let's stumble towards success and pack some snacks for little breaks

Co-worker #1: I like mini-pizzas. Things taste better when they're bite-sized. Everything should be small.
Co-worker #2: Do you want a premature baby, then?
Co-worker #1: It would be small and perfect.
Co-worker #2: It would be undersized and unhealthy.
Me: But delicious!
(total silence)
Me: :D?
Co-workers: O.o
Me: *slinks off*

...I thought it was funny.

I was over at Dr. K's today analyzing some data and talking her into buying me Photoshop (successfully, yay), and we were talking about getting an abstract ready for our AChemS poster submission, and she just kind of casually mentioned "first author, which would be you..."

dude, what?

Apparently I'm going to be listed as first author on this. I guess it sort of makes sense, looking back over the work that's been done in the lab since last year's conference. And I'll be the one doing the writing and layout and graphs for the poster itself. Still, I wasn't expecting this, and it feels sort of amazing.

Today, as I was taking the trash out at work, a bunch of kids (little kids, maybe eight years old or so) were hanging around behind the store, biking and skateboarding on the Michaels delivery ramp. As I emptied the cardboard into the recycling dumpster, they started showing off, circling closer to me and popping wheelies and such. I ignored them. Eventually, they all left, and one of them hollered at me as he passed, "Bye, baby!" I've heard those words in that tone before, from creepy old homeless guys at Kansas City bus stops when I'm boarding the bus. The little shit pretty much eradicated all my faith in the society of tomorrow.

Then they all came back and resumed their antics, and one of the smaller ones came over and asked me, tentatively and to all appearances sincerely, whether I was a cyborg.

Faith restored. ^_^

As I was cart-wrangling this evening around 9:45, a group of about eight young people in two cars pulled into the Price Chopper parking lot. They started blasting music, talking and laughing loudly, pushing each other around in shopping carts, and climbing on top of cars. I'm all about partying, but I also have work responsibilities, so I alerted the security guard on duty. He's new; I don't even know his name.

He ambled over to them with a cigarette in his hand and chatted with them for about five minutes, after which they cheerfully got back into their cars and left. I heard one of them call "Sounds good!" to the guard. I asked him what he'd said, and he told me that they'd been talking about car surfing, and he'd related to them his own experiences of motorcycle surfing on the highway. I don't know what else he said, but that's not important. The important part is that he talked to them, listened to them, identified with them, and solved the problem.

I'm really impressed. I wish all authority figures worked like that.

This is National Tutor Week, apparently, so all the tutors got candy and we have this morale-building paper star thing. Students are encouraged to write a note on a paper star to a tutor after a good session, just to let them know they're appreciated, and all the stars are put up on this bulletin board. Sharai made an appointment to look over her Guy/Girl paper with me (which we would have done anyway, but it gave me a kind of unofficial break from work) and was in the writing center for about twenty minutes. Before she left, Michelle told her to write a nice note to me on a star. She wrote, "Julia did an excellent job... but I brought in an excellent paper."

It was hung up on the board. My bosses rock.

I don’t like routine, as a rule. It bores me to do the same thing day after day, or even week after week. And yet, this morning, I woke up when my alarm went off, got up, used the bathroom, got dressed, went downstairs, ate a quick breakfast, checked my e-mail, put on my backpack, took the bus to Penn Valley, and walked up to work. From six-thirty (six o’clock if I take a shower) to eight in the morning, there is very little variation in this routine.

It’s unusual for me to do the same thing every morning. In fact, I’ve only been following this particular routine since the first day of classes a week and a day ago. Unless I find a non-bus ride to school in the mornings, I doubt it will change until December. Normally, that would bother me. Somehow, though, I don’t mind.

I think it’s because this routine gets me from sleep to a state in which I can face the day. I’m always a little groggy at home and on the bus, but by the time I get to work, I’m ready and able to handle life as it comes. When Mom or Bill drove me to school most mornings, that grogginess stayed with me through my first class. This way, even if I’m still sleepy when I get to school, I have a few hours of early-morning work to help me wake up before I need to really focus on anything. (Of course I focus on my tutoring sessions, but most papers are suffering from a subset of a group of problems I've learned to explain so that most students will understand. I don’t always need to use my brain very much.)

If my routine stayed the same all day, every day, I would hate it. And my days now are similar enough that after a while, they could get old: I have the same schedule each week, plus or minus a few things, and I see mostly the same people. But it’s varied enough to keep me interested for now, and it will all change next semester. I’m happy with that.

-I am home. Airport security has been uncharacteristically easy on this trip.

-Watchmen is an absolutely excellent graphic novel, and if you haven't read it, I highly recommend borrowing it from me. As soon as Clayton, Bill and Cordell have finished it, in that order.

-Last night, I called Sharai from the beach and she told me that Ray had talked to her about the open executive editorial position, and we joked about fighting to the death over it. Today, Craig told her that he wants us both to have it. Eeeeexcellent.

-I lost the piece of paper with my tutoring hours on it, and I'm supposed to work tomorrow morning. I guess I'll just show up when the TLC opens tomorrow just in case, and copy down my hours from the chart then.

-Textbooks might have been a good thing to procure before the first day of classes. Ah, well. I'll pay for my procrastination by waiting in line for three hours tomorrow.

-I want a "Hello My Name Is" sticker, so I can write "Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die." on it and wear it tomorrow. Sadly, I have no "Hello My Name Is" sticker. Perhaps I'll drop by Student Activities tomorrow and see if they have any.

-I cracked up out loud at today's QC strip. And then cracked up again at the idea of prodigal7512 doing his geek-smacking in a nun outfit.

Anybody feel like taking me to see "Snakes on a Plane" sometime after 3:15 tomorrow? Look at my icon- you know you want to buy that girl a movie ticket.

A student came into the TLC today for an appointment with me. He was Asian, and English was obviously his second language. He had a couple of papers with comments from the instructor for revision. He seemed intelligent, with good thoughts, but he had some issues with grammar and spelling- a fairly typical ESL student.

While going over his paper, I came across the word "perspicacious," underlined in red with three question marks from his teacher. At first I thought that he'd misspelled another word, but I couldn't figure out what word he meant, and he insisted that he had the right one. So I got a dictionary and looked it up.

Perspicacious: having or showing penetrating mental discernment; clear-sighted. He couldn't tell me where he'd learned the word, but he'd used it perfectly in his paper.

Because I don't know this particular instructor, I suggested he change it to a slightly more well-known word. If it had been Lisa or Casey, though, I would have told him to show them the definition and leave it in the paper.

Yep, Clay's hit a dozen. One more year and he'll be a teen. Boggle.

Regardless of the fact that without it I would still be unaware of the fact that the guy who plays Silent Bob also directed "Clerks," there was never meant to be a "Clerks II." And it would suck even without the Halle Berry lookalike.

I got my first paycheck today. Seventy-something bucks, whee. I'm going to pay back some of my Christmas debt to Mom, put some in the bank account, and keep some to buy coffee, because it's rude to go to coffeeshops without buying anything and I'm getting sick of studying in the library.

One of the new French students dropped out because he apparently hadn't taken French 101 (nobody's been able to figure out how he managed to sign up for 102) and the girl from East Central is quite obviously lost (she couldn't figure out what "chien" meant even after Ms. Brandt barked at her, for god's sake), but the other new people seem to be doing well. There's one called Rachel I like a lot, and another one (Tulani? Something like that) has the most awesome, massive, corkscrewy, red-and-black Afro ever. Hair like that makes me wish I was black.

Also, Student Activities. Erica, Dylynda, and Joshua's replacement Shannon were in the office today. Josh won't be leaving until next Friday, but he has barely any hours until then, so I haven't run into him yet. Shannon... she's nice and all, and I like her, but she hasn't really gotten the SAC atmosphere yet. She locks up her desk, her computer when she isn't using it, and the office when no one's there, which nobody ever does, and she wears formal clothes too. I think she'll loosen up, though- she just has to get used to us.

You know when you're in a really good mood and then someone says something and you just plummet to feeling like complete crap in .001 seconds? That's happened to me twice today, once just now. Meh. I did get a promise for a reference letter from Zola, one of my TLC bosses. When I asked, I made sure she knew that it was okay to say no because we haven't known each other all that long... but she told me that I come very well recommended, so she doesn't have any reservations. That was nice, because it means that Mindy, Ms. Sheeley and Dr. Spaulding gave me good references, and I was kind of worried about my reputation with the last two. Casey, one of the English teachers, was working in the writing lab while I was for three hours this morning, and we had a couple of really interesting discussions. I can't remember much of it, because I was practically asleep on my feet, but I'm very much looking forward to Friday mornings from now on.

I uploaded a couple of new icons, including this one, which is a pic taken of me by shoutingboy at vito_excalibur's birthday party.

Oh, I know what will make me feel better- hair dye! I've been waiting for some free time to do this. I hope you all are well, and I wish you a happy weekend.

Got up at seven AM today, because it's bloody Tuesday. Bill offered me a ride in, which was nice of him as it was about twenty degrees out and I can't find my gloves. It was the last day of honors seminar, and Jennifer gave her presentation on abstinence education. She passed around a handout her son brought home from school. It actually said that condoms cause disease and death, and included a six-inch diagram of the difference in size between a condom defect and an HIV virion. Interesting presentation, albeit a little scary.

I finally got the issue sorted out with Penn Valley HR, and I am now officially hired. Training is January 11th and 12th, and classes start on the 18th. That makes me very happy. Algebra was Algebra- I started in on the second page of complaints about the teacher to put in the letter to the math department head. I got my honors project and big research paper back from my English teacher- 100% on the former and A-minus on the latter, but the minus is only there because she marked me down for things she didn't mention on the draft. After class, I was at the drinking fountain when a girl behind me said my name. I turned around to see a girl from English, who said in a nervous voice, "Sorry to bother you, but I have a problem with my computer, and you seem like the smartest person in class. Can you help me?" I was astounded, and it turned out I actually could help her, despite my far-from-complete mastery of that machine known as the PC. High point of the day.

After French, I stopped on the third floor to talk with some people I know (Nicki from Student Activities, her awesomely wacko boyfriend Joe, and a girl who will be in my Newswriting and Reporting class next semester, whose name I'm not sure how to spell- ShaRae? Shiray?) I ended up hanging out for an hour eating those yummy gold-wrapped chocolate nut balls and then getting a ride home. Joe has Dan's gay-acting-straight-guy thing going, only more so. It's really funny.

I walked in the door to find a kajillion moms and kids sitting around our dining room table making gingerbread houses. They're the good homeschooled kind of families whose kids are polite, though, so I didn't mind.