It's good to have. Sometimes I'm too cynically realistic though.
Can I be hopeful and realistic?
Cynically hopeful?
Just... right?
I wish I knew.

Sometimes I have to just put on some Ulrich Schnauss.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X-M7SfcCfI
(Feel free to skip forward a minute. Slow start, but I assure you it's pretty.)

Everything will be okay.

Here's an excerpt out of the article I'm using to write my paper.

I think that student plagiarists are often poor plagiarists because they don't realize that it's even possible to be a savvy reader, that it's possible to read a text that has been cobbled together from multiple sources and determine where one source's contribution ends and another's begins. Those students don't pay attention to diction, syntax, or tone when they read, so they can't possibly imagine that someone else might.

If that is, in fact, what goes on (or, rather, doesn't go on) in our students' minds when they are copying material, then we may have run into an example of a broad human tendency to take our individual selves as the standard by which we judge everyone else.

The philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach noticed that tendency, explaining the difference between two bad poets like this: "He who, having written a bad poem, knows it to be bad, is in his intelligence, and therefore in his nature, not so limited as he who, having written a bad poem, admires it and thinks it good."

If Feuerbach is right, then by showing our students what good work is, helping them discover what makes it good work, and explaining how we can very clearly tell the difference between good and bad work, or the relative differences between two authors, we are not only improving their minds, but improving their "natures." That is a lofty word, one that even humanities professors (maybe especially humanities professors) hesitate to utter. But maybe we can agree at least that we can try to broaden students' perspectives and raise their standards, so that they can be better critics -- and better self-critics. (Malesic)

I find this interesting.

Also, that quote by Feuerbach is horribly convoluted, but I like it. Not that it's awesome to be pessimistic about everything we do, but I agree with him. It's good to be critical. Finding things to improve on = potential for growth.

I think I'm pretty critical. I know I can be critical about writing. I enjoy it. The chief reason I get crap grades in writing classes is not because of that, I believe, but because I never have my work done on time (if ever) because I'm too busy procrastinating to distract myself from a feeling of idea- and word-drought. I hate that feeling.

I've got a burstlet of inspiration though, so I'm hopefully going to finish a rough draft of this compare and contrast essay here in the next 1.5 hours...

PS. Totally not plagiarizing.

Works Cited

Malesic, John. "How dumb do they think we are?" Chronicle of Higher Education.
15 December 2006: 2-3.

Fellow WR121 classmates might appreciate this.
How to cite a periodical in MLA format
How to cite an electronic source (Ctrl+F for Wikipedia)

A bit late to post but here it be. Taken from a bulletin on Myspace by a venerable gentleman named Johnny:

So, I was at this cafe in ptown last night called Backspace, and they had changed the place around so much it began to creep me out.
Now I'm convinced Barack shouldn't be president.
They had changed the name to Barackspace.
There were pictures, both printed and hand drawn, all over.
I mean EVERYWHERE.
There were homemade art pieces centered around him.
Driving around, I'm seeing "Obama means Hope" and "Obama for Change" stickers and fliers everywhere, all of them with his face.

It brings to mind one other political figure in the past that promise hope and change, who came to power and, at first, was loved by his people.

Hitler.

Came to power during, and because of, an economic recession, promised to rise the country from it's ashes on the heels of a 'terrorist attack' (Reichstag fire), and during his reign, his face was EVERYWHERE.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying, "GO McCAIN!"
I'm saying I'm getting a bad feeling.
A very bad feeling.

On one hand it's sort of cliche and lame. But it's the vision I had, and I think I illustrated it fairly accurately, so. *shrug*

I pulled an all-nighter for no real reason. All I had today was Calculus at 9am anyway. I went and hoped I'd be awake enough.

I couldn't concentrate on what was on the board. When I tried to, I'd find myself rippling awake from almost falling face down on the desk or falling back with my mouth agape. Neither actually happened as far as I know, but I wondered how obvious it was--I was sitting in the front row and once or twice as I twitched I heard some people on the other side of the room laughing. Calculus isn't that funny.

After a while of the agonizing pattern of watching the teacher and dozing and jerking awake and analyzing the clock anxiously, I decided then to gather down notes instead. It was just copying from my notebook to another piece of paper.

sin²(x) = ½(1+

... no, that wasn't right. It was minus. I erased the plus. There is no peace. I like peace. Peace is good but peace isn't war. This one was war. I woke.

sin²(x) = ½(1- war )

It didn't even look like my handwriting... I stared at it for a few seconds, then erased it. I carefully copied down the correct equation, and went along.

I kept... falling asleep though... the clock... slow

I looked at the teacher's face (were my eyes even open?) and watched his chalk movements as well as I could. I considered walking out of the room and chilling in the halls or bathroom for a while, but the pressure against getting up in the middle of class kept me in my seat.

More notes. I had to look busy. I trained myself to make my jolty waking-up moments look sort of natural by easing it into a motion of stretching. Notes. Teacher. Clock. My pencil.

I woke. The teacher was now at the left side of the room, my side of the room. I looked at him and he was looking at me, I think. I didn't know how long I was looking at him or if I even had my eyes open, if I was even awake, but I heard him say, "..that's enough for one day, Friday test moving on, practice, next class handout copy down hah can your own really practice only way quick 50 minutes" was I sleeping?

I don't know.

I did get some notes down though.

I'm in the process of uploading my music library to my site. Since it's all on my old server, I had to get a 25' cable to reach it, and from there I started uploading.

Problem is, I only get 3.6GB per week of bandwidth on the wired connection, and I have around 40GB of music.

http://nuggit.nu/music

Weird day. Weird days? I thought I had grown shy again, but things stretch when I go on without sleep. Everything is stretching and compressing. The night went fast and slow at the same time, and eventually I was where I needed to be, somewhat charged with an energy that took me through the end of the essay. I made a goal and met it. Did I feel good?

I felt very okay, which surprised me. I got through my first two classes fine other than the occasional nod and twitch. Math was a pleasant surprise. I didn't fail. I suck so much at college but luck is leaning in my favor. Karma will get me back though. I went to the CU building after it because it let out early, and gave me some time to revise the essay like whoa into something decent-like. I was late to Sociology, and the printer at the Info Desk printed unsightly shadows on the left sides of my essay, but it was done. I slipped into class. I try to call as little attention to myself as possible when I do that. I hate being late but it's happened already a few other times. It was during Sociology that I started seeing the ridges in the wall and thinking, "Oh shit," and the very okay started draining.

Cracks in the concrete. Two, four, five steps down. The concrete rectangles were better. It's a longer walk to Purvine building, but the field is pretty. I like walking through it though I feel slightly bad for flattening the grass. I turned in my paper, and all my drafts too. Did I feel good? I think so, I think it did. I watched the clock for the class to end after that. Time stretched and the room compressed. When the guy beside me shook his leg hyperactively, it shook my seat too. Scooching is awkward in such a cramped area. The teacher wrote "Copia" on the board, and it struck me how beautiful that word is. Copia is what I need. Copia of ideas, words, creativity. I am going to print that word out and tape it to my wall. I knew what it meant but I didn't raise my hand.

Boomp3.com

I bombed my first test in calculus.
I thought I was good at math.

~
I am the son
and the heir
Of a shyness that is criminally vulgar
I am the son and heir
Of nothing in particular

You shut your mouth
How can you say
I go about things the wrong way
I am human and I need to be loved
Just like everybody else does

There's a club, if you'd like to go
You could meet somebody who really loves you
So you go, and you stand on your own
And you leave on your own
And you go home
And you cry
And you want to die

When you say it's gonna happen now,
Well, when exactly do you mean?
See I've already waited too long
And all my hope is gone

I am human and I need to be loved
Just like everybody else does

It's fun, I guess. We learn binary and hex and how to add and subtract and stuff, and how it does negative numbers.

The bad thing is it's at 2pm and that's the sleepy time of the day. I have to distract myself awake by drawing, even though I feel like a dork for drawing during lectures.

My mind's been in a weird funk all day. When I came back from Digital logic, I got into bed and stared at the wall for a few minutes with my mind in overdrive. I fell asleep eventually though, and it was very nice. I remember waking up a little during my nap and thinking "This is great, I'm sleeping. I love it."

I dream every night. Either I need to write more, or I need to draw more. I googled a bunch of Matisse and Picasso images earlier today and put them in my "Art I like" folder, which my screensaver cycles through. I like having an auto-gallery after being idle on the computer for 5 minutes. It makes me not want to disturb it, which can be a good thing.

Augh. I feel blah. For some reason I feel really drowsy and headachey. I got some progress on the sociology busywork extra credit, like, I'm almost done, which is nice. I'm using Office 07 for the second time in my life and I'm definitely not used to it yet. Every time I want to do something like change the font or line spacing I'm like ZOMG WHAR IT GO because everything is so different. For some reason my documents look nicer though. Yay for newer software that makes everything look prettier.

Everyone's kind of homesick. Am I homesick? I don't know. Sure. A little. I miss seeing friends. I miss getting hugs. I miss driving. I miss bugging my dad with random questions, and my mom's delicious well-rounded home cooked meals. Obviously, I miss seeing m'boy, too, muchly. I feel distant, but is it that persisting connection to those things I love what's keeping me going? I mean, it's not that bad here, other than it being pretty boring and the ridiculously cold weather, it is what's to be expected. I don't particularly love anything here. I'd be happier if I did. In theory, all I need to do is let myself.

Empty thoughts, empty words? That's why I have trouble writing serious essays. Of course these blogs count for nothing. He says rhetoric is basically a bunch of empty BS that sounds good. I could be good at it. I need to care less. Music is distracting. I can't write when it's on. It's dead quiet here. I feel really restless.

It's nice that reinaday.com and nuggit.nu actually load something now. I don't pay $38/year for a "could not connect to host" error. :b

I bought hosting for reinaday.com today, at Arvixe.com. 1 year, $40. And for the gigs and gigs of space and bandwidth they offer, that there is really, really reasonable. (Edit: to be exact, 300GB of space and 3TB/mo of bandwidth.) Getting hosted was really straightforward too. No problems at all. Plus everything loads lightning-fast. So far I'm pretty happy with them.

I considered making another order to get my old blog host thing back up on nuggit.nu, but eh... my stuff kind of sucks. I might do that later, when I'm feeling more confident about sprucing it up, but for now I decided to take advantage of this service on Blogger, just so nuggit.nu isn't just leading nowhere.

Hmm. I need to change the look of this page. It's nice but it's not really me.

I guess I just feel lost without some form of journal. Why not just pick up one of my many notebooks and start writing in there, you ask? Because I've become too lazy to hunt for irl objects just to get my thoughts down. I type faster than I write, now, too. I'm usually always in the vicinity of a laptop. So why not write in Notepad and save into a folder for journals, and keep my boring thoughts to myself? Convenience in the future. If someone IMs me and is like, "Heeey, long time no talk! How've you been?" I can just type out my blog URL to them and BAM, they have months' worth of blag to answer that question. Then to be polite I could follow up with a few lines of how I've been doing that particular day, and then copy and paste that conversation in a new blog to archive my efforts.

Efficiency. That's why.

Joking aside, yeah... I just like having a fresh blog like this. I like this site. It's very easy to use, it's attractive... hopefully this fresh online environment will inspire me to write more, which is something I need, personally. For example, I have to write a two-page essay by Monday, but if I am writing in here, it at least makes me feel less anxious because hey! I'm writing something.