My students are starting to turn in lab evaluations. Since they aren't my personal evaluations, I can peek at them now and see comments about how my students love me but hate the lab. One person wrote along the lines of, "I don't want to be an asshole about this, but these labs are really worthless. If it weren't for Jessamyn I wouldn't have learned anything." And I'm glad they all think I'm doing a good job; I feel confident about my teaching skills. But it pisses me off so much that the labs are like this!

The people who are responsible for them are 2/3 incompetent and disorganized, and even if they did an overhaul I really doubt it would help very much. On top of that, edicts come down from the professors that make things worse, like turning in the lab during class instead of being able to take it home and work on it. And the writeups are just so bad, and nobody takes responsibility. On top of that, there isn't even a discussion section for the course, just lecture and labs. Aren't you people here to teach these kids physics? Don't you want them to take a spirit of rational inquiry or at least a basic understanding of the world around them away from this, instead of a sense of confusion and mismanagement? It makes me so mad, because no one whose job it is care, and there's no incentive at all as a graduate student to try to do anything about it. Maybe we have less graduate student manpower than a bigger department would, and maybe we have to operate within the constraints of the resources available to us. But everyone keeps passing the buck, and the results are wronging a lot of students who are paying good money to learn something, and driving people who might otherwise have loved physics. Amazing lab experiences were what kept me in physics; would I have stayed if it had been like this? Not in a million years.

I was making myself some dinner yesterday when the doorbell rang. I answered, and standing in the rain is someone I've never seen before: "Excuse me, did you park a car on the 2300 block of this street? I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but it's been broken into." RRRRRRR.

The guy lived in the house right behind where I parked the car, which is how he noticed. They broke the passenger's side window (wtf? Civic locks are notoriously easy to jimmy, and every time Ben's radio got stolen when he lived in downtown LA, the window never got broken), rifled through everything, skipped over some CDs and the radio faceplate (again, wtf?), and took... wait for it... A ZIPLOC BAG OF CHANGE.

I was less upset than I would have imagined I'd be, so I made a police report, and my housemate Jen helped me clean out the bulk of the broken glass from the car. It sucked that it was raining at the time, and a lot of water had already gone into the car, but we put a trash bag over the window opening and it had dried out inside by this morning, when I got the window replaced. This is the second police report I've made in two months!

Dear thief, maybe you could have left me some of that change to help pay for the $100 new window? Oh wait, I guess since I left nothing of value in the car, you needed the change to cover your losses. SO LAME.

Today sucks because my wallet got stolen out of my office and the professor I want to work with was supposed to have a meeting with me but didn't show up.

OMFG, make a xerox of EVERYTHING in your wallet and put it in a safe place. I didn't know one of my debit card numbers and I didn't know my driver's license number (I just got it like a month ago!) and it really sucks.

Theft angers me, but especially out of a school. Did you know that when someone steals your wallet and wants to use your credit cards, frequently the first thing they do is buy a small amount of gas? This checks the card's validity in a place where there isn't a person to interact with and no camera is recording. My thief doing this is probably what caused my credit card company to call me and check up on me, because I didn't even notice my wallet was gone.

You know what's ironic? Until recently, I never carried a wallet and kept everything in my purse (which I didn't take with me to work or school). I would only carry around my driver's license and student ID. The result of this, though, was often that I forgot the card I needed or didn't have cash when an unexpected need for it came up. Ben convinced me to get a wallet. But unlike a guy, I don't want to always have it in my pants because of how women's pants fit. So it got stolen! I will think twice about where to keep things in the future.

I hurt my knee again.

There's an intramural soccer team composed entirely of physics graduate students that I joined, and they had a practice yesterday that I went to. I don't really play soccer much, but it sounded fun, and I'm in pretty good shape now from running, swimming, and yoga. So I went, and I wasn't great but I did pretty well. It helped a lot that I put so much effort into being able to run again (mainly because that was something I couldn't do for a long time after my knee injury, so that's something I focused on in physical therapy and am still doing). Anyways, we had been playing for a little over an hour, so my knee was probably somewhat tired, and I tried to save a goal and somehow put pressure on my knee funny and it gave out, made a little popping noise. I was really afraid I had pulled the ligament again, and also really embarassed because basically practice broke up after that. But I didn't put any weight on it for ten minutes or so, sat talking to a couple people, and then was able to get up and walk back to DRL. See, the fact that I could walk at all tells you that it isn't as bad as it was last year. Ben came and got me with the car, and once we got home I iced it and took some aspirin, which I still had from last year for keeping down inflammation.

I thought I'd be able to go on campus today for classes and a meeting I had, but when I got up this morning it hurt to put weight on it. It's not nearly as swollen as last time, but it is a little swollen. I've been keeping it elevated, icing, taking occasional aspirin... I guess this time I know what to do. My current prediction is that I should be ok to walk on it within a week, if not sooner, though it'll take awhile before I'll be ok running again.

What really pisses me off, though, is that after physical therapy I was supposed to be ok for anything. I asked my physical therapist about tennis, which has sudden starts and stops like soccer, and she said that would be fine with the therapy I'd been doing (assuming I kept doing it). I asked her about skiing before I went home and she said that would be fine, although when I got home and tried it my leg felt so weak I had to stop after two runs. It seems like anything I want to be able to do with my knee, I have to specifically train for. I trained for walking and running and weightlifting, but I didn't train for soccer so now I'm out for who knows how long. How do you even train for skiing? I am just mad because I don't want to keep having knee problems, I've done all the things that people told me to do, and I want to be active without worrying about my knee all the time.

I'll see how it is on Monday, and contact my physical therapist... I'll probably have to go back for a while. I hope that when the swelling goes down I don't have to redo a lot of what I did in the fall for physical therapy. It's really annoying and really scary not being able to walk, and not being able to count on your body.

My thinking on this has, like most people's, evolved a lot over the last few years. It's fluttered through all sorts of feelings and emotions, through examinations of freedom of religion and whether profiling is helpful or not, through examinations of freedom of speech, through the questions of when, if ever, the ends justify the means. I feel clear on two points.

The first is an echo of things I've said before, that terrorism is a hateful thing, based on a system of values that deserves nothing but contempt. It's true, in some cases, that people turned to terrorism such as the Palestinians are often coming from extremely desperate circumstances, and have had everything taken from them. Or alternately, the Israelis (who I feel are equally guilty of mass civilian slaughter), who are trying to defend what they feel is their home in a sea of hostility and danger. We must have empathy for that, and lapses born of desperation should be expected. But they are not justified. But when we see hurtful systems of values being adopted elsewhere and being used to hurt us, I think it's essential to first examine our own behavior to look for our own ethical lapses. Where have we committed the same mistakes? Where have we invented our own? We must be sure we are acting faithfully on our own principles beforing accusing anyone else. And I think it's critical in fighting terrorists that we stand by our moral code. Abandoning free speech, abandoning right to trial, abandoning any of our own rights or the rights of others, which we assert are universal, kills the thing we seek to defend. I still believe something I said a time ago that when a person acts towards destruction of life, that person's life is forfeit. But that does not mean we should take it, and break our own code.

The second point concerns the loss, the hurt, the tremendous waste. There's a feature in the New York Times right now that talks about families who lost someone; apparently they did a profile 1 year after and have now done a second for many families. You can read a few, and they're interesting, but what's amazing and terrible is to see how many profiles they've done, and realize how small a fraction that is of all the people who were hurt by what happened. Have you seen Munich"? It's well-executed and very disturbing, and I highly recommend it. And after you see it, most probably you'll be moved to feel the way I do, that all this fighting is mostly a terrible waste. I think one always has to realize that whenever a person takes an action, they have from their point of view all the reason in the world to take that action, and from their perspective they are being reasonable, just, and caring. And it's terrible to think, isn't it, about some of the worldviews necessary for the actions we've seen in recent years, both from the Muslim extremists and from our own government. It's foolish to say we shouldn't defend ourselves, but equally foolish to do so in a way that wastes life and hurts our own cause.

It's to the point where I can barely listen to world news any more. I'm not sure what's to be done, other than vote and keep pushing the world with my own small strength in the direction I want it to go.

I sort of try to keep my political and religious views out of here, mainly because you all have such disparate views, and since I wouldn't address a varied crowd with my leanings, why would I risk alienating people on here? I go to a good deal of trouble to maintain good relationships with people I respect.

That said, ( let me clear my throat )

I try to be diplomatic about most differences of opinion, especially because you can learn a lot by understanding what leads someone else to believe a certain thing. But some things, I have a hard time respecting.