Snoqualmie

...cataclysmic?

In what I can only assume to be a donut-shaped inversion of the Earth and its inhabitants, today my LGBT Studies lecture irritated the living hell out of me and my Hunter-Gatherer Archaeology class was quite good. I think in both cases it's because we're far enough into the semester to have finished with general background information and started looking at the instructor's area of particular interest. Unfortunately, my LGBT Studies instructor is a Queer Theory Person, or possibly just a Philosophy Person wearing Queer Theory drag. I hate Philosophy. That's not the same as hating philosophy; Philosophy in my dictionary is a specifically impenetrable mass of masturbatory jargon rattled off without concern for whether the audience can discern any meaning behind it (to which, if the audience is me, the answer is usually no). That was, unfortunately, today's lecture on queer theory and I hated it. My lecture notes are full of desperate half-sentences which trail off with my inability to keep up and end on "wait goddamnit what the fuck did that MEAN?".

After 90 minutes of that, I dragged myself sulkily into Hunter-Gatherer Archaeology and was utterly delighted by concrete and interesting facts like "the plants of use for agriculture have the characteristics of weeds: high reproductive energy expenditure, short reproductive cycle, and the ability to thrive in regularly disturbed habitats" and "if you find all of the waste products of seed or nut collection at all of the camps of the group eating those seed and nut foods, it means they're not doing field processing of the collected material, while if you find some camps with only shells and others with only husks, it means they're spending more time afield to partially refine the collected materials in order to make the most efficient use of their labor in bringing the harvest back to the base camp." I like facts. I love facts. The more excruciatingly specific and concrete they are, the more I like them. You can see where I get into trouble with philosophy.

I'm unsure how this fits into today's theme of groundshaking inversion, but I've also mailed off my application for summer fieldwork in Connecticut (and realized that I haven't responded to the question of what project I was applying to work on, but I will). I'm trying not to beat myself over the head too hard about whether my essay covered all the things it needed to and whether I should have taken the opportunity to fling myself at the professor's feet and apologize for my GPA in tones of readmission and promises to do better. I didn't; any attempt to get my application back at this point would constitute mail fraud; the "readmitted" note on my transcript will simply have to speak for itself. I will in the meantime wring my hands prettily and hope, because after all, that was the majority of my labor in getting readmitted in the first place.

The computer on which I'm typing this, at the Open Computing Facility on campus, is officially named Cataclysm. To my left are Tempest, Tsunami, and Tornado, to my right is Fallingrocks, and somewhere behind me is Apocalypse. I'd venture a guess that they were named by someone whose finals weren't going well, but that's only because I don't yet know whether I possess powers of time-traveling telekinetic computer-naming which would have allowed me to do it today during LGBT Studies.