Vainglorious Vicissitudes

I just finished my sporadic spam-folder check, and once again I am bemused. In addition to the usual offers to "bigger my short d1cck" and one attempt to convince me that I've won a lottery I never entered ("we don't sell tickets, we just use a 'cyber ballot system' to pick a random email address as our yearly winner--because we want to 'reward individuals who spend their time and resources surfing the web'")--oh, and one notice from a bank where I don't have an account, telling me they might have to suspend my account unless I clear up these reports of suspicious activity (read: tell them my credit card number), and quite clearly addressed to ten people besides me *snerk*--I've also received two pieces of blank junk mail. No subject, no text, and no sender either--so it's not even possible to reply to it.

Is this just a preliminary attempt to see which addresses don't bounce, or what? You wouldn't think they'd need to bother with that, right?

It's actually kinda eerie. I feel like it must be a setup for something weird, 'cause if it isn't, I can't explain it at all.

Seen on the bumper of a minivan this morning:

"How can there be too many children? That's like saying there are too many flowers."

....I have no words.


On a not unrelated note, why the hell do so many people have vanity plates that just state the make and model of the car? Do they think we won't notice how cool their car is if they don't point it out to us?

So I think my geometry final went okay. I became very frightened very quickly when I walked in and was handed back my midterm, and found that the prof hadn't given partial credit on one problem where I'd hoped she would and had given me a zero on a problem I thought I'd done a very thorough job on. If she'd graded the midterm this inexplicably harshly, I was horrified to think how she'd grade the final. I nervously worked my way through it, and felt I did pretty well by my own standards--there was one problem I didn't get anywhere on and two I only got half-solved, and two that I felt I solved perfectly well but worried she wouldn't find my intuitive proofs rigorous enough, and the remaining three I think I solved in a way that no one could find fault with...but of course I was no longer confident that reasonable fault-finding standards would apply.

Then, after turning it in, I asked her to take another look at the problem on the midterm she'd given me no credit for. It appeared that she'd somehow gotten confused about what I was saying--like, she'd thought when I stated an axiom at the beginning that I was saying that was what I was trying to prove, instead of saying that was what I was going to use to prove it. Don't know how that kind of muddle happened, as I'd thought my phrasing was perfectly clear. Granted, she's not a native English speaker, but most of my math profs haven't been and they've never seemed to have that kind of trouble figuring out what I was saying. So after I'd cleared up a couple things of that nature, she puzzled over the proof for another minute or so and concluded that it was in fact without error. She proceeded to note the grade change--rather a relief, as that one problem was worth (I think) six percent of my grade in the class--but I'm still a little nervous about the final. I now know she's not in fact a ridiculously hardassed grader, but a befuddled grader isn't a whole lot better. I foresee "consulting" with her about my final grade in a few weeks' time.

On the upside, I did overhear some guys afterward talking about one of the problems to which I'd applied an insight they apparently hadn't had. When I told them how I'd done it, they had that "I wish I'd thought of that" reaction and declared that it would've saved them a lot of work. It's nice to know I still have some talent for this sort of thing. No doubt I'd get reassured of this much more often if I could actually bring myself to socialize with my classmates. I used to have a good friend and study partner who told me rather often that I was a genius. I miss him.

One other odd thing happened: I ran into a fellow at the bus stop whom I'd apparently tutored once, and he seemed not just curious but pointedly curious about my post-graduation plans. When I mentioned looking for work, he wanted to know what kind of jobs I was looking for, and how long I anticipated staying in the work force before applying to grad school, and when I wanted to start working...the way these questions were going, I started to wonder if he was about to offer me a job himself, or tell me he knew of one. But then his bus arrived and he got on it without handing me a business card or anything. Don't know what all the questions were about, then.

Apparently that bike horn that I've been hearing across the street most afternoons doesn't belong to a small child as I'd assumed, but to a guy walking down the street with a shopping cart that has bags of something orange hanging from it. Presumably he's selling the orange stuff, and thus using the horn in an icecreamtruckish fashion (I have to say, I rather prefer even crappy music to this more distracting honking), but from this distance I can't figure out what on earth it might be. Cheesy popcorn, maybe? It's the right size but the wrong color for cotton candy.

Why is the living room so much cooler than my bedroom when the windows in both of them have been open all day (and face the same direction)?

And why is Ki meowing piteously at empty space?

So I did the interests suggestion meme, and most of the top interests are things like "music" and "reading" which I don't have on my interests list because they're so generic it's pointless to mention them. But number 8 on the list is "Tori Amos."

Boy, am I curious to know why she and no other specific artist made the list.

Yesterday, when I rode the elevator in Evans hall, I noticed a row of stickers high above the door that said "I TOOK THE STAIRS."

There appeared to be smaller text underneath saying something about a National Get-More-Exercise Day or something, so evidently it wasn't some kind of elevator boycott, but whatever it was...the person who put them there obviously hadn't taken the stairs, had they? There were enough of them and in a hard-enough-to-reach location that there's no way someone just reached a quick arm in and stuck them there--they'd have to have stood in the elevator for a good minute at least. So either they were in fact riding the elevator or they had a compatriot hold the door open, thereby keeping everyone else from using the elevator--which last, come to think of it, might indeed have been a rather heavy-handed attempt to enforce this get-more-exercise thing.

So, guerilla personal-trainer tactics, or merely deliberate irony through conscious self-contradiction? Or worse, plain and simple unconscious self-contradiction?

(Wow. Instead of parentheses, this seems to be an Entry Full of Hyphens.)

A guy walking past me on campus today was saying to his friend, "So, I went to this Passover Seder last night that was basically all sorority chicks."

I couldn't hear what he said after that, but I wasn't sure I wanted to. The mental images are frightening.