Behold! Kregg Gemp!

Yes, this is an actual fan from a recent Seahawks game. Yes, I am convinced he is somehow related to Gregg.

When the thunder rolls...

I recently was invited by my friend Josh to attend Celtic Thunder. At least, I hope it is Celtic Thunder, kinda like this:

I fear the alternate type of thunder. Please, don't let it be the Thunder from Down Under:

The revenant

What is it? What could it be? What force, be it on earth, in the stars above, or beyond the veil of the fourth dimension, could bring me back to blogging? This:
Yes indeed. The Volcano Taco, from Taco Bell. Who knew lava got it's rich, lustrous red color from Red Food Dye #5?

More than anything, I'm excited this item was released just in time for the Christmas season. I mean, jeez, just look at that thing. The red-dominant color scheme, with just a few green highlights? It screams Feliz Navidad! I know what I'm leaving out for Santa this year: a massive platter of Volcano Tacos. And do you know what Santa will leave me in return? Care to guess? That's right: a toilet bowl filled with spicy Santa volcano craps.

Thanks Taco Bell!

A bad trip

Well, the Winco employees were most certainly glad to see me leave their store today. In less than ten minutes I managed to bounce a glass bottle of pomegranate juice off an elderly lady's foot, breaking it all over the floor. And then while checking out I stepped on the toes of the check-out lady right behind me. When I apologized to her, I told her it had been a bad day for me in their store, telling her that I also broke some juice in the produce section. Her response? "Oh, so you're the one!"

Come in with the milk

You've all seen the Aviator, yeah? With Howard Hughes slipping into repetitive loops of language? Does that happen to anybody else out there? When things need be done I tend to say something over and over again, usually along the lines of "Gotta get rye bread, gotta get rye, gotta get rye."

Well, it happened again today, but the fabulous part was that I was getting my laundry sorted for wash day. The most pressing issue was doing my white t-shirts and socks, so I was repeating this mandate time and again. But because I tend to talk in marginally sensical slang sometimes, what came out of my mouth was this: "...gotta blow up the whites, gotta blow up the whites, gotta make those whites blow up..."

I imagine if anyone heard me I probaby some like sort of race traitor about to send out mail bombs to other white people.

Tony

So I need some new shoes for fall. I need a touch of class in my wardrobe, since all I have right now are garishly bright sneakers and massive, ugly hiking boots. Time to get some tony new footwear in Portland this weekend. Anyone up for some hot shopping action?

Dirge

Part of growing up is facing the fact that some people from your core group of friends will splinter off as they start their own families. Three days ago I had to say goodbye to my closest friend here in Eugene, as it seemed like she would be starting her own family at some point in the near future. Who is this mystery woman? The spider who lived in my bathroom since I moved in.

For the last few weeks she has been above my mirror every single morning, and while occasionally she'll move over near the toilet or by the shower, she always returned to the corner by the sink. It was rather nice, in a way, to know somebody was waiting at home for me each day, but as the season turns to winter, I feared she would decide to lay a sack of spider eggs somewhere and I would be overrun with little kiddies everywhere. Since I still live like a homeless man and sleep on the floor (I have no bed), the idea of potentially hundreds of tiny spiders running around was a bit too much to stomach. So I decided to release her into the wild and put her out in the bushes.

It was actually kind of a touching goodbye. I think she knew I was sending her off to greener pastures, because when it came time to gather her up she was suddenly gone, and I had to search until I found her hiding on my shower sponge.

So this is what is sounds like...when doves cry!

The Chronic

Anyone who has worked in a campus post office is familiar with the Chronicle of Higher Education, the massive newspaper that deals with all things related to academia. The arrival of the Chronic, as we lovingly referred to it, would add what seemed to be several hundred pounds to the amount of mail to be delivered around campus. Honestly, though, I never really minded the Chronic because there were quite a few interesting articles in it, and I enjoyed leafing through it in the post office.

I've been giving serious thought to bonking on my PhD studies recently, and I've been reading through a lot of information on the attrition rate of doctoral studies. Yikes. A recent NYT article said that the average length of time to finish a PhD is almost 9 years, and the dropout rate is about 50%. And this article in the Chronic puts the social sciences flop rate at over 60%. Sweet! Apparently what is puzzling to people is that there is no discernible, significant difference in the academic profiles of people who finish PhD programs and those who don't; the GRE and GPA numbers are essentially the same between those who finish and those who don't. What caught my eye was this passage, because it sort of sums up what has been in my head the last few weeks:

Yet the pot of gold at the end of the Ph.D. rainbow may not be there for every candidate. For many of them, despite their love of the subject and their dreams of reveling in the life of the mind, the most logical decision may be to leave.

After a year in a Ph.D. program in history at City University of New York, Nicole Kalian left to take a job as a publicist with a book publisher. Hers was the sort of early attrition that almost everyone agrees is the best kind.

"I didn't see any prospects for when I graduated," says Ms. Kalian, who was shocked to read an article about new Ph.D.'s who couldn't find jobs as adjuncts on enough campuses to earn at least $25,000 a year. "It was frightening, and I could never really shake that thought from my head."

Yup, that is about the size of it for me too. What I found bizarre, though, and rather alien to me, was this part:

The most important reason to care about attrition, most researchers agree, is the effect it has on students' lives. "This is tremendously painful," says Barbara E. Lovitts, who left two doctoral programs before finishing a third one, in sociology, at the University of Maryland at College Park in 1996.

Now a research scientist at Maryland, she is the author of Leaving the Ivory Tower: The Causes and Consequences of Departure From Doctoral Study (Rowman and Littlefield, 2001). She saw several people who had not completed their degrees cry during interviews about their grad-school experiences and the effect it had on their lives -- no matter what their reasons for leaving.

"There is a tremendous opportunity cost," Ms. Lovitts says. "These are people who have never failed before in their lives. They were summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa. And for the first time in their lives they've experienced failure. It takes people a lot of years to get over it."

Thankfully, I've become intimate with failure in my life, so dropping out of a PhD program and seeing my entire plan for my life crumble into dust in less than 6 weeks is hardly the worst thing I've gone through. I guess I have never really known that many people like this in my life, or at least known them that well, these fortunate souls who have never had to brush up against abject failure or complete and devastating heartache. I wonder what that is like, to live a life so devoid of trauma...

Teh kewtnuz

I know I've posted some of these before, but I just have to put more up. Darling.

Does this help?

Lodged in my inbox today was an email from a professor that was sent to everyone in my class, in which she responded to two student questions asking for a point of clarification before a quiz on two readings we did for class. Anticipating something useful, I read through the questions and responses. Note my careful word choice here: I used "responses", not "answers". And with just cause. Her response to both questions was, essentially, "read the material and make sure you can answer the questions in your own words." Seriously, that's all you can give us? Advise us to read the material again?

Not helpful.