It's amazing how much more exhausting it is to work a 15-hour day when it's just work vs. doing it when you've got some passion to drive you. Pulling long hours working on the Review and other things I enjoyed was no problem last year, but today gave new meaning to the word "blegh". Working on uber-crappy papers, fighting downtown traffic, ( Read more... )

Between dispensing coffee and dispensing knowledge, my free time is not what it once was, but today I had a day off. I planned to sleep in and get caught up in that area, and then I would still have the whole afternoon free to work on my grad school apps, and maybe even getting a few poems ready to submit. The sleeping in happened as planned, but ( Read more... )

I just completed an extremely interesting book by the name of The Trouble With Physics by Lee Smolin that deals with the subject of string theory in modern physics, while using that specific controversy to address larger issues of academic politics, how to define scientific progress, and the relationship between democratic communities and science ( Read more... )

I discovered an interesting linguistic difference today between people who are old enough to remember when email didn't exist and those younger folks do have grown up with it (the cut-off seems to fall at 1987 or so ( Read more... )

I have been spoiled by four years of quality theatre at UE. When I got off work at CCD this afternoon, I was trying to decide what to do with the rest of my Saturday, and I spotted a banner for As You Like It. It was being put on by the theatre department of Metro State (another college that shares the same campus with CCD and the University of ( Read more... )

So, this afternoon I went to a curator's lecture at the natural history museum, and I had a prime opportunity to try out my gameplan when I ended up in the same row as an attractive young woman. Her lab coat suggested that she was part of the museum staff (which wasn't unusual- most of the audience were museum volunteers or employees), but for some ( Read more... )

This may be an exercise in futility, as I suspect that the handful of people who might have read my entries in the past have probably moved on while I neglected this journal during the last few months. Nonetheless, I've been thinking about something that I would like to submit for feedback if anyone is listening ( Read more... )

Not much has happened this weekend, which is fine by me after all the excitement earlier this week. I am very excited by the fact that I am now the proud owner of Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage. It is a wonderful reference for any up-and-coming grammar dork who would like to stand out from the crowd of linguistically ignorant ( Read more... )

After quite a while with nothing going on in my life worth writing about, things started happening this week, and it rapidly turned into one of those situations of ( when it rains, it pours. )

The temperature peaked at 104 degrees today, and it felt like it. It is currently 1:10 in the morning, and it's still 86 degrees outside ( Read more... )