So I took the mock GRE yesterday. It was fun! I was torn between taking the mock LSAT or the mock GRE, and I went for the GRE because I'm more likely to attend grad school than law school in the next two years. It turns out that I really need to review my geometry and powers (I'm great with algebra, that's what years of student budgeting will do for you. "Given x months, I'll need y dollars to pay for z number of books...") and I misunderstood the finer nuances of the word "mawkish" (from the old English "maggot"). Otherwise I think I did alright, which is good. None of the grad programs that I'm most interested in require it, but they do use it if it's submitted.

Now I'm watching Iron Man and finishing up my latest contract. By the end of the month I should actually have... gasp... FREE TIME. Which I will use to restore my GPA to its former glory. Sigh. Working for a living? SO OVERRATED.

To the unidentified number that called me, twice, at 3:00am last night: I hate you. Coincidentally, I had an exam this morning at 9:00am. For some reason, I was VERY TIRED. AND CRANKY.

In other news, my science clothes arrived today. They're spectacular and they all fit perfectly. I love you, MEC. Among the haul were two pairs of light quick-dry hiking socks that make my feet feel like they are being gently hugged by a friend they haven't seen in years. I also got a set of the most comfortable combination tank tops/sports bras in the universe, and I think Damian will have trouble convincing me to take them off. Ever. I might even shower in them. They're that comfortable. I also got a bunch of those travel shirts - you know the ones, the kind you see people on safari wearing, the ones with collars and serious pockets. They, too, are comfortable. And venty.

I have one last exam, and then I am done. I am so tired. And cranky. And I got a C on one of my papers. It's only worth 15%, but the principle of the thing is that the TA who marked it is wrong wrong wrong and I am right right right. And cute. So, I will complain like I've never complained before! I've even been practicing in a mirror.

It never rains, but it pours. Like, outside, right now? It's pouring. Also, speaking of buckets of unexpected things, I have had five (5) offers of work in the past week. And two of them are huge projects. Like, massive. I have much glee and consternation. Because I have a problem: I love doing this stuff. And I love the extra cash. But here's the thing: I DON'T HAVE TIME!!! Augh! I have exams! And campaigning! And... augh!

Sigh. I love this stuff, and somehow I know I'll try to find a way to do it all, and you will find me sitting in a corner at 3:00am mumbling PHP to myself and rocking back and forth clutching my laptop... Count on it.

In other news, I KNEW IT. There is a Homosexual Agenda. (yeah, yeah, it's actually been posted on Pam's site for ages, which must have been how Sally Kern learned about it, because, you know, it was really kind of a secret for a long while). Also, speaking of the Homosexual Agenda, Dan Savage was wearing a Queen's Engineering GPA (golden party armor) on national television. Go Queen's! Although Dan himself didn't go to Queen's, he says that a friend gave it to him because, well, you know why.

In other news, things are Changing in my department, and I have trepidation. The general direction is that we are being required to make Business Cases for everything that we do. Which is great, to a point. Basic services like selling textbooks or getting through the registration lineup. But at that point and beyond - into the classroom and into teaching - we have to put up our dukes and insist to the government and to society that we're fundamentally not a business, and we are not like a business except in very superficial ways. What are we? We're a university.

And what, really, is the business case for higher education? How much the initials are worth we can measure, sort of. But what we can't measure is how much the knowledge and experiences are worth.

I don't know, I'm just a simple code monkey... But my humble socialist opinion is that education is an investment in people, in a profound and, frankly, unquantifiable way. We get people together in an environment that is full of stuff, and it's that environment which is special. Education is a long-term investment that doesn't -- and can never -- pay universities back in any direct way; it pays us back via the increased productivity of our graduates and society in general, but not via ledger balances. I look at education in the US - Stanford moving to a tuition-free model. And in Britain? Oxford was free for several hundred years yet managed to provide a world-class education (and so were all the other schools*). So what gives?

My discontent springs, I think, from the general - and relatively recent - idea of citizen-as-taxpayer; now we get student-as-customer, and it's pushing my buttons. Both of these models tends to miss the intangible psychological benefits of collective actions, things like learning or voting or participating in local government or yelling at the gas company.

That I disagree with the premises this model rests upon is part of a larger criticism, or course. Universities aren't getting the funding that they need to provide quality education, and the government isn't interested in providing it, because they don't believe in these intangibles either. "Intangibles" is just another way of saying "hippy feel-good mumbo-jumbo" because scientific management has infected the fabric of society.

Well. Now. There. I feel lots better.

* However "Public schools" run on a tuition model in England provide excellent secondary education, as opposed to state-run schools that don't. This is the privatize-health-care paradigm, where the good schools suck up the good students (via grants, subsidized by rich kids) and the good teachers (via higher pay) and leave the public system in the lurch.

• We were all sitting around on chairs and couches after dinner. I asked Thomas Homer-Dixon to come over and answer a student's question about the feasibility of using nuclear as an alternative power source, because the student was too shy to go over and ask him.

  Thomas Homer-Dixon: ... Nuclear power also poses a huge disposal problem. These nuclear cores have to be dismantled, and humans can't do it because these cores are so radioactive. They have to use special robots and equip these robots with diamond cutters. And then they have to figure out how to get rid of the materials...
  Me: And the robots!
  Thomas Homer-Dixon: (annoyed look)

  I'm sorry, Tad. I just love robots. And if you think about the spectre of having radioactive robots running around, I think you'll agree that we have to always be on our guard, against the inevitable uprising.

• A conversation I had about a zillion times:

  What I said:

  Me: ... and I'm also the Federal NDP Candidate for Kingston & the Islands.

  What they heard

  Me: ... and I'm also a leper! I advise that you back away slowly and avoid eye contact!

More later. Now, I'm off to Earth Hour, to give a speech! With words and everything!

This is a non-update update. I'm supposed to be writing about skinks, but I'm not. I'm sitting here staring at my bibliography and counting up my "scientific" sources compared to my "nonscientific" sources (ie: government reports which, when we're talking about habitat protection, regulation, and population, is a lot of stuff I can't use towards my count total) and fuming about the bureaucratization of my nice little paper which was going so well and even on time! But that was before I realized that I had to make copies of the front page and abstracts of every single source I've used. So, about twenty. So far. I don't have time for this crap. Argh!

In other news, I've rarely seen Paul Wells be so... well... mean. I mean, it's beautiful. But I was a bit surprised. And pleased.

I am having a skink of a day. And I have a skinky problem. That is to say, can somebody please find me three papers from the mid '80s on the five-lined skink? Please?

I am doing a case study for one of my courses, and I'm doing it on the issues that are facing endangered and threatened reptiles in Eastern Ontario. The key species I'm studying is the five-lined skink. I picked the skink because I love the word "skink." Seriously. But studying these dudes has made me very fond of their skinky selves.

Unfortunately, however, it's not a very well studied beastie. There are a few new papers in a few journals, and a few papers from the '80s... But since academic publishers put a "moving wall" on the number of years their back-issues are available, I can't get these papers. The UVic library has access to them; Waterloo has access to them (I think), but not Queen's. I have to meet a "quota" of publications for my case-study (which is terrible, since most of the useful publications are unpublished reports from various government environmental agencies. But that's another story).

So, if you have a library subscription and you think the word "skink" is as awesome as I do, please please please let me know.

In other news, I'm busy. Ok, bye!

This morning I had my "attendance is now mandatory because nobody was showing up for class and maybe that should tell you something about the class, eh?" class, which is coincidentally at 9:30am on a Monday morning. "Oh, 9:30am?" I hear you say. "Cry me a river," I hear you say. "Nuts to you," I say.

So. Monday morning. I got up. I ate breakfast. I even managed to be relatively cheerful about it. And I left the house on time! Which is a first! Ever! Alas, it was not meant to be.

They cleaned the streets yesterday (for some reason). Then the temperature dropped. The water froze into icy sheets on the streets and sidewalks. Inevitably. A woman running for the bus slipped and fell, right in front of us. She was knocked unconscious. Drama ensued. There were concerned bystanders, cell phones whipped out, ambulances called. So, the bus arrived downtown very late (Don't worry, I asked the bus driver, he said she was conscious by the time the ambulance got there, and she should be fine. I did my part by staying the hell out of the way).

So I wandered into class fifteen minutes late. As usual. Happy Monday!

Hi! I am tired. I have been tired since forever, and I blame it entirely on Winter. Winter is stupid. I hate you, winter. Go away now.

But there is hope. This week I started on some new medication, medication whose sole purpose it is to fill in the gaps left by the medication I'm already on, and also to ameliorate some of its minor side-effects as a bonus -- the worst is that I sleep badly. I mean, I've always slept badly, probably because of my deviated septum, but I used to at least get to sleep before I would sleep badly. I used to be out like a light when my head hit the pillow. Now, not so much. Now I worry. I worry and I worry and I worry and this sometimes goes on all night long. Hopefully a daily injection of norepinephron will help with this; my doctor is enthusiastic, but it's easy for her to be enthusiastic, because she has a medical degree and also she can GET TO SLEEP AT NIGHT.

Also, and this is really weird, my attention span lately completely sucks. It has shrunk to about ten seconds, five if I'm reading philosophy. I am easily distracted by shiny objects, and I have to keep forcing myself back to what I was doing, because if I don't consciously keep a leash on my brain then my eyes will pop away from the page faster than Lindsay Lohan's rehab stays. So it's maddeningly hard to get things done at the moment, which is just perfect for my last semester of 3rd year -- the year with the most reading. Sigh.

Anyway, enough about me, upright crusader for mental illness and women's rights, friend to working folks and wearer of Doc Martens. I have some reading to do! Which is why I'm posting on my 'blog. Obviously.