Seven Red

I liked how Working Blue fessed up to a Not My Best Moment Moment (although, frankly, the other mother in the story strikes me as either a clueless idiot or plain vicious). I had a Not My Best Moment Moment myself today, and I thought I’d share.

I’m doing summer advising for Unnamed Employer Institution. It involves getting first-year and transfer students across the College lined up and registered for their fall courses, and generally informing them of the abundance of requirements they’ll have to fulfill to earn their degrees. By and large it’s mechanical work: when you talk to five eighteen or nineteen year-olds in a few hours about how they want to plan their next few years, you learn that most of them don’t want to. That’s not really a judgment; it may even be the better way to go about things. You also see the industrial side of higher ed pretty clearly. The repetitive nature of the advising hour is striking: their interests cluster just where you’d expect, you start to deploy the same little phrases and jokes to feign a deeper affective encounter, you nod and smile, they nod and smile, and at the end of the day, maybe 70% have near identical schedules, with some variations for time and stuff like that. Again, this is neither good nor bad. It should be no surprise that our institutions of higher learning operate in some ways like old style factories. More slippery, always, is what the actual product might be.

But today I had a real doozy. The transfer student sessions are supposed to take a complete hour, and the students are meant to leave registered for the fall classes. My last guy today went two hours, and we barely finished his registration. By the end of the session, I was literally fuming, and I will pat myself on the back a bit by saying that I have never lost my temper with a student (she knows this is no small claim, since I lose my temper about 8 times a day regularly). Students come up apologizing about a late paper. I usually just shrug. They know the policy. I’m really not that emotionally invested in late papers or plagiarism or other problems like that. I enforce the policies, but with a sort of bureaucratic detachment and – pat on the back part 2 – I think good humor. This is one of the great benefits of working in a university: you don’t even have to pretend to be angry about these sorts of things. Students often seem to take this absence of anger as a revelation, as if they are just now discovering that their high school teachers’ anger about this or that was just a feint, a sham. And what that says about our education system.

The student comes in Undeclared. Fine. We’ll spread around the required courses until he figures out a major, maybe in the Spring. No, he tells me. He wants to go into medicine. That’s fine, too. I retrieve the sheet that lays out a pre-med sequence. As you would expect, it is fairly rigorous, filled with bio, chem, organic chem, physics, and calculus calculus calculus. Mind you, this student had no science courses in his first year at another institution, so if he wants to finish on time, he really needs to get cracking on this. We start working out the schedule, and the conditions suddenly come out. No, he says, I can’t take classes on Friday. This was fair enough, since the obligation was religious, and he eventually acceded to Friday mornings. But not too early, because condition 2 was “No, I can’t take classes at 8:30.” That’s too early, see? Oh, and he also didn’t really think late afternoon/evening classes would work for him. Well, now.

To take biology, he would have three regular course meetings (MWF), a discussion meeting (Tuesday), and a three-hour lab. That’s just for ONE class. He had to register for four. Oh, and the calculus? That’s a two hour class twice a week that meets at 8:30, or three days a week at a “more reasonable” time with an additional hour and a half lab. Naw, that didn’t work for him, either. Too early. Or, too much. We go back and forth for an hour, looking at various permutations, while still trying to get his other classes in. My next session has to be moved to another advisor, because this one is going over, and then over again. Really? Why does the biology class meet that often, he says. Really, do I have to take calculus? That’s when I lost it. I look at the guy and say “Listen, do you want to be a doctor?” He nods apprehensively, perhaps sensing that I am unpleased with the progress of our session. Then I launch into it.

First some context. My roommate from college, and still my dear friend, is a board certified radiologist. This guy worked his ass off in college. I know this, because I would often be stumbling back to the room as he’d be arriving back from the library extended hours. Every. Goddamn. Weeknight. (Not really true: I double majored and had a minor, so I wasn’t exactly flush with free time either). He also managed to have a nice social life, and remain well-adjusted. But dammit, that boy worked. Up at seven, go to class and study all day, meet us for some dinner, then back to the library until midnight. He also took his other requirements and stayed in touch with cultural activities (I mean wine tastings, of course). And he’s a doctor, and I have no doubt a damn good one.  But the guy worked constantly.

So I say to this kid, and my tone is not nurturing: “Listen, you can’t schedule for Friday afternoon, and you don’t want to take early or late classes. You don’t want multiple meetings of a biology class, and you don’t want a math lab, and you’re not really that interested in taking calculus. If you want to be a doctor, this is what being a doctor is. Yes, it’s a hard schedule. It’s supposed to be. If you want to be a doctor, you’re probably going to have to get up earlier.” Period. But he won’t do it, so we take the next whole hour reshuffling him into a bunch of liberal arts requirement classes, because he wants some “adjustment time” before he “really starts on the pre-med stuff.” I am, at this point, utterly disgusted, and it shows.

I have provided every other advisee with my email, even though my official duties really end with the session. It’s a courtesy, and several have taken me up on it with follow up questions, all of which I’ve answered. At the end of our (two) sessions, which have now dragged on past even the second hour, making me late for picking up babygirl from daycare, the future doctor asks if I will be his advisor in the future, or if he can contact me. I say – and this is curtness, not courtesy – “If you have questions, contact the advising office.” And I turned around and walked out.

Not my best moment.

But curiously satisfying.

So, after one year in Chicago, I am just a boss parallel parker. I mean, I’m fantastic. I squeeze into impossible spots at the perfect angle, and end up arrow-straight three inches from the curb. Let me reinforce this point: I’m friggin awesome at it. It took some work, since I didn’t do a whole lot of parallel parking in Massive State University College Town, where we had a giant parking lot at our apartment complex. And what really did it here was this past Hell-Winter, a trial by fire (some say by ice), which involved inhuman parking maneuvers through snow-plow walls and over hard-pack – a nightmare. Ah, but it honed my skills, Grasshopper. Sometimes adversity is the best teacher.

So, like, anyway, a few weeks ago, I asked she if I could consider myself a parallel parking guru. Y’know, since I’m so goddamn good at it? she informed me – rather unceremoniously, to my mind – that in order to be a guru, I would need actual followers and, since it didn’t appear likely that I would gain any actual followers for my fucking incredible parallel parking abilities, that I could not be a parallel parking guru, and would have to settle for being a delusional self-congratulator RE: my pizzarking skillz. I thought her assessment ungenerous.  Today I determined that it was also false.

I was coming back from The Target (as babygirl calls it) because yesterday I promised her that she could watch Diego on the computer if only she would cease whatever unbearable tantrum that she was then conducting. Yes, it was a bribe, and one that would require procurement of an actual Diego DVD at some point, but it made sense at the time, largely because it didn’t commit me to any immediate activity. Damned if she didn’t remember it in its exact phrasing this morning, so off I went to The Target, looking for Diego. When I arrive back at The Block, I notice a spot right in front of our place. It’s tight, people. Maybe two feet bigger than the car, maybe less. In other words, it’s perfect. The question is not whether I’ll get into it. That’s obvious. I’m awesome. The question is how many moves will it take? Can I shave some off? I survey the space, check the distance of the two bordering cars from the curb, and pull into place. I check my angle one more time, cut the wheel, reverse. Perfect. Cut the wheel, pull up. Perfect. One last reverse for fine-tuning, and I’m in.  The whole operation takes less than ten seconds. I brush the dust off my shoulders Obama-style, knowing that the small space directly in front of my door couldn’t defeat me, and I exit the car.

Standing there next to the door is Some Guy Hanging Around on the Street, a typical sight. What’s he doing? I don’t know, and I don’t care. But I notice that he’s looking down at the wheels of my car. He looks up at me, and back down at the wheels. He checks my distance from the car behind, and the car in front. Ten inches on either side, maybe. And he says:

“Hey man. That was great parking.”

No lie, G.I.

I nod knowingly, like I know it was great parking, son. You ain’t gah tell me. And I head inside.

But the conclusion here is simple. I appear to have a follower, so that would make me a parallel parking guru, after all. Score: topspun 1, she 0 (if scoring begins today; otherwise: topspun 3, she 2,791).

It’s a Class War, Stupid : Rolling Stone.

Once again, Taibbi cuts through the crap in this incredible Rolling Stone piece, and manages to do so with the usual incredulous humor. How anyone can listen to the so-called analysis coming from packs of pundits who have been nothing but wrong for twenty years is a mystery, but it’s not a mystery without consequence. Taibbi:

This is why you need to pay careful attention when you hear about John McCain claiming that he’s going to “look at entitlement program” waste as a means of solving the budget crisis, or when you tune into the debate about the “death tax.” We are in the midst of a political movement to concentrate private wealth into fewer and fewer hands while at the same time placing more and more of the burden for public expenditures on working people. If that sounds like half-baked Marxian analysis… well, shit, what can I say? That’s what’s happening. Repealing the estate tax (the proposal to phase it out by the year 2010 would save the Walton family alone $30 billion) and targeting “entitlement” programs for cuts while continually funneling an ever-expanding treasure trove of military appropriations down the befouled anus of pointless war profiteering, government waste and North Virginia McMansions — this is all part of a conversation we should be having about who gets what share of the national pie. But we’re not going to have that conversation, because we’re going to spend this fall mesmerized by the typical media-generated distractions, yammering about whether or not Michelle Obama’s voice is too annoying, about flag lapel pins, about Jeremiah Wright and other such idiotic bullshit.

Yes, it’s an absolute disgrace, but it pushes and pushes at a limit that must either be reinvented or crashed upon:

These fantasy elections we’ve been having — overblown sports contests with great production values, decided by haircuts and sound bytes and high-tech mudslinging campaigns — those were sort of fun while they lasted, and were certainly useful in providing jerk-off pundit-dickheads like me with high-paying jobs. But we just can’t afford them anymore. We have officially spent and mismanaged our way out of la-la land and back to the ugly place where politics really lives — a depressingly serious and desperate argument about how to keep large numbers of us from starving and freezing to death. Or losing our homes, or having our cars repossessed. For a long time America has been too embarrassed to talk about class; we all liked to imagine ourselves in the wealthy column, or at least potentially so, flush enough to afford this pissing away of our political power on meaningless game-show debates once every four years. The reality is much different, and this might be the year we’re all forced to admit it.

Indeed. The whole thing’s worth a read.

The Blue Screen of Death saga continues.

In this installment, topspun determines that the motherboard’s failure to recognize the secondary drive must derive from its current status as slave. As such, the primary drive must be completely removed, and the jumpers for the secondary set to master. This turns out to be a correct diagnosis of the problem (after numerous failed diagnoses, a la House), so our hero swaps out the failed primary HD for the backup, runs his recovery program, and recovers all his data. He also determines that, because it was merely the failure of the primary HD, the entire machine is still in good working order, and needs only a fresh IDE drive to be up and running once again. The old bastard lives yet, friends. All’s for the best, in this best of all possible worlds.

I finally got to experience the infamous “blue screen of death,” the screen that tells you your computer is kaput. It was on my dear old Dell 4100, a truly obsolete monster I got way back in 2001; it came with 256mb of RAM and something like a 987mhz Pentium 2. To give you a sense for how ridiculously old this machine was, it came loaded with the awful Windows ME. Needless to say, I upgraded to XP Pro almost immediately (Millenium being perhaps MS’s most unstable OS ever), and I’ve tinkered with the thing on and off for years, adding additional drives, a new power supply (thanks for the non-standard sizes, Dell!), sound card, video card, etc. I long ago partitioned the primary HD and dual booted it with Ubuntu (I think I started with 4.10). Of course, the machine was fundamentally hobbled because its motherboard can only take 512mb of RAM, so every year it seemed to get slower and slower as all the programs piled up and seemed to require the now standard 2gb. Ah, well. I really learned how to work the inside of the box on this old monster, and – really – 7+ years is not that bad.

In terms of diagnostics, I think it’s a motherboard failure. I have two HD’s on the thing, the primary with multiple partitions for the OS’s, and a second HD just for backups. I backed up yesterday morning, which means I should have lost almost nothing. But the computer does not see HD 1 or 2, which leads me to believe that its a motherboard problem rather than catastrophic hard drive failure (on two drives? simultaneously?). None of the detectors I used (BIOS, Seagate’s own drive diagnostic program, Norton Ghost, or an Ubuntu Live CD) even saw Primary Master or Primary Slave, but all these programs recognized the dual DVD/CD drives. I think it’s the motherboard IDE connection. I still have to try switching out the connections, but maybe this won’y work either. That means I’ll have to go out and get an USB to IDE drive enclosure (yes, this monster came in the days before widespread SATA HDs). Maybe, if I’m really lucky, it’s just a failure of the IDE connector, in which case I might even be able to get the old bastard up and running again, blue screen be damned! But I’m usually not that lucky.

In any case, the blue screen is really powerful as a mourning signifier. she was on the computer at the time and she came into the living room, saying “There’s something wrong with the computer.” Oh, what now, I thought. As I arrived in my office and saw the blue screen of death, my heart just sank. I do not fear (fingers crossed!) that I lost that data, but – dammit – this little monster was like a friend, and it’s sad to see it die like that…

I read a lot of 70’s era computer stuff, mostly magazines and hobbyist newsletters and the like. I’ve noticed this phrasing over and over, and it’s curious, because nobody really says it anymore: “that really puts people uptight.” So, to put uptight, meaning, roughly, to make nervous. People still use “uptight,” but they don’t really mean it as “nervous” so much as “overly reserved.” I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone use “to put uptight.” My Google searches have only turned up the lyrics from the Byrd’s song “Mr. Spaceman” (those saucer shaped lights put people uptight), but it was otherwise a fairly common phrase during most of the 1970’s. I like it. I’m bringing it back, like, this Fannie Mae business really puts people uptight. Yeah.

Communism has to be about more than the redistribution of property. Who wants all this shit? – Antonio Negri and Felix Guattari, Communist Like Us

Yikes…. Wachovia trying to build up depleted cash reserves. Ain’t post-Keynesianism grand?

Yesterday, Bair, President Bush and other senior regulators made a concerted effort to reassure people that their money is safe and that the nation’s banking system is sound. Noting that the vast majority of banks remain well-capitalized, Bair said it had been an “uphill battle” to counter false rumors and restore calm among investors and bank customers.

“This is not a serious situation. I would call it challenging, increasingly challenging,” she said in an interview. “We’ve had five bank failures this year. That is not huge. . . . I don’t want to overreact or underreact, but let’s get the facts. We are at a very low level of failures compared to previous cycles of economic distress.”

Why am I having flashbacks of Ken Lay telling all the Enron employees that everything’s fine and they should stick with the company stock? It’s always fun to note that despite all the complex economic theorizing, the whole shabang actually and virtually runs on little more than particular affective attachments:

In California, police were called to calm crowds of anxious customers…The current environment is risky for financial firms. Rumors and false reports can trigger a run on a bank even if it is well-capitalized. Two institutions have been sunk by such panics this year, the 85-year-old brokerage house Bear Stearns and IndyMac.

Crowds! Rumors! Panic! Lesson: disturbances in the crowd ecology are rhetorical, and can only be countered rhetorically: don’t worry…you’re covered.

Well, we’re covered, alright…

For Bastille Day, I guess, topspun’s birth document. Vive la France.

Faux French patriotism only redeemed here by tres mysterious Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage style redactions….

On the twenty seventh of September, nineteen hundred seventy three, is born at 22 Rue de Meudon: [topspun, redacted], a baby boy (“of the masculine sex,” if you can believe it), to Francesco [topspun's Dad, redacted], born in Milan (Italy), November 2, 1941, and Mary Ellen [topspun's Mom, redacted], born in New York (United States of America), December 30, 1942, his wife.

I translate this only because she just loves the last part: “his wife.” They apparently wanted to make that good and clear.

You may have noticed that there’s been no Mets blogging this year, despite the reappearance of the baseball links in April. That’s largely because there hasn’t been much to say outside of “Wow, they suck.” I could have chimed in on the surprise firing of Willie Randolph, but I decided to hold my fire and let Jerry be Jerry. That’s paid off. The Mets go into the All Star break having won nine straight, and only a late inning dinger by Pat Burrell in Philly today separates them from first place in the NL East. My old pals in the PA are sweating now like they haven’t all season, since the decision to shitcan Randolph seems to be paying dividends. Specifically, the Mets middle relief – my nemesis – has actually been pulling it off, and the bats are alive to boot. Yesterday, five separate relievers no-hit the hapless Rockies after Pedro went limping off again; tonight they didn’t have to, since Pelfrey went eight in a 7-0 wipe-out.  It’s odd. The Phillies got to 40 wins fast, and then limped along for the better part of a month trying to get 50. The Mets took a tortured and largely sub-.500 route to 40, but zipped to 50 in about a week and a half. At this time last week, they were at .500. Now they’re half a game out and actually looking like contenders. A few weeks ago, it seemed almost impossible that anyone from the NL East would pick up a wild card, the NL Central being fortified as all get out. Now, I’m not so sure. After last year’s epic collapse, it would take a 14 game lead to make me feeel secure that the Metropolitans will be extending the life of Shea Stadium into October, but some progress is good.

So I totally maced this three year-old today.

We have babygirl in a new daycare, since the old one only went up to age two. It’s a better arrangement for us, both cheaper and closer, but she and I seem to have more transition anxiety than babygirl about it. First off, it’s a Montessori daycare. I don’t really know what that means, and I’m not sure I really care to know, but it does seem weirdly obsessed with time structures. When I brought her in last week to get a look at the place, she immediately went for a group of toys placed on a shelf. One of the teachers sprang into action, pulling the toys out of babygirl’s hands and noting that it was currently “free play time,” while those toys were strictly for “work time.” These folks need to catch up on our new economy! Who separates play from work time anymore? During another portion of the day, she explained, they were to sit cross-legged in a circle and demonstrate the functioning of yet another group of toys. She’s two years friggin’ old. But what the hell do I know about early childhood development, really? Not much, truth be told, so I kinda shrug. At least they’re not crazy fundamentalists. I guess.

But back to my macing of the three year-old. Apparently, in the new school, we are not to leave sunblock with the daycare providers, but rather apply it before school. So, the spray-on sunblock that we left in her “cubby” was to be removed from there immediately, and I sorta got that part, because now the kids can get their hands on this stuff in a way they couldn’t at the 15-months to two-year school. Also, it is Montessori doctrine that sunblock can magically last 8 hours on a toddler’s skin if he or she can silently demonstrate the way it works to the other kids. So the teacher, treating me like a complete imbecile for not having fathomed out these intricacies (damned if I even knew she had sunblock), hands me the spray on sunblock, which I immediately attempt to shove in the pocket of my slacks. At precisely this moment, some other kid from the class runs up tugging on my pants for some reason, blabbering something or other. So, I’m pushing down – stupidly, I’ll admit – on the top of the sunblock, and he’s directly in front of me, and suddenly there’s a mist. I maced this kid like a Seattle riot cop. Full on blast to the face with the spray-on sunblock. He grabs his face, staggers back, but then removes his hands and appears to be fine, if a little surprised. Take that, fucker. But the Montessori teachers fly into panic mode, dragging the poor kid into the bathroom for the Defcon 4 eye treatment, which I guess inspired some confidence that they’d take chemical attacks on my own daughter reasonably seriously. Trust me, if they thought I was an imbecile before, my general dumbfuckness is now permanently cemented in their memories. Yeah, that’s the guy who maced little Johnny like he was a kerchiefed environmentalist! Welcome to the fuckin’ Terrordome, Johnny!

As you contemplate my day, some sleepy pics of babygirl. This is usually how we find her at about 10pm, covers thrown off and evidence of significant play prior to falling asleep. Why one shoe? Why?

So, we get her set up again, and hopefully don’t have to deal with her again until morning. Yes. Good sleeper. The insane forty minute tantrums probably help in that regard…