rax | Entries tagged with school

Woke up this morning with Selene curled up on my chest and Leo curled up mixed in with my legs and blankets. I guess it could have been better, but I'm hard pressed to ask for more than that. Particularly because when I got up and hopped in the shower and came back, Selene was lazily grooming in a sunbeam, and I ended up just sitting and watching her for ten minutes while Leo sat on my lap. I don't know what I would do without cats.
My next reading assignment that I haven't done yet --- barring things that get sent out last-minute, as I expect two to do --- is due on April 6th. By Tuesday I would like that to be April 13th, but that's probably unrealistic. Regardless, I am back to "ahead of where I absolutely have to be," which gives me leeway to put lots of effort into the books I most care about and/or get work done ahead of time on my final projects. This is very important to me, particularly because my girlfriend and her wife will be in town the weekend before one of my final paper drafts is due, and so I really want to have free time then, but also just because RACHELS LOVE WORK.
Related to this, I haven't finished the main plot of Pokemon Black yet, because I keep doing homework instead. I'm pretty sure this is a good thing, but it means I keep not being able to read my friends' posts about it, which is frustrating. If you are curious where I am: ( pokemon babbling, an attempt at no spoilers )
I'll be in San Francisco next weekend, doing Fisher-Price My First Fieldwork (tm). Relatedly, if you can think of anyone in the Bay Area, particularly who I don't know, who is into animal costuming and role-playing and might be interested in talking to me about it for 15-60 minutes, please drop me an email so I can send an official form to you [to send to them] to see if they are interested. I'll have somewhat limited time and mobility, but I have no problem spending hours on public transit to get data. DELICIOUS DATA. Also I have to fill out IRB forms to continue my research after the semester is over how did I end up doing fieldwork already I wasn't even going to do fieldwork this is so very what. (And awesome.)
I don't think very much else is going on. (Well, there's that conference.) Other than I think I might have a new friend, who is really good at Scrabble. I might have to start learning the two-letter words. :) And even though it's still cold out, the sun is here and it's really pretty and there are birds. So I guess a bunch of things are going on, but I am choosing my narrative to be about these things, because I need to get grading done now.

Crossposts: http://rax.livejournal.com/78587.html

I'm in a cafe in Seattle sitting with Rik and trying to figure out how to get a paper I've written under 8000 words so that I can submit it to a journal. It was 11000 when I started; I've got it down to around 8900 and am starting to cut things I think are really important. :/ On the one hand, this is super frustrating; on the other hand, having this much important stuff to cut makes me more and more confident that I can turn "Rachel Who Studies Furries Using Weird Philosophy" into a valid and valuable dissertation.
Seattle has mostly been gray and rainy (surprise!) but there was some sun this afternoon and we walked around a bit and it was really nice. It is super easy to find vegan food here, which is great, although I am apparently now nightshade-sensitive enough that I cannot eat one french fry. Waugh. On the plus side, the fettucini alfredo at Pizza Pi is nothing short of a revelation; I had assumed I would never have an alfredo of quality again when I went vegan and had reluctantly accepted this. I was wrong.
It is sad that my life is not as closely intertwined with anyone's as I am used to it being and expected it to be; on the other hand, the latticework of intersections with people dear to me, sustained across travel and texting and Skype, is really really awesome. Being with Rik, and with my other friends in Seattle, has been really awesome for me. I had my requisite "oh god I let my guard down now everything ever will explode" breakdown this morning but I think I am better for it, and making a ton of progress on getting this paper improved. My ideal version would be around 9500 words, but I think I have trimmed a lot of ... unnecessary prose.
Sadly I haven't gotten IRB approval for my ethnography yet, so I haven't been able to do any interviews here. I am hoping I will wake up to it tomorrow morning but at this point I am not expecting to be able to do work on it until after spring break. Fiddlesticks and frippery.
I am still only four gyms into Pokemon Black --- I have been busy seeing people I care about and working on worky things --- but I'm having a blast with it. I cannot wait to get to trade things --- I haven't had net that I could use with the DS. (Although the cafe I am in right now might --- I may check tomorrow if it's dreary out and we are spending a lot of cafe time.)
Random life-process thing: I was freaking out about my tasklist a whole lot and then I did time estimates. I am freaking out less now. It's still not great, but it is way better than the average week. I should remember this for when I am feeling crazy stressed --- and you might consider it if you have a similar life tracking mechanism to me. It's something I used to do but got out of the habit of.
I am in a two-story cafe where I can see down into the bottom story, and I am watching a couple play chess. I have this great birds-eye view. 1. d4 Nc6 2. Bf4 d5 3. Nc3 e6 4. Nf3 Bd6 5. b4?? Bxf4 6. e3 Bd6 I am deeply pleased that Black, and not White, is the girl with black and purple hair. <3 Oh look, now the game doesn't hold her attention enough that she has started texting. Heeeeee.
Seriously, she's just toying with him at this point. Okay, back to work.

Crossposts: http://rax.livejournal.com/77100.html

I am enplagued. I woke up yesterday morning and felt kind of woozy but thought it might just be because I was hanging around with smokers on Friday? But then it got worse and worse and when I felt too out of it to play Pokémon at 9:30 PM I knew I was doomed. I slept for like ten hours although I had bizarro fever dreams? And woke up and was like maybe this will work and stood up and was super lightheaded and was like "...Nope!" I took some medicine and a long hot shower and am drinking tea and hopefully I will have enough brain to get through some of my homework, but my weekend tasklist is... not gonna get done. Eit.
The whole fever thing explains why I somehow felt obligated to spend an hour yesterday looking for and uploading My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic icons for my LJ/DW. ^^;; Don't get me wrong, the fever isn't why I like the show, I like it because it's smart and fun and full of little references to older ponies and other animated works and different bits of itself, and because the characters are real people I'd really like to hang out with (if I were a pony or some such) although they would occasionally drive me insane, and because it's exciting to think that as a culture we are producing television shows for kids that are actually good. WIth the big caveat that reasonable depictions of masculinity are few and far between, I strongly recommend it. Anyway, expect to see ponies next to "rax" in comments about half the time instead of Pokémon characters now. and yes I bought more LJ icons in order to do this don't judge me
The class that didn't have a set syllabus before now has a set syllabus. Hooray! ...and the final project proposal is due Wednesday. I've done some work on it, and I really hope my brain wakes all the way up before then so I can finish.
For those of you excited about the Rachel's Cats Show, Leo has started spending some time up in the kitchen and dining room, but Selene hasn't stopped; he comes up when she's asleep on my bed, and she chases him off when she wants to sit on my lap while I'm working. I'm gonna go ahead and call this progress. Also, and less awesomely, Leo appears to be able to open the garage door, and wreak havoc in the garage. I may have to get a different latch or something; I still don't know what he knocked down this most recent time.
I was gonna call a bunch of people today but I kind of have no voice? So that probably won't happen.
If I'm still sick by Tuesday and Wednesday, should I go to school? Opinions on this seem to be mixed across professors and departments. I don't want to get other people sick, but I also don't want to miss class discussion, since honestly that's most of the point of being in these classes. If I don't feel up for even walking to the class from the bus stop (which is how I feel today) it's pretty clear I shouldn't leave the house. Rrf. We'll see how I'm doing in two days I guess.
...wow I am tempted to go back to bed already.

Crossposts: http://rax.livejournal.com/74928.html

Reports of my getting a new cat have sadly been exaggerated. On the plus side, this means my aunt and uncle have found a way to keep their cat, which is very good, because no one wants to give up their cat. And I'm basically prepped for another cat... so... we'll see. If I'm timing it myself, I won't be getting another cat until I will be in town for a month straight, anyway. Or any other pet. Maybe I only need one pet? I don't know. Anyway.
School starts super soon! I'm really excited for this semester, and not sure what to expect, although I guess a little more sure than I was last semester. Probably we will read a lot of books, have discussions in class, and I will have to write two or three long papers and a number of shorter papers. There might be a small group project or two, and probably I'll go to a conference or two. There will be at least one book that bores me to tears and at least one that takes thirty hours of my time and I am thinking about for months after. At some point I will get ahead and be able to genuinely coast for a little while; at some point I will get behind and freak out for a little while. Yup, it's graduate school.
For some reason I made two loaves of bread today. The foccaccia turned out delicious if slightly misshapen; the loaf of half-wheat-half-white bread is delicious but I put too much yeast in and... well, here, let me show you a picture:
I am not sure what I am going to do about this or how I will clean the top of the bread machine. I may have to disassemble it. :/ At least I have confirmed that the issue I was having earlier is "the zojirushi demands more water" not "the zojirushi demands more yeast." The zojirushi definitely does not demand more yeast. You can tell from the that.
Today has been an absurdly productive day for me. I have done almost all of the things I wanted to get done this weekend, and it is only Saturday evening. Expect tomorrow to be spent playing video games. Maybe I'll take a walk if it isn't hideous out. Ooh, or maybe I will try to find something social to do! I could take the bus into town and sit in a cafe maybe. That seemed to work pretty well for me in San Francisco. And the cafe I like has vegan cookies...
Speaking of video games, I started Final Fantasy: Four Heroes of Light. I agree with my brother that it's sort of hard to figure out what to do; miss one person in the town and don't talk to them and you can be completely lost for an hour wandering places you should not wander and being stomped. Oops. It's still fun overall, so far, though, and it does have that old-school flavor in a way other recent Final Fantasy games have not. Will it hold my attention strongly enough for me to finish it during a semester? ...With Pokemon White/Black coming out March 6th? ... I'm not counting on it.
I woke up this morning at 8:30 AM without an alarm. Given that a week ago I woke up at 2:30 PM local time, this is pretty incredible. I only need to get to 7:30 in order to have a reasonable sleep schedule for the semester. One more hour, three more days. I can do this.
I am still dealing with insurance fallout from the fire in November. This is an irritation. Hopefully it will be done soon.

Crossposts: http://rax.livejournal.com/69791.html

So excited about catgirl goth rave. There are logistical issues; I will conquer them. Conversation included "Well, there's nothing you can do about weather." "Want to bet?" MUAHAHAHAHAHA. I am so psyched for this party. I seriously brought 45 pairs of cat ears with me in a suitcase. (This fact caused the people at the warehouse the party is at to be like "We like you already." :)
The non-academic (though still intelligent, incisive, &c.) test reader for my transsomatechnics paper has said that "THIS PAPER MAKES D&G SEEM LIKE THEY MAKE SENSE." I'm still nervous that it's terrible but I think it is probably OK to hand in if I poke at the ending a bit more. I am certainly not going to fail. Someone else who started reading it for me but didn't finish said it had them laughing uproariously which I think is good? I dunno. I just futzed with the introduction some and am still not happy with the conclusion but I don't know if I'm going to get happy with the conclusion by tomorrow and maybe I should just let it go for now. We'll see.
This week I did a good thing: I convinced my company to add sexual orientation to their harassment policy and gender identity and expression to bot the harassment policy and the equal employment statement. I mean, it wasn't hard, but it wasn't in there, and I asked, and I backed it up, and found wording that they like. Hooray for using the things I am learning in school to make a difference, even if it's a really small one, in the world. (And thanks to the friend who took me aside and was just like "Rachel, you need to ask for this.") So that's awesome and makes me feel good about my continued employment with them.
I spent much of yesterday in transit --- it takes like three hours to get from my house to the airport if I'm not driving, and then I had two longish flights, and then I had to take a train from the San Francisco airport to SoMa. Most of that time, when I wasn't dozing off, I was playing Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky. (This is your faults, yonho and bossgoji!) It is ADORABLE. Playing as a pokemon rather than as a trainer, and talking to the pokemon, and oh god. I am playing it for the plot more than for the mechanics; it's clearly a love letter to roguelikes but the actual gameplay is kinda angbandy, which is not super my thing. Although it's actually somewhat hard, which I appreciate; ( spoilers I guess? Just in case? )
In the meantime, I am going to keep playing this, because oh my god it is so adorable. I am a mudkip and my best friend is a Vulpix. We sleep on bales of hay in a room together. Why is this not actually my liiiiiiiiiiiife
It looks like I'm going to read a bunch of the books for next semester in advance? I got an email with a list of them and at first I misread it and thought I had to read them all by the first day of class and I was like "Five books? Over Christmas break? I am filled with rage!!!!" and planned out how I would get them all done and get notes taken on them during that time. It turns out those are the five major books for the class instead, and she was just offering us the chance to get a head start, and here I am having already started two of them. I... guess I might as well just continue? Maybe the other classes will also send out their reading lists and then I can get sufficiently ahead that my crazy travel plans will not hose my schoolwork as much as I worry they might. Or maybe I will get distracted and not get that much done. But if I only do half of the reading for the class before it even starts, I will probably be OK.
I complain, because working this hard does wear me down, but I really do love what I do. Otherwise I would not be able to do this much of it. And my transsomatechnics paper, while it was a grind that took me almost fifty hours to draft 27 pages, is only 27 pages because it has to be 25-30; my initial outline has two entire sections I cut out of it, and I also trimmed out an entire five-page digression from the conclusion. I love reading and talking and thinking and writing about this stuff, and I hope it is someday useful to someone else. If I can find people to let me do a dissertation on this, I think I can do one and make it good.
My brain is convinced I am on vacation. Weirdly, I have no problem doing work for my job while on vacation, which I have been doing all morning, and no problem doing work for school on vacation. But when I'm on vacation and people try to pin me down to a schedule, I bristle, and it's a little unreasonable of me. How else am I going to actually see people? I'm hoping this calms down after a few days. I guess I am still stressed about Catgirl Goth Rave and jetlagged and wasn't able to eat normally yesterday and and and and.
The phone charging cable I brought with me... just doesn't work. I will definitely fix this by tomorrow. It could cause me some issues tonight. My current anti-planning attitude is "good I should just let the battery die and people who wish to contact me should have to find me in person" but that's uh not at all reasonable Rachel and you need to get over that. And find a micro USB cable. Preferably not for stupid expensive.
The Brainwash, my favorite pinball laundromat, has Attack from Mars!!! It has been years and years but I used to be Good at that table --- in ten games, I was able to score two replays, and you can get on the high score list right now with only like seven billion. I think I can hit seven billion with some practice; I was on the scoreboard the last time the Brainwash had Attack from Mars. I have a win condition for my trip now. I CAN DO THIS. I need to read up on strategies though, and accept that I'm going to burn like $40 re-learning all of the shots. Also my ball control has gone to shit. I'm not reliably able to stop on the flipper right now, which ugh. Ugh ugh ugh. Practice is good. Good lord my non-social time this trip is going to include a lot of games. Also my social time! I brought Race for the Galaxy.
I'm a smidge overbouncy. I think this iced tea is caffeinated... did I mention here that I more or less gave up caffeine in August when I gave up alcohol? I drink tea occasionally. That's about it.

Current Mood: bouncy
Crossposts: http://rax.livejournal.com/67574.html

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my baby's in the white fluffy clouds

xe's miles above the desert, xe drops Shaymins down

Weekly Post of Week

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Oh yeah there was a week

oh god it is so cold why did I leave California

You get your bullets early this week.

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December 2022

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