This is the sickness that will not go away. You remember, the one I've mentioned a few times? Still here. This bastard perplexes me. Colds can take awhile to wank off into the distance, but I'm still getting symptoms like:

*Coughing as if I were a chain smoker

*That tickle in the throat leading to coughing fits that should get me into a plague ward

*Yucky white phlegm whatnot; lotsa dead white cells

It hasn't gotten better over the last 4 days, but it hasn't gotten worse. Maybe it's allergies. That'd be new. And evil.

This whole finals thing has been much more laid back than I thought it'd be.

On saturday I met up with Megan to go over the stats final. It's take-home and open-book, so we decided to collaborate. I'd finished up most of it, but 'parently she'd finished every question. Still, there was some good interchange in which one person's work corrected the other person's errors.

And so with the late evening approaching and the stats final ostensibly done, we decided to hitch outta the place. At first I thought I'd just go to my apartment, but we got to talking about Megan's first year project, other stuff, etc. She does work involving reading comprehension in kids and how the brain develops it. Nowhere near my specialization, but it's always cool to learn about cognition stuff. And so we wended around the center of town by the capital, along apartment complexes, and finally along a street in the calming downtown backwater. A friend of her's called, they yaked, threw some LJ references, and I meanwhile composed two new shots that I hope to get soon. I explained my plans after she got off the phone. She thought it was cool.

Her flat/apartment was a sprawling thing for a one bedroom, with wood trim and wood stuff all over. She hadn't had anything to eat for ages, so she boiled pasta while I drank water. We got to talking about how lonely it'd be around Madison, but at the same time how strange it was to have peers who appreciated your intelligence and were pretty capable themselves. Still, she said, she didn't get a chance to express some parts of herself, such as the fact that she's openly gay and more liberal than most of the liberals here. I could relate, using my 'artsy' side as an example (and leaving the whole 'shamanism and dealing with the unseen world or being a raging fucking lunatic' part out of it).

We'd always been outcasts. I knew how she felt, and I could tell from her body language that the feeling was mutual. Outcasts for different reasons, but still ending up at the same point.

She'd called a friend of hers over so the three of us could do stuff. He was busy playing (what I guessed) was an online role-playing game of some sort, or something involving him levelling up. Megan rolled her eyes and kept hounding him about when he'd come over--in a cute way.

After that we talked some about straight white men. That started because, as if you haven't noticed yet, I'm not exactly typical for my sex. And I really wonder why most men act the way they do, as much to learn about myself as to see what's considered societally acceptable. Megan had some rather interesting insight on that. Quotting "feminist queer theory", straight white men never have to defend their racial and sexual status in the face of their work. Their work is judged solely on their individual merit. By contrast, everyone else gets some sort of yardstick.

I hadn't heard the 'white privilege' argument laid out so succinctly, and it made sense given my observations.

She also mentioned that "feminist queer theory" has a good working idea of why straight white men hate other white men that deviate from the norm, and why society generally likes to keep men in a far more narrow range than women. Apparently, there's a certain "power" inherent in being a straight white male--and somehow if you give that power up by not acting in that way, then you're looked down upon.

I'm just summarizing, but it was fascinating to listen to it all.

And after about 30 minutes, Megan's friend Rich showed up. Oddly enough the first thing I noticed were the unbelievably long eyelashes. Go fig. The three of us yakked for awhile and eventually decided to go get ice-cream. It was funny as hell seeing those two interact. They constantly gave one another shit in the most adorable ways. He and I also gave props to Megan for breaking the lesbian frontier and having a pseudo-date with one.

Gives me hope, even though I don't think I've ever pursued a lesbian. Well once, but I should've known and it was just a tad obvious.

Anyway, long story short: no place where we wanted ice-cream was open and we just sat out on the student union harbor-front instead. There was more playful arguing and play fighting and general silliness from those two, while I offered occasionally witty commentary. Eventually we all parted ways and I headed back to my apartment.

Nice to be social for a change.

What's been more of a pain in the ass than I thought was being a 'reader' for Dr. C's course. Basically I'm the guy who photocopies tests (in this case 360 tests), proctors the exam with the TA, takes the tests to be processed, then collates the results into excel sheets. Good pay, not much work--usually.

Proctoring the final on sunday was alright. I coughed my ass off at some points, firmly reattached my ass to get all quiet again, and kinda sorta forgot to mix the A form and B form of the test together (since the students of a given row are supposed to alternate A, B, A, B, etc.). That took 5 minutes but I still felt like a jackass doing that in front of 250 some-odd people--with the rest next door while the TA, Sara, did the same spiel.

With the final underway, though, I just had to concentrate on not hacking when the fits came on. Ye gods those fits suck candied balls: I start sweating as if I've seen the dead snorting coke from my stomach, breathing harder, and can't stop myself from hacking over and over again. Even so, the process was more or less the usual.

Today, however, was dedicated to putting back the third pair of my monkeys for my experiment, doing lab shit and regulatin' (sing it with me: ba da da ba da da daaa da), and trying to collate all the excel files for the three tests into one excel file.

Damn. What a pain in the ass. Pain pain pain. For starters, neither I nor the TA got notes on who dropped the course. So you'd see people who took one test and only that test. That sorta thing was a problem because, over the course of the semester, there were alot of mofo's who ended up taking these exams late. You'd be awe-struck by how many grandmothers bite it during or around exam days.

Like I said before: academic examinations are a silent epidemic for grannies everywhere.

So at one point, after waiting for her to call for 40 minutes after the time she said she would, Sara phoned me. We went over the missing exam scores I had, figured out who had dropped the course based on logic (i.e. getting 40% on the first exam and taking no exams after is a pretty solid find), and got the whole list done.

All 340 of the students, all 3 exams. Now I just have to wait until tomorrow to see if the total scores I got match up to what she got from an online computation thing fucker whatever. Bottom line: I get the thing done with tomorrow.

And at the moment I'm sitting in one of the student unions doing stats. Well, I was doing stats before I felt the update pinch. This place is more dead than a sex rally for 90 year olds. Dead as fuck indeed. There's an indian dude who's been utterly zonked for at least the last two hours, a chinese dude way over yonder who looks like he's watching a DVD, and then there's the cashier along the way. And many 20 oz. soda bottles, all tempting me within their neon-blazing refridgerators of capitalistic goodness.

And on occasion people pass by and give me the 'are you a raccoon typing on a laptop? Hrm, curious' look. Not that I look like a critter, I just get looks from people often.

So, I should get back to this whole stats thing. It's due tomorrow; I wanna go over it all again to make sure I didn't screw up.

Obssessive? Slightly. Glad that finals are almost over? You bet your sweet ass.

Soon I'll be able to watch movies, and photograph, and write, and talk to long-distance organisms, possibly travel to meet some semi-close by ones if time permits, and other things reasonably approximating a life outside of work.

Concept. Dig.

Out.

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