Merp Gets an A

Cet automne, j’étais très occupée.  J’ai assisté à mes cours et j’ai fait presque tous mes devoirs.  Vers la fin du semestre—non, je plaisante, c’était malheureusement le milieu—je commençais à m’ennuyer pendant l’un de mes cours de psychologie.  J’ai décidé alors d’arrêter la façade de taper des notes avec un air sérieux et assidu.  À partir de cet instant, je passais les cours en dessinant avec Microsoft Paint.  (Le crayon mâché des logiciels pour dessiner.)  Mais je gardais l’air sérieux et assidu.
This fall, I was very busy.  I went to my classes and did almost all of my homework.  Near the end of the semester—just kidding, it was unfortunately the middle of the semester—I started to get bored during one of my psychology classes.  I decided to stop the façade of typing up notes with a serious, diligent look on my face.  From then on, I spent these classes drawing in Microsoft Paint.  (The chewed pencil of drawing programs.)  But I held on to the air of seriousness and diligence.

Aujourd’hui, c’était Halloween.  Une fille s’est déguisée comme Andy Warhol.  On a appris que dépenser de l’argent pour les autres nous donne plus de bonheur que dépenser pour nous-mêmes.  J’avais eu trop de caféine.  On a parlé des femmes qui vendent leurs ovules.
Today was Halloween.  Someone dressed up as Andy Warhol.  We learned that spending money on others makes you happier than spending money on yourself.  I had had too much caffeine.  We talked about women selling their eggs.

J’avais vraiment eu trop de caféine.  Le professeur a erré hors sujet.  On a parlé de donner son sang et la hiérarchie de Maslow.
I had really had too much caffeine.  The professor lurched off-topic.  We talked about donating blood and Maslow’s hierarchy.

Beaucoup d'aspects du comportement des humains sont irrationnels, surtout nos moyens de chercher le bonheur.  L’argent.  Personne ne lit de livres académiques.
Many things about human behavior are irrational, especially the way we seek happiness.  Money.  No one reads academic books.

La technologie n’est pas bonne pour les cerveaux et les rapports, mais on l’aime comme un fou quand même.
Technology isn’t good for our brains or our relationships, but we are crazy in love with it anyway.

On a un moi privé et un moi public.  Les « millennials » ne savent quoi faire avec des tas de papier.  On traite les autres des machines « sur demande. »  Rectangles.
We have a private self and a public self.  Millennials don’t know what to do with heaps of paper.  We treat others like on-demand machines.  Rectangles.

Je suis distraite.  On n’entend pas ce qu’on ne veut pas entendre.  Le prof a une question pour nous.
I am daydreaming.  We don’t hear what we don’t want to hear.  The professor has a question for us.

Juice Lawn: The Cheese Amplifier

I've decided to turn to a random word generator for post titles when my Ouija board produces inconclusive results.  This has the disadvantage of making post titles read like spam.  I am pleased.

J’ai décidé de m’adresser à un générateur de mots aléatoires pour intituler mes posts quand mon planche de Ouija ne produit pas de résultats satisfaisants.  Cela a l’effet de faire rassembler les titres des posts au spam.  Ça me plaît. 

Playing with markers--ah, what precision!

Jouer avec des feutres fins—quelle précision!

Lana del Rey, "Diet Mountain Dew"

This is Merp College.
C’est Merp College.

I refuse to take an art class;

I prefer not to know what I'm doing.

TWO DRAWINGS:

In honor of those who are flying back to college.

Pour ceux qui prennent l’avion pour retourner à l’université.

In honor of dog people.

Pour ceux qui aiment les chiens.

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..."

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.

EEEEEEE! Back to School!

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

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.

So You Think You Can Park Here

This actually happened.  Except that I did not move my car.  I brazenly left it in the closest lot--a multistory lot with 2/3 of the spaces STILL FREE, mind you--while I sherpa'd from my room FIFTEEN TIMES.  I think this was a lose-lose situation.

Fire Alarms

One of the great things about college is having fire alarms go off in your dorm at all hours of the day.  

It could be eleven a.m. when you’ve just gotten back from your first class.  You walk down the hallway, letting your shoulders slump because no one can see you, already mentally rehearsing your door code, reaching out to touch the handle, and BLEEEEP BLEEEEP BLEEEEP you are DENIED sanctuary.  Time to execute a prompt about-face and trot back outside until it’s “safe.”

But usually, the fire alarm goes off late at night.  Especially if you live in a freshman dorm.  Actually, if you live in a freshman dorm, the damned thing will be blaring and flashing pretty much 24/7.  Why?  Because freshmen are not house-trained yet.

Perks of frequent fire drills:  You’ll get really good at leaping out of bed, putting on your shoes and picking up your ID card in one motion, and running down a few flights of stairs and outside before waking up.  Fire alarms are social events.  There’s always someone who forgot her shoes, so you let her stand on your feet instead of in the snow.  There’s always a quilt-wrapped, two-person burrito talking to their friends, who are trying hard to hide their smirks.  There’s always a grumpy girl wearing a towel and suds in her hair.  And there’s always the cool guy who strolls outside minutes after everyone else, perhaps hoping for a dramatic and fiery demise.

So what the heezy are your fellow students doing to set off the alarm so often?  Mostly, it’s “DURR imma burn the shit outta my popcorn at 2 AM that sounds like a good idea hurr.”  There is no other explanation.