I am fixated on the idea of college.
We live in a tiny enclosed community until we graduate, then we set out in all directions for college, imagining that we are exhibiting some kind of agency, some autonomy over the volatile variation of life, but in reality we're just throwing ourselves upon the mercy of a vast, multifarious machine. College happens to us, like a gigantic wrecking ball crashing into a building, and the only agency we have is the right to pick up the pieces when what we've built is inevitably destroyed.
I know that this right is more than most have, but this constant destruction and reinvention is painful to experience and to watch.
Some of us get lost and never find ourselves again. Some of us find a cause, something greater to be a part of. Some of us put on masks that we never remove again for the rest of our lives. Some of us find love, and some of us grow to hate it. Some of us discover dreams, and even fewer of us find the courage to pursue it.
We, young, bright-eyed, and hopeful, mortgage our lives to gamble on the future, and the investment doesn't always pay off.
Sorry. I am an unrealistic person with an overactive consciousness who sometimes drinks too much coffee.
ANYWAYS, time to study.
brain dump
I really suck at ordering drinks at coffee shops, even though I study there most of the time. I typically end up ordering something that's not even on the menu and getting a weirded out look from the barista. I'm very confused by the menus, the various names for the sizes, and what things I can get iced or not. Tall equals medium equals venti equals small equals large equals what? They need more pictures on the menu - pictures of the drinks, not hands sinking into bags of coffee beans and shit like that. Also, I don't like to order lattes because let's face it, that's some foo foo shit, and I don't know what any of that other crap is. I just want espresso, milk, and mocha in a certain proportion, what's the name for that?
Hope is a dangerous, even psychotic emotion that can take over your life.
I live with 2 black guys and a philipino, and as a result I am now more racist than I ever have been, because well, it's funny.
If melancholy was a drink, it would be some kind of very strong, sweet wine that I can't talk about here because I don't know anything about wine or alcohol in general. What a failure of a thought, haha.
Sometimes I'm really mad/sad that I won't ever get the opportunity to be one of those ignorant americans studying abroad in europe and taking obnoxious pictures in front of landmarks and such.
heeeeyyy, 'white men can't jump' is on!
Jeff Tweedy from Wilco is the only person in the world that really understands me right now.
back to studying.
Hope is a dangerous, even psychotic emotion that can take over your life.
I live with 2 black guys and a philipino, and as a result I am now more racist than I ever have been, because well, it's funny.
If melancholy was a drink, it would be some kind of very strong, sweet wine that I can't talk about here because I don't know anything about wine or alcohol in general. What a failure of a thought, haha.
Sometimes I'm really mad/sad that I won't ever get the opportunity to be one of those ignorant americans studying abroad in europe and taking obnoxious pictures in front of landmarks and such.
heeeeyyy, 'white men can't jump' is on!
Jeff Tweedy from Wilco is the only person in the world that really understands me right now.
back to studying.
In retrospect, I didn't realize the magnitude of the decision I made to leave Tennessee and move to Los Angeles. I traded an incredible, diverse group of friends that I respected and who appreciated me for a complete unknown. I figured I would keep in touch with the people that mattered to me, but it's not that simple. You can call, you can write, you can savor brief moments in the margins of your lives, but it doesn't matter. Your paths diverge. Life churns on and the distance grows.
Fast friends fading, opportunities forgotten, years disappearing. You don't really notice a lot of the tragedy in life, but it's always hovering in the periphery.
Fast friends fading, opportunities forgotten, years disappearing. You don't really notice a lot of the tragedy in life, but it's always hovering in the periphery.
Notetaking FAIL
I'm sitting next to this guy in history of economic thought this morning. He sleeps the whole time, except for waking up briefly to write the words 'the fall of rome' then goes back to sleep. At the end of class he awakes and frantically copies a graph from the slide that we didn't actually talk about. So his notes for the day read 'the fall of rome' and some completely irrelevant graph that he doesn't even know the meaning of.
Labels:
College
Dell D400 sequence of events.
July 25th, 2009: The memory and the harddrive on my dell d400 simultaneously fail, taking months of research notes and 3 pages of my rough draft with it. I install a backup harddrive, replace the memory, dry my tears of rage and soldier on.
August 30th, 2009: The memory and the harddrive fail again, taking 8 pages of the final draft of my research paper. I stop just short of cleaving the entire thing in half with an axe. My dad arrives to visit, bringing a replacement computer, which ironically is another d400.
September 30th, 2009: Dell d400 powercord begins to fail, charging the battery only after several minutes of jimmying the cord in various directions.
HRRROUGGGGGGAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUGHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
but anyway. The workload this quarter is ridiculous. But I like my classes - they have so much variety. This morning I had Physics m155, energy and modern economy, taught by Michael E Kahn, one of my favorite professors and a world renowned natural resource economist, and Michael Jura, a physics professor. They alternate teaching on tuesdays and thursdays, and Jura taught today. This meant that I looked down for a second to check a text message, and then looked up to find that we had fully diagrammed and calculated the energy flux between the earth and the sun and moved on to climate change. Kahn teaches energy economics on tuesdays, which is also awesome but in a way that I can actually understand.
Time to get to work.
August 30th, 2009: The memory and the harddrive fail again, taking 8 pages of the final draft of my research paper. I stop just short of cleaving the entire thing in half with an axe. My dad arrives to visit, bringing a replacement computer, which ironically is another d400.
September 30th, 2009: Dell d400 powercord begins to fail, charging the battery only after several minutes of jimmying the cord in various directions.
HRRROUGGGGGGAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUGHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
but anyway. The workload this quarter is ridiculous. But I like my classes - they have so much variety. This morning I had Physics m155, energy and modern economy, taught by Michael E Kahn, one of my favorite professors and a world renowned natural resource economist, and Michael Jura, a physics professor. They alternate teaching on tuesdays and thursdays, and Jura taught today. This meant that I looked down for a second to check a text message, and then looked up to find that we had fully diagrammed and calculated the energy flux between the earth and the sun and moved on to climate change. Kahn teaches energy economics on tuesdays, which is also awesome but in a way that I can actually understand.
Time to get to work.
Damn It, Television
I've never watched much tv. I had cable access to the internet since I was about 12 years old and before that I preferred books. But over this summer I've been working over 20 hours a week at Young Research Library (paltry length of time for most but not for my soft, unlined hands) and I have now experienced the fully body torpor that takes hold when you get home from a shitty day at work. The average person(me) wants 2 things after they get off of work: food of some sort, with cheese on it, and to forget that they just spent the whole day completing boring, repetitive tasks. This combination of desires is essentially a mathematical equation that sums to tv and hot pockets.
So long story short, I've been watching more tv than I have ever watched in my entire life. It's been a whirlwind summer full of self discovery and enlightenment. But mostly rage.
TV enrages me. I hate reality TV, late night tv journalism, everything on E!, and I really hate that stupid exclamation point at the end of E!. But the last straw is commercials. Commercials really enrage me, to the point that I can't watch commercials - I'm too sensitive of the effect that it's trying to have on me and I just complain incessantly. It's probably pretty awful watching tv with me.
Carl jr is a consistent offender.
"HA HA Big Mac has a Jingle, that's so fucking lame!" What the fuck is this shit, I ask you? What are you expecting me to think? "Sorry McDonald's, that big mac is a really classic sandwich and all and I'd eat one except I'M NOT A PUSSY." Mostly what I hate is the tone of the announcer's voice. It's like he's announcing a professional wrestling match. It's just a goddamn hamburger.
Then this:
CARL JR'S WANTS ME TO SEXUALLY ATTRACTED TO HAMBURGERS. I don't have anything to say about this.
The way things are marketed today is terribly fucked up. My rant is pointless because this stuff works and everyone who watched the above videos is probably extremely hungry or horny or both right now.
As for the FreeCreditReport.com commercials, I have no specific complaints. They don't appeal to my base instincts or anything. I just really want to strangle that guy.
So long story short, I've been watching more tv than I have ever watched in my entire life. It's been a whirlwind summer full of self discovery and enlightenment. But mostly rage.
TV enrages me. I hate reality TV, late night tv journalism, everything on E!, and I really hate that stupid exclamation point at the end of E!. But the last straw is commercials. Commercials really enrage me, to the point that I can't watch commercials - I'm too sensitive of the effect that it's trying to have on me and I just complain incessantly. It's probably pretty awful watching tv with me.
Carl jr is a consistent offender.
"HA HA Big Mac has a Jingle, that's so fucking lame!" What the fuck is this shit, I ask you? What are you expecting me to think? "Sorry McDonald's, that big mac is a really classic sandwich and all and I'd eat one except I'M NOT A PUSSY." Mostly what I hate is the tone of the announcer's voice. It's like he's announcing a professional wrestling match. It's just a goddamn hamburger.
Then this:
CARL JR'S WANTS ME TO SEXUALLY ATTRACTED TO HAMBURGERS. I don't have anything to say about this.
The way things are marketed today is terribly fucked up. My rant is pointless because this stuff works and everyone who watched the above videos is probably extremely hungry or horny or both right now.
As for the FreeCreditReport.com commercials, I have no specific complaints. They don't appeal to my base instincts or anything. I just really want to strangle that guy.
Everyone and Their Mother has a law school blog
The sheer volume of information out there about whether or not to go to law school is pretty mind boggling. Why does everyone feel like they have to weigh in on this? There must be more people who write law school advice blogs then there are that vote in mayoral elections.
I've spent the last 24 hours lost in a maze of law school confidential blogs and career advice websites. It's been a kind of like walking through a stadium jam packed with people shouting "don't do it, you idiot!" The general consensus is that you should only go if you want to be a lawyer, because it's very expensive and insanely competitive. Also, most people find that being a lawyer either sucks because you work at a firm, or doesn't pay well because you work for the public interest. Here's how much debt you will rack up, on average. The people are all a bunch of jerks. Job prospects aren't actually all that shiny. This is how shitty it is to work in a corporate law firm.
I must be a deaf idiot, because I'm leaning towards it.
Yes, law school costs a lot and you shouldn't invest that much unless you know where you're going with it. But I'm not convinced by this argument. Undergraduate education is just as, if not more expensive and typically even more worthless. Barely anyone knows what they're going to major in and what they're going to use it for when they start undergraduate, but that's not keeping anyone's wallet shut. My own reasons were for college were pretty dumb in retrospect, but I still stand by them. I needed to get the hell out of Nashville, Tennessee (no offense to my friends and family there - the best friends I have are still there), and I wanted to learn something about the way the world works. I got exactly what I wanted out of my undergraduate - an incredible experience living in the insanity of Los Angeles and a new lens with which to view the world, tinted green.
I think that I can get exactly what I want out of law school. Anonymous Lawyer's Jeremey Blachman talks about law school giving you a sense of purpose. On the real, I want that - I want a path, so I can just get started running on it already! My internship director has ph.d's, bachelor's, masters, professorships, you name it, and she tells me her law degree was the one that changed her life the most. Say what you want, but people treat you differently if you have a j.d. I'm not just talking about the opportunity to preen at a party when someone asks you about your career. It's like a big fucking gold star on your resume, and god knows why but people take it seriously. A lot of journalists have law degrees. And I think it will matter when I go into the job market. Assuming symmetric information and symmetric skill sets(forgive me, I am an economics major.), a J.D. is going to make a difference to a hiring director. Big. Fat. Period. Additionally, I will find the classes interesting. I will learn information I consider useful. I can get at least as much out of a law degree as out of UCLA, and it can't possible cost me more than UCLA has.
Admittedly it will take some convincing, a few lifechanging epiphanies, perhaps a lobotomy(law school admissions board, please read this as humor) until I can seem myself being happy as a big corporate lawyer. But what if I can use these skill to do something more meaningful, in environmental law, or in public interest? I've never cared about money. (wait what's my major?) All I care about is finding a job that I can care about enough so that it's not hell making a living off of it. (If anyone's having this dilemma, read this now. It's like he plucked the thoughts about careers from my brain, really eerie.) It's a definite possibility that those jobs could make me happy. I know that I want to end up as a published writer no matter what I do after UCLA and for how long, and that kind of work can only help me in that.
I know exactly how hard it will be - I've read more than enough about it. From what I hear, it's exactly like placing your head in a meat grinder and turning the crank yourself.(this site for mature audiences. apologies to the creators of Saw if I stole the idea for your next movie.) But for some reason I'm not afraid. Assuming that I'm not an overconfident fool, I think it's because I've spent the past 3 years strapping my brain in the iron maiden that is the UCLA economics program, and I'm not even slightly mathematically minded. I'm so right brained that I don't even know how to use the number pad on the keyboard. It's like I'm right handed and I've been trying to make a career as a lefty armwrestler. If I can have the success I've had in economics with my particular skillset, then I can't feel real fear when I read those law school horror stories. Law school may be hard, but at least I'll get to use my right hand.
Damn this was long. but yeah, I need help on this one guys.
I've spent the last 24 hours lost in a maze of law school confidential blogs and career advice websites. It's been a kind of like walking through a stadium jam packed with people shouting "don't do it, you idiot!" The general consensus is that you should only go if you want to be a lawyer, because it's very expensive and insanely competitive. Also, most people find that being a lawyer either sucks because you work at a firm, or doesn't pay well because you work for the public interest. Here's how much debt you will rack up, on average. The people are all a bunch of jerks. Job prospects aren't actually all that shiny. This is how shitty it is to work in a corporate law firm.
I must be a deaf idiot, because I'm leaning towards it.
Yes, law school costs a lot and you shouldn't invest that much unless you know where you're going with it. But I'm not convinced by this argument. Undergraduate education is just as, if not more expensive and typically even more worthless. Barely anyone knows what they're going to major in and what they're going to use it for when they start undergraduate, but that's not keeping anyone's wallet shut. My own reasons were for college were pretty dumb in retrospect, but I still stand by them. I needed to get the hell out of Nashville, Tennessee (no offense to my friends and family there - the best friends I have are still there), and I wanted to learn something about the way the world works. I got exactly what I wanted out of my undergraduate - an incredible experience living in the insanity of Los Angeles and a new lens with which to view the world, tinted green.
I think that I can get exactly what I want out of law school. Anonymous Lawyer's Jeremey Blachman talks about law school giving you a sense of purpose. On the real, I want that - I want a path, so I can just get started running on it already! My internship director has ph.d's, bachelor's, masters, professorships, you name it, and she tells me her law degree was the one that changed her life the most. Say what you want, but people treat you differently if you have a j.d. I'm not just talking about the opportunity to preen at a party when someone asks you about your career. It's like a big fucking gold star on your resume, and god knows why but people take it seriously. A lot of journalists have law degrees. And I think it will matter when I go into the job market. Assuming symmetric information and symmetric skill sets(forgive me, I am an economics major.), a J.D. is going to make a difference to a hiring director. Big. Fat. Period. Additionally, I will find the classes interesting. I will learn information I consider useful. I can get at least as much out of a law degree as out of UCLA, and it can't possible cost me more than UCLA has.
Admittedly it will take some convincing, a few lifechanging epiphanies, perhaps a lobotomy(law school admissions board, please read this as humor) until I can seem myself being happy as a big corporate lawyer. But what if I can use these skill to do something more meaningful, in environmental law, or in public interest? I've never cared about money. (wait what's my major?) All I care about is finding a job that I can care about enough so that it's not hell making a living off of it. (If anyone's having this dilemma, read this now. It's like he plucked the thoughts about careers from my brain, really eerie.) It's a definite possibility that those jobs could make me happy. I know that I want to end up as a published writer no matter what I do after UCLA and for how long, and that kind of work can only help me in that.
I know exactly how hard it will be - I've read more than enough about it. From what I hear, it's exactly like placing your head in a meat grinder and turning the crank yourself.(this site for mature audiences. apologies to the creators of Saw if I stole the idea for your next movie.) But for some reason I'm not afraid. Assuming that I'm not an overconfident fool, I think it's because I've spent the past 3 years strapping my brain in the iron maiden that is the UCLA economics program, and I'm not even slightly mathematically minded. I'm so right brained that I don't even know how to use the number pad on the keyboard. It's like I'm right handed and I've been trying to make a career as a lefty armwrestler. If I can have the success I've had in economics with my particular skillset, then I can't feel real fear when I read those law school horror stories. Law school may be hard, but at least I'll get to use my right hand.
Damn this was long. but yeah, I need help on this one guys.
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