I’d write about how I broke out the fall-themed desktops (collected from HOPI, among other places) today, or about how someone in my philosophy seminar tried to argue that Kant is ultimately a closet utilitarian, or about how clumsy and slow Java seems (at least when inevitably compared to C), but the truth is that I don’t get home before ten on Tuesday nights and when it comes down to it I’m just too tired to write about all of that stuff and still finish my epistemology reading for tomorrow morning.
It’s become clear to me that I absolutely have to get new shoes. My old leather ones are so loose and fucked up now that I feel like I’m clomping around in clown shoes, and as great as Tim Curry was in It, I’m not really a fan of that whole clown style, you might say.
It’s true that I still own two pairs of boots (possibly three, depending on whether or not I ever clean out my closet) which more or less fit me, although none of them was purchased fewer than five years ago and all of them cause me no end of agony if I’m tramping around the city all day with the Messenger Bag of Doom. I wore the taller, cuter pair today and neglected to consider the fact that Mondays and Wednesdays I need to attend five different classes that are scattered all over the Village. I came home and actually needed to soak my feet, which I’m not sure I’ve ever done before (unless you count falling asleep drunk in the bathtub).
I had some cute cat sneakers for a while. Some of you may have seen the cat sneakers, and exclaimed at their cuteness, but the truth is that they’re much too big and every single time you’ve seen me wearing them I’ve been secretly wearing two pairs of socks, which as it turns out isn’t as much fun as you might think. And weirdly, despite that second X chromosome, I don’t own a single pair of heels. Not one, as long as you don’t count two of the three pairs of boots mentioned above which technically do have something of a heel. I’m not sure that I want to own any heels, I’m just saying.
I think it’s a reasonable goal to acquire one or possibly two pairs of comfortable shoes that fit me properly by, say, Christmas. Yeah, I know it doesn’t take three months to buy two pairs of shoes, but I’m being reasonable here: I still haven’t cleaned out that closet, after all.
I’ve spent the past couple hours grading a heaping stack of logic quizzes, which has made me aware of a couple of things, including the fact that almost everyone has really awful handwriting (at least when they’ve got ten minutes to explain the correspondence theory of truth and the relationship between sentences, propositions, and facts). A few of you - because I’m aware that there are at least a couple Caoine readers in this class - have freakishly neat handwriting and don’t seem to ever cross anything out. My only real complaint about the non-freakish handwriters is that it’s awfully difficult to record your grades when I can’t read your name.
On an only slightly related note, I spent the couple of hours before the past couple of hours reading Plato for the first time in years. I bitch and moan about having to do the Greeks again, but I’d forgotten that as it happens I actually like this stuff. I might have read the dialogues half a dozen times in the past, but the Apology is still pretty hot shit. And it’s better than reading Descartes again - which, incidentally, I’m also doing. I don’t quite understand why nearly all the required classes for philosophy majors at NYU include Descartes, and specifically the Meditations - I had drinks on Friday with Al, who suggested it has to do with the whole Cartesian notion of clear and distinct perception and the transparency of mental states, which is a popular one. I suppose that’s all well and good, but I think we’d get the gist of it from one course - I wish we didn’t have to repeat it year after year (there are, after all, other people who have written on the subject).
Continuing in the Buying New Stuff vein, for a moment: I used to use the standard Apple Pro optical mouse that comes with new Macs these days, and it was a decent mouse as far as one-button optical mice go, but I’d been meaning to buy a two- or three-button for a while. Finally, though, my Apple Pro gave up the ghost about a week ago and I was relegated to using the god-awful iMac hockey puck I’ve had kicking around since 1997. I took that as a sign and ordered what seemed to me to be a shockingly cheap Logitech - it’s been a long time since I’ve had to buy a new mouse, but I don’t remember opticals going for fourteen dollars. It showed up today and I’m pretty happy with it - it’s not a freakishly many-buttoned mouse like the sort Spencer favors, but it’s a perfectly decent one (especially for under fifteen bucks).
Advance Wars, incidentally, is the only GBA game to ever make me miss a subway stop. I was completely oblivious to the Q’s arrival at 14th yesterday, and very nearly missed Times Square on my way home this afternoon. It’s not my fault that little anime tank battles are so engrossing, I swear!
As a followup: this afternoon I did indeed cash in my bonus for a lovely little backlit block of Onyx-toned delight. Being able to play Advance Wars in a dark (and sadly smoke-free) bar is surely evidence of the greatest advance modern technology has ever seen. And surely, too, it means it’s unlikely that I’ll get all these quizzes graded in a timely fashion over the weekend (much less tackle the reading that’s already starting to pile up). But hey, at least I didn’t run out and buy an XBox. Yet.
I walked down St Mark’s Place today for the first time in a long time, despite the fact that NYU’s only a couple blocks away. I still buy my socks and tights at the Sock Man, but I’m more rarely in the market for new boots and corsets and other gothful accoutrements. I was surprised at how different it looks now, and depressed at how much the changes reminded me of what’s happened to Harvard Square over the past ten years or so. The shop on St Mark’s where I used to buy my skirts is now a chain smoothie place, and the used and vintage clothing store across the street is a Quizno’s. There’s also an ugly new neon-signed bar and a chain burrito place being opened farther up. I hope that Religious Sex doesn’t become an Abercrombie & Fitch - I think I would go into mourning for weeks.
On a more cheerful note, I’ve been playing Advance Wars for the past couple of days thanks to the most advanced Zot, and it’s rapidly becoming my second favorite GBA game ever (second only to Pokémon Ruby). I’ve heard good things about AV2 as well, so I’ll probably pick that up when I’m finished. The company I resigned from a few weeks ago tossed in a bonus in Amex gift cheques, so I may even pick up a GBA SP in luscious Onyx while I’m at it.
1. I’ve either got to start taking fewer notes or start writing so small that reading the resulting notes requires a little magnifying glass, like the one that comes with the Condensed OED. As it is, I can’t count on needing less than an entire notebook per class per semester, and now that I’ve got five classes on Mondays and Wednesdays, carrying around five notebooks and the relevant textbooks for ten hours a day just isn’t feasible. I suppose I could also become that person who always has to share a textbook with someone else, but I hate that person.
2. Chase Manhattan has earned the glory of having the Second Worst Customer Service In All The Fucking World (the Absolute Worst being Home Depot). I’m not going to elaborate beyond the following: three separate bank cards accidentally cancelled, leaving me without a debit card for the third straight week.
3. Spending an hour digging through the dollar racks outside the Strand is the perfect thing to do when you’re thoroughly pissed off from dealing with Chase Manhattan all morning. There is nothing more soothing than really cheap Kierkegaard.
During the academic year, I usually try to wake up ass-early on Friday or Saturday to study before other people wake up and expect me to be, like, dressed and conscious. This week things were a little off - Friday morning I had a seminar to go to, and Saturday morning mysteriously dissolved into watching Pokémon over a fourth cup of coffee (which is probably why I ended up playing Ruby most of the afternoon). So this morning I woke up promptly at ass o’clock only to discover that I couldn’t study because my apartment was a wreck. We’ve covered my obsessive compulsive tendencies before, I think, so I won’t go down that particular road right now - suffice to say that before I could even think about cracking a book, I spent several hours washing dishes and Swiffering the bejeezus out of my poor little one-bedroom. Then, of course, I had to go grocery shopping which somehow turned into watching Nature on PBS, and now it’s 10pm and I’m just starting a hefty epistemology reading. Which is, of course, what I wanted to avoid by getting up early in the first place. (This is why Jeebus gave us No-Doz.)
I keep forgetting today that I have to get up in the morning and go attend classes again on Monday morning. I only had a week off between work and the beginning of the semester, but it seems to have been long enough for me to get used to the idea that I’m allowed to sleep all day if I want to. I did manage to get some reading done today, but that quickly degenerated into the unlikely combination of alcohol and Pokémon. I just dozed off in my chair and woke up to see helicopters circling my neighborhood, but a glance at Google News didn’t offer much enlightment. Maybe that means I should go to bed.
In other news, I mentioned Head First Java way back in June, but I’ve only now started to really dig into it. I’ve been really impressed with how effective the book’s teaching methods have turned out to be - it looks like some sort of goofy LEARN JAVA IN 2 HOURZ thing at first glance, but that’s just because there’s a lot of graphics. A big chunk of each chapter involves puzzles and exercises, many of which can be done directly in the book (as well as programming exercises to be compiled and run). Java’s my first really object-oriented language, but I’m picking it up much faster than I thought I would. Not that the whole thing doesn’t still seem a bit strange after spending so much time snuggled up to C with its attendant procedural delights, but OO isn’t nearly as confusing as it was a few weeks ago.
So, the first week of classes is over. I’ve finally got all my textbooks, figured out what my schedule will actually be like, and found out I’m going to be Erin’s TA (which clearly means she should contribute to the Me Getting Drunk On Thursdays fund). And although yesterday was Thursday, I didn’t really get drunk, although we did stop by Swift’s for a couple pints, after which we rented Happiness. Which, incidentally, I recommend if you like very, very dark humor.
In other news, Neuromancer is almost as old as I am. MTV, on the other hand, is almost exactly as old as I am.
