Jayeless

One of the biggest things I’ve noticed about going to uni, and everything associated with that, is that I suddenly have no time to do everything I need and want to do.

Another of the biggest things I’ve noticed is just how much time I waste.

My day is full of periods of time where I’m doing nothing but lack the capability to do anything more. Going to uni each day takes me a bit under an hour, and all I usually do then is listen to my iPod. Once, I used the trip to do my reading for my tutorial on the French Revolution which awaited me at the other end of that bus ride. No others.

And at uni, I can’t use the time between classes to do anything useful (other than eat and caffeinate) because there are never any computers available for use, there is never any convenient place to sit and do some work (okay there probably are but I’ve never found unoccupied ones), and ugh. It’s like some crazily under-resourced over-crowded school.

Actually as an excellent example of how under-resourced and over-crowded my university is, let me say that every single one of my tutorial classes (except possibly linguistics because I haven’t had a linguistics tutorial yet) is bigger than every single one of my year 12 classes. My Spanish class has thirty-six people¹. I mean, what the hell, man?

The third tutor (we have three) also knows this is excessive. There are not enough chairs in her classroom for all the students, so she kicks people out as to allow them to stay would be to violate “health and safety regulations”. Then today she revealed that a maximum of thirty people are allowed in a tutorial group anyway, so next week, she will deny entry to anyone except the first thirty students to arrive, regardless of the number of chairs.

Which is JUST GREAT for me, because immediately before that tutorial I have a linguistics lecture aaaaaall the way over in the Science Precinct. I don’t want to re-allocate to 9am or 10am Friday mornings either, because currently my only Friday class is at 3pm.

Anyway, that is clearly tangential to my original point that I am wasting lots of time during the day, but whatever.

Wasting lots of time is particularly annoying because I have so much to do. I am already behind in linguistics (!) and I have about 4+ hours of work to do in order to catch up. Spanish is overwhelming me (doing the study they actually suggest we should do will only get me 65%ish on tests, judging by today’s quiz). And what about stuff I actually want to do, like write blog entries, or work on my novel, or READ THE NEWS?!

I mean that. I haven’t read the news in two or three weeks. I know bits and pieces about what’s happened, but my vision of recent events is quite sketchy.

I know, I know, I should probably be working on knocking out a few of these tasks rather than writing whiny blog entries. I think I’m too tired for now, though. Hopefully I have the time tomorrow!

1. Actually, I think it had forty originally. One of my tutors today kicked out a few people because there weren’t enough chairs for them, and there were thirty-six remaining after that.

It turned out that my first week of uni was busier than I’d expected. Well, okay, Monday wasn’t very busy and was in fact rather anti-climactic — one linguistics lecture. But Tuesday was busy. Wednesday was even worse. By Thursday I was exhausted, and although I had the day off on Friday (linguistics tutorials only start in week 2), that was when my family went away for the Labour Day weekend.

Because universities suck they don’t actually give students (or staff) the day off for Labour Day (nor any state holiday), which means I missed this week’s Monday’s linguistics lecture. Luckily, I can listen online!

Anyway, I spent a large part of my weekend studying a list of 26 Spanish words. I have a vocabulary test next week (er, this week) on a bunch of words that are NOT the words we learned in class. (We learned how to say useful things like, “Mi carrera es ciencias sociales,” and “Estudio historia.”¹ The test is on useful things like, “Es un lápiz.” CLEARLY everyone needs to know what pencils are called.)

I’ll try to write a more detailed post tomorrow, but basically, international studies has been AWESOME because the lecturer is awesome, my tutor is awesome, and the subject matter is the latter half of the twentieth century which is self-evidently awesome. Judging by this, I chose an excellent major. Linguistics has also been extremely interesting. History looks interesting but we’re doing the French Revolution this week and I am still thoroughly sick of it from VCE, and I haven’t read anything for it yet, and I have a lecture at 9am tomorrow. However, the unit is on the role of wars and revolutions in creating a national consciousness. Funnily enough, this is the same theme as half my Spanish unit, which (unbeknownst to me until last week) is a history unit by stealth. I have to read this book by some extremely annoying historian for Spanish. She does not know how to write a sentence and seems to enjoy rambling about how awesome “the state” is. At least the book is in English…?

So that’s all for now. And sorry if the title of this entry is incorrect Spanish. I will just invoke the point I learned in linguistics last Thursday: prescriptive grammar was only invented in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for the satisfaction of people with more money (to spend on dictionaries and grammar books) than sense. Linguistically all grammars are equal, not just the ones written in grammar books. And if my title is all correct, no worries then!

1. The unhelpful book did not list the Spanish terms for “linguistics” or “international studies”, so for the purposes of the class I said I studied history. Which I do. But you know. That’s not all.

I have been super-busy in recent times, and I have the cold and the not-so-nice sunburn to prove it. I haven’t been sick since the illness I ranted about last June¹, so this latest cold has reminded me of exactly why I despise colds. Because it clearly slipped my mind during that months-long reprieve which I probably should be grateful for. But now… ugh!

Anyway, uni starts tomorrow. I have only one class for the whole day, a linguistics lecture. Unfortunately, Monash decided to put this linguistics lecture (and every linguistics lecture) in the “Western Science Lecture Theatre”, which is for the record:

• nowhere near the campus centre
• nowhere near the Arts Precinct
• nowhere near the bus stop
• nowhere near any of the other buildings I have classes in
• nowhere near any of the parts of Monash I have actually been to
• one of the very last buildings before Engineering City²

I have a decent timetable. No days off, but Mondays and Fridays have only one class each, only one day of the week (Tuesday) starts before 11am (starting at 9am), only one day (Wednesday) ends so late that by the time I leave in winter it’ll be dark (at 6pm)… and so on. Clearly it’d be better if some of those “only one day…” and “only one class…” things didn’t happen at all, but still not that bad.

I spent part of yesterday looking over course outlines for “Contemporary worlds” (my international studies unit) and linguistics. It looks like there’s much less overlap between “Contemporary worlds” and next semester’s twentieth-century history unit than I initially thought — Contemporary worlds is pretty much entirely post-WW2 stuff, while twentieth-century history is, you know, about the entire (“short”) twentieth century (so 1914-1991).

Linguistics also looks really good despite its annoying locations and class times and the fact that the entire course handbook is written in Comic Sans MS. There’s assorted stuff on slang, language change over time, the international phonetic alphabet, neurolinguistics… and I get assignments to translate sentences written in obscure languages like Comanche.

I don’t have much else to say for now, so I’ll leave this entry here. I wanted to post something before February actually ended and passed me by. (March’ll be better for my resolution for sure!)

1. Actually, brief and belated update on that: it may have been swine flu. A friend of mine experienced much the same symptoms as me and developed them only a few days after I did… and she, who actually bothered to go to the doctor (I didn’t), was diagnosed with swine flu.
2. Disclaimer: not actually a city, but literally half the campus is just engineering buildings. The bright side is that that’s the half not in close proximity to the bus stop/campus centre/anywhere I need to know, so I can pretend it’s not there for the most part.

As I’m sure pretty much every single person who could possibly read this is aware, Vancouver is currently hosting the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. This means that for the past few weeks I’ve been enduring endless ads on Channel Nine when I’ve been trying to watch the cricket. A few weeks ago they ran a particularly interesting ad in which they described themselves as “bringing Australia to Vancouver”, and showed a CGI picture of Vancouver with the domineering form of Uluru right in the centre.

Sometimes, Channel Nine even broadcasts ads which attempt to entice the viewer to WATCH THE OLYMPIC GAMES, rather than just attempting to make us think, “Wow, Channel Nine is so awesome, with the way they somehow managed to haul Uluru across the Pacific Ocean and put it in Vancouver!”

For instance, in the middle of a Twenty20 cricket match, there’s supposed to be a musical performance (because Twenty20 is “the rock and roll form of the game”, lololol u so funny cricket commentators). However, at a recent one, Channel Nine went, “SCRATCH THAT - we need to inspire people to watch the Olympics!”

So they told us the ~inspirational~ story of Steven Bradbury, an Australian speed skater who was coming dead last in the final, only for every single other competitor to fall over, allowing him to win the gold medal.

I feel that this says a lot about Australia’s talent at the Winter Olympics. Keep trying and trying, and one day, everyone else will sabotage their own chances, allowing you to step forward and win. Read More »

I haven’t been blogging anywhere near as much as I was in December, but I have kept in mind the resolution I made at the end of that month. That is, this:

Post, on average, 30 posts each month. This is like my own personal NaBloPoMo. One thing that irritated me about this event was the need to post EVERY SINGLE DAY — compensating by posting two posts another day was not an option. So I will alter the rules just for myself, to remove the need for useless asides.

Luckily for myself there are a number of ways to interpret this. “On average” is so ripe for alternative interpretations, and I’m glad I added it to the resolution rather than just writing “Post 30 posts each month” (which I would already have failed!). Here are some ways I could decide to enforce this resolution:

• 360 posts in a year (since 360 ÷ 12 = 30).
• The median post count is at or above 30.
• I exclude outliers and then find the average post count, and the average is above 30.
• I look at all the months’ post counts at the end of the year and the most frequent one is 30.

I don’t think that last one is particularly relevant, since it would discourage me from posting any more than 30 posts, and what if there were no repeats over the whole year? Then every number would be a mode! But I was running out of ways to calculate averages.

Probably the fairest way to calculate is a combination of the first two — I make 360 posts over the whole year, and the median is at or above 30. The third one also seems pretty fair, provided I remember how to calculate outliers and don’t just exclude really low numbers because I dislike them. However, it would mean that I couldn’t post about 150 posts in December while trying to catch up!

Regardless of what is fair, you can bet that I’ll calculate the average in any way that helps me win! You know, like a creative accountant.