December 2003
January Is Not All That Exciting
So it’s New Year’s Eve again - my fifth since moving to New York. I’ve spent the recent ones staying as far away from Times Square as possible, but even before I moved here I wasn’t really one for New Year’s parties. It’s always seemed like such a non-holiday to me; I think I tend to get all my it’s-another-year-already reflection and nostalgia out of the...
Good Times
I’ve mentioned my nutsy downstairs neighbor before, but last night reached new heights - she got shitfaced and tried to beat me up, which was exciting. I have a split lip and a torn shirt, but since she got to spend the rest of the night hanging out with the police, I think I probably got the better deal. Needless to say, I anticipate spending most of my time at Chris’s for the next...
Great Books I Got For Christmas
Buckeroos and buckerettes, you sure do have me pegged. I seem to get a heap of new books every Crhistmas (along with all the other fantastic stuff), and this year’s haul is no exception. A few that I’ve already started sampling, with the understanding that there are many more to come:
Revenge (Stephen Fry): I haven’t read a new Stephen Fry novel in years (probably because he...
Andy Serkis's Gollum Book
Since Chris and I just got back from our second viewing of The Return of the King, I suppose now is as good a time as any to point out Andy Serkis’s new book Gollum. It’s your typical behind-the-scenes thing, but it’s only ten bucks and I found Gollum’s role interesting enough that I’ll probably shell out for it. There was an interview with Serkis on NPR last year...
Home Again Home Again
I’m back from the folks’ house and still getting my bearings: despite the fact that I was gone for almost exactly a week, I feel as though I’ve been away for a (perhaps unusually long) weekend, and that today is Monday. It’s also a pleasantly disorienting feeling to be using a Mac again - the parental computer is an ancient laptop running 98. My own keyboard feels strange...
Merry, Etc
I also noticed the disappearing wishlist item thing about a week ago, but in my case the mystery was solved this (particularly rainy) Christmas morning: everything that was flagged as purchased but hadn’t shown up was in fact bought by my parents, who had cleverly pretended not to know that I had a wishlist at all. So along with some other things, I got some gifts that I had been...
Mmmmm Novocaine
It’s looking like this is going to be the week of short, content-free posts: I’m being just about as lazy as it’s possible to be, so I haven’t got a lot of news to report. Today was perhaps a little less restful than yesterday or the day before; I went to both the dentist and the optometrist, so I spent most of my day being poked and prodded and at least half of it numb and...
And Then There's Tuesday
The least Monday-ish Monday I’ve had in a long time: made wrapping paper and Christmas cookies with my mother, got my hair cut, had fish and chips with the neighbors, and read on the couch for hours on end. More weekdays should be like this. While I dig the school thing to no end (and will be sad to leave in six months, assuming all goes well), there’s definitely something to be said...
There Are Owls, Too
It’s a pretty definitive sign that the semester’s over and I’m visiting at my parents’ when what wakes me up is not my 6am get-up-and-study alarm, but instead a pack of coyotes howling in the middle of the night. Apart from them, it’s amazingly quiet here. I guess I don’t notice the fact that you can hear the subway go by my building every seven minutes until...
Off To Massachusetts
Chris and I finally got around to seeing The Return of the King yesterday. While I did the midnight showing thing when Fellowship came out, that wasn’t really an option this year, as both Tuesday and Wednesday night fell smack dab in the middle of finals. The movie was great, of course. Chris and I are big dweeby LOTR fans, but not the kind who sit in the theatre whispering angrily about...
Caoine Slashbox
For those of you with Slashdot accounts: there’s a brand-new Caoine.org Slashbox you can add to your homepage if you so desire. Get on over to your user preferences and soon you’ll be basking in the RSS glory.
Finally
Just a quick update before I go collapse into a state of blissful vegetation, now that the semester is officially over and I don’t have to wake up at six tomorrow morning to study. Chris and I hit up the new Mandoo Bar on University Place tonight for some dumplings and drinks after my very last final of the term. I definitely needed some of each after over two hours of paper-and-pencil...
A Quick Summary
Number of final exams taken today: 2
Number of final exams remaining: 1
Christmas presents wrapped today: 3.5
Christmas presents waiting to be wrapped: 5.2 million
Christmas presents waiting to be bought: 0
Days left remaining until I leave for Massachusetts: 2ish
Milligrams of caffeine consumed this week: all of them
Finals Week
Non-philosophy majors tend to be surprised that philosophy classes often have final exams. Of course we’d all rather they didn’t, but they do for what are probably more or less the same reasons other courses have them. In classes where we only have to write papers, most people read just enough to write the papers, and discussions tend to be either dull or irritating (or both) if nobody...
Early Presents, Early Thank You Notes
Thanks to Adam, who sent Pirates and Harmonizer! I got them last night, and while things are a little too crazy tonight to settle down with Johnny Depp, I’m sure I’ll make time for him once finals are over on Thursday. Speaking of finals - I should probably get back to Aristotle. (I still hate him, just a little bit.) And for those of you who have been asking me what I want - well...
Don't Get Any Ideas
Since I’m already playing Answer Lady this weekend: Upon discovering that NYU does actually pay me to be a Logic TA, a student from the class asked if I would still have agreed to do it if they didn’t. Unsurprisingly, the short answer is no. That’s not to suggest that I dislike either the job or the students, however - it’s just that grading derivations is amazingly dull,...
Sing We Now
A reader asked about my policy on Christmas - do I celebrate it? Do I go through the motions for the sake of the candy canes and eggnog? Am I, perhaps, secretly a devout Christian after all?
Well, that might be going a bit far: I’m pretty clearly a godless heathen with no plans for the saving of my soul. That said, though, I don’t feel as though I’m just going through the...
They're More Fun Than You'd Think
For those of you in Logic who came to my office hours today: shoot me an email if you’d like solutions to those last two derivations we didn’t have time to go over, I’ve got them done and am happy to send them along. They’ll be PDFs because of all those zany quantifiers and whatnot. Good luck on Monday!
Guest Post: Chris Replies
While he hasn’t run for his life (yet), Chris has nonetheless provided his own collection of things he feels I ought to know before I spend any more time leafing through IKEA catalogs on the train.
As most of you now know, my feline friend and I will be gaining a roommate within a month. In the spirit of letting Emma know who wears the pants, here’s a list of things she should...
Full Disclosure
As some of you know and most of you don’t, in about three or four weeks I’ll be leaving my cozy Brooklyn apartment for a spacious 3br in way-the-fuck-uptown Manhattan, where I’ll be gaining a Roommate and a Fearsome Beast. In the spirit of giving Chris one last chance to run for his life, here are some things anyone who plans to live with me probably ought to know:
All that...
Spam Spam Spam Spam
I admire Jish’s commitment to his goal of leading a spam-free life, but I think there’s an even simpler way to achieve it, at least in some cases: install SpamAssassin. I’ve been running SA for about a year now, and I get little to no spam, despite the fact that my primary email address has been on the web for over four years. Once in a while something makes its way through, but...
Finally
I stumbled through today walleyed with caffeine and still uselessly tired (again), but I plan to sleep for a solid twelve hours tonight. Today was the last day of classes, so my papers are all turned in, programs written, quizzes graded. Of course, I need to spend the next several days catching up on some reading in preparation for the three finals I still have to take, but that’s not...
Zzzz
You know, when I was a rosy-cheeked freshman (at a tender eighteen years of age), I never slept and it never bothered me. I went out nearly every night with my newfound local friends to all the various then-thriving goth clubs and came home long enough to shower before hitting my eight am class, and I didn’t feel much the worse for wear.
Now, it’s not quite five years later and...
Updates
The awful, awful paper that sparked last night’s shocking anti-Aristotle post is now finished, footnoted, and ready to turn in. I’m suddenly feeling a lot more benevolent toward ancient philosophy as a whole, although that’s likely to change - I’ll be knee-deep in pre-Socratics this week, since finals start Wednesday.
I finished my Christmas shopping today, by which I...
Dear Aristotle: Fuck Off
Look, I’ve tried to like ancient philosophy, I really have. However, I still can’t get over the fact that reading this stuff feels like that one physics class I had sophomore year where we spent three weeks covering the fucking ether: I mean, why? One lecture on the ether theory, that’s fine. Get a sense of the general pre-Einstein consensus, and all that. Influence, development,...
Your Problem Is You're All Foreigners
Supa asked why I hadn’t made a real post about the Wizbang Weblog Awards. I guess part of it is that I’ve never heard of Wizbang nor of most of the other sites that are nominated, either in my category or others, with a few notable exceptions - including the excellent Crooked Timber and the indefatigable Rabbit Blog. Another part of it is that some of the categories strike me as a...
The Unphoenix
While I realize I’m the last person in the world to do so, I finally switched from Mozilla to Firebird today, and was surprised to discover it’s actually faster than Safari on my box (and, of course, faster than Mozilla - but that’s not saying much). The last time I downloaded a version of Firebird, I wasn’t impressed - but that was quite a while ago, now. I haven’t...
Now It's Really December
I’ve got another one of those irritating hurts-to-breathe sore throats, but it started to snow this morning. Not the first flurry of the season (that was Tuesday), but the first time it’s actually piling up. I enjoy snow a great deal when I don’t have to go out in it, and when I’m home writing papers with plenty of coffee and hot chocolate in my kitchen, and now that I...
Old Philosophy Journals?
Here’s a question for you philosophers: where does one buy cheap back issues of the big journals? Is such a thing possible? I mean, there’s always JSTOR and Bobst, but my access to both of these goes away in about six months, when I don a dweeby purple cap and gown and my ID expires. While it’s likely that I’ll be back at some university or other in the near future, it...
Lost in Plato
We caught Lost in Translation last night, and I thought it was awfully good in a sad sort of way. I’ve never thought of myself as a big Bill Murray fan, but I realized that I’ve never actually disliked him in anything I’ve seen him in. I didn’t realize until after the film (when Chris told me) that Scarlett Johansson was also in Ghost World - and that she’s even...
Cold
I’d tell you how my day went, but I just got home from standing outside for twenty five minutes on an elevated train platform after my Q express went out of service at King’s Highway and I had to wait for a local. Given that it’s currently twenty one degrees Farenheit outside (eight degrees, with wind chill), and given too that my hands are cold enough that my fingernails have...
Another Existentialist Is Created
My greatest accomplishment today: teaching a fidgeting toddler to say ‘Nietzsche.’ (Or at least ‘Neech.’) A woman next to me on the train looked ready to strangle someone after trying for half an hour to get her little girl to stop pulling off her socks and other articles of clothing, so since I happened to be on my way home from a trip to the Unemployed Philosophers’...