Thursday, November 04, 2004
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Wasting My Time
I have two assignments due tomorrow. Both are going to take me a substantial amount of time. Both have been started, neither are close to being finished. One is weighted for 3% of my course mark and the other is 10%. Both are rather important. In fact, I really should be working on them right now.
Yet, I'm not.
Just in case anyone was having any doubts about my academic
chi, let me turn your collective attention to my midterm grades. So far, I've received three out of my four midterms back. For Psych 100, I scored 87.5%; class average 59.2%. For Linguisitics 311 (
Phonology) I scored 90%; class average 77%. For Ling 300 (
Syntax) -a class in which almost no one knows what's going on- I'm 0.5 of a mark (out of 45) from a A after scaling. If you think my explaination of my Ling 300 mid-term mark is confusing, you should've been in class while
Carden was trying to explain the distribution, curve and what he was going to do about it. (Considering that he is so confusing when explaining a simple concept like distribution and scaling, just imagine what he's like expounding on complex syntactic concepts!) I'm still waiting on my mid-term score for Psych 217 (
Research Methods) but I think I'm going to score way above the class average. That mid-term was so brutal. There were so many trick questions (e.g.: Does causation imply correlation?) that I suspect many did not catch.
So. I'm doing alright in school. Doesn't mean that I can ignore my pending assignments. In fact, there's a good third of the semester left before I can recycle my notes. I take incredible notes, I usually get strangers sitting next to me telling me so. Despite this, however, I didn't get a single one of the three notetaking jobs that I applied for.
The
Disability Resource Centre at UBC has a program in which students with disabilities can request a notetaker for the courses they are taking. It invovles having someone else CC or photocopy their notes for them after every class. I think I didn't get the position because the transcript that I provided them with was printed off the student serivce centre and not a photocopy of an official transcript. I wasn't going to pay $5 to get a copy of my transcript at that point in the year just to apply for this. In retrospect, however (considering that the positions pay you $300-500/term just to attend class and take notes) I should've paid to get a copy of my official transcript. Oh well. I know what I'm going to do next term.
I think it's starting to get evident that I really have nothing to say in this entry, and that I'm blogging just to put off tackling my assignments. So I'm going to start talking about the US presidential elections, just so that there's some substance to this entry.
There isn't anything that I can say that hasn't already been said about the results of the election. Also, I don't think I can say it as succintly and eloquently in
this article by Zafar Sobhan for the Daily Star. I'm surprised, frankly, and I know quite a number of other people who are as well. I had Jim's mom over for dinner last night. She has recently moved to the States (her new husband is American) and the circles that they move in are very distressed by the results. Four more years with a president that runs the country to line his pockets. Walter (who incidently ate 6 slices of pie at
UChicago's Culinary Club's pie eating competition) mentioned that it's not really my problem seeing as how I don't live there.
He's right you know.
It's not my problem, it's not my president, it's not my country. What I can tell you though is that I will no longer have any sympathy for the American people when Dubya's antics continue to take them downhill. No more sympathy. If you're stupid enough to think that abortion and gay marriages take precedence over the slaughter of innocents to boost the Bushes' bank account(s) then you deserve a president like that. Granted, some are saying that if Kerry wasn't the walking corpse that he is he might've been able to garner more support, but seriously, this isn't (well, this shouldn't be) a personality contest. Oh well, majority rules (apparently in this election, Bush has received more votes than any other president in American history) but don't come crying to Canada for medicine and vaccines (oh wait you guys already are) and don't bitch about the economy and don't bitch about the war in Iraq.
Bah. Stupid Americans.
posted by Joie! at
10:42 a.m.
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