One of many awkward me-affiliated places.
Time-Dependent SemiPublic Memory Bank,
Super Secret Dumping/Proving Ground,
Displaced Miscellany Collection,
3 Hours in the Future (EST)
[On arty side-projects]
It makes the constant academic rejection slightly more bearable.
ME to a former denizen of the ‘view.
You know those things you don’t realize you think until you say them? (Or type them, as is perhaps unfortunately slightly more often—but also often more usefully, in my own experience—the case?)
This was one such notional thing.
“How” is a fun thing to know. […] (Natural-competence? Thanks for setting up a false dichotomy, Wikipedia.) My amassing of assorted “how” knowledge is what I need to feel secure at night.
“Why” is kind of a nice thing to stumble upon knowing too, though.
There are these pictures I have, the ones on the right side in the image above, just shy of a decade old now. They’re under-exposed and so one only would be able to see what they are if the context was clear. However, I think about them a lot.
I had been taking a metal fabrication class (machining, welding, blacksmith-ing).
Let’s pause for a moment here to really comprehend the fact that, at that point: right around the throes of the turn this century, one could still take iron- and steel-working classes at ivy-league institutions. That, despite my Wile E. Coyote jokey business cards, I’ve had scholarly reasons to use an anvil for its intended purposes. Given some of my pursuits since then, it was probably one of the most useful classes I took as an undergrad. (Independent research was clearly most important, but surely Metal Fab snags a place in my top 5.)
The nature of the class was a lecture in the mornings and then evenings of testing and practical work, arranged in an assortment of projects that had to be completed: braze this pipe, forge a chisel, do angled weld work, mill whatever shapes to build some things, etc. Something around 25 projects so that if you were a decent pair of hands, you could do 2 a week an have some time leftover to go back and try to do better work at the end of 14 weeks.
Anyhow, it was the end of the Spring semester (senior year). And I was so tired.
Aside: In terms of value, education is priceless—that is something that was emphasized in a household where clearly it was through education that “The American Dream” was this tangible thing—however, given limited funds it would be naive to forget that it had real costs. I did go to a fancy school, but I maxed the bejeezus out of every semester because the price is the same regardless of how many credit hours you take. Why would I miss out on Ancient Greek and Barbarian Art and Architecture just because I had to take the core curricula for being a chemist and a biologist? That would be a shame. I was getting BAs anyway—forgoing liberal arts courses wouldn’t magically turn a BA into a BS. I wasn’t taking MetalFab in place of something, it was just something I wanted to learn so I slipped it in. If I had taken the same amount of credits at some online program I’d’ve actually paid as much or more. However, I skipped a total of …maybe 5 lectures in 4 years. The 1st was my 1st course the 1st day of my 1st year in which I overslept and sprinted to class with only minutes left. And ran into a guy on a bike. Literally ran into him with my person. (I’ll look both ways for cars, but a bike doesn’t register as a car.) We both ended up sprawled in the street. I skinned my knee but scrambled up and to the math building with enough time to be shamed by the TA. Sam. Sam Hsiao. I think that initial association of pain with missing class was probably the springboard for my aversion to absenteeism. This has been a good session. Anyhow.
It had been a 23 credit hour semester, 8 of which were graduate level. I was getting paid to do research, which kept me flush with ramen noodles and canned tuna. Which I would mix together, clearly, as I am now fantasizing about how disgustingly delicious such a meal would be. Maybe 43 cents back then. Add in a can of corn and you’ve got yourself a big-time dinner. I am so distracted by this tongue memory. Fat-kid Fantasy!
Okay, so back to that last day of the semester. SUPER TIRED; I had come home to our little off-campus house and paused a moment before I was going to make food and eat and go back to campus and the metal-work building so I could finish out the project re-doings. 25 metal fab projects had been finished…20 of them up to the standard I had set for myself. And my dear philosopher king looked over as I just leaned against the shelf by the window and slid into a chair and put my head in my hands and surrendered.
“I can’t make this happen today, I’ll take a B-.”
And he grabbed one of the crappy disposable cameras that we always had around the house, and took that bottom picture, where the light was behind me and so I’m in this weird shadow with my shame. And then I took a picture of him, the top picture, where he is doing jazz hands or some such, rejoicing in the moment that he witnessed where instead of going back to work, I was about to engage in rocket launchers in the caves (probably my favorite of the Goldeneye scenarios, preempting by years jokes about my people’s competencies and proclivities vis-à-vis caves) with him in between some intermittent naps for the next 10 hours. I think he might have the heart part of that slaggy and sloppily arc-cut piece of scrap metal. Together, it is a commemoration of a failure of will which was not the end of the world.
We’re all alright.
(#9 from the 1979 Dutch Singles Chart!)
In the time since then, I have come to better understand the importance of surrendering faster. Not always, but there are some situations where diminishing returns are not worth it. I ended up getting an B+, because I had forgotten that I did okay on the written tests too. Also, Tom had been generally been amused by my moxie*. My GPA was never great to begin with; the primary reason I had worried about it in MetalFab was that I was relying on doing well in easier/practical courses to offset the fact that undergrads in grad-level classes do not get the “Gentleman’s B” which is the low end grade of a graduate student in the sciences.
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When I wrote this, Saturday, I had 2 more projects on my list than I do now. BUT, funds for the commissioned thing just showed up today, so…progress net: 1 down.
*Effective against paralysis, softening of the brain, nervousness, and insomnia!
“We do not wish to ruin the fun of the holidays. But, if you want to appraise something, you need to do it right.”
There is a clear voice in this analysis and it kills me a little that there is no byline because I am terribly curious how the author would misspell “Van Hœt”.
Here in my verbs
I can only *receive*
I can *listen* to you
It *keeps* me stable for days
In verbs
_Decreasing Passivity_
Research-Related Verbs
Computer-Related
Communication-related
Teamwork-related
Project Management-related
Teaching-related
Consulting-related
Verbs that convey accomplishment
That feeling there? That’s 120 Volts.
The first day of the practical half of the course in metal fabrication (machining, blacksmithing, welding), Tom Cook had each of us grab a hot arc welding electrode while touching ground, so we’d know how it felt and wouldn’t freak out if we inadvertently did it while working.
There are many things that could be a good metaphor for, but it comes to mind as I just grabbed a plug the wrong way while trying to yank it from a surge-suppressor. So we’re having a little sit-down. Hey, how’s it going? Read any good books lately? Note: I am not especially interested in The Good Book—Word Lovers of Oak Ridge: lesson learned.
They no longer teach that agricultural/biological engineering course—Metal Fab got cut a couple years ago as the ABEN department became BEE—which is a little sad because it was one of the most practically useful things I learned outside of my field. Not so much the blacksmithing part: though it is pretty amusing to remember that, like Wile E. Coyote, I have had practical anvil experience.
Edit: I was wrong, the dept. name change was before the axing.
Whät Wë Tälk Äböüt Whën Wë Tälk Äböüt Röck.”
One of my former bosses is noted for saying that you can sleep with your ideas, but you should not marry them. Some of them make awfully compelling cases for themselves, though, my abuse of diacritics notwithstanding.
I just like making up titles. While the phrase usually used is “too clever by half”, I imagine one can be too clever by 3/4. I’ll let you know when I get there.
841 bits of madness. Submitting the 3rd set of proofs here makes the 3 lingering manuscripts there feel like when you flush and it comes back.
“I saved Latin. What did you ever do?”
I’d quipped the other day that I was neither a “Type-A student”, nor even an “A-student”, in high-school. But, after careful spreadsheeting, maybe I was a little bit of the former. That list isn’t even necessarily comprehensive—it’s just what I could remember as I was sitting here.
I used to worry that I got into college on the merit not of my transcript, but of a very rational argument I made in the comic-book I drew as my optional essay. Accepting that “being able to sell oneself” is not necessarily whoring or a con artistry made that less of a worry in later years. There is some re-accepting of that concept that must be done every once in a while, though.
The asterisks indicate activities that involved trips off-site, sometimes during the school-day. Those were the best. A puppet troop given a short bus and an elementary school assembly circuit is pretty much as ridiculous and awesome as one would imagine. Summer Math/Science camp doesn’t get on the list as it was in the summer. And, for the sake of continuity, I used to get in trouble for wearing pants underneath my candy-striping uniform. I didn’t stop wearing them, I just started to avoid the lady who found my sartorial choices irksome.
[201107150121: Links added in for increased narratological continuity. Also, to lend credence to the fact that Reading Olympics was, in fact, a real thing.]
Top 5 Things I’ve Felt the Need to Share—Snapshot: 20110620-1206.
Broken Down By Month, Based on Use-Frequency in the Tootstream
…And folks worry I don’t apply sufficient rigor to the analysis of me. Pff. My scrupulousness is such that I’ll analyze anything, even myself. On one hand, I’ve always got something on my mind; on the other hand, the idea of out of date spreadsheets or incomplete analysis makes me regularly dyspeptic. The blessing/curse tradeoff is ubiquitous.
It’s amusing to see the things I talk about that aren’t the things I talk about most. Bowling. Yams. Things. Probably. If one looked at the overall averages, these blips of brief fascination would disappear, but they represent very real obsessions for a couple weeks or so in there. Yams are delicious.
“If an alien species would make an ensemble-averaged observation of the human population on Earth, they would conclude that each person has one testicle and one ovary!”
—Certainly my, and probably the, most quoted Steven Chu-ism.
Moles are like dozens. But not like THE dozens. That’s totally different.
…the important part being the mole, who is a mole, who has a mole, in mole. Buffalo.
It’s only been 2 years since I’ve taught second semester gen-chem, this shouldn’t have taken so much thought.
A group of moles is a labour. I…am not working.
On the Grimace (non-FACS related):
…He has an unnamed mom, an unnamed dad, a grandma named “Winky”, a great, great grandma named Jenny Grimace, and might be brothers with “King Gonga”… In “Grimace’s Oddysey”, Grimace is portrayed as a ham radio enthusiast who uses a homemade transmitter made from a colander. Grimace’s physical appearance is difficult to describe, even for the other denizens of McDonaldland. Ronald says Grimace has his mother’s eyes, while Birdie says he has his father’s prominent chin, and Hamburglar jokingly says he has his Grandma Winky’s fat ankles. Despite his massive girth, Grimace took ballet classes.
I was going to make an observation about Brak and the recurrent editorial choice of turning erstwhile vaguely capable villains into incompetent boobs.
And then, I was going to comment on how parallel structure and oxford commas lead to the inference that Grimace has “might be brothers” that maybe would be related to possible giants. And the brothers perhaps have a malady with a weird name.
And let’s not even take first steps into re-imagining Grimace’s “Odyssey”, which drops into Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey territory and OHMYGOD, Grimace doesn’t play the role of Odysseus, he plays the role of HOMER. What a narrator. “It all started when I guy named Troy fell. Maybe he tripped on a fry-guy.” I’ve got a deep Ithacan back catalog.
And, eventually, I probably would have gotten around to ruminations on whether it was “difficult to describe” Grimace because in the McDonaldland universe no one can envision what a giant eggplant with limbs and a face would look like OR, because all his former enemies/current friends are under the constant pressure to distinguish themselves as good guys and be polite and decent clowns/anthropomorphic birds/hamburger monsters. Which, clearly, would have been dead center of my wheelhouse of private/public self-conscious worries about judging alternate universes without leaning too hard on cultural relativism, being “good”, and being awkward looking. Could have hit that out of the park.
But, as is often the case, I glanced peripherally upward and learned that playing the role of MINI-ME was actually a dwarfsploitation/baby-step UP from being RONALD McDONALD’s DOG, Sundae. Which is a far more important thing to focus on, obviously, as now I am wheezing with the intellectual excitement of a cascade of tangents.
Oddly enough, now that I have written this, I will likely work instead.
Thus ended lunch.
Creative people alternate between imagination and fantasy, and a rooted sense of reality. Great art and great science involve a leap of imagination into a world that is different from the present. The rest of society often views these new ideas as fantasies without relevance to current reality. And they are right. But the whole point of art and science is to go beyond what we now consider real and create a new reality. At the same time, this “escape” is not into a never-never land. What makes a novel idea creative is that once we see it, sooner or later we recognize that, strange as it is, it is true…Most of us assume that artists—musicians, writers, poets, painters—are strong on the fantasy side, whereas scientists, politicians, and businesspeople are realists. This may be true in terms of day-to-day routine activities. But when a person begins to work creatively, all bets are off.
Csikszentmihalyi
Tangential:
Practical exams in many fields don’t necessarily yield situations where students are given “correct” answers, so much as they are passed/failed for satisfactory/unsatisfactory results. As a student, one can attempt to figure out where the wrong choices were made, but piecing together where the failure took place after the fact, especially in a complex simulation with many potential variables would require eidetic memory, hyper-awareness of changes in the scenario, and/or multiple failures. Consequently, a teacher can give the same essential test, year after year, without it necessarily becoming “more passable”. I’d imagine.
Such a weird job.
In addition to the tornado, this storm is capable of producing up to quarter sized hail and destructive straight line winds. If you are caught outside, seek shelter in a nearby reinforced building. As a last resort, seek shelter in a culvert, ditch, or low spot and cover your head with your hands. If in mobile homes or vehicles, evacuate them and get inside a sturdy shelter. If no shelter is available, lie flat in the nearest ditch or other low spot and cover your head with your hands. The safest place to be during a tornado is in a basement. Get under a workbench or other piece of sturdy furniture. If no basement is available, seek shelter on the lowest floor of the building in an interior hallway or room such as a closet. Use blankets or pillows to cover your body and always stay away from windows.
Transcription from the RobotVox telling me how to deal with the weather in town last week.
As of yesterday, April and its showers are over. I only just now looked up “culvert”. “Culvert-exploration” sounds much classier and less ninja-turtle-inspired than “mapping the local storm-drains and sewers”: if revisiting tales of my youthful adventures, substitute appropriately.
Anyhow, high expectations where flowers are concerned when I go outside. Keep passing the open windows.
