Archive for October, 2006

Yesterday, the Internet called

Saturday, October 28th, 2006

Last night, I received a ran­dom tele­phone call from a num­ber that I did not rec­og­nize and, as is my style, I answered it. My, “Hello” was met with an, “Is this George Waksman?” to which I responded in the affir­ma­tive, a response that met with much rev­elry from the other end of the line. The call even­tu­ally turned out to be from some guy who come across my research into Tootsie Roll Pops and taken advan­tage of the fact that I keep my cell phone num­ber on my home­page. This man was call­ing because he wanted to know both if I was seri­ous and if I had really eaten all those Tootsie Roll Pops. Not being a lying sort of per­son, I of course informed the gen­tle­man that I was only kind of seri­ous but that I had in fact eaten all of those Tootsie Roll Pops. The man on the tele­phone seemed over­joyed by the infor­ma­tion that I had just pro­vided him, thanked me and took his leave of the tele­phone conversation.

Funny how I miss a long empty thing

Thursday, October 26th, 2006

I was walk­ing back from grab­bing a bite to eat and a caf­feinated bev­er­age and the return trip had me pass­ing down a hall­way when I was sud­denly struck by how very short the hall­way was. Well, long story short, I found myself miss­ing MIT’s Infinite Corridor. When I’m next in Massachusetts, I’ll have to make a point of walk­ing down that hallway.

All Saints be praised, I’m going blind

Monday, October 23rd, 2006

Joy of won­der­ous joys, my vision has decided to pack its bags and take off for an indef­i­nite vaca­tion. It turns out that I have inher­ited my mother’s astig­ma­tism as well as hav­ing suf­fered gen­eral tem­po­rally based degra­da­tion of my eyes. Sadly, the days when my left eye was 20/8 and my right eye was 20/12 are gone to be replaced with astig­ma­tism and 20/30 in my left eye and 20/60 in my right eye. On the pos­i­tive side, I guess, my left eye is still suf­fi­cient to have passed a Minnesota dri­ving test and the fan­tas­tic blue­ness of my eyes hasn’t gone any­where at all. Hopefully glasses will make me look sophis­ti­cated, sexy or some­thing else decribed with a pos­i­tive adjective.

P.S. Getting old and falling apart sucks.

P.P.S. Isn’t 23 too early to start feel­ing old?

Borderline Assault Roller Derby

Sunday, October 22nd, 2006

I went to another roller derby last night and it was even bet­ter than the first one. Last nights derby saw our Minnesota Rollergirls fac­ing off against the Dairyland Dolls of Madison, Wisconsin. For a num­ber of rea­sons, this matchup was sub­stan­tially more inter­est­ing than last times; specif­i­cally, the Dairyland Dolls are a team on par with ours, wheras the pre­vi­ous encounter was strongly in our favor and Minnesota has a bit of a rivalry with Wisconsin, a rivalry which I have started buy­ing into in my time here. I am also devel­op­ing a more refined appre­ci­a­tion for the joy that is roller derby. I freely admit that the rea­son I went to the first derby was because the idea of chicks on roller­skates run­ning into each other seemed kind of hot and pretty awe­some but this time around, I actu­ally under­stand the rules. While there was still an ele­ment of lik­ing that there were a bunch of scant­ily clad women roller skat­ing in a full con­tact man­ner, I found myself tak­ing a great deal of inter­est in mat­ters of defen­sive and offen­sive strat­egy. I will go so far as to say that last nights match showed me that Minnesota has a fan­tas­tic offense with some really spot on jam­mers but our defense leaves a bit to be desired. Wisconsin, on the other hand, had an absolutely fan­tas­tic defense – near impen­e­tra­ble at times – but their offense is only so-so. Sadly, our strong offense was not enough to take the bout and Wisconsin beat us 60-something to 40-something (I can’t remem­ber exactly). Everything else included, I main­tain that roller derby is the best spec­ta­tor sport ever and that you should all check it out.

Not Yo Momma’s Climate

Wednesday, October 11th, 2006

I guess, in a sense though, this is my momma’s cli­mate but that’s not really the point. Today, October 11th, marks the first time that we’ve received snow here in Minneapolis. As I sit here wait­ing for the feel­ing to return to my ears, I wanted to let all of you out there in warmer climes know what you’re missing.

The Paper Chase

Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006

This evening I watched The Paper Chase with a few of the other law stu­dents here. For those of you that don’t know, The Paper Chase is about a few law stu­dents (one in par­tic­u­lar) going through their first year at Harvard Law School, with a par­tic­u­lar focus on their con­tracts class (and it’s pro­fes­sor). If you would like to get some idea of what law school is like, I rec­om­mend watch­ing this movie as it has a lot of very accu­rate ele­ments. In spite of its accu­racy, The Paper Chase does not match up with my expe­ri­ence in a few key ways: none of my pro­fes­sors are quite as mean as Professor Kingsfield and none of my class­mates are quite as self-servingly cut­throat as most of the other stu­dents in the movie. The movie does, how­ever, give a seem­ingly accu­rate por­trayal of the work­load, class struc­ture, stress lev­els, sleep depri­va­tion and gen­eral style of the expe­ri­ence. I should like to add the caveat to every­thing pre­vi­ously said in this post that I’ve only fin­ished one month of my first term and things could change dra­mat­i­cally between now and finals.