eye spy

i've got long, luscious eyelashes. I don't know if that has anything to do with my eyelash problems or not. Maybe I just have really sharp eyelashes, or maybe my eyelids are particularly good at trapping broken off eyelashes. but whatever the reason, I sometimes get sharp eyelashes stuck to my eyelid in such a way as to really hurt. The last time it happened to me, I wanted to gouge my eyeball out with a spoon. I tried to wash it out, I tried to get it with my finger. I was at work at the time, and finally I had to go to cvs and buy a pair of tweezers and pull it out.
Now I also have problems whenever anything gets near my eyes. Everytime someone puts makeup on my eyes, they water, if someone talks about gross eye-related things, my eyes water, if i even watch someone put contact lenses in (or take them out) my eyes water. I can't let anyone get near my eyes. so a few days ago, when i noticed this irritation in my eye, I tried not to rub it, knowing that this would probably just drive the eyelash deeper under my eyelid. I tried to ignore it on the assumption that evoloution had desvised some sort of solution that was way better than taking a sharp metal object and trying to dig this eyelash out of my eye, especially since depth perception is gone if you are just using one eye. but it just got worse, and worse, and today i couldn't stand it anymore. I'm not sure what I did with the tweezers i bought at cvs that day, and the only ones I could find were the ones in my swiss army knife, all covered in gunk and lint and carbonized from sterilizeing them with fire. Now, I was worried about getting some sort of infection from placing this object up in my eye, but I didn't think it would be such a good idea to put hot tweezers in my eye either, and the eyelash was really getting to me so i went ahead and performed an eyelashectomy.
Now, however, I have a pair of tweezers stuck in my eye.

headline edition

Rescue dogs could be out of a job
extensive retraining efforts may be necessary

Leila and other word-nerds can free up shelf space.

Gassy Goats get vaccine to slow global warming. "much better than requiring more fuel efficient cars," says oil magnate.

60 minutes doesn't want public to have important information in a timely fashion. "Voters might use that info to make an informed decision," one staffer feared.

and today

this sure screwed things up on campus today. Apparantly if you are a big shot, you get exclusive use of public sidewalks in front of subway entrances whenever the F* you want. And cops get real mad if you try to walk past them while they are blocking off the sidewalk. real mad.

seen on the subway yesterday

a guy wearing a red sox shirt, and a yankees hat.

I know you can't rhyme "infinite" with "infinite"

Dude, is it something about the French language, or is it just French thinkers, philosophical?
why do they say things that sound so roundabout and nonsonsical?
why do they love phrases like: "Any experience at all is the infinite
deployment of infinite
differences. Even the apparently reflexive experience of myself is by no means the intuition of a unity
but a labyrinth of differentiations"? it makes my intelect feel all punity
to read such stuff.
this is the price I pay, I suppose, for wanting a brain that's buff.

rhythm is optional

the rest of the day is blog-rhyming day
if you have something you'd like to say
you must take the extra time
to ensure it has a rhyme.

end rhymes are cool
but internals are too
as are half-rhymes like the one above,
so please blog people, show the love

and blog with me in rhyming style.
why you ask?
it will make me smile;
unless you think it's too tough, this task?

ps, comments must also chime
in a way we call a rhyme

Dear Diary

Dear Diary,

Last night i had the strangest dream.
I dreamed that I was eating pillows. And when I woke up, all my marshmallows were missing.
What do you think it means, Diary?

mmmm... grilled cheese

samara has been posting about grilled cheese today. she has powers that remind me of:
A) hypnotizm
B) vamperic mind control
C) sheer animal magnetism

There was a force working in my head, a little voice that kept whispering "grilled cheese. you must make and eat grilled cheese. resistance is futile. you will be grilled cheeseified."
It was yumtacular. And i souped up my meal by adding some creamy tomato soup.

Do me a favor, and don't post about buying diamonds or shaving eybrows, ok?

what I learned today

it's a bad idea to show up to a class you are teaching at 8:40 on monday morning on 5 hours of sleep. It's an even worse idea to do so and to not have much planned for the day. I was confused, and flustered, and didn't have anything interesting to say about the story, and it showed. The funny thing is that I thought i was well prepared for the class. I read the story a couple of times, I had all these things to say about it. But I didn't tie anything into an overall theme. It was just a bunch of loose threads. We looked at one passage then another, then another, and the students weren't much help this morning.
Here's hoping my late class goes better.

Philadelphia

Last night, while watching the red sox beat the yankees on tv (actually, it was during the rain delay) me and my brother got to talking about how Philly compares to Boston. I went on and on about why philly sucked, why boston rocked, etc., etc.,. And he talked about all the things philly had going for it, and why it was better than boston. And we talked about what would make philly better.
And then this morning, as I was eating my breakfast (leftover pizza from last night, thanks Rob) I was flipping through this week's City paper, and the cover story was on how to market philly (NB that link will expire shortly, I couldn't find a persistent url).
But the whole thing got me thinking about my situation. I don't dislike Philly. It has a lot going for it. It's just that Boston has so much more for me.
But in the light of the fact that I am here for the next few years, I have decided to make an effort. I am going to conduct an experiment over the next six months.
I've learned from my last few weeks of teaching that if you play a role long enough, the role just takes over and stops being a role; I've been pretending to be a teacher, and now I am a teacher. So in the same spirit, I now love Philly.
I am going to explore this city, I am going to find wonderful things here; I am going to find out who Johnny Docks is; I'm going to try water ice; I'm going to walk around the city, and meet car thieves and hustlers; I'm going to listen to the city, and learn to appreciate that high pitched squealing sound that comes out of the exit only turnstile at the cecil b moore stop on the subway that I usually duck my head and walk quickly by in the hope hope that I get out of hearing range before someone walks through it.
Please, Boston, don't be upset. You will always be very special to me. You were my First. I will never badmouth you, I will just cease singing your praises. I will still root for the red sox; hatred for the yankees is something in my bones. That will never change. And I may come back one day, with flowers and candy, and tears, and ask you, Boston, to please take me back, even though I don't deserve it.

Because I know you all are curious...

The American Renaissance: 40 pages done 616 left.
It's dull people. but it is a "foundational text"

*yawn*

My new career as an ad man

As Lauren has mentioned, Campbell’s has an ad campaign for their tomato soup that has something about "possibilities."
Well the other night out to dinner with a bunch of folks, I came up with the idea that the campaign would be much better if it were "po-soup-bilities" which I thought was pretty clever. But then I topped even my own ad-wizardliness.
I envision a campaign called "soup up your day" and you would have a guy coming home from a long day of work, getting rained on and splashed on, and getting home, finding a big stack of bills to pay, going into the cupboard and pulling out soup and having it make his day and rejuvenate him. Or have someone at the office about to go into a big meeting and having soup for lunch in order to get him all revved up for the meeting.

Look out Darrin Stephens!

Faith in Apple: restored

so my new airport card came in the mail today. It turns out that my lacluster wifi perfomance was due entirely to a faulty card. I had a refurbished one (according to the tech guys at the apple store in king of prussia, "refurbished by gnomes." I don't know if this is how apple really does refurbish their products, but I'd like to think so), and now I seem to have a brand new one. It now works exaclty as advertised. I can get a signal in my bedroom, after it has traveled through the concrete in the basement, and all the way up to my room on the second floor. And now I can share files back and forth with my PC.
Although I still can't get my printer, which is hooked up to my windows machine to accept a print command from my mac. Even using windows print sharing via samba. Not much help on the web, though I have found people having the same problem.

faith in humanity: restored

so Lauren and I went out to eat with rob and heather tonight. while we were waiting for the bus, this guy came over to try to get us to sponsor him for the aids walk he was doing, and he shook my hand, and I thought to myself, "is he trying to steal my ring?" and he shook Lauren's hand. we politely declined to sponsor him, but after we got on the bus Lauren looked at her hand and realized she didn't have her great aunt's ring anymore. We cursed and moaned and felt stupid for getting hustled, and I kicked myself for breaking my rule of saying "no" whenever anyone I don't know wants to ask me innocent sounding questions.

then we got home.
and Lauren's ring was sitting there on the bookshelf. then i had to take back all the nasty things i mentally said about that guy.

ikea, belatedly

We went to ikea on tuesday. It was wonderful, and large, and lots of fun. for the first hour or so.
the human female's ability to windowshop for home furnishings is an unstoppable force, unmatched anywhere in nature.

does not compute

ok.

so I was sure that my class of 35 kids at 8:40 am would be way less energetic than my class of 20 kids at 10:40 am.

but no. my morning class is with it, they all volunteer to answer questions, it seems like most of them do the reading and read it pretty closely. I was greeted with a whole lot of blank stares at my 10:40 class.

ps
if you are a student of mine, I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about the girl/guy sitting next to you.

american scholar

I just got done with my first real class.
I don't know what the students thought, but I thought it was excellent. some of the kids, of course, slept in the back, but a lot of them seemed interested, and seemed to have read the stuff closely. Of course, first impressions are often wrong. one person who I thought was going to give me trouble, was one of the more active students in the discussion, and had some very insightful things to say.

they are definitely city kids, though. only one kid had ever been camping or hiking.