Winter 2020 quotes

These have accumulated for awhile and I might've missed some as there is currently a "scratch notebook" infestation throughout the rooms of my house.

Out-of-context semi-anonymized quotes for your enjoyment!

I: "Evidence is really piling up for us living in a weird simulation. Let's have their teeth fall out, try that!"

M: "What's the official wine pairing for bacon-wrapped chicken?"
L: "Bacon-wrapped wine."

Z: "There's more red flags than potential here."

G: "I'm discovering things about people I never knew."
L: "By looking at their backgrounds?"
G: "By listening to what they say!"

N: "I like that JavaScript is being described as low-level here."

Z: "You accidentally muted yourself."
I: "No, I did it on purpose, but at the wrong time."

M: "I was such a good writer back then. That was before I went to grad school, I can tell."

F: "The problem with legacy code is, they did a lot of stuff in the past, and they keep doing it!"

Z: "Do you have a job, or is this, like, private daycare?"

D: "He died of syphilis because he had all these... incubis... you know?"

Z+D (simultaneously, uncoordinated): "Maybe don't do your taxes today."
M: "I think it'll work out in our favor!"

D: "Julius Caesar was not another Groundhog's Day."

L: "Isn't it being livestreamed on the IRS Facebook page?"
K: "That is a cursed sentence."

I: "I don't trust the government. I don't trust anyone! I don't trust myself! I do trust Paypal."

A: "Tomato grove?"
B: "Tomato thicket."

I, on the topic of grad school: "It was actually quite useful, but not directly."

F: "You know, I'm in a perfect position here to rob the bank."

R: "Can I promise that the results of this won't be used for evil, anywhere, ever? No."

I: "We're all just in a sorry state."

Z: "surveil and digitize" (which I suggested would be a good evil catchphrase)

L: "The problem with buying a fanny pack is..."

Z: "No, I don't want a duck-face filter, I want a duck filter. I want to look like a duck."

D: "When I look at the scores, I think... we shouldn't have explained to her how the points work."

L: "I like to say a long goodbye and get cut off so that my children feel an obligation to talk to me again soon."
D: "Mom, I don't think you should reveal the secrets of how you maintain the social contract!"

This post's theme word is meech (v), "to whine" or "to move in a furtive manner" or "to loiter." Stop meeching about the park, meeching to each other, I see you meeching over there!

How 2020 feels

Basically the only way I can engage with the horribleness of modernity, politics, society, economics, and human-built institutions which degrade everything about the human condition, is through other people's senses of humor.

For example, Tycho of Penny Arcade on the Google monopoly lawsuit:

There's a lot of odd dialogue that surrounds this stuff, like if you hate the naked exertion of monopoly power you're just hating the player or some shit. That you have a problem with people winning or something, issues with the concept of profit fundamentally. What an incredible rhetorical dodge! We're not talking about profit, and even if we were, it matters how the profit was generated. What we're talking about is a Draconic hoarding of wealth, collected in a vessel made from illegal mergers and filled by illegal acts.

... You can't really make the case to younger people that "capitalism," broadly writ, is gonna do shit for them. ... if money is allowed to pool like this, devils grow in it. If you don't fucking govern, if you don't moat these things in a circle of salt, they will invariably become something uncontainable - something too big to fail, part of the walls.  

Or Alice Fraser on reasons that the money-vampires who rule us hate the idea of minimum wage:

In the news today, debates about minimum wage rage on in America despite the entire economy collapsing in all directions. Because if you can't argue about how much money you shouldn't be paying the employees you're itching to replace with robots, how can you even call yourself a bloated blutocrat? 

Isn't it actually more insulting to pay someone a minimum wage that they can afford to feed their children with, than have them work for free while sucking at the milky teat of a rhetorical belief in forward momentum to a Trumpian future? Do you even want a job if you don't want to work for free? Have you ever thought that working for tips is just charity by c**ts who can refuse to give it to you if they don't like your smile, and let's be honest, you've got a shitty smile 'cause you can't afford teeth in your goddamn mess of a country. 

European countries have suggested that if you can't afford to pay your employees then you shouldn't have employees, if you can't run an economy on businesses that can afford to pay their employees, your economy is a lie, and if you're paying your employees in hopes for some sort of amorphous future advancement, you're not a business, you're a religion. (The Last Post 248: Arts in Crisis, 1m59s -- 2m51s, bleeping in original)

... or basically any episode of TRASHFUTURE, although I warn you that listening to educated people describe the state of the world has flung me into intense despair several times. (The hosts do lighten it with comedy but it's very much a sarcastic look at how horrible everything is.)

If you want something hopeful instead, I suggest following Cory Doctorow's excellent advocacy work, for example  the several articles, books, and links offered here.

This post's theme word is scamander (v. intr.), "to take a winding course." Most dystopias do not reasonably portray the slow scamander preface.

Quotes, summer 2020

I jotted down many quotes in this time interval, because every. single. social. interaction. now feels deeply meaningful and like a carefully conserved resource. Plus they're all happening over video chat, so my notebook is always at-hand. Here is a selection (some quotes were expurgated for being too personal, or too crass when out-of-context); my apologies that my name-randomizing algorithm does only one letter/person, and so has a lot of collisions in the namespace.

M: "I'm super-enjoying not owning things."

Z: "I'm sure there's middle-management goats."

M: "I have the, like, the limping-along ovary."

Z: "Moving online is just an endless stream of apps that stink."

B: "We're DnD role-playing millennial fantasy: we all have stable jobs and healthy relationships with good communication."

B: "Climb the clocktower?"
K: "That's the kind of thing I should wait until AFTER I have tenure to do."

J: "Filibuster #4 has been my favorite"

I: "I am confident our future department chair can be nimble and flexible in the upcoming Battle Royale."

Z: "A lot of this makes no sense."

K: "We learned: everything is bad and nobody is happy."

K: "I can't wait to read your bestselling business novel about How Not to be a Craven Bootlicker." 

Q: "Basically everything the administration does is a giant fuck-you to student culture."

Y: "... not disappointed with the decision, more disappointed with reality."

Y: "You can't compress coding time."

I: "What happens in a COVID year stays in a COVID year."

Z: "I have to look up what is legal or not legal in Pennsylvania."
Q: "Most things are legal if you don't get caught."

N: "[name redacted] stepped on my glasses. I'm trying to fix them."
N': "With a pine cone?"

Z: "All KINDS of things can happen!"
Q: "Meteors?"
Z: "Hurricane season's just getting started."

M: "Oooh, all this talk of working out, I'm sweating."

Z (offhandedly): "high-functioning democracy here"

M: "In theory, anything can be ruined with any move."

N: "If you go by feel you'll know what to do."
Z: "You might be setting your expectations of [name redacted] a bit high."

N: "Winter is coming." (w.r.t. self-haircuts)

Z: "Koi are domesticated carp. They'll eat trash. They're aquatic goats."

Z: "We need to think about how to teach our classes. We can't spend all our time doing other people's jobs."

M: "I don't like shoreline poop."

D: "To Americans right now, euros are fantasy currency."

N: "When I began my homeowning episode..."

Z: "I got the email that Swarthmore ran out of electricity." (i.e., power outage)
Z': "I like that phrasing."

Z: "Postmodern algebra... it's like Bauhaus meets rings and groups."

C: "[name redacted]'s like, this is lovely, I love being so confused."

C: "I tried to write 'an exercise left to the reader' in my homework."
Z: "In physics you can totally just insert a random minus sign to make it work."

C: "I ended up playing with my tmix configuration for a day and a half."
Z: "Quarantine life! ... why do something in 4 keystrokes when you could do it in 3?"

N: "He had it apart several times this week, doing exploratory surgery." (re: the dryer)

N: "You're living the life! Tomorrow you'll be 90 and you found a secret medication that lets you eat salami!"

Z: "I snoozed the email and hoped it would go away in a week. It has not gone away."

K: "We had a really similar form that was much shorter but still as stupid as this one."

N: "The serger so ups the quality of your sewing."
F: "It doesn't if you don't use it."

F: "Bike doula."
K: "I think you mean 'sherpa'."

K: "You're very badly-behaved children." (re: some adults)
F (parent): "They could be worse."

Z: "For upper-level courses I have no problem offering both, and if one of them just dies a natural death, that's fine."

N: "The 38th is conventionally the bandsaw anniversary. ... the 39th is the home security system for birds."

I: "We don't get updates because the policy is changing, we get updates because the slogan is changing."

Z: "Thank god there's a deadly virus around so we don't have to focus on Brexit anymore."

I: "That crisis only affects teenagers, so we don't care."

Z (product pitch): "Each week you get a box of foods that people won't purchase even in an emergency."

Z: "Thank god for climate change and the death of the amphibian."

Z: "Could the Ottomans competently administer a test to teens? I say, welcome to our new Ottoman overlords."

Z: "Someone pored over the outline of the eagle thing. Gotta get paid somehow."

Z: "Everybody universally hates the robot, which is the appropriate response."

Q: "Static! I only hear it when you're talking."
Z: "That's just my midwestern accent."

Z: "I was uncomfortable because I'm an idealist."

N: "It's a circular saw at the end of a string trimmer."
M: "Wait, like... Mad Max?"

[D joins the video chat]
All others: "Good morning! Welcome to Vasectomy Talk."

Z: "I have walked less than 20 steps today & all of them were on this camera."

D: "Whoever is playing the video of my voice, can you mute it?"

Firstborn: "Everyone knows I'm the one who inherits the titles and lands."
Secondborn: "And I have the right to marry a divorcée."
Thirdborn: "And I'm supposed to go into the clergy?"
[laughter]
Parent: "I love my children! That was the best possible answer! Perfect!

Q: "They'll only hear your yowls of pain when you're shocked for typing on the keyboard wrong."

This post's theme word is lithophone (n), "a musical instrument which is sounded by striking pieces of stone." It's easy to fall down a quarantine video rabbit-hole and watch many modern and ancient lithophones played.

"Write it in your dream journal."

"Write it in your dream journal" is this season's witty riposte. Please help me disseminate it by hurling it --- with disdain, if you can manage it --- in reply to any conversational foray you desire.

For example:

• Misery poker retort:
  "I have three papers due this week!"
  "Write it in your dream journal."
• Cut off that annoying conversationalist:
  "I had such a crazy weekend that-"
  "Write it in your dream journal."
• Conversation ender:
  "Will you help me with this project?"
  "Write it in your dream journal." (accompanied by hair flip and smoothly walking away)

Hello, internet. I often remember my dreams, but the coolness of this is offset by the banality of the dreams themselves. Even to me, they are not that compelling; perhaps I have stringent requirements for characterization, plot, and style --- and my own imagination fails to meet these standards.

I recently had a dream wherein I kept trying to remember what happened in my dream, and almost remembering it, then feeling it slip away. When I woke up, I had this feeling... but then I remembered: that was exactly a dream! So it didn't slip away. I found the bottom of the inception stack, and what was there was, frankly, not that interesting.

I also recently had a dream where I noticed a very vibrantly-colored spider, with rectangular pastel markings that looked a bit like eye spots. It also had a very elaborate web design. (Possibly this dream comes from watching too many nature documentaries.)

... and now: they are written in my dream journal. Of sorts. May my continued public expression of private thoughts please you, my readership.


This post's theme word is: antimeria (n), "a rhetorical device in which an existing word is used as if it were a different part of speech." English is insidious about verbing nouns and nouning verbs, and mushing all together until the meaning must coalesce, as from a dream, out of a certain invoked ambiance.

Stunningly efficacious

I have no particular, publicly-declarable goals to commemorate the incrementing of our calendar year, except that --- as always --- I want to hone myself into the startlingly effective, time-efficient, prosperous, merry, well-balanced person that other people (hopefully) think I already am.

I like circuitous sentences and superfluous verbiage, and I refuse to change either of those personal attributes in 2018. Come back and try again in 2019, haters.

Day 1 is marked by a high turnaround of holiday letters and emails, paying bills, updating all my yearly-in-January donations, and staring in awe at the truly prodigious list of half-written draft posts for this blog.

(Sorry about that.)

You, my diligent readers, whether my parents or my overcurious students or internet strangers looking to post advertisements as comments (don't, I delete them and it wastes everyone's time), will simply have to put up with me as I am, striving yet again, always, in a continual manner. I want to write more, and more cleverly, and because this platform is free and quick (except when stuck in draft limbo), it will likely be the recipient of this output.

Although frankly, a lot of it goes to /dev/null right now anyway, and that might be for the best.

My year-end phrase-stuck-in-my-head is "flamboyantly intelligent", which is a descriptor of the kind of people I'd like to surround myself with. Maybe there's a subreddit? I'm on a (mild) quest, in any case; if you find any such people, please send them my way. I am a diligent and snarky correspondent, and I have been told I am secretly kind and caring, but that was 2017 and I am looking to turn over a new leaf, so...


This post's theme word is palilalia (n), "a speech disorder characterized by involuntary repetition of words, phrases, or sentences." I am trying to remember the word for "having a phrase stuck in your head", but all I can come up with is palilalia, which is not-quite-it-but-close-enough-to-blot-it-from-recoverable-memory, plus: contains "lila" as a substring!

We're done, Verizon. [mic drop]

... and I'm out (previously: In which I am about to cancel my Verizon home DSL and Verizon update). The service continued to be terrible, intermittent with bad. Both options were disagreeable to me, as a customer, but the variability was even more frustrating. Could they not simply deliver a consistently bad service?

I priced it out, measured my usage and the bandwidth available, and I'll get more consistent, sufficient service by doing almost anything else. My personal favorite is to inscribe individual packets by hand on nuts, and pass these off to squirrels and birds, who by means of their own mysterious communication networks, eventually pass me back the data I requested. (Current bug: this arrives in the timing and placement of bird poops on my car windshield, which I must decode by hand. Don't worry, I'm writing a script to do it automatically.)

In a practice which apparently recurs annually, I add to my list of "forsworn companies" every August. This time it's Verizon: never again, Verizon. You have forced me to listen to at least 10 cumulative hours of your "on hold" music. Never again.

This post's theme word is inveigle (v. tr.), "to get something or to persuade someone to do something by deception or flattery." They could no longer inveigle me into subscribing to the service.

Verizon update

An update: the squeaky wheel does, indeed, get the grease.

After being maximally noisy in a public forum (Twitter) and expressing, at length and in excruciating detail, my dissatisfaction to a customer service agent, Verizon did actually restore my service yesterday evening.

When I say "restore", I mean "restore" --- for example, this morning when I awoke, my modem required a reboot before I was connected to the internet again. (This is pretty standard for my experience of Verizon's home DSL; it often stops working when left unattended, and requires a reboot to connect to the network properly again.)

My subscription-abandonment is forestalled, but that sword of Damocles continues to dangle...

This post's theme word is fulminate, "to explode or cause to explode" or "to issue denunciations." My fulminating rage is tamped down, temporarily.

In which I am about to cancel my Verizon home DSL

I have not had home internet service since July 18th. My provider is Verizon DSL. At this point I have called, emailed, tweeted, and interacted with their phone/troubleshooting menu so many times that I am bored and incredibly frustrated with the system. I might just cancel --- which would be functionally indistinguishable from my current situation of no internet connection, with the exception that I'd know I could stop trying to get them to fix it, and also stop anticipating that they'll send me a bill for this non-service.

Are you a Verizon agent, customer service representative, or technician? Let me answer your questions.

• The DSL light on my modem is blinking red.
• Yes, it continues blinking red even if I reboot the modem. Go ahead and "run diagnostics" from your end.
• The modem is plugged directly into the phone jack, with no splitter.
• This situation persists even if I use a different phone cable to plug the modem into the jack.
• I do not use my home phone service and don't have a corded telephone, so I can't tell you if the phone is working.

Previously (see my outage from July 4 -- July 7, for which you have a ticket in your system), you sent a technician (the helpful Joe!) to my home. He confirmed that the problem was in your wiring infrastructure that delivers the signal to my home, and not inside my home itself. 

"There is a ticket for the Central Office." since July 19th... but no progress. 

• I called on July 19 --- I was told that someone would come to my home July 20, and I needed to be at home from 8am to noon.
• I called July 20, at noon, when no one had come --- I was told that no one was coming, after all, because the problem was in the infrastructure of Verizon's wired network, but it would be repaired by 4pm today.
• I called July 21, in the evening, when I still had no service --- was told that they're working on it, it will be fixed in 24-48 hours, and to stop calling. Verizon would certainly call me with any updates.

There have been no updates.

• I tweeted @verizon today --- got three different replies, asking questions answered by the bulleted information points above, then got sent to a Verizon chat window.
• In chat, was told that "there is a ticket for the Central Office", which will take 24-48 hours to reply via email, at which point I'll get an update from "Verizon Social Media Team" on Twitter.

I'm not optimistic about actually receiving any promised update. (I'm going to wait until the end of the day today, though, before cancelling --- on the off chance that they do actually manage to make progress and get back to me.)

Alternatives? Verizon FIOS (recommended by my neighbors on NextDoor) is not available at my address, so my only alternative internet provider is Comcast. By consensus on NextDoor, Comcast service is terrible and customer service is worse. At this point, tethering my computer to my cell phone looks like the cheapest and most effective way to get home internet service. 

This post's theme word is pernancy (n), "a taking or receiving of rent, profit, etc." Charging for a nonexistent service is atrocious pernancy.

Proper system revision documentation

Dear readers,

If you can read this, then an incredibly unlikely sequence of steps has succeeded. Huzzah!

There is currently some sort of eldritch alignment of planets whose main influence is to rewrite critical boot sectors of all my hard drives. (Perhaps concomitant with finishing a semester?) Alas! Time to reformat and reinstall, in every operating system known to man. If one more computer fails, I'll be reduced to publishing tweets via carrier pigeon. This blog post may have been written via telegraph STOP

This means I get to start a new "installation notes: what I did" file. And so I am revisiting my past logs, little missives from my past self, to make sure I set up all the bells and whistles just right. (Keyboard shortcuts are the main way I interact with these light-boxes I relentlessly stare into.) Usually these logs are curt and useful, but sometimes they range into quite colorful and narrative tales, for example (details and lengthy intro expurgated to prevent your eyes from bleeding):

After fiddling with [hardware], I find that [software flag] is again disabled. Augh. The following commands did not work to re-enable it: 

sudo [heinous and expurgated set of commands]

This time, banging around wildly on [list of unusual keyboard keys] and crying openly into my hands worked.

... it's important that every log includes instructions for how to replicate the steps that ultimately led to a successful setup. Apparently at the time I felt that the strange wizardry that made my keyboard commands work included crying, and included the notes necessary to replicate it.

Don't worry, I have extensive notes on which "fiddling with [hardware]" caused this weird thing, and I am very carefully not reproducing that. Also, according to the logs, I have not solved any computer problem by weeping since 2012. My streak continues!

Writing to you from the edge of known OS support forums,
 --- Lila

P.S. While writing this post I jinxed my wifi card and it refused several times to maintain a connection. Go figure. I also managed to get exactly the perfect alt-tab behavior, so it's a wash.


This post's theme word is lazaretto (noun), "a medical facility for people with infectious diseases", or "a building or ship used for quarantine", or "on a ship, a space between decks used as storage." I fear my brain is the lazaretto between different computer systems.

Pasta pizza

Why, though?

You know what would go great atop this starchy transport layer? Another layer of starch, with a different form factor!


This post's theme word is matutolypea (n), "the state of being in a bad mood, annoyed, obnoxious first thing in the morning." Pasta pizza is known to invoke matutolypea, for its inappropriate use of starches too early in the day.

Course message board

There is a homework due this morning.

The single most popular post on the course message board occurred last night.

1:10am: "do we have to finish the problem set even though Trump is winning? we have no will to continue."

Follow-up comments throughout the night:

• "please, I second."
• "Well with the way things are going, will there really be a GPA left for this to ruin anyway? "
• "fourth'd. why is this happening."
• "Murica is now NP Complete"
• "Please Lila"
• "make my GPA great again"
• "Not gpa that doesn't matter right now as much as general health and sanity"
• "not that wall street doesn't matter as much as minority citizens"
• "please reply, we're crying"

My reply upon waking: "It is very important to be educated, as this election highlights." We'll see if  I can remain as anodyne in my not-on-the-permanent-and-searchable-record aloud delivery of lecture this morning.

I'm considering scrapping my network flow lecture to discuss social choice theory and voting (lecture tentatively titled: "Arrow's impossibility theorem, or how math is the reason why we can't have nice things"). On the other hand, the problems we face in the real world are usually not theoretical problems of design and feasibility, but implementation detail problems (e.g., how to check election results) and issues arising from grandfathered-in historical systems which had no rational design to begin with.

This post's theme word is peripeteia (noun), "a sudden or unexpected change of fortune, especially in a literary work. A classic example is Oedipus learning about his parentage." Too crushed by peripeteia for cleverness, the characters shouted "I want out of this novel!" in a fourth-wall-breakingly desperate plea for clemency.

Extremely first-world, privileged problem

Nothing comes out perfectly round in practice; observe, my residence in Paris will not be a number of months divisible by 12. Thus, my gym membership has run out, and I will be here for only ~2 more months. Renewing for a full year is unreasonably expensive when amortized over 2 months; paying per-entry is unreasonably expensive at 25€/day multiplied by my 5-6 day/week gym habit.

What to do?

It's summer, so of course I could just switch to outside/no-equipment exercising, but I find this dissatisfying and it also means zero swimming during the peak heat-relieving swimming months.

On the other hand, I live in a big city and there are many gyms. Most offer a one-time-only free pass (as an incentive to lure people to subscribe), so perhaps I can string together enough free gym visits, interspersed with 25€/day visits and swimming at public pools and running outside, to meet my needs without using up my budget for food and rent.

Problems of privilege --- irritating, but I'm glad that this is the kind of worry my brain has leisure to contemplate.


This post's theme word is sook, "a timid or cowardly person, a crybaby." Ignore that overprivileged sook, visibly-bulging triceps are SO last season.

On marriage and land ownership

Mawwiage... is what bwings us here togefah... today.

And it also permeates my social media of late, a symptom of the pleasantness of July and August weather in the northern hemisphere, where most of my acquaintances live. If only there were a social media filter that let me elide* "wedding photos and announcements". It is an inundation, and one that makes me feel like I am falling behind in some sort of absurd life-contest, even though it's not a contest and I'm quite happy with my life. Which is successful!

Part of the overwhelmed feeling is certainly the concentration: a huge spike in the graph for August weddings, a giant plunge in the graph for November, February, and all other months. Babies are similarly-celebrated Giant Life Milestones (GLMs), but they're more evenly spread across the year. A few years ago when my entire cohort seemed to simultaneously graduate from law/business school I had similar feelings of being left behind the GLM-race while everyone else forged ahead.

I found this article satisfying just because it asked any questions about the desirability of marriage: "How we end up marrying the wrong people". I understand, of course, that outward-facing social announcements will focus on the perfection, the love, the happily-forever-after, how lucky X is to spend the rest of zis life with Y, etc. It seems... performative.** And at this point in late August, repetitive.

I think I'd be pretty ok starting my list of criteria with "how much land do they have". A grain of salt: I remain unwed. #Spinsterlife forevah! Until the sufficiently-landed suitor comes along... and we are married in January (in our volcano supervillain lair) or November (by a Pastafarian minister on a hangglider over the Sahara)  or March (witnessed by a pod of dolphins in international waters).


This post's theme word is vituperation, "bitter and abusive language." I intend no vituperation towards the happy couples; their joy is delightful, and should be duly celebrated.


*What would be much more satisfying would be a filter which restricted the feed of announcements to conform more closely to demographic trends, e.g., by showing one divorce announcement for every two wedding announcements.

**... like all social media. My own included. Cognitive dissonance acknowledged.

Sequential timestamping

If you write your date in the American order (month-day-year) then today is momentous for its sequentiality: 10-11-12 (and even more momentous at 1:14pm!).

Today is otherwise rather unremarkable. I have lost my voice, swamped under work and viral bodies. The one pervades my mind; the other, my body. I am attempting to write a description of my research which simultaneously renders it accessible to the reader and emphasizes its broad applications and stresses its difficulty and level of mathematical abstraction.

Days like this make me wonder if I could support myself writing bodice-rippers. Well, it's a fall-back plan, way down the list.


This post's theme word is cerumen, "earwax." Is that cerumen, or are my ears congested?

Regarding the weather

Dear Toronto,

I know it's been awhile since we last spoke, and I blame myself: I've been too busy to set aside time for you. And trust me, I feel your resentment: I felt it all through this dreary, muddy, lukewarm, snow-free winter. And whether it is a personal vendetta against me or simply the effects of global climate change, I want you to know this: this weather is absurd.

I moved to Canada from cold, snowy parts of a country south of here. Part of the allure was the northerly climate (and the degree program and the health care). My first winter here did not disappoint, and I found myself crutching through blizzards. What delight! What rapture! What single-minded focus, what visceral experiences the weather induces, merely to move about in the extreme cold!

And yet this recent so-called "winter" had none of these characteristics. I have coped by reading and rereading wintry books (like Antarctica and The Left Hand of Darkness), and attempting to ski on what paltry manmade stuff is at hand. I never had to use my most serious winter clothing.

And now, at the very beginning of spring, we've had a series of consistently 60F+ days. The equinox was just yesterday. Were you so impatient for spring that you rushed into it immediately after autumn?

I've only ever seen equally capricious seasons in film. As a joke.

Please. My body is still expecting freezing temperatures and windburn and frostbite. This afternoon it was 70F and I felt like reverse-hibernating (a.k.a. "moving to New Zealand"). Please do not rush headlong into summer, and its punishing heat and humidity, without dwelling a bit longer on winter. Don't give up so soon, and so easily.

I'm holding out for April snow. You've had it in reserve all these months.

Your resident (who carried her skis home in a tank top and sandals today),
Lila


This post's theme words are fann, an Orkney word for "snowdrift," and skutch, "a slight snowfall." We are famished for fanns, and skiing season suffers serious skutch scarcity.

Corporeal suffering

Every muscle and soft tissue from my ribs to my knees hurts. My eyes are red and unpleasant. My right ankle feels like it's trying to turn into some fourth spatial dimension, and only tender tendons are wrenching it back into the standard three for walking purposes. I slept poorly, woke up at 5, and refused to get out of bed until the alarm, as if I could force myself to sleep.

This is what I get for (1) original sin, (2) lounging around yesterday eating ice cream, and (3) running this morning. I'll avoid two of those things tomorrow. (I might run.)

I cannot wait until we uplift-transmogrify-singularityize into incorporeal plasma energy beings.


This post's theme word is valetudinarian, "chronically sick or concerned with one's own health." Also available as a noun. The veterinarian wasn't the valedictorian of her class, but she was a valetudinarian.

Obstructive engineers

It is the end of the semester for undergraduates. Do you know what that means? Big project time! The engineers who share the building with us theorists are all very busy building robots. In the hallways.
It is a terrible fire obstruction. Also, it makes it difficult to access our offices. There are students, robots, and power tools in piles everywhere, including blocking our doors. Look at this doorway (the inlet in the wall on the right of this photo). I'm not joking about the power tools: there are students machining metal and welding, plugged into hallway outlets. Even after they have left, the hallway is a tripping hazard.
It must be that their professor -- who assigned these projects and did not provide enough lab space to construct them -- knows that they are working in the hallways. And implicitly condones it. We disadvantaged grad students resent this inconsiderate arrangement.


This post's theme word is feculent, "full of filth or waste matter." The corridor was feculent with undergraduates.

I'm getting old?

Every day I wake up and get [some of] the news from the radio and reading online. This makes me grumpy about the world. (See the "whinge" tag.) Everything is broken and wrong -- our "news" deliverers are unabashedly biased. Governmental organizations hide information from the populace and oppress us with unreasonable Big Brother-hood from the TSA, the Toronto police, the legislature, the executive. The world these days! -- it's not like it was back when I was young! -- whine whine whine grump grump grump.

Pretty much anything that would be mentioned in a voice-over at the beginning of a disutopia movie is true. Propaganda everywhere is designed to keep us confused and docile. (Even to the point that I am not entirely convinced this is a bad thing.)

Even inspirational statements like "Even if what you're doing feels small, you still have to have faith in the grandeur of it all." fail to inspire me. I am frustrated. I feel like there is very little I can do to improve the world, and very little I can do to make it worse, too -- I have no impact on anything. Nevertheless, I feel it's important to act with dignity and try to do good work. What else can I do? Being the change I want to see in the world (à la Gandhi) is not enough.

The only thing that makes me feel better about the status of the world is to completely ignore it. I am lucky in that "ignore the outside world" is nearly part of my job description as a grad student. I will feel better as soon as I leave the house and get away from this global-news mindset.

Ivory tower, whoo!

This post's theme word is sesquipedalian, "pollysyllabic."
This post written like Cory Doctorow.

Internet usability

I have become recently frustrated at the unusability of teh internet [sic]. No, I don't want your cookies or to run Flash... and as a consequence, many pages simply don't load, or they load forever, taking up memory and bandwidth without ever deciding to display some frakking content. I don't understand why the internet has trended this way. There must be other users like me out there, who are increasingly shut out of miscellaneous internet browsing.

Do most users not notice? Is this because, in my reluctance to buy any new hardware, I have finally fallen behind the lagging event horizon of "supported"? Are my computers' software/hardware combinations now actually too old to browse the latest, grooviest incarnation of teh internets [sic]? Maybe most users:

1. Regularly destroy and cannot rescuscitate computers, and thus purchase new computers every... 2?... years. (I remember hearing a statistic like that once: the average laptop lives for 1.5 years. My last store-bought new computer is from 2005.)
2. Accept cookies.
3. Accept and install whatever plugins claim to be required.
4. Don't block ads. (<-- N.B. this must be the case, since otherwise the advertisers would figure out a different way to attack our eyeballs.)
   

It's frustrating, and I feel like a whiny old dinosaur. I long for the "good old days" that are so old I never witnessed them: text-only browsing, with pure content right at one's fingertips.


This post's theme word: anomie, "social instability and alienation caused by the erosion of norms and values." Modern anomie is based upon flash cookies and banner ads.
This post written like Cory Doctorow.