Wow, it's been two weeks. Well, as I mentioned in the previous post, school is back in session. And that has certainly put a bit of a crimp on my time. I haven't played FFXII in 2 weeks, and I think it's safe to say that will continue until spring break. But here's a quick recap of what's happening and some other fun bits 'n pieces.
Over the three day weekend Steph & I used our first Zipcar (in Portland they're Flexcars). Not bad. We did a whole bunch of shopping and errands around the town. I miss a car sometimes. It's certainly much easier not having one, but when you really want to bounce around doing a bunch of stuff, one comes in handy. Zipcar will hopefully take care of that need. We also did a lovely dinner at the local Peruvian place and had a good meal. Steph's been missing the South cuisine, and by South I mean South America.
Steph is always worried about how much we'll define the gender roles in front of our future children. She grew up in a more traditional household with Mother cooking & cleaning while Father would dispense wisdom from Mount Olympus. My family not so much, but we also had our traditional settings as well. I dispute the fact that we'll end up like her family (with Steph doing all the house work while I drink beer in my underpants) because I willingly help out with the stuff around the house, and even enjoy it. Then there are times like last weekend where I organized our books, did the dishes and folded laundry while Steph played World Of Warcraft for 4 hours. I think if anything, our kids will just be confused about the traditional gender arrangements.
This came up a little bit ago. It has to do with Alanis Morrisette's You Oughta Know. During the chorus, I heard the line (keep in mind I never look up lyrics until confronted with some situation like this one) "It's not fair to deny me or the cross-eyed bear that you gave to me." Now, this song is about a slightly crazy ex-girlfriend, and that's fine. I just thought that this little bit was highlighting how crazy she was, like she was holding onto some little stuffed animal that her now-ex had won for her at a carnival or something and then promised to love her forever. You know, something stupid and sappy, which she took a little too seriously. Now the real lyrics are "It's not fair to deny me of the cross I bear that you gave to me." First off, this must be a fairly mis-heard quote. Am I the only one who heard this wrong in this particular permutation? Well, Steph thinks now I'm crazy for thinking this. She can't believe I mis-heard it in this way, calling it completely ridiculous. She also thinks the narrator for the song isn't crazy. Just pissed-ff, but not crazy pissed-off. I retorted that if it's not crazy, then will she go down on me in a theater? I think Steph wanted to slap me. Is the singer-woman crazy? Am I crazy for mis-hearing? Maybe in general?
One of our chores from the three day weekend was to do a bunch of spring cleaning and bring old stuff (clothes and some junk) over to Goodwill (using the car!). This naturally led to a treasure trove of old things I haven't seen since we moved out here because they've been buried in various boxes. Pez with a Star Wars Stormtrooper dispenser! Lots of pictures of drunken parties in The Cube! And high school pictures, too! Well, those were all good times, but there was nothing like clearing out my T-shirt drawer. Now, just to make clear right now, I did not give away my old T-shirts. Steph is collecting them and wants to make some kind of quilt out of our used T's in another 10-20 years (roughly the time scale for her projects). Here's a quick list and maybe you can try and picture the shirt and bring back some good memories.
Healy's, Kokopalie, Living Known Animal Species, White Bread 5 for $2.70, Morning Dew, Ireland (black), Celtic Dragons, DeadHead, Carpe Diem, Know Your Insects, Smithsonian (purple), Star Wars TIE Fighter, Jerry Garcia, Athenes 2004, Why I? Why B? Why Me?, Colorado, Guiness, Ireland (off-white), Rabbits, Wassail, Blues Brothers, Lincoln High Seniors, Moon Jerry Garcia (purple long-sleeved)
So many memories...
Back to school, though. I "get" to teach 3 lab sections during the term, 2 nights per lab, roughly 3 hours per night from 6:30-9:30 pm. It really sucks. It's fun to explain how it works the first few times, then you have to do it 50 times to all the different groups and it's really draining. What's so hard about electrostatics? Well, that plus grading and my own homeworks to work on doesn't leave me much time to do anything fun, like research or games. But that little segway gets me to my research point of the day. Starting in January I got a new little thing to work on with the Advisor. It has to do with a conjectured bound on the viscosity of a fluid divided by the entropy density. The conjecture is that this is always greater than or equal to 1 over 4 pi. (Too bad Blogger doesn't support LaTex, I could make this look much nicer.) This was shown to be true for a large class of theories in the AdS/CFT correspondence, and conjectured to be true more generally about 3 years ago. I was reading about how to calculated these things in a general field theory framework (rather than through AdS/CFT) and working out some basic calculations the last few weeks. Then last week someone published a counter-example. So the last week was like the 5 stages of loss. You know, denial, anger, bargaining and so on. At first we didn't believe it, then we were pissed off that such a simple counter-example could be worked out. Now we've grown to accept it and I need to find something else to occupy what little free time I have. So that sucks. Science really blows sometimes. But I learned something that may be useful someday. And now I get to start that all over again.
Well, that's all the news that's fit to print! Peace!
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A physics graduate student with little in the way of coherent thought or reasoning.
6 comments:
Nope. I was very, very confused about the significance of a cross-eyed bear as a gift for quite some time, before one of my cousins thoughtfully explained it to me. And yeah, I'd call her "crazy". I mean, you know, not clinically crazy or anything of the sort. But certainly emotionally unstable and overly invested in a relationship type crazy, yeah.
Mayhaps its the influence of a strong Catholic upbrining, but I neaver heard anything other than "cross I bear." I always thought it was a pretty common idiom, and have never to this day considered the idea that it might be "cross-eyed bear."
Is she crazy. Nah. Just pissed. That's ok. It was the early 90s- music was all about being pissed.
If you can post any of those pictures of Cube parties, I will totally love you forever, man. Seriously. Any reminders of the days of cramped living conditions, perpetual VH1, Prisoner's Dillema, you stalking Steph, etc., will be liked by me.
If you and Steph have kids I imagine they'll be funny little creatures. I think that you and Steph's collective oddness will easily shape them far more than any perceptions of traditional gender roles.
Oh, and the right answer to your question- "What kind of theater?"
First of all, I would like to point out that that particular Alanis album (Jagged Little Pill) is a pretty kick ass album all around; perfect background music for when you are playing Stratego and waiting to watch SNICK. I would go so far as to call it on of the seminal albums of the decade, especially since I would be given extra cool-points for using seminal to describe a (basically) feminist album. But I digress...
I too, right up until about 5 minutes or so, heard the lyric as "cross-eyed bear." I'm still not convinced these aren't the words, whetver the linar notes might say. I had a similar interpretation to you, although not so crazy, just bitter and angry. I mean, she might slash your tires or call you at all hours of the night, but you aren't going to find your new girlfriend's head on your doorstep with a rose in her mouth anytime soon.
Interesting sidenote: Supposedly Alanis wrote "You Outta Know" about Dave Coulier. That's right, Uncle Joey from Full House. Doesn't that make the song like six times as awesome?
P.S. Did they have cool-points in Oregon? Maybe that was a Chi-Town thing.
Good to know I'm not alone. I wasn't implying that the singer should be institutionalized kind of crazy or Fatal Attraction, but more along the lines you guys have described. And Llama, I'm not saying "cross I bear" isn't a real expression - as someone who listens to the Allman Brothers, I am quite familiar with it and have used it before. Just that the particular wording she uses is very obtuse to get her point across and it sounds a lot like cross-eyed bear. An awful lot.
As for the cube pictures, we only have the photos, no negatives or digital stuff. We don't have a scanner to do this, but Steph has one at work, so we'll try and go through sometime soon and pick a half-dozen or so to post. I won't make any promises about the quality.
And Hoff, when we had this discussion we looked up some stuff about this song and that's when I discovered it was supposedly about Dave Coulier. That does make him an order of magnitude cooler, and frankly makes this song seem even wierder... Is it really worth it to stalk Uncle Joey? Cool points translates nicely, so event though I don't recall using them back in the day on the West Coast, I get your drift.
Ha ha, your "cross-eyed bear" mistake reminds me of when my Mom and Aunt were fighting over the Bee Gees song of "More than a woman" and my mom thought the line was actually "4-letter woman" and my aunt says "that's crazy it's bald-headed woman." Maybe they'd hear it as the cross-eyed bear too?
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