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Less than inspired

I’m not sure why today feels like such a “blah” day. Maybe it’s because I had class yesterday and I’m feeling a “blah” aftermath, maybe it’s because Thanksgiving is tomorrow and today is “blah” in comparison… I’m sure there are other potential reasons and at least one of them is good enough to make this feel like a “blah” day.

It’s not like I haven’t accomplished anything today. We’re getting together with Mom’s side of the family for lunch—there’ll be 15 of us there—and we’re supposed to bring a salad. Since we’re awesome, we took the recipe for an eight-layer salad and added three more. If you include the mayo on top (which adds some flavor and preserves the moisture and freshness of the ingredients underneath), we made a 12-layer salad. It looks mighty impressive in the glass punch bowl we used so you can see all the different colors and layers.

Okay, I’m feeling slightly more inspired now, but I can’t think of much else to write about. Still, it’s an entry for today, so I’m still keeping pace with National Blog Writing Month and there’s just a week to go. Yay me! (Incidentally, I’m way behind in copying and pasting my blog entries into Word documents that I can save on my laptop or a flash drive—that’s the reason I still had almost all of the old stuff for reposting after I lost shawnbakken.com—so I’m gonna be spending some loooooong hours making up for that one of these days. And that’s not so yay.)

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Another empiricist bites the dust

Back on November 4th, I went on a tear because someone in my class was obsessed with empiricism and insistent on the existence of an “empirical truth”. I wanted to punch him in the face then and I might still feel the urge now, but the gods answered an unspoken prayer to preserve my fists and shut the guy up in one fell swoop: he dropped out of the class. And that’s the truth, too.

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Thank God a picture says a thousand words…

Because his paper didn’t do the picture justice.

This may sound like one of those stupid passive-aggressive Facebook status messages where the person is implying something angrily, but doesn’t outright say, “Jeremy, pull your head out of your ass and stop having sex with my girlfriend! I hate you!” In this case, I know my classmate is a good guy, but… ugh.

In our current class, we’ve been split into small groups and there are three things we have to do every week: 1) Write an individual paper about the topic, 2) use everyone’s information and analysis to write a group paper, then 3) make a group presentation. Doesn’t seem too difficult and might be fun in some cases. This group paper… not so fun.

It was about systems theory (I mentioned it back on November 8th) and we were each supposed to observe something. An event, a situation, your neighbor naked in the shower—whatever tickled your fancy. Along with describing it according to systems theory, we were supposed to draw a diagram that included a bunch of elements that had an influence within that system: traffic is bad because rubberneckers crash into each other, Dick Cheney got away with shooting someone in the face because he was the vice president, there’s no steam in the neighbor’s shower because she likes using cold water, etc.

The diagram and the paper were supposed to match. You could look at either one and get the same information with the same relationships of the elements in the system. In this person’s paper, the final page was a very complex and elaborate chart with a lot of items and a lot of arrows. Very dynamic, very informative—I thought it was really good. The section of his paper that coincided with that chart was two paragraphs long.

I was working on the group paper using what we’d all written and sometimes I could copy and paste some of the information. Not in this case. Nope, I had to choose a portion of his diagram on my own and write about that. I finished the paper, sent it out to the group and told them explicitly what I’d used their papers to focus on. Since some of the information overlapped, having people talking about the same stuff during our group presentation wouldn’t leave a good impression, you know?

Once that was done, I had plenty of time to roam around the house, feeling frustrated and angry and doing a lot of swearing inside my head. It was so upsetting, I didn’t even bother trying to watch my neighbor naked in the shower tonight. Yeah, it was that bad.

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The first snow of the season in Minnesota

Like I said yesterday, I could have tried getting home sooner, but it wasn’t a good day to drive fast. Hell, it wasn’t a good day to drive, period, but I had places to go, so I was going to be careful. I was going to take my time and make sure I got home in one piece. (One smashed-up car per year, that’s my limit.)

The day got started when I went up to Minneapolis for an IOGT meeting. If nothing else, we needed to do an audit for the fiscal year that ended on August 31st. Since I’m the treasurer, my presence was kinda necessary. It was starting to snow when we left, but things weren’t too bad heading north to the city. Once the meeting was over, though, things were no longer “weren’t too bad”. It was pretty nasty outside.

I was heading to a friend’s house for an Xbox party—he bought Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 a couple weeks ago and invited a handful of people over so we could kill each other over and over and over. (Yeah, that’s basically the point of the game: blow up everyone else.) Normally, it would take me maybe half an hour to get there. Yesterday’s drive lasted a little over an hour.

What’s worse, I was tired. I’m sure I’ve mentioned this at some point before, but it may have been a few years ago: my eyes don’t focus in the same place, so when I start getting really tired, I get double vision. That was happening for about the last third of the trip. I cranked up the radio, turned off the heat, drove slowly, focused on the road and I managed pretty well.

Such was not the case with everyone out there. For some ungodly reason, people in Minnesota forget how to drive in snow over the summer, so when the first one of the winter hits… over the course of five miles or so on a major highway, one van had spun out and hit the barrier so it was on the left side of the highway facing traffic. Another car went right instead, so it headed down the slope of a hill. Not very steep, but not flat by any means, so I imagine the driver had lots of fun spinning around in circles, bouncing around in his seat thinking “Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit…” He didn’t hit anything except the ground, but I didn’t want to be either of those guys, so slow and steady seemed like the better option.

I got to my friend’s place, played Xbox with the others for a while, then demonstrated just how tired I was. He’s got a setup down in his basement that’s really good for watching movies: a projector on the ceiling that turns the wall into a giant screen, awesome stereo sound system… it’s pretty sweet. When there’s lots of gunfire, exploding grenades and people yelling at each other into their headsets because they keep killing each other… pretty loud. And I fell asleep. Then I woke up because I was cold. After my friend gave me a blanket, I fell asleep again.

Thankfully, all that rest made it a lot easier to get home. (So did the fact that it was a little after 11:00pm and it had stopped snowing, but the sleep helped, too.) I got back on the road and drove home, but I still wanted to be careful because of my one-vehicle limit. Thus, by taking my time, I got home with just a couple minutes left, talked to my mom for a bit, then got to my laptop and cranked this baby up right about midnight. I probably would have been fine driving home a little faster, but I’m still okay with my decision. Because I’m okay. Had I driven faster and ended up not okay, backdating last night’s entry by five minutes would be the least of my worries.

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Obligatory blog entry

It’s short and it’s sweet and it’s actually a couple minutes late. I could have tried getting home a little sooner to write it on time, but… I’ll explain it in the next entry. Suffice it to say that I tried really hard and I’m giving myself credit. (If that’s not good enough for the local folks, the people in the Mountain and Pacific time zones can still read this on the 19th, so I’ll let them give me credit instead.)

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I should update the links on the site

I should, but I don’t. I’m sure it’s especially bad back in the Beauty and the Geek years—you could click on a link in a blog entry and it would take you to the WB’s (or the CW’s) website so you could read more about the show. Nowadays… I have no idea where those links go. They might go nowhere, they might lead to a random site that’s written entirely in Mandarin Chinese. The same potential goes for just about everything on here—after a bunch of years, I have no idea what the destination of any given link might be. Thus, if you click on one and it doesn’t direct you to wherever it’s supposed to go, my apologies. I doubt I’ll do anything about it, but my apologies nonetheless.

(Note of interest: I just searched for my old blog address, www.shawnbakken.com, and it’s been abandoned. Nothing there. The thought of repurchasing the site and using it again floated through my head for approximately two seconds—trying to move everything from here to there would be way too much of a hassle. Considering how long it took me to post about 14 months worth of entries in here that I neglected to put in the first time… yeah. But it was a nice two-second-long thought.)