Academic Marketing

In the halls of the University of Notre Dame, I see posters every day, plastered to the wall with the intention of convincing undergraduate students that a particular department has the right academic major or minor for them. The assumption is often that you have chosen your major. Either that or a minor in something you enjoy is likely to spark an interest in taking that subject on as a major. The point is, students are supposed to think about changing a big portion of their life, or at least their college career, based on the inspiring logic of a  catchy line on a poster.

The foreign language study posters are my favorite, but there are plenty of others. Some even advertise specific classes. So: "Confused about life?" is the header for a class called "Tolstoy (in English)" and a painting of Tolstoy is supposed to help with that. Is that what Tolstoy offers? Resolution to life's confusions? Not in my experience.

The French department offers: "Yes, French. C'est Chic!" Written on simple white paper, I suspect this is trying to appeal to some Apple-Mac-like simplicity of color motif.

But the best are from the Italian department. Last year one read, "Milton spoke Italian. Shouldn't you?" The logic escapes me. Another read, "Aristotle spoke Italian. Shouldn't you?" which is just plain false. But recently they've been updated. So, "Colin Firth speaks Italian. Shouldn't you?" At which point I could only think to myself, "If I ever run into Colin Firth, I doubt I'll be relying on Italian to communicate."

Good luck, Italian language department. I hope the black-and-white posters work for you.

Cartoon thing

I use this presentation software for class stuff. I'm trying to get better at using it more creatively. So, I used an app on my phone called "Cartoon Camera" and put this together. Hopefully this works...

Cartoon experiment on Prezi

The Cost of Racing

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lanternerouge/5901695630/

This picture and one other surfaced recently on a flickr account related to a race I did in Kansas City last summer. The rights to the picture are reserved, but it offered me html code for inserting the picture into something else, so I feel like I'm doing it justice somehow right now. I'm still very confused about how photo and video copyrights work. Anyway, I paid $40 to be in that race (the cost of racing), so I feel like the least I get is an awkward picture of me from the final stretch on my blog.

Even thought it was a three lap race, I know this is from the final stretch because, for the first two laps, I went down to the finish with a big smile and my arms spread out because I knew I was going to win. Finishing the race was achievement enough. When I was going up the last hill, which was a beast, for the last time, I saw that I was gaining on a guy who had passed me a couple miles back. So, I pushed with all my remaining strength and passed him and came 42nd instead of 43rd out of 48.

If anyone asks you if you want to be in a bike race... you know, just for fun, I suggest you check a few things:
1) Is it a hilly race?
2) Will it be over 95 degrees outside?
3) Do I have a thirty-year-old, steel-framed bike? / Does everyone else have bikes that cost more than my rent for this year's rent?

Graduate Words

A long time ago, I started writing a post about what words are overused in graduate school. I ran into two problems: 1) most of the words were overly specific to literary studies 2) I learned that these words are actually useful, which was kind of disappointing.

Here's the dilemma. If someone uses a word (let's say, "peanut") and then says, "I mean that in the Hegelian sense," I kind of want that person to punch him/herself in the face.* The problem is that if you know what it means for something to be meant in the "Hegelian sense" then you realize that they were saying something rather specific (In the case of "peanut" it wouldn't make sense, and I would get to laugh at them, thus removing the need for self-inflicted face punching). In graduate school, it's also difficult to know that people are using basic words in the same way you would use them (As in, "I sure hope you're not saying 'peanut' in some obscure sense of the word**). So, if you use words with more specific meanings, you're actually being helpful to people around you... most of the time. It's hard to be mad at people who are trying to be helpful.

All of that aside, here is my list of the top three words that are overused and yet annoyingly useful:
- ontology/ontological: inquiry into the natures of being itself/something that speculates about the nature of being (often used to describe a bold claim about something definitely existing, like "goodness")
- telos/teleological: the goal of a goal-oriented process/something that is headed for a specific goal (math problems and political campaigns are usually teleological, but literary criticism and scientific inquiry often don't have a telos unless you count the rather broad goals of knowledge and insight)
- epistemology/epistemological: the study of how we know things or comes to know them/relating to the study of knowledge or the process of obtaining knowledge (philosophers, psychologists, and educators are deeply interested in epistemology whether or not they use the word)

Although this has all been my way of communicating a little bit about what my grad school existence is like, we don't actually spend any time defining these words, we're just expected to pick them up along the way. I hope you didn't mind reading that.

* Being a largely non-violent person, I don't like to imagine myself punching people in face, but I'm totally okay with them hitting themselves.

** I think this is hilaaarious.

No Cash Prizes?

Today I ran in the St. Nick's Six! That's the short name for a 6km run / 3km walk that is connected to the St. Joseph school and church a couple blocks from my house.

The weather was better than expected, and the field of competition was fierce. I had a little electric chip thing attached to a shoelace that recorded my time. I've never been in a race that has that, so that was kind of cool. I got a free shirt, also kind of cool. And I ran and I ran and I ran and then I was done and I felt kind of good because I didn't push myself toooo hard and my calf muscles hurt, but that's about it. Also there was hot chocolate.

The sheet of paper said that I came 7th of all the males aged 20-24. Apparently, there were exactly 7 males aged 20-24 racing. 6th place was about 5 minutes ahead of me. My finishing time was listed as 35.07, which I worked out is about 9m25s per mile. So, you know, pretty good for a guy who ran on Thursday to prepare and before that hadn't gone on a run since 1.5 miles in the summer of 2010.

Yeeeeah... running... it's so not my favorite.

I had a few friends running also. Gary came 4th of the 7 males aged 20-24 with a time of 27ish minutes. He set this whole thing up for us, including registering us all. I was pleased to see my name was spelled correctly after Monika G****** went up to the registration board and said, "Gary, did you put me down as Monika G-Polish?" I maintain that this worked out in Monika's favor because she decided to do the 3k walk at the last minute and accidentally came first among the females aged 25-29 (Monika will turn 25 in 2013). Neil won 2nd in his group and got a hat. Tim got a $5 DQ giftcard for 3rd place in his. What was first prize? Cash? We will never know because Monika was too embarrassed to claim her prize that she didn't earn.

Put a Price on Sleep

First of all, welcome to my new house:

Yeah, front porch... and you can't see it, but there's a swing on the right. It's pretty cool. It swings and whatnot. Two people could sit on it. It generally has a pretty good view. You can see storm clouds rolling in from the West. The view right now, however, is mostly taken up by this:

There's a construction site down the way. It's full of disgruntled workers that seem to be in a permanent state of semi-on-strike. That's where they wake up super early in the morning and make tons of noise, but still manage to find time to stand on the side of the road with signs that don't explain what they want. While your "Honk for worker's rights!" sign appeals to my desire for a daily recognizable but abstract sense of justice, I don't feel strongly about your cause because I don't know what it is.

So, instead of supporting the workers who make lots of noise really early in the morning despite their confusingly intermittent strike, I decided to fix the main problem with the house. The problem is as follows: three bedrooms, three graduate students, but one of the bedrooms is in the back of the house, which is my room and was probably part of an addition at some point in the house's 105-year history. There are two doors to my bedroom. One is through another bedroom and the other is to the outside (and leads out onto a covered back-patio area). The problem is with the door to the outside. It led out to the patio, but with a two-and-a-half foot drop.

Woodworking project:

Win. Awesome. End of story.

Well, not quite end of story. I enlisted some help from Tyler. So, he deserves proper credit for helping with fixing the stairs into the concrete and reducing wobbliness. Also, I should varnish or paint it.

Some things money can rent

Sort of dull account of moving (not too long though...)

So, I moved. It was a good move. I mean, it was a good decision. Also, the move went okay. I got a lot of help from my new roommate and his family, who moved him here from Chatham, Ontario in a mini-van that they offered to use to assist me with my move. I'd say about half of my possessions made it into or onto that van during the move. So, I couldn't be more grateful.

A lot of my friends here were very busy around moving time. So, I did most of the work on my own. I was somehow surprised at how long it takes to move yourself. I've always had at least one person helping with any moving I've done in the past and it makes the whole process more than twice as hard and frustrating to do it on your own.

When the move was done, my room at the new place looked like this:

It was remarkable that I even managed to fit all that in the room. While it is a good-sized room, this amounts to 80-90% of my non-kitchen possessions from my old apartment. It was weird trying to figure out how to get a 1-bedroom-apartment lifestyle into a shared house.

Yes, that's right! A house. I live in a house. With the wonderful difference in housing markets from Chicago to South, it is possible to live in not-an-apartment. I haven't lived in a house since 2005 and it feels good. Hopefully, I won't have to move next summer.

I sold my old twin bed to new-roommate Gary and got this new (new-to-me) queen size from the St. Vincent DePaul Society warehouse, which is where much of my furniture has been purchased. Then, I got the sweet gray-scale, low quality, mostly polyester, Meijer bedding:

There are pillowcases that match the comforter, but extra pillows for aesthetic purposes... not really a high priority.

So, for now, Gary, Semyon and I live in this 3-bedroom house. In British terms, it's a bungalow, I believe, but it has a basement. So, I don't know what to call that, but it works out pretty well. There's a lot more space to do things like wood-working side projects and whatnot. Also, more place for people to stay if anyone should desire to visit.

More on the latest wood-working project soon...