Kaladan. Now, there was no need for fine dresses or jewelry. The widow spun her own cloth — all white, as it had been for many years — and wore a simple, braided cord around her neck with a knotted metal pendant. Her servant, blind as she was, lingered in the doorway of the room and recounted, when she heard them, the whispers of passing nobles, the laughter of the little princess, and the passage of the emperor Rodim from room to room.
Then, I actually had to do stuff (here I am, reduced to complaining about homework). For everything except Logic, I had a game plan. With Logic, I either messed around with some haphazard guesswork or sat around bawling for a bearded little elf man to turn my quantifiers into gold. You’ll just have to guess which tactic actually worked.
One of the things I discovered about Logic is that it isn’t very logical. My intuitive leap was usually not correct, except in some very simple situations. And proofs are horrible in all situations. But that’s over and done with, and I should make some sort of decent grade in there. And then, never again!. It’s funny how many times I’ve told myself that only to have a similarly horrible class crawl up to my door to say, “Hello.”
“Hello,” indeed.
Other stuff
I made a live development section of my site. It’s called Sandbox — for obvious reasons, and also because I never get tired of using the Sandbox theme for WordPress. I have two projects in the works right now. One of them is a new design for this site; the other is a little site for my friend Erica. Both of them use Cufón, which I have found both extremely easy to use and extremely flexible. Now, some notes:
- I haven’t used
@font-face yet. That’s next on my list.
- I don’t think Cufón is suitable for body text. It works fabulously in headings though, which is where I will continue to use. The lack of selectability is a problem, but not a huge one. And you can use links in Cufón just fine!
Feel free to check those out and leave me some notes/tips!
In closing
I hope I don’t have too many more of these doldrum periods. It’s boring for you guys and it’s boring for me. But it’s tons of fun for demon mastadons, so you guys keep your eyes open, okay? Okay.
