on nasality

So anyways-

I woke up this morning to my alarm clock reading 6:27 AM. I opened my eyes for a moment and noticed how bright it was outside already. Thirty seconds later, my roommate's alarm went off.

What on earth does she do so early of a morning?! It was bad enough when she would wake up at 6:45, let alone 15 minutes earlier (my alarm clock is 3 minutes behind real time. My 9:30 alarms wake me up at 9:27 according to it)

Anyways, I laid back and try to let the waves of sleep wash back over me before she started being loud in her morning routine, but schemes and dreams of demons and planes ran through my head (can you tell how stressed this project had me? I had gotten pretty good about laying stress aside in order to sleep, but after 5 hours of sleep I'm pretty susceptible).

Anyways, I awoke later to massive quantities of snot running down my nose, the first torrent of many today. The massively flash flood thunderstorm yesterday morning must have triggered all the trees to bloom and emit their pollen in my airstream. so I've been pretty miserable, if slightly coherent today. That is, I can think clearly, just not quickly.

We learned some massively fascinating things in physics today about the lensness of the eyeball, and I was astounded when JS informed us that the general 'near point' of the lens is about 7cm for the well-sighted young, and 20 cm for the aging populace. I may have misinterpreted what he said, but I think I can focus slightly well on things inside that range. I was also amazed that the far point of human focus is infinity. How awful would it be if we couldn't see the stars at all? Of course the smog and light pollution are doing their best to take that ability away. . perhaps I should move to Phoenix (for the stars and for the lack of pollen).

At lunch, it was revealed that the pomfreteria (did you know they are incorporating that dear nickname into the renovations they are making right now?) is trying to get us to cut down on wasting their food. I remarked to stu that they could do this by making good looking dishes tasty instead of merely good looking, and later Kaleb affirmed my statement, but I finished my plate of barbeque sandwich (and got that song stuck in my head for half an hour) and recieved a mini snickers bar for my trouble. sexcellent. Stu couldn't quite finish his quesadilla and his french fries both, so he recieved no compensation.

This brings my candy total up to about four pieces. I voted in the run off student goverment elections, so I felt free to take candy from the candidates for teh first time. (I refused to take anything from them earlier, seeing it as a bribe. However, when one side decided it was good policy to blast rap across the lawn where I was trying to study my french, the camel decided it had had enough).

In calculus, dr. meek surprised us all by bringing out some papers and saying we would have a quiz, and I felt so disheartened because not only did I not have a pencil with me, but also I hadn't practiced the problems at all. however, it was merely a bluff; he really wanted to refresh our minds on the parabola, the ellipse, to introduce the hyperbola, and bring together the hyperbolic sine and cosine with the idea of parametric equations.

I'm not sure I understand that all, having been busy sneezing during the lecture, but maybe it'll come to me xD

ANYWAYS THAT"S ALL MOSTLY IRRELEVANT.

The crux of today's experience was after our first GNEG meeting in several weeks when I stopped by my project advisor's office to talk about our failplane. He said the grade wouldn't be based so much on the actual performance, which really brings a load off my mind. Most of my waking dream this morning was ideas on how to invent a frisbee to deliver our nickel payload, so I can stop all that now, hopefully.

I do need to install the motor, or have someone help me install the motor, etc so that we can actually drop things. The dropping part is what I really enjoyed working on, because it's something much more accessible to understand. I liked learning about the airflow over the wings and body, but I don't know so much so thoroughly about it, so mostly my experience was asking [dumb] questions and building what I was told to build. So I don't feel so responsible about it. Anyways, I can concentrate on working on the presentation materials and writing an essay and studying parabolas, ellipses, power series etc than fretting that our plane doesn't fly.

I think I might make another post shortly. I've been distracted by a conversation now and it's piqued my interest on another subject besides my mundane life. 8)

the counter culture and why don't people like other people?

quite a few people whose ljs I read have remarked on theferrett's 'open source boob project', generally negatively. This isn't really about that, but I've read a lot of comments on the issue since ferrett is someone whose lj I've read for a long time (four or five years now?), and one of them that piqued my interest said something along the lines of 'nerds should learn to live in society'.

Let me try to collect my thoughts. There's a lot of them running through my head just now.

Many of you who read my journal probably realize that I like to do rather odd things. I won't list them out, but one that has resurfaced in the warm weather is the act of going places barefoot. (here is the article that did it http://nymag.com/health/features/46213/ )

A lot of people in high school were pretty vocal about how disgusting they find feet. Not penises, not hands, not buttholes, but feet. One girl in particular who enraged me regularly the five years we went to school together, was particularly disgusted by them.

I never really understood why they found them so distasteful. My feet do a lot for me, help me walk or run, or keep me balanced when sitting in positions that would be unstable otherwise. They don't have any liquids that come out of them naturally, and really they're just hands that are shaped different and that we walk on.

We put our hands in some disgusting places sometimes, and a lot of people are total germaphobes and will lather their hands in antibacterial soaps. that's cool for them I guess, but they still don't consider their hands to be gross or dirty. Maybe it's because they can put them closer to their face to inspect them, I don't know. But why aren't they slathering their feet in antibacterial creams or anti fungal creams? Apparently they aren't concerned about that, so it must be that the concept of a foot in itself is abhorent to them. Whatever.

so anyways, I try to gauge the distraction and discomfort level realized in other people whenever i go around without shoes. I've overheard other girls barefoot explaning their condition away as though otherwise it would be shameful. I'm determined not to let it be shameful for me. My friends generally laugh or ask questions in genuine surprise ('did you walk all the way up here like that?!:O' no, just from the greek theater when i got sick of having them on, but I might tomorrow), but especially those girls wearing sorority shirts (or baseball caps. That's another dead giveaway), there's definitely a feel of apprehension from them. 'omg can foot disease go from her through my shoes to me :ooooo what if I catch the crazy!'

And really, what's the point? It took exactly one attempt at trying to shower in a communal shower with flipflops on to realize that it was worse than worthless, so I have trod regularly onto the tiled floors to defecate, to urinate, to me brosser les dents, to prend une douche, prend du bain, etc unless I happen to have shoes on already.

anyways, there is still this great social stigma about the foot thing. 100 or even 50 years ago, shoes were a status symbol; poor people didn't need to waste money on them in good weather. My family may be pretty low class (and maybe some of you are thinking 'ill-bred. my God, how could they have raised such a crazy as this girl?'), but shoe-money is definitely not an issue (unless you count my dad telling me I should buy quite so many if I'm not going to wear them xD).

There used to be social stigmas about other things as well. Girls wearing pants for one (I did wear a skirt today. And stu, the final count was something like 14 skirts and 9 dresses), girls with shaved heads, boys with tattoos, girls with tattoos, actually girls doing pretty much anything was a social stigma if it isn't still one today.

I find one great advantage in such a large school as I go to; if I do things that people think are crazy, I'm just one more crazy against the background, and they won't come up to me and be 'Allison, what are you doing? You so crazy' like some classmates from high school did (The aforementioned prissy anti-foot girl, and some others more closely tied in my circle of friends.). If I do know people, they're usually close enough (or relaxed enough!) that they take it for being me, or they laugh and don't care.

And the whole point of this long post is that this is how more people should be. Laugh and not care.

How many people would be going about their lives differently if people early in their development had laughed and not cared when they done things that went against the social norm?

Here, a poem

I pray I never lose the nobility of youth,
Be jaded to the miseries and greivances of life;
To always keep that Utopian dream
Awake within my heart, aflash behind my eyes.

I pray I never lose the nobility of youth,
That vigor to improve the world I love, Heedless of cost to self.
To serve and expect alike in turn;
But expecting naught by anyless than what I give, in return.

I pray I never lose the nobility of youth,
Never succumb to derisive cynicism or Dreamless apathy,
Toujours avoir l'esprit ambitieux.

I pray I never lose the nobility of youth.

I'm happy to see that while I might be more cynical about things, I am still willing to make a change. Still yet, I see assimilation as the supreme evil to pit myself against. I hope that the day that my spirit will have been dashed against the rock of social adversity one time too many is long off. I have referred to myself in the past as an emotional sponge, and I'm afraid I might not have the sufficient strength of will to survive the onslaught that I inevitably will be subject to.

To those of you who have given in your self control for the straight forward pace of following others' dictates, try to think back fondly to the times before you cared. This might be a very young age, perhaps the precise moment before your mother forbade you from ever bringing mudpies into her kitchen again, or it might have been yesterday, when you decided to dash it all and cut your hair the way the other ladies in your office have worn it for months now.

To those who still maintain a free spirit, let us trade encouragement while we laugh and don't care.

Anyways, you're probably wonderful wtf does this have to do with open source breasts.

What is has to do is with that comment. There is no reason why nerds should not form their own society. We have already done it . The countless circles of lj friends, on-line forums, IRC chat channels or networks, that is how we've begun to build a society apart from the one we see on the tv or around our neighbors. Wars have been fought because one group decided it didn't want to play with the other and tried to make their own playgroup. It's selfish to stop them, really.