I went swimming at the gym and was walking back to my office, just now. There is about two inches of the thick, wet slush that people here call snow on the ground, and it was raining small ice pellets as I walked. I was on Walnut, which has a lot of shops and things by the university, and I noticed a guy in a DHL uniform, next to a parked DHL truck, lobbing a snowball over a bus going by. "What is he doing," I wondered, until noticing that behind the bus on the opposite side of the street was a UPS truck! The UPS guy had been standing in the street, but jumped into the truck and out the other side of the front to get snowballs to throw back, while the DHL guy kept pelting his truck!

It was pretty funny.

( a long and irritating story )

So, long story short, I am teaching three lab sections instead of one, and have a lot more grading that I have in the past. And am still expected to do research. But at least I'm not doing two sections at once.

Something kind of funny happened at my first lab section last night; after I finished explaining grading policy and everything, and told everyone to get started, one of the guys at the station nearest me turns to me and says, "So you're Ben's girlfriend?" I was very surprised and said yes, and then he told me he's an undergrad in the graphics lab Ben works in, and has seen me around. Ben and I wondered if we'd ever end up teaching the same students, and this is probably as close as we'll get.

And apparently last night, when I had fallen asleep and Ben was reading in bed, I rolled over and opened my eyes and glared at him. Ben claims that he said, "What is it, sweets?" and I said, "Bang! Bang!" and rolled back over. I don't remember that, but his telling me has prompted me to randomly interject "Bang!" into our conversations and e-mails today.

This is extremely funny, though only if you've seen some scientific conference presentations in your time. The paper is also hilarious.

My liquid crystals professor, Randy Kamien, is crazy. But very entertaining, and an excellent speaker. I liked his class a lot, and I tried to write down in the margins of my notes whenever he said something especially funny. Most of these are kind of strange, though.

"It was just like when I invented grunge."

"Now if you have an algebraic relation, then you're finished! You can give it to a computer, or a dog, and tell them x and y and have it spit out z. But if you have a transcendental relation, you have a problem. Because few dogs can solve transcendental equations."

"This took me a long time to figure out how to draw. But that's because Decepticon was doing something to Opticon in the room behind me."

"Now we will study the much-storied XY model. Please write it that way in your notes, the 'much-storied XY model'. I think if we all start calling it that, never just the 'XY model', then it will stick!"

"Have you ever thought about what the course would be like if Eeyore were teaching?"

"Smectics are like ogres. HOW are smectics like ogres?" *long pause* "They have layers!"

"Whenever you hear such a statement in a talk, you should throw up at the very idea!"

"This is nice and happy! It's like a Goldstone mode! But this is horrible and sick! It has a one over q squared!"

"A window slammed. A maid screamed. A young surgeon exited an operating room. A pirate ship appeared in the distance."

By the way, a long-ish talk which my class spent all semester preparing to read is online here.

This is really fantastic. Star Wars: Backstroke of the West.

I did this thing with Jeanine this semester where one of us gives the other a word to write about, and the other just writes whatever they think about it and gives the first person a word to write about. It's a fun way to pretend that your good friends are closer and emulate actual conversation, rather than the exchange of "what's going on in my life" e-mails. I still miss Jeanine, though, but I'll see her and everyone in Los Alamos in a couple weeks. I wanted to share our first 30 exchange words, though. They are:

fresh fruit
bran
Mexican food
fat
fall
lightsaber
Valhalla
apocalypse
intelligentsia
wig
comics
imperialism
contradictory
viewpoint
parents
stitches
A is A
pride
cats
bad news
sports
trumpet
free
clams
daydream
flaming
hysteria
militant feminism
emotional men
delivery
Christmas carols
autobiography
running
exile

I'll give you bonus points if you can guess which words were generated by whom, but not that many bonus points because it's a 50-50 guess.

EDIT: More words, after exile.

New Year
Judaism
Jesus
reinterpret
Penny Arcade
guitar
dorms
commune
hippie
prayer
nature
lying
Laura Ingalls Wilder
the Third World
World War II
Cold War
intentions
cowardice
survival
identity
Islam
foreign policy
playground
body modification
Africa
primal
racism
victim
Soviet Union
music
coffee house
fulfillment
scatter-brained
initiative
blood-thirsty
wasteful
manipulative
illustration
art history
Italian food
dieting
image
homework
real
map
lost
swamp
flight
dream
reckless
pinnacle
design
virtue
inappropriate
late
neuroses
OCD
hygiene
cookie dough
cannibalism
metabolism
energy
fundamental
teaching
skill
quick
nostalgia
afterlife
porn
kinky
taboo
insecure
suppressed memories

Something totally weird about iTunes is how it keeps track of what songs you play. On the one hand, it's cool to see what songs I play the most, and what percentage of my songs are unplayed by iTunes (lots of stuff I got from other people but never sorted through, and some old CDs I ripped but haven't craved in the year or so I've gone digital with my music). It's bizarre, though, to sort my songs by last played and see sometime in February, when I was in the library listening to Swan Lake. But if I listen to Swan Lake again, that information is gone forever! Not that it's especially important... it's also odd to see how songs populate my most played list, like once when I went to class and didn't quite turn off my iPod, so it cycled through my short Franz Ferdinand playlist a lot and now those songs will never come off my most listened to. There's also a huge chunk of songs that I last listened to when we drove my car out from New Mexico. This is all so interesting that it's obvious to me I'll never reset my song count, and I'll be sad when I eventually reinstall my OS or something and lose this information, useless though it is.

Anyhow, that said, iTunes meme.

iTunes Pop Quiz

How many total songs?
6300

Sort by Song Title - first and last?
"'Round Midnight" - Kronos Quartet - Monk Suite
"Zwitter" - Rammstein - Mutter

Sort by Time - first and last?
"desert2" - 0:01 (I have no idea what this is. I listened to it and it sounds like the Sarlacc. If you're ever bored, listen to the shortest songs in iTunes; it's hilarious. Most of mine were opera lines and sound effects.)
"Learn to Speak German" - 1:12:46 (sweet! I shoud listen to this.)

Sort by Album - first and last?
"'Heroes' Symphony" - Philip Glass
"Zoot Suit Riot" - Cherry Poppin' Daddies

Sort by Artist - first and last?
A New Found Glory
Zorica Markovic

Find "sex," how many songs show up?
28 (mostly from the Red Hot Chili Peppers album "Blood Sugar Sex Magik")

Find "death," how many songs show up?
10

Find "love," how many songs show up?
113

Find "peace", how many songs show up?
1 ("Love and Peace or Else", by U2)

Find "fuck", how many songs show up?
8

I think that now I will explore the depths of my unlistened to music. Uh, I mean study.

This is really cool, lots of interesting details.