New York, in its ongoing war against junk food, is considering regulating soda .
When I was moving to New York, I blogged , in disapproval, about calorie counts on menu items at fast food places. I did not like them because I thought a person who cared about such things could take responsibility for finding that information online, and sometimes a person wants a (high-calorie) treat.
In the months since, I've changed my mind. I eat Starbucks baked goods about twice a week, which may be slightly less than previously, but this is because my lifestyle has changed (I'm in coffee shops less) and not because of improved willpower (generally I go to the coffee shop planning to eat there, or I am picking up breakfast on my way from TSTM's apartment to work, or I desperately need a chocolate muffin and a cup of diesel fuel to make it through the morning). I almost always have the cinnamon coffee cake or the chocolate muffin, both of which are among the lower-calorie menu items (although not the healthiest - the healthier ones that I've had are just gross, and probably still less healthy than eating at home) and also offer a pleasant infusion of my favorite drugs (sugar and caffeine, obviously). If the calorie counts were not posted, I'd probably still know which were the healthy items - but I would more often order something else. I'd look at the lemon loaf and I'd say, "oh, that looks good, I'll try it for a change"; now I say to myself, "really? does it look 1.5 times as good?" and the answer is almost always no, and I order my usual and am very happy with it.
I realize the optimal health situation would be to be eating whey-protein-infused quinoa with soy milk in my apartment, but in the actual world that does not seem to be happening. When I'm out of town and go to Starbucks and there are no calorie placards, I'm surprised. I've gotten used to mindfulness, to being aware of my actual calorie consumption as opposed to either eating whatever strikes my fancy and ignoring the calories or, alternately, assuming that everything they offer is at least 600 calories. I eat a little, but not a lot, better for it. Maybe other regulations along the same lines would do the same.
Today I went to the New Museum. They are showing an exhibit called “Younger than Jesus” - works by artists under the age of 33. Most of the works were some combination of incomprehensible and off-putting, frequently verging on offensive, several were also interesting, and a few were appealing. This is exactly what I had expected. My favorite part of the exhibit was the “Learning Center”, which included a film of various events and cultural landmarks of the last 33 years (the Challenger explosion, Back to the Future, the AIDS quilt, “this is your brain on drugs”) and featured a timeline occupying one whole wall and encompassing only the years since 1976. I was reminded of an argument I had with my mother recently: she insisted that JFK’s assasination was the formative event of the 20th century, while I argued that quite a few events were more significant and influential, even just in the West (for example - two world wars, the Depression, the Holocaust and consequent establishment of Israel, the rise and fall of communism, voting rights for women and racial minorities… and I know nothing about history). She became very upset, protective, most likely, of the assassination’s pivotal role in her own life, and apparently unable to see - as many of her generation apparently don’t see - that the world has moved on from 1963, that in fact to quite a lot of people (perhaps a majority or nearly one) the Kennedy assassination is not personal history, but just history. To my generation, the important world-changing events are things like the Berlin Wall falling and 9/11. To our children, it will be something that hasn’t happened yet, something that we consider an insignificant afterthought - just as my grandmother probably considers JFK getting shot a minor event compared to Germany’s attempt at cultural purification and world domination twenty years previously. The point being, it was really good to see ideas and events of my lifetime - the things that are familiar and formative to me and people my age - being presented not just as a footnote to the real history of the world, but as an important history of its own.
—
One of the items of art in the museum was called, I think, This is XX. It was a bed on a platform, with a fluffy white coverlet, and under the coverlet was a young woman, asleep. According to the explanatory placard, she was drugged, and this item of art was commenting on (by participating in, apparently) the exploitation of the female body in art throughout history. The girl was sleeping soundly despite the noise in the high-ceilinged, uncarpeted exhibit space. Her face was visible; she was in her early 20’s, of indeterminate race, and the only person in the museum I saw smile.
—
On the 6 train, a man was singing. He was in the middle of the packed car, belting out oldies in a deep voice, trying to get the passengers to put money in his knit cap. In Midtown, a couple got on near the end of the car: he, mid-30’s, paunchy, hipsterish; she, 10 years older with thick plastic-rimmed glasses. A toddler with blond curls and a pink knit hat was swaddled to her chest, red-faced and fussing. The singing man started into “You’ve Got a Friend” and the woman swayed back and forth, her knees absorbing the shocks of the ride as she hummed along with the melody, the subway and the rustlings of a hundred passengers and the strange man’s voice and her own singing twining together, rocking her baby to sleep.
In the absence of wrinkle (so far), the thing that is making me feel old is how many documents I have. I am not even copying my archive from high school and college (since it’s on the old machine as well as the backup hard drive), and still it is taking ages and ages. And there is still other stuff I want to put on the machine - but at least it’s functional. I have officially more-or-less decommissioned the old computer (it is in its case, under my bed) and am writing this entry on the new one.
Now. Christmas. (If I write this entry slow enough, there might even be pictures.)
It feels like the holidays have been very long. I guess my holidays started Thursday night, but I told you-all about the opera and MoMA and the FIT museum. I spent most of the weekend working, as well as Monday. (oh, work… so much stress… must be super-productive tomorrow and every day from then on until infinity.) Monday night I received a surprise Xmas present - a rice cooker from N! This is exellen because now I can make myself lots and lots and lots of rice, and also I got to learn about my skin’s ability to heal after I slashed off a big hunk of it trying to pop the big air bubbles Amazon sends in its packages.
Tuesday the IB came to town. He almost didn’t because his flight got cancelled and he didn’t get to his parents’ house until 2 a.m. and then he had to get up early to drive for two hours to New Haven to get the train to the city, which I felt bad for when I found out about. Also he brought me a present! It was a Borders gift card, in one of those little boxes they have at the register to put your gift cards in, containing also some fancy chocolate. This was pretty impressive. Boys very rarely give me presents, especially books and chocolate, which are obviously two of the very best things. I felt a little bad because I didn’t have a present for him, but he said it was okay because he has flaked out so many times in the past and his goal is to not be a screwup anymore. He said he couldn’t remember whether I preferred Borders or Barnes and Noble… I would have gotten better use out of a Barnes and Noble gift card, but I’m impressed that he even remembered I had a preference. Anyway, we had a really nice day. We walked around, and ate things, and drank things, and talked a lot. He’s great to talk to because we have known each other well for a long time. And he is a good guy. But that is really all there is with us, and the only thing sad about this is that it is true on his end as well but he doesn’t seem to realize it.
Wednesday I went home. I had a nice two days with my family. We built a gingerbread house, and made latkes, and opened presents. My brother gave me a book about opera and an Einstein finger puppet (this was a crowd-pleaser), and my parents gave me the new Neal Stephenson book and a contribution to the laptop fund. My brother and I gave my father a GPS. I gave my mother a scarf and a candle (yeah, cop-out gifts, but I thought she would like them both.) and my brother an Australia guidebook (he is about to go there for work).
While we are on the subject for gifts, I gave TSTM a book before I went home. I chose the book because I knew he would like it. However it was kind of a cop-out gift - it was a new, well-promoted book (at least if you keep up with these things) and it was so obvious he’d like it that I was a bit worried someone else would give it to him or that he’d already bought it for himself. [my keyboard is weird. it seems ... sticky. not in the sense that my fingers stick to the keys but in the sense that i feel like i have to press very hard to get keystrokes to register. is this because it's new?] But I also knew that he probably wouldn’t get me anything (he doesn’t really like Christmas - apparently, according to N, a lot of people don’t - and he isn’t even really into shopping for his family, as opposed to me, who has an entire file on my computer devoted for gift ideas and notes for various people in my life) so I didn’t want to make a big investment of money or, more importantly, time that would cause discomfort between us or lead me to be resentful that the gift exchange was one-sided. He seemed to really like the book; I think at least half of his happiness was not about the book but about being given something that he would like. And I guess I was still kind of holding out hope that he would give me something, because I was a little bit disappointed that he didn’t… it isn’t really about the gift itself, but about being given a gift.
But, actually, I’m surprised by how not-upset I am about this. I’m really big on occasions. Other people aren’t, especially guys. For my birthday, I usually deal with this by celebrating privately by myself (I’m convinced this is part of why none of my relationships last more than a year - all the long ones have started in the fall, and being given something like an electric teakettle as a combination birthday/anniversary gift has generally been a big part of their downfall, or at least a sign of it). Obviously it is not possible to not tell someone when Christmas / Hanukkah is and thereby make it a private occasion, and TSTM knew in advance I was going to give him something (I mentioned it) and I think it is common knowledge, or at least there are plenty of books and people who would tell me, that if a guy you are seeing doesn’t give you even a card or a poinsettia or something for the holidays he not only doesn’t like you much but doesn’t even consider himself to be seeing you, and perhaps you have hallucinated the whole thing. But, I don’t know, maybe I have gotten stupid in my old age, or else confident, because I feel like it is just not that big a deal. Would I have liked TSTM to give me something? Yes, of course. Everybody likes being given presents. But it is just a gift. It is not actually the same thing as him wearing a big neon sign on his forehead saying “I don’t give a rat’s ass about you,” and in this case it doesn’t even feel like it is.
Anyway, continuing the narrative of my holiday. I returned from my parents’ house Friday afternoon and ran errands for a while. Then TSTM and I attempted to go to a crepe place for dinner, but it had closed (permanently), so we went to this very strange little bistro with fancy martinis and tin ceilings, and had wine and food and fancy dessert drinks (chocolate martini for me and something with coffee and alcohol for him) and fancy dessert. Saturday, in between each running a couple more errands (errands seem to have proliferated over the last few weeks, so that I have to do about eight every day from now until forever) we exercised our mutual superpower, the ability to accomplish absolutely nothing for exceptionally long times when we’re together.
Today TT, TE, the LP and the in-situ ELP (Tinkering Theorist, her husband Tinkering Experimentalist, their toddler, the Little Poker, and the Even Littler Poker that Tinkering Theorist is pregnant with) came to town. We went to the zoo (the zoo!) and had pizza (at Ray’s Famous Original, which I think is one of the knockoffs but which turned out to be quite good). The zoo was a disappointment, until we got to the children’s zoo, which was extremely cool. I got to feed a llama. And there were frogs (maybe that was in the adult zoo?) and many many birds. There were peacoks and peahens and giant blue birds. But no lions or tigers or anything. TE called it a bird zoo. The children’s zoo had a separate netted-in area where the animals (mostly birds and turtles) were semi-loose, which was really neat… I’m glad I went with them rather than with other people, because I never would have thought to go to the children’s zoo otherwise.
So… it was quite the holiday week and a half. I got some culture, did some work, saw my family, saw some friends, spent time with TSTM, and got lots of rest. Tomorrow it is back to work, with an emphasis on productivity because I need to have something to present for a conference in about ten weeks. It is going to be a bit of a slog, but I feel good about the break I just had.
I hope everyone else’s holidays were great, and that you’re all psyched for great start to 2009!
- On my new computer, I can actually use Chrome (it made my old computer unhappy). One of the (many) excellent things about Chrome is that I can make any web page into an application. I assume it is still a web page deep down, but it looks like an application to me, which makes it easier to find and less annoying (since I don’t have tons of evergreen web pages open). I have made applications for gmail, reader, google docs, and blogger. I did not on purpose make applications only for google properties; that is just how it happened.
- You know how it is a giant pain to get a person on the phone when you call a company, and sometimes even to get a phone number to talk to a machine? One of the (very many) things I love about Vanguard is that they do not make it hard at all. And now they are making it even easier: right on my personal account homepage they give me their phone number, and I know from experience that I can be talking to a human being (and a knowledgeable, competent one at that) in just a few minutes.
- For many years I have had unhappy feet. Dry, yucky, itchy, painful, ugly, scaly feet. And now I do not, because for the last two weeks I have been semi-religiously using Curel Targeted Therapy Deep-Penetrating Foot Cream before going to sleep. This stuff is amazing. It is not like regular moisturizer, which at most can reduce the severity of my foot trauma. It has special healing powers. I do not care that it makes my hands feel greasy and gross or that it costs $6.50 for a rather petite tube. For the first time in years, my feet are not unhappy, and they are starting to look and feel like they are composed of actual human skin. From the top, with my toenails painted, they actually look pretty.
While I was home for Thanksgiving, my mother and I watched And Then She Found Me. I hadn’t heard anything about the movie, and my mother had rented it thinking it was a “frothy chick flick”, which could not have been a less accurate description, unless things like love and motherhood and faith and family are insubstantial.
One line from that movie has remained with me, so much so that I had to google it to find out where I was remembering it from. [spoilers in the next sentence] The always-amazing Helen Hunt, playing the Jewish protagonist of the movie, doubts her faith in G-d when her husband leaves her the day her adoptive mother passes away, her newly-discovered birth mother is difficult and perhaps crazy, and she is unable to sustain a pregnancy even after endangering her new relationship by having sex with her now-ex. [end spoilers] Searching for a prayer to say in a pivotal moment, she settles on the Shema.
The Shema is the quintessential prayer of Judaism. The full Shema is several paragraphs, but the first line - the Shema proper - is short enough that probably anyone with any Jewish education has memorized it. Shema Yisrael, Adonai eloheynu, Adonai ehad. Commonly translated - I can see, in my mind’s eye, the small blue card my parents gave me when I was six to keep in my bedroom so that, until I had memorized it, I could recite the prayer every night before sleeping, which I almost always still do - this is Hear O Israel, the Lord is our G-d, the Lord is One. It is a declaration of faith that observant Jews speak at moments both pivotal and mundane, when they lie down and when they rise up, when their children are first born and as they themselves die.
In the literal sense, the Shema is what the Jewish religion originally was: a repudiation of polytheism and idolatry. It is the fulfillment of the first commandment. It is also a connection to the community, addressing itself not to the divine or to nonbelievers but to others of the faith. It is saying, History, ancestry, family: I am still a part of you. It is saying, The G-d of Sarah and Rebecca and Rachel and Leah, the Force who brought us out of Egypt and gave us our identity, is still alive in the world. It is saying, There is only One.
Hunt’s character in the movie offered a more modern interpretation: The G-d of love and the G-d of Fear are the same G-d. This is an argument against indifference and forced safety, and also against the new idolatry, the modern insistence that the spiritual and the physical are somehow separate, that joy does not arise from the same source as pain, that life is not intrinsically tied into death. That acceptance of beauty does not imply and is not implicit in acceptance of heartbreak.
We all have a tendency to place ourselves somewhere on an imaginary continuum between virtue and vice, weigh our lives on a scale of successes and failures, pretend that there is a separation between the things we embrace and those we try to deny. We try to exclude from our lives the pain of loss, of waste, of terror - but the only way to succeed in this is by also excluding joy and love and hope. And G-d does not command us to avoid pain. She tells us to honor our parents and love our children, to share our food with the hungry and give our animals a weekly day of rest, to dress and act in ways that mark us. To fight war after war for our independence and to light candles in honor of our own who have died and to spill wine in sorrow for our slain enemies, and to wander in the desert for forty years if that is what it takes to find a place where we feel at home. None of those things is untinged by difficulty, obstacle, sorrow, sacrifice, but that does not diminish their good. The G-d who brings us the things we desire also brings us those we avoid, because we need them just as much.
Warning: Any comments on this post that I deem offensive, unsupportive, or insensitive will be deleted immediately. If you comment regularly on HS, please do not comment on this post, either here or there. I admit this blog is irrational and I am ruled by my emotions, okay? Now shoo.
Last night TSTM had what I guess you would call an argument. He called me up, stressed about any number of things unrelated to me, and we had a nice talk. Then somehow we got embroiled in his stress about things related to me, and that turned out poorly. (Not, like, catastrophically poorly or anything. We made up by the end of the call, and although I am not feeling 100% good about things - as evidenced by my need to write this post - I think it will get a lot better when I see him tonight.)
The basic issue is, TSTM is a man, and as such has a bit of difficulty with the concept of being an adult, and particularly with the concept of being involved with a woman who does not idolize him and give him everything he wants (generally, from how his stories end, in the hope of later jellyfishing him into giving her everything she wants). It is not that he wants to have sex with every woman in New York, exactly, or that his meeting of me interrupted some great streak of Casanovian conquest. It is certainly not that he doesn’t want to be seeing me or even, apparently, that he wants to see me rarely enough to have time for substantial opportunities to have sex with every woman in New York. It is that he wants to know that he can sleep with every woman in New York.
This is a pretty typical male desire, I think, and I am not upset by it in the abstract. What bothers me is that he seems incapable of finding a stable ground for himself. If he truly wants to be completely free to do whatever and whoever he wants, he should have stopped calling me months ago. Or he should have been out doing other things/people concurrently, or he should still be doing that. But he does not. This is because he desires - much more than I do, I think - the practical and emotional security of a relationship, and also because he is crazy about me. So this is not exactly a new concept, that you can’t have everything, but he struggles desperately to assimilate it. I’m sympathetic to this plight, because choices are hard and he seems to have the feeling that he is on the tightrope of a single correct path and always about to fall off.
What I am not sympathetic to is when he brings up his therapist.
This is partly because I am uneasy with the concept of therapy as it is generally deployed (here I am not talking about people who seek therapy to deal with a traumatic incident or a major problem, but rather people - including many New Yorkers -who seem to think spending $400 per month to sit in a room and talk is an important component of self-care): basically, people with no serious problems pay someone who barely knows them to listen to them obsess about their every trivial issue, and take every word the therapist utters as gospel. Perhaps part of the problem is my general distrust of doctors of all kinds - they don’t seem, in aggregate, to be nearly as bright as people assume. But even so, therapists are not omniscient. They are human beings and have human biases, they misunderstand (or their patients misstate), they have bad days, they make mistakes. And patients misinterpret them, or they hear what they want to hear. Many times I have heard someone say, “My therapist says…” to preface a statement so ridiculous their therapist could not possibly have said it and still be sane, and/or so offensive or immature that they would never utter it without that disclaimer. But instead of objecting to whatever is problematic about the assertion, people are expected to accept it unquestioningly because the therapist’s word is law.
What TSTM’s therapist says about me is that he doesn’t want TSTM to limit himself. On the face of it, I totally agree with that statement. I don’t want TSTM to limit himself either. I want him to accomplish, or at least aim for, anything he wants, and I want him to believe in himself, and I want him to always be seeing and learning and doing new things to whatever extent he desires. This is what I want for everyone I care for. But as it happens that is not what the therapist meant, or not what TSTM thinks he meant; what he meant was that TSTM should not limit the number of women he dates or has sex with.
I find this ludicrous for any number of reasons. First of all, it is not as if TSTM is a virgin, or has only dated two girls, or is twenty-two years old. Second, it strikes me as advice brimming with latent sexism, since I’m pretty sure no therapist would advise a female patient who has just met a promising man that she should ditch him in order to sleep around. Third - where the hell does this therapist get off referring to our entire relationship as TSTM limiting himself?
This is the thing that upsets me most. Last time I checked, life was not about how many people you can sleep with before you die. Even people who have had a fair amount of fairly and/or very casual sex (like, um, me) know this. Even TSTM knows this. Sleeping with, or going out with, or what have you with, a lot of different people is great fun, but it is only great fun. It is not creating meaning or becoming a better person or growing or really doing anything. It is just fucking.
Of course, by engaging in something with potential for seriousness, one generally accepts certain restrictions - limits, if you will - just as one accepts restrictions of other types in order to pursue or accomplish anything meaningful. A man who wants to lose weight accepts restrictions on his diet; a man who wants to run a marathon tomorrow accepts restrictions on his alcohol consumption today; a man who wants to develop a meaningful interaction with one woman accepts restrictions on his interactions with other women. This is not called “limiting oneself”; it is called “growing”. If anything, I think - from my vantage point of having no degree in anything therapeutic but in being a person who thinks about things rather a lot - that resolving to engage in as much casualness as possible and refusing to allow anything to develop beyond that is much more limiting.
Of course, it is inadvisable to accept restrictions lightly, or to accept them for inadequate return. I am not saying all men should immediately stop their screwing around and get married to the nearest available women. I am just saying, if in the course of his screwing around a guy meets a woman he finds himself drawn to and wanting to see again and again, I don’t see what’s so “limiting” about acknowledging that.
I’m also offended on a personal level. I like TSTM, and I am glad I met him, and knowing him makes my life better. About 95% of everything he says and does indicates he feels this way as well. While I am aware that I have lost some of my freewheelingness since meeting him - I no longer to to bars and dance with, or flirt with, or have drinks bought for me by strange boys, for example; also, I no longer have the guarantee of not having to spend my Tuesday night dealing with someone else’s issues - and while that freewheelingness was fun, I consider this an acceptable loss. In return I have gained a companion on some of my adventures, a thoughtful and supportive confidant, and an intelligent sounding board with a perspective unique from but still understandable by my own, among other things. I do not feel that dating TSTM limits my New York experience, on the whole; I think it encourages a tradeoff of things I don’t really care about (going to bars with my roommate) for things I do (going to new plays in tiny theaters) and introduces other things I would never have thought of doing or would not have had the courage or wherewithal to do on my own. I do not think TSTM really feels that I limit him, either, and I think to some extent he is aware that the idea of infinite freedom in the absence of all real engagement in one’s life is illusory and nihilistic, but it is upsetting to me that he brought up the idea.
31
Dec
manifesto: the demise of the computer science degree
Author: admin // Category: UncategorizedI know an awful lot of computer people, i.e. people with college degrees in computer science or computer engineering. Some of them are very intelligent; many are just smart enough to have gotten outsized ideas of their brilliance. One of their favorite things to do, as a group, is to comment on any difficulties I may be having with my work, a fondness that is in no way diminished by their having no idea what I am doing, what it entails, or why I am having trouble. So I will be having trouble with the fact that, say, my system of thousands of interdependent equations has a metastable solution and I need to find the stable solution, and they will tell me how if I use an editor that color codes different parts of speech I can easily figure out when I've misnamed a variable, and that this will fix everything. This annoys me because (1) it does not help, (2) usually they are telling me such things when I am trying to do something else, like eat dinner or have sex (yes, I date computer people, more or less exclusively… this is not recommended unless you have a very high tolerance for geekery), and (3) I have a very low tolerance for being treated like I am stupid.
The other thing that is starting to annoy me is the very concept of a computer science degree. Not because I don't think there is anything valuable about computers that I don't know, but because the people I know who know the most of that sort of thing didn't learn it from computer science courses in college; they learned it in their jobs, or in their physics or chemE classes, or through their reading. What is computer science, really? It's (1) a collection of languages, most of which are basically English with some vowels removed, (2) a logical grammar with variations, and (3) a lot of technical knowhow. Technical knowhow is not exactly what a real university education is about; it is the domain of certifications and workshops and manuals and, mostly, sweating it out until you know how to do it without sweating. Of course, there are many advanced programming ideas that I have never really understood, like why it is necessary to do it while wearing a rancid t-shirt dating from 1993, but are there really a whole degree's worth?
In the past, a computer science degree was a big deal because nobody who wasn't technical knew anything about computers. Even physical science majors graduated from college with only a rudimentary understanding of one or maybe two programming languages. But things have changed a lot in the last ten years, and they are only going to change more and faster as today's teenagers hit college and then the work force. In ten or twenty years, everyone will be a computer person. All those twelve-year-olds who write widgets for their facebook pages will be adults, and they won't have computer science degrees because by the time they got to college they will have learned all the stuff in the Intro to Java textbook. Even their least geeky cohorts will have written web pages related to projects for their high school classes. And computer science classes will change, because basic programming is increasingly something that most people in most fields need to know. When I was in college, computer science courses were available only to computer science majors, and the number of majors was limited - you couldn't just switch to the CS major (as I wanted to do temporarily in order to take the classes). Despite the fact that I majored in physics and math, which are not exactly divorced from technology, there were no computer science courses open to me. This will not always be the case. In the future, computer science courses will be offered as a general education option, perhaps as an option in lieu of physical sciences or math, and at colleges where enlightened people are in charge of things, all three will be required to some degree (no, I'm not being anti-humanities… just as you have to take English and history and a foreign language in college, you should have to take physics and math and some sort of intro-coding class). Presumably high schools will also get a bit more on-board; I took two CS courses in high school (one was required), but I don't think everyone had that option.
My point is not to diminish computer science as a discipline; in fact, the opposite. Computer programming is an essential skill, and everyone who considers themselves educated should have a basic familiarity with it. The argument that humanities majors can't learn such things is either patronizing or indicative of the fact that not enough energy has been devoted to developing methods to teach them; the argument that they won't need it is likely incorrect and certainly irrelevant, since the point of a liberal arts degree is not to develop the skills one needs for one's first job out of college but to acquaint oneself with the full breadth of human knowledge, of which computer science and the associated logical and mathematical ideas is an increasingly instrumental part.
There will still be room, of course, for people with a better understanding of computers than even those of us scientists who spend our days programming them. Just as there are now, in the future there will be hardware designers and software developers, mathematicians who write encryption algorithms and scientists who develop artificial intelligences and engineers who work to build smaller, cooler, faster chips. But while the knowledge bases relevant to these fields are related, they are not identical. Classing them all in one major (or, in larger schools, two majors - computer science and computer engineering) will become just as old-fashioned seeming as having one major for all the physical scientists. I think that as more and more non-CS majors develop computer skills, and as more specific and content-driven computing programs develop, the computer science major will become a cipher major (like Philosophy or English or General Science, which they actually had at my university), something that a motivated student can turn into a vehicle for their particular learning quest or a preparation for graduate school, but that on the transcript of an unmotivated student means nothing.
The following behaviors should be prohibited at the grocery store between 4 and 8 p.m.:
- Using a cart. You do not need a cart to pick up enough items for 1-4 people to eat for 24-48 hours. If you are shopping for the next two weeks, as some of you seem to be, (a) you need to be realistic about the size of your kitchen, and/or (b) come back later. If you are disabled or too frail to carry a basket, you should have one of those little pushcart things.
- Excessive dawdling. You should have a good idea about what you want to buy before you go into the store. Not that you aren’t allowed to change your mind, but this is not the time to conduct extensive in-store research on all the different meals you could cook tonight. Perfect mental shopping list: cobb salad, Stoneyfield farms single-serving yogurt, Amy’s frozen dinners, popcorn. Acceptable mental shopping list: premade salad, yogurt, organic frozen meals, salty snacks. Unacceptable mental shopping list: something to eat tonight, and maybe some other stuff.
- Standing in the aisle, taking up space, while you talk on the phone, fiddle with your organizer, or analyze your navel lint. Step to the side or leave the store.
- Bringing more than two children under the age of six. Nobody can wrangle three small offspring and a basket simultaneously in a crowded store; even two is pushing it.
- Spacing out in the checkout line. This is not daydream time or serious-conversation-with-boyfriend time. Move forward when the line moves; when you get to the front, go to the first register that opens up.
- Spacing out at the register. Put your items on the belt. Accept the fact that groceries cost money, and figure out how you plan to play. prepare your money or card. If you still have time and the checker is not bagging your groceries as she scans them, start bagging. It will not kill you.
- Yelling at the checker. Yes, she is slow. They are almost all slow. But what do you expect? Her job is to stand up for hours on end and perform repetitive tasks at high speed while people like you harass her. She is the same age as your children, most likely, but instead of being given a clothing-and-restaurants allowance by her parents while she drinks her way through an Arts and Letters degree at a small college upstate, she is supporting herself bagging your fussy organic groceries, which she most likely can’t afford to buy for herself. Give her a break.
A little while ago I went upstairs to find some dinner and ended up spending half a hour nodding and inching away while my roommate lectured me on relationship tactics. Apparently, men do not like it when women are too agreeable (not, I assure you, a trait I am known for) or when you are open to them or try to make them happy. They like when women start arguments with them for no reason, and when women demand that they provide expensive jewelry, and particularly when women threaten to stop speaking to them entirely if they call two hours later than they said they would call. When I told TSTM that I was going to strive to be as prickly as possible, according to this advice, he could barely contain his excitement. (that last sentence is a joke. the rest is true, if presented in a sarcastic tone.)
I know I am not really any girl’s idea of a role model in these things, and I do feel for her but considering our respective situations (me having by accident met a great guy who buys me ice cream if I mention I am craving it, even if it is two degrees out, and her devoting a significant amount of her energy to dating and still spending most of her time feeling lonely or used) if there is going to be unsolicited boy advice passing between roommates, shouldn’t it maybe be flowing in the opposite direction?
