ThePanda

This entry might have spelling errors, one of the sad things about not being on a Mac while writing a blog entry is that no curly red lines show up on plain text editors, and I am really not going to open up AbiWord to type this stuff out. OK strike that, I just opened up AbiWord, so we can have cleaner spellings, yay for that, I hope anyways. This is kind of strange, I am at the CIT because I wanted to get through homework, so I really shouldn’t be typing a blog entry, but I am sort of bored and unable to concentrate, so this is somewhat helpful, I don’t know, is strange, I am at the CIT, one of my most favored non-humanities buildings (the humanities, some of them anyways have better, older buildings) on campus, and I am here doing math homework, as a potential, I am going to file concentration, math concentrator, and yet I do so while sitting on comfy facilities provided by the CS department for CS researchers and grad students, so is sort of strange. There are other things which are strange, as I have been reminded a few times over the last few weeks, this is like the month before I turn 20 and stop being a “teenager”, which in itself is a funny concept, because I am not really sure about what I have done as a “teenager” or as anything else, so is sort of funny.

Nice thing about living in a house with people who have different experiences is that you can usually bitch about stupid officious people from your country and still find someone who supports your claims, well OK in the case of India, that’s not really a hard thing to do, so so much for that, but it’s still nice to be able to call your own Minister of External Affairs a stupid officious person who gives awful speeches and have people agree with you and add to the heaps of bad reviews he has gotten so far. So, yesterday we had Natwar Singh come in and deliver a speech at the invitation of the Watson Institute, another one of those things named after Thomas J. Watson Sr. As usual I got a bunch of questions about whether people should go there or not, a bunch of people who were really interested in going, and a bunch of people who couldn’t care less, and of course we had NTM who said his parents believed Natwar Singh was an officious, interfering bureaucrat, which seems to be an apt description from what I have heard of him. I stumbled across someones notes from the speech today morning, and they were sort of interesting, there was a mention of the fact that it was boring, and an unanswered question about how any part of the speech differed from what most Indian textbooks could tell you anyways, sort of true and interesting in a funny sort of way.

So I am still paying taxes despite being a full-time student now, this confuses and kind of annoys me, I guess it’s good for me to do so, and at least it isn’t half as much as it was last time, but still like 20 bucks from my paychecks is not a pointer to good times, there’s so so much that can be done with 20 bucks, but whatever, they want that money, they take that money, it isn’t as if I have much of an option, bah… I did finally take to walking around with my camera in my pocket, and I have come across things that I really wish to photograph, but then there is the obvious question of whether I want to risk photographing bikers sans permission, or risk my neck getting permission from said bikers. Well, fine I am following a stereotype here, and most of the bikers on Thayer are probably nice, non-homicidal people, especially seeing as my direct non-student boss at work is one of those bikers (complete with gigantic tattoos, and stuff), but umm it still is sort of scary to approach one of them, and ask for permission. Bah, need to find other things to photograph, photography is nice, and I kind of miss some of the walking around a city photographing random people shit I did right before I came to Brown, it would be sort of intriguing. HCA seemed sort of interested in walking around with me and taking photographs, which would be fun, seeing as we sort of have identical cameras, but ummm, there were things which happened last night which I kind of want to process before I actually get back to either her or ADC about anything which requires me being anymore social than talking to them. Hell I need time to process things before I get back to being anymore social than sit there and talk with someone with most people. It is intriguing, I want to photograph only so I don’t have to really know people, just take pictures so I can look at them, I am finding certain people to be extremely condescending of late, and a lot of the holier than thou attitude going around which is probably why I am sitting in the CIT on a Saturday afternoon doing homework, I doubt anyone would really trouble me in my room, my roommates (yes that does come in the plural) are generally nice, supportive, fun people, but umm ya… I guess I am just annoyed about all those comments on what is and is not good for me, or anyone else, seeing as I find a bunch of thing other people do annoyingly unhealthy, but don’t exactly take to going around telling them how unhealthy they are, telling other people about it, finally leading to a whole bunch of people being weirded out by not so strange things. I have had times when I have wanted to scream at the next person who tells me about my drinking soda, like well, so many people believe sodas, especially Coke and Mountain Dew are bad for you, but those same people seem to manage to finish a bottle of root beer, bought by me, for communal enjoyment, in less than a day without me ever actually drinking any of it, like wtf, decide whose side you are on, and then pick what you want to do according to that, this two sided approach seems counter productive for all involved.

I guess I shouldn’t have written all of that down, but it needs to get out, there are already too many things pressuring me, I can’t take too much more, and I really don’t want to be anti-social, but it’s hard being social when people just stick to acting weirdly and not telling you what’s going on, and acting as if you are a pain to have around, and still complain about not seeing you. Oh and this is so DPS now, I finally had someone tell me I am annoying in a class which I probably shouldn’t be taking anyways because it’s too simple for me (is kind of true, but hell it’s like 4 hard classes, 1 simple class), and a semi-serious statement about how I make people feel stupid, even though I don’t try to do so. Oh well, so now this is where it stands, not helping people makes me bad for other reasons, helping people makes people think they are stupid, like what the hell do they expect me to do. Oh well OK, some people I truly believe are stupid, and I wouldn’t care if they made these statements, but this did not come out of someone who I believe is genuinely stupid, this person is far more intelligent than I am, and while it was all said in good humor, and is still taken in good humor, it feels bad to be told that you make someone feel stupid, even though you’d honestly never ever try to do something like that without feeling stupid yourself. So I know for a fact I am not TAing any CS courses next semester, I’ll apply to be a TA, sure as hell will, but I have a feeling it’s not going to work out, the TAs at the class I am officially taking, or at least one of the TA’s believes I am a “pain in the arse”, and umm I am not actually taking the second, and by far more interesting, CS course which I am sitting in on, thus leading to weird dynamics on trying to TA that course, since I haven’t actually spoken to the professor, who seems like a nice jovial old man, about vagabonding it, I am kind of uncertain about the results of such a discussion, and therefore feel continuing as such would be far more useful, to me anyways, and being somewhat selfish is one of my new resolutions for the semester.

OK homework time, I kind of want to get more done before tonight when I am going to try and have some fun…

Ze Panda

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 24th, 2005 at 12:54 pm and is filed under article, meaningful labor. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.