Phrases Googled by the Professor During Class

Gary Busey

Falun Gong

Vic DiCara

Bling Cross

Bling Cross Bikini

Things It's Maybe Not OK to do at Work?

Eat a chewy bagel that must be ripped apart with the teeth, at the front desk

Spread cream cheese with the index finger

Stare blankly at blond freshman when she asks a dumb question, inwardly stick a pin in the freshman voodoo doll

Hope the staff meeting lasts longer than expected in order to thwart students wanting to see their advisors

Realize that thwarting students would really only create more problems, scratch that last one

Watch the phone ring a few times before answering in order to avoid the appearance of eagerness/ lack of more important things to do

Take unattractively large bites of bagel because no one is watching

Write about it on my blog

I would say that Hell had frozen over, but that's way too cliche

Here we go, proof that all that stuff about "global warming" is a complete fallacy.

Actual Word-for-word Descriptions of my Hair's Personality

Like a dancer

Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz

Irish Whore

A 1940's Starlet

Wild Woman of Borneo

Ironically, we'd thought about it, too

This comes from kottke.org, also known as "that one site I go to when there's nothing else to do at work."

I want to donate my own water buffalo! If I only had the money...

I Remember

Today I rediscovered why I like my field of study. It is not because I like helping people. I'm too lazy for that. It is not because I like to understand why people do stuff. I enjoy ignorance a lot, actually.

The real reason why I love my major is that I can start the day off with a good dose of emotionally moving, nigh-spiritual instruction (in this case watching an episode of Eyes on the Prize, the part about Birmingham and the water hoses and police dogs and the march on Washington), and wrap the day up with a lighthearted and pretty non-sacred look at world religions (today my prof. said enthusiastically, "Step one! Go out and find an innocent virgin so you can slaughter her and spill her fertile blood on the ground").

And really, that's what sociology is all about: diversity. The diversity of human experience is something I find fascinating, especially when you see all the stuff that we do have in common. That is probably why I wanted to slap my business major friend who bragged that he had graduated without ever having taken a class on diversity in the workplace. That, and because he qualified that statement with the reason that "women are the cause of all sorrow, so much more so women in business."

#35: Show Some Skin!

Huzzah, my first MightyGirl-inspired post! I figured I'd go in chronological order here, just to keep things organized.




Here we have my face. More specifically, the barely noticable (in the picture) pock mark a little bit above my eyebrow, exactly parallel to the dark part of my eyeball. This is from when I was four and had the chicken pox. We flew to Missouri (why? because we're crazy!), and my mother put a giant floppy hat on me so the stewardesses wouldn't notice and eject the plague-ridden four year old from the plane. I don't remember having the pox, but I do remember the flight. It didn't occur to my four year old mind that the plane landed in a different place than it took off from. I thought we simply went on an hours-long joyride through the sky for fun, and came back to the same airport.




This scar comes from not too long after the pox, maybe around five or six years old. We lived on a cul-de-sac, close to the opening, and down towards the other end was a single man with an immaculate lawn. He owned a spazzy little dog, a basenji named Bordeaux. Bordeaux was always chained up in the front yard, and when I would ride by on my big wheel, his owner would step on the chain to keep him from chasing after me down the sidewalk. One day, as I rode by, I decided that I could get by without waiting for my neighbor to step on the chain. I was wrong.

One of the neighbor ladies saw the attack, and swooped me up and carried my bleeding self to my house where my mother laid me on the floor by the front door and wrapped my arm in a towel. When we got to the hospital, I was pretty tired and cranky (and hurting). All I remember about getting the stitches is that the doctor kept calling me "Punkin" which annoyed me a little. But he was piecing my body back together, so I really had no room to complain.




Ah, the obligatory appendectomy. Mine happened when I was ten. I was sick for a week, and we thought I just had the flu or something. Once my mom realized that my whining was really too much just for the flu, we went to urgent care. They didn't know what it was. They sent us to the hospital. They thought they might know, but to make sure we should go to the other hospital. Cue the drive across town in the middle of the stinking night, moaning child lying across the back seat, writhing in agony. Finally, like ten hours after we initially went to seek medical help, they found out what it was. It was appendicitis. Or rather, it had been appendicitis until a few days before, when it turned into a ruptured appendix. For the longest time, nobody could tell what was wrong with me, then suddenly I'm sitting in the hallway and some tech comes up to us and tells us he's there to get me ready for surgery. Let me tell you, I wasn't happy about that. However, I was very happy after the surgery when I was introduced to the pediatric ward's rolling nintendo machine.




You'll have to use your imagination for this one, because you can't actually see a scar here. What you can see, roughly, is my eye. Sometime between late middle school years and early high school years, I had a picnic with my family in the park that adjoins the high school. One of my favorite things to do in parks, to this day, is to swing on the swings, and I did that happily during that picnic. A few days? weeks? after that evening, I noticed that there was a little brown spot on my eye that wasn't going away, that I couldn't wash off, that didn't feel like some dirt stuck on my eyeball. I watched it for a few days and when it continued in not disappearing, we again went to urgent care. They tried washing it out a few times, then referred me to an opthamologist who told me a tiny shard of metal had gotten into my eye and rusted there. We figured it must've come from the swings, then moved to the more important matter: how to get rid of it? It proved to be a most interesting experience, as the doctor got a tiny little drill and some blue eyedrops out, and proceded to grind away part of my eye. It is incredibly hard to sit still and not blink when a man is right up in your face, grinding away your eye with a drill. It didn't hurt, but it definately wasn't my idea of a fun way to spend the day. I did get to wear an eyepatch to church, though, which made up for the whole ordeal.

Pretty Confused and a Little Freaked Out

Um, commenter on my last post, would you please make yourself known? Like, could you call me up on my phone and tell me, "Hi violasaint, it's me, [your name here], and I commented on your blog the other day?"

And now to other news, I got a book for Christmas! A special, green book, with a picture of french fries on it. That's right, I got Maggie Mason's big book on blogging. I'm very excited, and intend to begin using it... tonight?

That is, if you're lucky.

My Week in Photos

Enjoy!