set term=vt100
stty rows 24
I've been saying that all day. For some reason, vi is getting some weird term emulation bad karma! Yuck!
I felt like shit last night. Augh well whatever ... I feel better than Linda does today. She's not sick, but there is some application you get to send before you apply to Med School and she just found out about it today and it takes a month to process and it's all ambiguous and she's going to miss all the deadlines because nobody told her and all sorts of awful stuff that just made her feel like shit.
I wisht I could have helped her in some way. I think she'll feel better once that evil application she'd never expected gets FedExed away from her. 'til then though her headache is certainly worse than mine!
I was half an hour late to English 302 again. The Students for Real Democracy had a protest for the Board of Trustees who are meeting to vote to screw us over with the Athletic Fee tomorrow ... I dropped by the gathering spot to show my support, and was just too entranced with the signs, the balloons, and the solidarity, between GEO (the Grad Employees Union that is being refused recognition by the BOT) and People Against Racism, and another Anti-Chief group, as well as Laura Appenzeller, president or something of the Student Government, who made a speech relating to lack of student representation and the damned fee.
Anyways, I liked it there, so now Hawisher gets to think I'm even more of a slacker. I swear, skulking in a half-hour late ... I think Kathy is drawing parallels between my current state and my legendary level of slackitude which I possessed in High School. (Kathy Kottaras being an LPHS alum and a classmate in 302.)
And I don't even have a decent "Language Project" - a proposal for which was due today. I did submit a message that said I didn't know what I want to do, and that if I were in to traditional kind of things, well I might as just well be a Linguistics major eh? But anyhow I wanna do something with computers but I doubt I can get more sophisticated than mere "playing around" ... argh!
And while I'm on a bitch fest - CS327 IS BEING DUMB! The homework I did at 0900h which was due at 1000h was drawing stinking FLOW CHARTS! Not even flow charts, but "data flow diagrams"
See, if you have a complex system, you break it down in to smaller bits. That's like, intuitive and all. A Data Flow Diagram - DFD, is a bunch of circles and boxes that shows what sort of data is flowing between which bits.
We've been learning this eye-bleedingly simple idea like FOREVER!
It reminds me of CS173 ... I shudder to contemplate.
And, well ... I'm so behind with English 381 journal entries it aint even funny. I guess part of the problem is that I'm not writing this journal here for class, but for me, and for you, whomever is reading.
Anyways, I'm also too lazy to try to write a separate journal. (Redundancy?) And I'm reluctant to try my hand at you know ... writing .. hand-writing a more conventional journal in the first place. Ahhh, a quandary.
But this whole on-line journal thing is going to help me out though ... you know because in Engl 381 I'm analyzing diary-l for our own little language thingy in that class. Yay!
So, without further adieu, let's talk about "Ways With Words" (Woohoo!)
Ways With Words ... Shirley Brice Heath ... uhmmm ... chapters 3 and 4 were ethnographies of communication for two Appalachian towns, called "Roadville" and "Trackton" - two very annoyingly cute, or is it dull, pseudonyms for these two anonymous communities - one black and one white.
Anyways, like Roadville has white people. Trackton has black people. In Trackton kids learn how to talk without any mothering, and just hang around the community, and learn to speak for a variety of different occasions, responding to things in differing contexts. White kids in Roadville live tedious childhoods of parents teaching them stuff.
I could yammer on, but I have a problem saying stuff that's already been said in class. Too cynical, this one. Suffice it to say that the book gets pretty uninteresting as you read it ... it's got loads of examples see, and after awhile the details start to corrode your brain and you're left wondering "what is the point?"
This will all make the paper I'm writing in a similar vein this weekend all the more fun.
Oh, you remember that girl who recognized me as Dannyman? She's doing uiuc.test newsgroup. Oh, she had a lot of fun trying to explain some of the ideologies of .test to students in a discussion group. I chipped in and tried to help. She knows more of them in person than I do. I'm interested to know what she'll observe and possibly conclude about the communicative strategies of a sort of rag-tag collection of the Campus' hardest-core geeks.
Whew.
Chapter 5 we skipped. Chapter six was ... uhmmm, I think I'm reading that now. "The Townspeople"
The townspeople are this elite race of androids who live in town and are constantly active and are generally the oppressor or something. I don't understand what they have to do with Roadville and Trackton yet, but it's like the book is hurting my brain anyways.
I guess I'll get back to work on the chapter. This work keyboard hurts me fingers anyway.
...
Augh, just finished reading that last chapter. Class distinctions and all huh? See the "townsfolks" are a bunch of upper-middle-class highly-literate types. And the Trackton and Roadville people are more like folks who don't have the same queer, constantly-reading habits of the townsfolk.
I've seen this before.
My family likes to read. Lotsa the folks I've come to know, by growing up in Chicago, aren't much for reading. In trying to fit in, I've become more averse to Academics and stuff, or being too "nerdy" ... I like to relax and whatnot, try to be normal, but that's not a normal state of affairs for me really, as I do have this inborn desire to geek out.
That's why it's kinda cool being at the University, and especially in the Allen Hall environment, where nerdy geeky people abound. Except of course for my roommates, who are like theater/film people. Greg Gargano is always playing video games!
I'm sure I could say something much deeper. Sinuses!
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