Time Consuming

Well it's been a while since an update because school has whittled down to the last few weeks, and "spring break planning" is now "summer planning." But since then, quite a few things have happened. Notre Dame missed the NCAA tourney, big surprise. Obama is still president. I still find it necessary to stay up until 4am for no reason. Anyway, onto some thoughts...

One of the pleasures of a late weekend night is the joy of drunk texting and drunk facebooking. It can cause unwanted fights, reveal unknown secrets, or let everyone know that you "love them." Ryan posted in a message to a few of my friends this message. "holy $h!t so drunk fordham bar, ran $h!t 9-0 me and kennny, im lost innwotrds." Knowing Ryan, it was easy to translate. "Hello everyone. I am ecstatic and in disbelief! My friend Kenny and I ran the beer pong tables 9 straight times! And due to my consumption of large amounts of alcohol, I seem to have lost my ability to continue my thoughts and therefore this conversation. Goodnight!"

I was sitting in a booth studying at Lafortune, our Student Center, when I couldn't help but overhear the conversation going on next to me. I paid it little attention until I heard this line from a frustrated girl. "Ugh, spell check is always wrong. If you're talking about more than one of the United States, isn't it United States's?(United States-ses-ses) You know, cause there's like, 50 of them??" After my mind came to a screeching halt, the only thing I could think about was, "Yep, she voted too."

I have a very ethnic math professor teaching me calculus 2 for engineers, and he has this fun habit of standing right in front of the board blocking anything he has written while he writing other stuff down. He's not particularly skinny, so he'll write down an equation to solve, then proceed to block it and ask us whats the next step. Here I am fuming in the back row because he loves the phrase, "Is this clear? Yes?" But since its a math class, obviously no one responds. In hindsight, I realize there isn't much he can do because he's a righty, but its just a huge pet peeve of mine that it's not a perfect world.

One more quick thing about math.. proofs and proving concepts. Just tell me how to do it. I don't need to know why integrals of natural logs are related to "e", and it's unecessary to spend 25 minutes and 4 pages of my notebook explaining all this to end up saying, "Ok, so that's proving the concept. You can just use this formula to do it all in one step."

Notre Dame is a pretty big campus, with quite a few "quads." There are a bunch of sidewalks crisscrossing each one, and I think it's a rule that you must have one awkward avoidance encounter at an intersection with someone every time you walk somewhere. Regardless of the time, it could be 6am and I'm catching a bus to a regatta for crew, and I'll see a single person 200 yards away. 2 minutes later, we both inevitably arrive at the same intersection, and come to a dead halt 3 feet apart because neither one of us could decide to go right or left.

People who walk slow irk me. A lot. On my way to each class I'll pass 20+ people on the 5 minutes walk. I don't get it... they aren't enjoying the weather, because its usually cold outside, they aren't injured, they aren't texting, they're just.. walking obnoxiously slow. And you always end up looking obnoxious when you try to squeeze by them on the sidewalk and slightly bump them. Sorry, but I don't enjoy listening to your conversation with your friend about how to pluralize our country.

I was at Subway waiting in line. My sandwich was toasted, and I was waiting for the condiments behind some girl. When the Subway worker asked her what she wanted, she said, "lettuce, tomato.. and SEVEN cucumbers." I don't know, I just thought that was kind of odd that this was necessary for her to announce. I'd appreciate any sort of explanation.

In a few buildings here, there are these like... "long" steps. They make you look extremely awkward walking up them. Everyone knows what I'm talking about. They're like, 3/4 the height of a normal step, and twice the "distance" between each one. So you can take like an awkward half step in between each mini-step upwards, or you can just look like an idiot as you take super huge strides and go 2 steps at a time. The steps are completely unnecessary. Just make normal ones.

I'm a late night crammer study-er for tests. That's just my style, I have to do it all the night before. But, studying for 3-7 hours the night before a test and learning everything there is to know about chemical reactions or momentum, I hate the day after the morning exam. I don't like wasting much time doing all of that work just to answer 50 questions and 3 essays. I feel like I should integrate it into my life because I clearly spent a significant amount of time grinding it into my brain. "Hey do you know what the time is?" "Yeah, 11:43, and force equals mass times acceleration in case you were wondering."

Oh, and the new facebook sucks.

Later-