Monday, November 17, 2008

A Running Commentary

What am I doing blogging so soon after my last one you may be asking yourself. And within 20 hours of my paper being due as well! Well obviously what I'm doing is procrastinating.

Why do I do this to myself? Why do I continuously wait to start assignments until it's absolutely necessary, and in the meantime waste my hours on mindless TV, movies, books, websites, games etc?

It's the whole school scene, I'm totally over it. I'd rather get a mindless job that I work when I work and then return home and not have homework but just do whatever the hell I want after putting in my hours. The motivation to work at work is being at work, the motivation to work at home is slim to nonexistent.

Think my biggest problem is that I'm still not sure what mindless career I want to pursue. Research (in certain areas i.e. animal behavior) sounds fascinating, but writing the papers and some aspects of course are not appealing to me at all. Whales. I want to study whales. But everyone wants to study whales. So I just spent the last 20 minutes searching whales on Google and I kept getting graphic whaling photos and it just made me sick. Maybe I'll go work for an activist organization against whaling.

And apparently Japan excuses their whaling, claiming it's for "scientific purposes." Scientific purposes my ass. And while many indigenous cultures used whaling for subsistence in antiquity, get over it. There are other ways to live nowadays and I don't care if it's a part of your culture, these creatures are near-if not totally sentient and don't deserve that treatment. Our culture used to ride horses everywhere but we evolved and moved on. We also used to have slaves, and again (for the most part) evolved and moved on! Why must so many societies use arcane practices and claim them to be "culturally important?" And if it's important to the culture, why are they canning them and shipping them out for sale? That doesn't seem culturally relevant... And this isn't just about the whaling or indigenous peoples, but things like the banning of gay marriage in the USA. Why is that a threat to our culture, society, or the construct of marriage? How can anyone even try to make a logical argument about that?

And the picture of the small boy in Greenland smiling with his knife gutting a whale... how sick.

Just went to dinner in there, wasn't very hungry so dinner became a side of cheesy mashed potatoes and chocolate milk... ah well. Now I have actually started writing my paper - yay! Unfortunately I just looked at the guidelines and I'm supposed to have all these figures which I will not have. We were supposed to make them in lab on Wednesday, and while we made some of them, our group kept fucking around and we didn't finish. I should have gone in to finish them but I didn't realize how many were still missing. Crap.

For some reason that just reminded me of my little speech on Australia earlier today! That's right, I volunteered to go speak to an FTS class (first term seminar - for the ickle firsties!) about studying abroad and my experience there. I was so excited to talk about it, but when I got there they all gave me these bored uninterested looks and I was reminded how much I hate public speaking. Sigh. But I got through it and maybe some of them will remember (but I highly doubt it). At least I got to talk about one of my favorite subjects!

So I was going to go into the computer lab to work on my paper (and I still will have to at one point) but it's actually full for once! It shocked me, when I was stuck in there when my computer went angry I hardly ever had company.

Took a 20 minute nap there... dang it. And listening to Eddie Izzard. Someone explain to me why writing is considered so important? And who decided what the "right" way to write was?

Never knew I could feel like this, like I've never seen the sky before... listen to my heart, can you hear it sing? Telling me to give you everything!

And that would be from Moulin Rouge ladies and gents. Luckily I'm not procrastinating so much that I'm actually watching the movie - although now I want to. I've got a timer set up to go off every 20 minutes to remind me to get my ass back on task and it just went off, so I'll be back probably within 20 minutes...

Woo I've gone like 40 minutes without coming back here! Of course I checked Facebook once or twice but the internet is going slowly so that helped me stay on track a bit. That and the fact that no one is online to distract me. Today's blog has turned into a running commentary of how my night's going by the way (in case that wasn't obvious), so feel free to stop paying attention should you feel so inclined. The time is now 9:18 pm... well at least I'm on the second of the two sections I need.

Yay for Blogger's autosave! My Firefox just got angry at me for trying to open a .pdf for my paper and closed out. I'm so glad this long and pointless blog wasn't lost... not quite sure why at the moment. Ah crap it's 9:40pm and I haven't added anything since the last little blurb. Back to the grind...

10:32pm and I'm actually feeling pretty good right now. I'm nearly done with what I can do tonight. Only part that concerns me is the fact that I can't get all the graphs I need... and I really really should have, I have no excuse other than laziness.

And now I blame Sybylla for my further procrastination - she put in a request for Mamma Mia songs and of course I felt obligated to comply. (10:39pm).

And my future Evolution prof and my former Organic Chemistry I prof had a conversation on Facebook:

Joel Carlin: Excuse me, Dr. Bur? On that protocol you gave us, I got confused on step 5, just before my lab partner caught on fire...
Scott Bur: The problem, son, is that I only gave you a 3 step procedure.
Joel Carlin: Does this mean I don't get extra credit for doing steps 4 and 5?

They were making fun of us! THAT'S HILARIOUS!!!

And now I have to start conditioning my roommate to not crack her knuckles while I'm around - YAY BLACK BETTY BY SPIDERBAIT!! (11:02pm).

11:54 pm and my fingers are covered with chip flavoring making it mildly difficult to type. Why am I eating chips? No idea. I'm not hungry and strangely enough I wasn't hungry at dinner either. I guess this time I'm eating because it's another way to procrastinate! I really just have one section left to do (1/10) so I should just get my act together and write it. I'm going to have to get up early tomorrow to finish the rest of the graphs anyway so I should try to finish early so I can at least pretend to get a decent amount of sleep tonight. Which means I should stop typing in my blog and get back to work!

12:09 am - so I just spent some time culling unnecessary groups from my Facebook groups... why??? GET TO WORK KAT!! *timid voice* yes ma'am... (and now she's talking to herself... great)

12:37 am - Finishing up the references section! And then I'm going to shower and go to bed! Hopefully... unless I get distracted...

1:03 am - So I got it printed but then I still have to go make tons of graphs sometime early tomorrow morning. I couldn't get one of my graphs that I already have in there either because 3/4 computers in there were in use and the 4th was frozen... of course on the night when I really need a school computer they're all in use! I really just need it because the stupid graph is in SigmaPlot and guess who doesn't have SigmaPlot? That's right, me doesn't. Anyway, now I'm off to shower and decide how early I need to get up to get it done. Right now I'm thinking 8 am... crap thats in 7 hours... there's gonna be a cranky Kat tomorrow.

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