Awooo! The Hunt is On.

The past three weeks have seen an unprecedented level of pandemonium, procrastination, and hospital visits.  Let it suffice for me to say that I appear to be in good working order and that no one should be alarmed.  I even made a good series of drawings when I had to stay up all night before the EEG--every neurological exam has a silver lining, right?  Those will go up soon.

The big project now is finding meself a job for the ol' summer.  I tackled my college's career office website for the first time tonight.  That was a mistake.

I fumbled through the labyrinthine website and found a job search engine.  After lightly restricting the search results to "during the summer" and "in the United States," I scrolled through 132 consulting jobs with increasing rage.  I think the problem is that I'm not interested in grown-up things like "implementing media campaigns" or "providing financial advisory services".  My interests are a bit more elemental, like "eating" and "not dropping crumbs on myself while eating".

I tried to prod the search engine into giving me something that wasn't consulting by putting in keywords related to my interests.  The formerly infinite job list erased itself.  "Share and Enjoy!" smiled the career counselors from their homepage.   After another twenty minutes of fiddling with the Advanced Search Options, I ended up with a handful of things that didn't sound awful--but none of them were paid.  I let out a velociraptor screech and dragon-kicked my computer across the room.

What am I looking for?  Well, my IDEAL job would probably be Humor Filter, if housing was included.

To help myself out, I decided to brainstorm a list of my skills:
--I can read really fast
--I can walk on my hands
--I can run long distances without getting bored
--I can speak French proficiently (and I hope to be fluent by this summer)
--I can curl my tongue and make a lot of startling faces
--I can draw cartoons in response to realtime stimuli (and I've got more coming soon)
--I can make people laugh
--I can write and edit very well under pressure (according to my parents, it isn't really good that I've discovered this about myself)
--I can beat almost anyone in Bananagrams
--I can organize and take responsibility like nobody's business
--I can wake up early, no problem
--I can hang out in the woods at night without getting scared
--I can cook really good fried eggs
--I can bellydance a little bit

Huh, that's not so bad.  What I'm NOT good at is managing my time and finishing things by their due dates.  Sixteen and a half years of schooling have gradually numbed my reaction to deadlines to the point where I have basically become immune to them.

"I lose 1 out of 10 points if this is late?  Ehh, that's not so bad," mumbles my complacent brain.  And another night of frivolous time-wasting slides by.  I think the part of me that used to be afraid of academic consequences up and died sometime during my freshman year.  That would explain the smell, anyway.

Unfortunately, potential employers think the ability to complete tasks is really important for some reason.  So I'll have to try attacking the job hunt from a different angle.  I'll do that later.

I'm Thinking of a Number

Sometimes writing essays is like a game.  The professor says, “I’m thinking of a number between 1 and a billion.  Guess.”  But the number is an essay and if you don’t write the one the professor’s thinking of, you fail.

"Now I'm thinking of a letter between E and G..."

If you give a mouse a conference...

...she will take notes entirely in cartoons.
And if you let her take notes in cartoons,
she will put them on her blog.
And if she puts them on her blog,
you might rethink inviting mice to conferences.

(Isn't that what If You Give a Mouse a Cookie was about?  Anyway, this was a conference on translation.)

Professor Bingo

Have fun, kids.

I realized that this isn't the traditional bingo board size--ehh, deal with it.

How to stop procrastinating

Still Cool, Brah?

I have noticed that I frequently zone out during class, and tune back in ten or fifteen minutes later to find that our discussion on computational theories of cognition has turned into an argument about whether babies are really people or not.  I have also noticed that I pay better attention when I take notes in pictures instead of words.  This could be an interesting semester.

Utensils

This post was inspired by this summer's trip to England.  We visited a castle that was more than twice as old as anything that still exists in America.  After lying down for a bit to think about that, we proceeded to make fun of ALL OF IT.

Time for your Closeup

"Is this thing on?"

Please Report Past Drug History

True story.

Runner Problems #4

"Are you kidding me?" I said to my dad.  "You're not allowed to call yourself a marathoner until you've run several marathons?"

"Nope," said my dad, who has run over a dozen of the things.

"How is that fair?" I complained.

"Because reasons," he said.

Some Days

EEEEEEE! Back to School!

...when you realize that you were too excited about school to pay attention to homework, professors, or biological needs.

Ask a Dorm Person!

Mr. Mustache is the only game show host in the universe.

Hitting Restart on the Funny Machine

Hello again!

This is Merp, broadcasting live from Merpsville.  This fall semester is going to be a busy one, but I intend to post weekly because that's the least often I can do it while still feeling proud of myself.  Summer vacation gave me tons of new material!  Especially the part that I spent in England with my family, which supplied a tonne and a half by itself.  All of this material is still in mad scribble form ("bagel cafe in forest reached by elevator") but I feel confident about Future Merp's work ethic.

So, have a safe trip back to school, young'uns.  Enjoy the peace and quiet, old'uns.  Nibble & Spew will be with you every step of the way.  Expect a new post within the week.

What is distracting?

The more venerable readers of Nibble & Spew may be enlightened by the fact that "hw" means "homework".  This is an old picture, so be a good sport and feign amnesia if you've already seen it.

Pride & Procrastination

Tonight, I present to you a chronicle of incoherent thoughts collected during one dark and stormy night last spring.  I had to write a four-page English paper on Pride and Prejudice.  That was all.  Four pages is incredibly short by college standards.  It should have taken about four well-planned hours--but as soon as my fingers touched the keyboard, my brain emitted a fart and died.  Note the times of each successive comment.

A Muffin of Sudden Clarity

And Yet, Still Majoring in French

Sorry for the late post.  Due to me not understanding how to use my cell phone, the weekly "DON'T FORGET YOU HAVE A BLOG!" alarm failed to fire. 

The French take an indescribable, meticulous fascination in distilling every nuance from the slightest of emotions.  I base this conclusion on four years of reading France's answer to The Catcher in the Rye mixed with Where the Red Fern Grows à la Slaughterhouse Five.

First, it is a law that characters must die in every single work of fiction penned by a French hand.  Not only that, but they must die painfully, and their deaths must cause untold agony for those who once knew them.  (Readers included.)  Death by drowning, by poison, by gunshot, or simply by wasting away of misery--these are the only acceptable ends for fictional residents of the Hexagon.

Second, the characters who don’t die (or who remain woefully alive until the end of the story) are required to be unhappy.  Their wives or husbands should be unfaithful.  Their shops should do badly.  Their children or lovers should die.  Extra points if they kill their own cat by throwing it against a wall.

Finally, since nothing resembling success ever occurs, these characters have plenty of time to reflect on what a cruel beast is Fate.  One may spend an entire morning wandering hag-like through the boulevards of Paris and wondering when the greenish, bloated, rotting visage of one's drowned husband (whom one has killed) will fade from one's memory and allow one to sleep.  There's nothing better than a long walk for fixating on nauseating imagery and the feelings it provokes.  Ô la belle vie française!

I'm guessing that if you have read only one French book, it was The Little Prince.  The Little Prince was slightly different from the trope in that (SPOILER ALERT) the certainty of the death of the Little Prince is under debate.  But this book contains another important element of French literature, which is that it does not make sense.