That was supposed to be my brilliant title for the previous entry, but I forgot it just when I went to post. Katie and Chester, please feel free to continue damning me.
I got an email last night reminding me to check my Tele-Bears appointment times online, which means that I really am a legitimate Berkeley student once again. I'm actually looking forward to making massively complicated charts of class schedules and breadth categories and final exam groups that I can pore over to figure out which classes to sign up for. Massively complicated charts are a particular specialty of mine; for a final paper in my Southwestern archaeology class, I made a chart so complicated it needed to be written over 35 notecards and strung together with a matrix of tape across the front of my bookshelf. You had better believe there's more where that came from.
Other, dorky, things I'm looking forward to include carrying stacks of books around the library; I've never quite gotten over the thrill of showing everyone that I'm an actual college student doing actual research. Being able to wear t-shirts with dumb things on them, instead of being respectably bland between the hours of 8 and 5? I'm looking forward to that too. I have silk-screening supplies and I'm really not afraid to use them to make myself appear foolish.
Consider, for instance, the dingir sign. The dingir sign is a cuneiform symbol that was used in, I believe, ancient Sumer (I need to consult my class notes here) to indicate "that which comes next is hereby designated as divine". It's basically an HTML tag, like saying [god] and [/god]. Putting it on a t-shirt would be ridiculously self-aggrandizing, an ancient history equivalent of those ThinkGeek shirts with cutting insults in binary. I'm planning to do it.
The secret real reason why I need to be back in school is so that I'm too busy to put things like this into practice.
Posted by dianna at November 8, 2005 10:55 AMin my recent experience, if you get bored with ancient sumerian symbols, it is still a-ok to wear a cal sweatshirt and sweatpants to class every single day. you could even silk-screen the script "cal" on a t-shirt if you wanted.
Posted by: sean at November 8, 2005 11:10 AMI always used to get dorky pride out of wheeling trucks around the library, or out of walking behind the Circ Desk, or getting to use the back door in the far-left elevator, just because it said to people, "Look at me! I work here! I can go places you can't!"
Posted by: Zach S. at November 8, 2005 11:19 AMZach: absolutely. It was often counteracted, though, by the embarrassment of having patrons find me hunkered down in the HQ section reading while my 3/4 full truck sat abandoned in the aisle. I'd try to distract them and then run away to some other range to try to regain my employee hauteur.
Sean, I haven't owned any Golden Bearwear in at least four years. The colors have just never meshed well with the rest of my wardrobe. Perhaps I could silk-screen "Cal" in dark grey on a black sweatshirt: school spirit for the angsty.
Posted by: Dianna at November 8, 2005 11:39 AMI don't know about the selection of Cal merchandise, but here at Columbia they solve that problem by just not caring about the school colors in women's clothing. That is, about 40% of the women's clothing is in Columbia colors (baby blue and white) and the rest are in various other combinations (browns, greens, reds, pinks, greys, blacks, etc.).
Of course, Columbia's football team is the whipping boy of the Ivy League, which is not known for its raw athleticism to begin with, and their other sports aren't much better. So my guess is that there's not a huge rooting contingent here that is particularly enamored of the school's colors.
Posted by: Zach S. at November 8, 2005 01:21 PMThis is a good point. I do recall long ago having a grey Cal tank top with a pastel pink and green butterfly logo on it, which is pretty far from being blue and gold (or bears for that matter). Still, though, I don't think I've noticed the student store carrying much in the way of black.
Posted by: Dianna at November 8, 2005 01:45 PMIt took me a full five minutes to figure out what you were talking about w/r/t the title of this post, the context of the last post, and my jesting damnation of your soul.
And then I laughed for a full five seconds, which is really quite a lot, because I'm usually a humorless curmudgeon.
Until I figured out the joke, I just thought that "A stranger with your dorky" was some random Balki-style mangling of English. And even on that level, it's pretty damned funny.
On the topic of misheard lyrics, I was at the mall recently when a Go-Gos song came on. "Did they just sing 'almonds or cedars'!?!" I asked my friend.
"No," she answered. "It's 'Our Lips Are Sealed'."
Posted by: Chester at November 8, 2005 08:47 PMHey, how'd that there election thing go for you Californians? I have to get my election night excitement from you guys, since here we just re-elected Mike Bloomberg by what appears to be the biggest margin of victory for a Republican Mayor of New York ever. The most fascinating thing to vote for this time around was a transportation bond issue. Wheeeeee!
Posted by: Zach S. at November 8, 2005 08:58 PM