The Soup

A couple of days ago, I was watching Joel McHale's The Soup. At the end of his usual banter of celebrity gossip, McHale paid a short tribute to Heath Leger and told people to stop trying to dig up dirt after his death. I thought that it was a very good statement, and I appreciated it.

Job Search

After having my third job interview this week, I got an email back that said they had chosen someone else. So, out of all three jobs I've applied for, no one hired me. Yes, it has been a very busy and interesting week.

SAG awards

I noticed that none of the female actors in the Screen Actor Guild Awards were wearing necklaces. Has this commonplace piece of jewelry instantaneously found its way out of the wardrobe? The most-sported look was a strapless gown with earrings and a bare upper-chest with no necklace at all. The men sported moppy hair with shaggy beards. You think that because all they have to worry about is a suit, they would at least shave.

President Gordon B. Hinckley

Yesterday, the president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints died 7 p.m. in his home. I had never met the man, but he has taught me wonderful things about how to manage my life through correct, smart choices and taking the time to listen to intuition. My personal life has been continually blessed by the man who simply told me to pray and listen to my Heavenly Father. My heart goes out to his family; he was a great man.

Jobs

I just got two job offers in the same week! (Two companies contacted me back after seeing my resume.) I also had a call for papers in one of my classes to be considered for publication. Other than my monstrous load of homework, this weekend should be fun. (And I hope I hear back from some people.)

Plasma Misconception

I was donating plasma and thinking about when I first heard about plasma donation. I was about ten and heard about someone who was donating plasma. Immediately interested in the topic, I asked what plasma was. The adult who explained it to me asked if I had ever gotten a rug burn, and I said yes. She said that the clear or yellowish fluid that comes to the top of a rug burn is plasma.

I pondered this for a moment, and wondered how plasma would be extracted from the donor. I figured that there would be a sand-paper person to rub the donor down with sandpaper until their was a rug-burn-type injury, then scrape off the plasma that collected at the top of the wound and collect it in a small dish.

Luckily, this is not the process that I have to go through to donate plasma. I leave the donation center with only a small puncture in one arm. Besides that, I get $30, juice, and crackers. Life is good.

Feminism

I was thinking about something I heard in a feminist seminar: "Women will not truly become women as their own entity unless they cease to be women of men." In the dating world, women are dependent on men for compliments and reassurances about their appearence, their decisions, et cetera. It is almost as if a women needs a man to wave his magic wand and say "I noticed that you were pretty, now you are pretty." A woman who has a sparkle in her eyes does not notice her radiance until a man points it out. It is almost as if the sparkle wasn't there until he came along.

But what about the women who do not date? Are they simply not pretty, smart, or funny? Are they destined to be the duds until a man comes along and declairs them the fairest in the land? I know many such women that are beautiful, radiant, and smart who go unoticed by men. I believe that personal qualities are arbitrary to whether anyone notices them or not.

Technical Support for Wireless Internet Service

I've been tryting to set up a high-speed internet conection today, and finally I have it set up. It took three hours on the phone with people who all sounded like they were from India, and my brain was thouroughly fried before I even got to my homework, but I now have an internet connection. I have never been so happy to have wireless internet.

Forgetting Something? Walk into Another Room.

Do you ever walk into a room and forget what it is that you needed to get? I have that with school assignments. Every time I look at a blank page my mind shuts off, then I look away from the page and the thought I was having comes right back. As soon as my eyes return to the page, I forget what it was that I was going to write about.

A lot of life is staring at blank pages and thinking about what to do. Researchers figure out how much time in our entire lifetime we spend going to the bathroom, kissing, playing tenis, you name it, but I wonder how much time is spent walking into rooms to get things that we don't remember what it was we needed to get.

The Nerd Complex: Hierarchies of Nerds

Introduction

One day I was speaking with one of my friends and asked her what her major was. “I’m a bio major,” she replied. “I’m in there with all the nerds.” I began to think about her statement. Doesn’t every major have nerds? I began to see what had happened historically to the population of nerds throughout the ages. In grade school they were the ones that we excluded because they were different from us. In middle school, they helped us with our homework, so they were okay friends, as long as they weren’t friends with us in public. In high school, the nerds found strength lumping into one group, but in college, they slowly evolved into hierarchies of different types of nerds. They specialized in different aspects of the humanities and the sciences and became more and more eccentric in their obsessions. Now they are everywhere, formulating equations, writing reports for fun, and claiming that they invented the internet and the concept of global warming.

Some Nerds Out There

Todd Wilbur is a nerd notorious for using cooking and chemistry to find the secret recipes of restaurants around the nation. He has researched the Coca Cola Company and has found that only three or four top executives, including the Coca Cola chemist, know the secret formula for Coca Cola. They never travel together, and undisclosed precautionary measures have been taken for their utmost safety. When one member of the secret group dies, all others must agree to elect a new individual. The secret yellowing paper with the Coca Cola recipe is deep in a vault in Atlanta, Georgia.
Do you ever think of being a secret agent, but the FBI is too hard to get into? You can work for the Coca Cola Company! You can protect the secret recipe vault, travel with top executives, and carry a gun. Stop being a nerd and do something cool! Your title would be “secret agent protector of the executives that know the Coca Cola secret recipe,” and you can say that every time you pull out your special badge. Make yo mama proud!

Bill Gates

I checked out the official website of Microsoft and found a biography on Bill Gates. Gate’s biography reads much like an obituary when it talks about his past life and reads like a resume for the beginning and end. It is a true testimony to the fact that Bill Gates has been a nerd his entire life, from the time he was thirteen and programming computers to the time he was a student at Harvard. In this biography, I found a passage that filled my soul with glee: “Gates was married on Jan. 1, 1994, to Melinda French Gates.” The writer of this biography had written the sentence using Melinda’s married name, making the writing vague to the point that you can’t tell whether or not Bill Gates married a relative. Unfortunately for me, it was just a vague sentence, and Bill Gates did not marry his relative. But to comfort those who do marry their cousins, Teddy Roosevelt married his fifth cousin. So if you’re looking misty-eyed across the threshold of your family reunion, you are not alone in the world.

You may be a nerd if…

Do you ever wonder about the water that splashes you when you flush a public toilet? Of course everyone wonders about random things, but do you actually research the dangers of secondhand toilet-water splashing? If so, you are a bio nerd. You are one of those people who researches the germs on door handles for fun. Your weekends are filled with mathematical equations and Petri dishes. You have a full life.
Have you ever written a sonnet for someone on Valentine’s Day? Do you recite Shakespeare to prove your point? Do you have wild fantasies about members of the opposite sex that only appear in novels, poems, and other literature? You are an English nerd. You are sadistic and enjoy unhappy endings. You love to argue, and you believe that true love only exists in Jane Austin novels. If you encounter an English nerd, beware. Never get into a discussion involving your favorite movie, for it will soon be reduced to the thematic reproduction of the modernist existential angst of the movie’s putrid producer. If you have no idea what this means, consult the English nerd nearest you.

Thanksgiving Point Wedding Expo

Today I went with my friends to a wedding expo. Yes, kind of a weird thing to do on a Saturday, but we mainly went for the freebies and labeled one of my friends as the "bride to be." She had her boyfriend with her so they could sign up for more prizes. I hope I get the free spa facial. Yes, we are weird.

News Stories

For one of my classes I was asked to write a 50-100 word blurb about something that was going on around campus or the community. I had always made fun of the local newscasters because they seemed corny when they ran out of ideas for the news. They would talk about the weather or some boy who completed his eagle scout project, and I would point my finger in scorn.

Of course, I was asked to do this assignment within the first week of school, and there was nothing really going on. I was faced with the same situation as a local newscaster of a small town. The theatre department is preparing for things clear in spring, the biology department's triumphs were already covered in December issues of on-campus magazines, and the humanities department has such a lack of funding that nothing is ever going on. So what did I write about? The weather.

Jamie Lynn Spears

I am writing about a topic of grave seriousness: the Spears family. You have to pay attention to anyone who takes an interest in Brittney Spears and her kin. It's like the train wreck you just can't stop watching.

I have read the exclusive interview of her pregnant sister in OK!. It was after the hollidays when fridges are full and no one even wants to step foot into a grocery store when I had all my closing duties finished. One of the magazines was out of place and I was interrupted by a customer as I was putting it back. The smiling face of Jamie Lynn stared up at me. She was posing in a hip top with facial expressions in her "exclusive photos" that seemed disturbing because it was such a carefree smile. I had to read the article.

So at 11 p.m. in an empty grocery store I flipped the pages to discover an empty life. She had been staying at a friend's house when she became suspicious and bought a pregnancy test. She decided to give herself about two weeks to tell no one and decide for herself what to do. She told her mother that she had something to tell her but that she couldn't tell her in person and she would have to read the note. Her mother read the note and asked her daughter's boyfriend if it was true. He confirmed. Jamie Lynn has decided to keep the baby and wants to be the best mom that she can be. I disagree. I think the best thing for that baby is to be raised by a family other than the Spears. It takes a better mom to admit she may not be the best thing for her baby.

National Geographic Geography Bee

I just took an online geography bee test. I did not know that there was such a thing, but it sparked my interest, and I thought it was a neat idea to feature contestants on the subject of geography. The questions ranged from which country Germany invaded in World War II to which country Buddhism was founded in. It helped me just for a second to brush up on my geography and to increase my interest in geography. It is sad every time someone says where they are from or what happened in the news and I have to look at a map with my forefinger outstretched, saying, "Where was that, again?"

Editing Internships

I have been looking at editing internships and am amazed at the different variety of internships and jobs that are available to people who edit. I have seen everything from editing instructional pamphlets to internet sites to newspapers, magazines, and novels. Fiction editing is a competitive market, largely because people have visions of becoming the first person to ever read the next bestseller. As of now, I have applied to a few editing internships, one of which had funding cut for the program (needless to say, no one was hired for the position) and a couple that I applied for just after they hired someone. My job search has been a frustrating one, but hopefully it will turn out well.

The First of the Last

Today is one of the last times that I will experience the first day of a semester. I am graduating soon, and I am glad I will never have to experience the first day of school again. The first day of school is a ritual that reminds me of high school. Everyone wears nice clothes and makes sure to make a good first impression.

Some classrooms full of people do not talk to each other at all and nervously look around and quickly find other things to do: texting, reading the newspaper, becoming fascinated by the buttons on their shirts, etc. Occaisionally, someone in the classroom will pipe up with small talk to the person next to them about their major or where they are from, and sometimes a few people will have had a class together before and their chatter will echo in the empty classroom until the professor arrives.

The arrival of the professor is very important. He or she will make sure to arrive exactly on time, and not a second early or late. That increases the anticipation of the students as they wonder whether the professor will ever show up and wonder how long they will be cooped up with strangers while they pretend to read the dull commentary of a crappy school newspaper trying to be fresh and edgy. The professor arrives, makes a few well-rehearsed jokes about the course that they have been reciting for so many decades that the jokes are sorely outdated, and hands out a syllabus that was made in the fifties and reused ever since. Thus commences the first day of school.

Writers

My friend gave me a book about query letters for Christmas, and it has been incredibly useful to my knowledge about writing and submitting one's writing. I knew about query letters, which are business letters that one writes to a publisher to express interest in the publication and to advertise the particular enclosed (or not enclosed) poem, short story, article, et cetera. What was new to me was that the vast majority of article writers advertise their articles to the publisher before they even write the article. This allows the publisher to have a say in what is said and how long the article will be. This also cuts down on the writer's frustration in having to change everything after putting so much work into an article.

What's That Smell?

A couple of days ago, a coworker was scanning groceries and came across something uncanny. Someone had picked up a jar of alfredo sauce who knows how long ago, screwed off the lid and put it on the shelf. Over time, the contents of the jar congealed in the form of chunky mold. As my coworker was running the jar over the scanner, the lid came off, spilling a small amount of the contents. A smell enveloped the front end of the store for a while, and the mess was quickly cleaned up, but an hour later a customer asked me what the smell was and put her coat over her nose. Today, I checked in that checkstand and could occaisionally make out The Smell, which was lurking in no particular place.