Super Swiss Army knife to the rescue

I feel like documenting the instances in which my small, pink Swiss Army knife has come in handy. A gift from my dad, I love it to pieces and it resides on my key chain. As a result, it's with me nearly everywhere I go (except for vacations that require flights. I couldn't bear to lose it in my luggage and I can't exactly waltz blithely onto a plane with a knife, even a small one, in my pocket).

Of course, I can't recall specific dates or instances of usage in the past (except one time in undergrad when I randomly got a glass shard stuck in my palm waiting for my class to meet at Spurlock and used the tweezers to extract it.) From now on, more specific documentation!

June 4, 2009: Used the knife's screwdriver tool to open many compartments of a friend's iMac in order to extract the hard drive. Did not complete the extraction with the screwdriver attachment, but it went a long way towards accomplishing this, considering relative lack of appropriately-headed screwdrivers (are star-headed screws new?).

June 11, 2009: Approached by boyfriend's former lab boss who inquired if we had any sharp implements with either of us for the purpose of unthreadifying his blazer. My scissor attachment was chipperly produced and the offending thread perched on his shoulder was removed so that the prof, newly natty, could enjoy an important dinner with wife et. al.

Grad school vocab

one more grad school word, that I've looked up a bunch of times before but always forget:

hermeneutic: interpretive, explanatory, to make clear

I want a girl with a short skirt and a grad school vocab

So, this week, I learned three words. The first two were dropped in class and one was in my readings. The neat thing about classroom technology: I could bring up dictionary.com right there and then and discover what the words meant. Pretty cool.

Didactic: 1. intended for instruction; instructive: didactic poetry. 2. inclined to teach or lecture others too much: a boring, didactic speaker.

Hagiography: a biography that idealizes or idolizes the person (especially a person who is a saint)

Reify: to convert into or regard as a concrete thing: to reify a concept.

Sarcastic Rants

1. Apparently I missed the memo where all females (regardless of social status, mental capacity, or fabric choice) must stuff their pant-legs into their winter boots. Yes folks, that includes sweatpants, which I must say makes for a really pulled-together look, what with the lank fabric spilling irregularly out of its boot-top casing and all.

2. I don't have forms for a reason. Nope. They're not to guarantee that the right piece of info gets connected to another correct piece of info. In fact, they're completely to be ignored. I never spend time getting those just right so that people can fill them out correctly and make my job a little easier and more direct when I have to process the info. And I most certainly would never have to call a form-filler-outer and request that he use the correct form that I nicely prepared and sent to him over a month ago. And even if I did have to make a call, no form-filler-outer that I know would ever act like he couldn't be bothered. Not once! Never!

my blood pressure can't take this. Let's just hope the graph of the function of approaching insanity is asymptotic and not heading directly for an intercept with the point of insanity with all the steadiness and irreversibility of a freight train.

Rock the vote?

Lucasfilm - taking advantage of the electoral season with its merchandising! Somehow, I don't think that helped us very much... though I am highly interested. Especially in the R2-D2/C-3PO ticket: These ARE the droids you're looking for!

Star Wars election

I'd like to see University administration crack down on a partisan bumper sticker and/or button of that nature.

DFW

I'm just... can't-even-pony-up-the-energy-or-focus-to-work bummed. I haven't even really begun to sort through what it means that David Foster Wallace has died, apparently by his own hand. The word "sad" just doesn't begin to cover it. It's grotesque, it's such a waste, such broad possibility collapsed into a tiny speck and then crushed or winked out, gone. Empty. It makes me wonder if there's any weird correlation that two of my favorite authors have been suicides. There have been reports surfacing, that his father has indicated that DFW had a long-term history with depression and a relatively short-term difficulty with treating and managing this depression. This seems particularly sad to me since it reveals a little more clearly the struggle against the depression, and what we now know to be the loss of the battle. Though, I suppose some see suicide as a way to regain control, and in that sense, that type of death is a sort of victory (or, as Foster Wallace more or less put it in a short story, as a sort of birthday present). Put in less confrontational terms, suicide is at least thought to be an end to the pain caused by existence. I don't know. It bothers me. It... weighs on me.

What does this immediately mean to me? After blowing through the majority of his body of work in one sequence of book after book, I have had DFW on my mind in a back-burner kind of way, consistently checking every now and then to see if he's written something new, either traipsing through the bookstores, or searching on-line for news of a new release. So...it will be a process of erasing that feedback loop from my brain. No more timer going off in the back of my mind - "time to check on DFW." I had even been thinking about his work over the weekend (I didn't find out about his death until Monday morning), considering using one of his books as a foundation for an assignment for an electronic publications course I'm taking. I had sort of ruled it out though, given the complexity of his work and my desire to make my life as simple as possible regarding these assignments. Now... it just feels macabre and opportunistic to use his work, even though he was one of my favorite authors.

So horribly sad and disturbing. According to NPR's somewhat chilling article, "When someone very gifted kills themselves, it's like the best student dropping out of high school. There's the tragedy, but it's set in a particular and personal fear: What are they seeing that we don't?"

A decent tribute and re-print of a telling interview circa the release of Infinte Jest is to be found here, on the Chicago Tribune site.

A rather lovely memoir from a former student of Foster Wallace's.

OH NOES!

I didn't even know this website existed until today (icanhasforce.com). Thanks to Ranjit B for making his profile pic refer to this site!