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While I'm glad it didn't pass, it's still disturbing that the reason the Freedom Caucus rejected the bill was that it wasn't draconian enough. It makes me worried what they'll try to push next time.

Meaning to say: maybe living with constant irony crumbles in the face of actual danger.

That brings up the point that perhaps irony is the sole privilege of the relatively well-off. A parallel you could draw would be with the affected aristocratic languor of the nobility of days of yore. Perhaps cultivation of irony is a privilege of people without any significant, immediate threats to their day-to-day survival.   

So, Technical/Professional writing, right?
Group project, more about learning to work with a team than reporting on the benefits of tea for students at my school.

I hate group work and have successfully avoided it since the 6th grade when a science project teammate bailed on me, joined another project, and neglected to tell me. I found out two days before my assignment was due and had to build a balsa wood bridge my own damned self. I did a poor job of it, no doubt.

Anyway. Tea report. We all try the tea, we have a video conference meeting. Our roles are pre-determined by the instructor. I am proofreading, the other three are editing, designing, and leading. The editor crams together huge, poorly written paragraphs, the designer shoves in some tiny photos of tea brands and makes letter head improper. The leader occasional asks if we need anything and does nothing.

I fix just about everything, edit, resize, shift paragraphs and change headers, etc. I get it all done and send an email saying I am going to turn it in at 5pm.

The leader swoops in and says she is going to turn in as thought I hadn't SAID A GOD DAMNED MOTHERFUCKING THING.

But, whatever, right? So. I get the grade back and we are short of a 100% because she didn't download the motherfucking thing as a PDF so the formatting was all fucky.

Group work is pretty much the worst thing ever. I would almost rather do everything myself, since that's usually what ends up happening anyway.

So I decided I want to go for my BA so I went for it and finally applied for UCSB this semester! I'll find out some time this spring if I'm accepted or not. As for major, it was pretty much an equal toss up between archaeology, art history, or Asian studies for me, but I went with Asian studies because it was the easiest thing to apply to and it meshed well with my previous skill set. 

So now I'm back at community college finishing up my IGETC requirements. Two of my classes are going fine and I really like them, but the two that I'm taking online - Statistics and Critical Thinking - are a miserable slog.

It's been a whirlwind six months, honestly. I got a new job, entered a new relationship, broke off said relationship, was hospitalized twice - once for salmonella (lol) and then for a spider bite (lol wut), my grandma died, and of course all this craziness going on in the world just contributes to the general stress level. Now it's the middle of the semester now and I just feel kind of burnt out and unable to bring myself to care.

I'm trying to drum up the motivation to apply myself since these two classes are utterly crucial for me, but...blargh, just blargh.

A wildfire started in my town as well today, not bad enough to worry about evacuating but maybe should start to think about what to put in a go-bag. Living that SoCal life!

In other news I found a job! It's not as many hours as I'd like, but I make good tips so that's nice. It's also crazy and bilingual.

(I don't know if this is a general academic aspirations thread or not, so if I'm threadjacking please move my post to the Open Bar or something.)

I also really miss school. Although, it may be just because I'm having such a shitty time finding a job that I yearn to crawl back into the warm womb of academia. In a perfect world I'd be studying ancient and non-Western art history right now, but it's not a feasible prospect at the moment because of lack of money for tuition and lack of job prospects in that field. I don't think the humanities are "worthless", I just think our society has a hard time applying the humanities in a practical way in our current capitalist system.

[highlighted holes]

Relevant: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/10/why_i_hate_star_trek.html

Ha! That's hilarious! This reminds me that when my friend Primefactor and I were deep in the midst of constant moneymaking schemes, one of our schemes was writing highly specific fetish porn novellas to publish on Kindle. I can write good smut but am shit at plot and character development, and Primefactor is great at those things. So she would just send me pages of plotline that had highlighted holes in it that said "[porn]", and I would fill it in. If I had a good idea for some weird smut, I would write it out and send it to her with highlighted holes that said "[plot]". We didn't finish even one novella, but it was funny while it lasted.

(Sorry, I had to.)

That is entirely spot on.

'Suspending a chicken over your bed could protect against Zika virus and malaria'

"The researchers believe mosquitoes are wary of chickens because the birds eat the insects, and their blood is not nutritious enough to be worth the taking the risk."

Here's the link: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/07/21/suspending-a-chicken-over-your-bed-could-protect-against-zika-vi/

Those patterns though! 
Were Sasanian pearl roundels a common motif in the Medieval West too? I know that they show up in Chinese and Japanese textiles from time to time. Silk Road and all that.

So the poem that Hillary quoted for her 1969 graduation speech is pretty awesome and uncannily relevant to current day affairs. Thought I'd share:

"The Art of Making Possible" by Nancy Scheibner

My entrance into the world of so-called "social problems"
Must be with quiet laughter, or not at all.
The hollow men of anger and bitterness
The bountiful ladies of righteous degradation
All must be left to a bygone age.
And the purpose of history is to provide a receptacle
For all those myths and oddments
Which oddly we have acquired
And from which we would become unburdened
To create a newer world
To translate the future into the past.
We have no need of false revolutions
In a world where categories tend to tyrannize our minds
And hang our wills up on narrow pegs.
It is well at every given moment to seek the limits in our lives.
And once those limits are understood
To understand that limitations no longer exist.
Earth could be fair. And you and I must be free
Not to save the world in a glorious crusade
Not to kill ourselves with a nameless gnawing pain
But to practice with all the skill of our being
The art of making possible.

Aw, the best part of that game was jumping over the entire landmass of Vvardenfell in a single leap. Until the computer crashed from having to load too many new areas.

It is so nice to see everyone keeping a calm, cool level head this election season. It's so God damned delightful to watch everyone carefully and tactfully avoid eating each other's faces. It's so fucking rad, why can't you see how rad it is, stupid?

I generally have a no-political-discussion policy on FB, just because it can get so ugly. Sometimes I have to try really hard to hold my tongue, though. 

Observation: drunk people are, by and large, boring as hell.

SERIOUSLY.

Am currently scoping out what mire of internet horror I have come across again.