I'm afraid I'm moved to bitch today. Bear with me.
Is my school so hard up for faculty that they have to hire people who can't speak English? I love accented English, world English, well spoken English of any extraction. People who think English isn't a beautiful language need to read Alexander Pope out loud—it's better than champagne bubbles bursting on the tongue! But broken, incoherent English that sounds like it's causing pain to the speaker? It's just as painful to me, if not more so. And even worse than the aural unpleasantness is the confusion induced in the listeners when different words used in context together are pronounced in the exact same way. We have eleven more weeks of this.
The homework deluge began this week. I'm going to have to start getting up at 6:00 am so I can get everything done. And my hands are going to hurt too.
The medicine I have to take for my un-diagnosable joint problems has side effects. Over winter break I increased the dosage and my joints have been feeling better. I thought I didn't have any side effects from the increase, but then school started and the side effects became obvious. This drug, which shall not be named, makes you stupid at high doses. I spent over an hour on a homework problem, trying to find my errors. I was having trouble with units! Units! I got over the units thing years ago! Duh. (If you don't understand the importance of units in engineering, go watch Spinal Tap.) I'm not the only person who's noticed this side effect. One of my lab partners last semester had the same problem when he took the same drug for his knee. So it's back to the lower dosage for me. Sharp brain, more pain. These are my choices?
My French TV channel is giving their programming lineup a makeover. They've moved my favorite documentary show to an inconvenient night and they seem to have eliminated the cheesy French cop shows. I love my French cop shows on Wednesday nights. Where else will you see a Chinese person running a prostitution ring in Paris with the character name "Madame Ho"? Where else will you see an interrogation along the lines of "You smoke Pinky cigarettes. We found a Pinky pack at the crime scene. You did it, didn't you? Here, let's type up your confession right now!" Tonight? TV5 is showing French people arguing about current events (George W. Bush is bête. Yeah, tell me about it, French guys.), so I'm watching Japanese TV (I've only got the two channels) and it's a music show with middle-aged Japanese pop singers singing Carpenters songs.
The rest of the peevishness is with myself.
Do I really need to be ten minutes early for every class? No. I like to sit in the front. It's not like I have to fight for my seat. But I'm so compulsive about being on time that I've missed out on two fun photographic opportunities this week. On my way to school I drive down Dock Street between the flood wall and the Kanawha Canal. On Tuesday morning I saw train cars from the circus stopped on a railway siding on the island between the canal and the river. Did I stop? No. I was fifteen minutes early for class. Then, tonight I saw a flock of Canada geese sitting and standing around on the canal which is iced over right now. The brown and black geese on the brown ice, with the green and brown vegetation and the brown iron trestle passing overhead looked so cool. Did I stop for a few minutes and play with my camera? No, and I was ten minutes early for class so I sat in the hall, waiting for the classroom to be unlocked. How boring! Where are my priorities?
And what was I thinking when I decided I had time to write every day? Shall I blame that on my medicine?
670 words | February 11, 2004 09:35 PM | Because I said