The Stupid Comes Early
Wow. Last year it took until October for law school to make me stupid. This year? Three days, people. Three days.It’s good to be back, in a lot of ways. And the classes don’t seem too bad, except for evidence, which makes me weep. And will continue to do so until the closed book 33 question exam at the end, which will be the sole determination of the value of over 200 hours of my life. Yup. Love law school. Love.
But mostly it’s good, and A and I have the same schedule which means we don’t have to do scary things like walk into class on the first day alone, and we can double check homework and trade notes and BOTH not have the foggiest idea what the professor is talking about when he makes sure everyone picked up the packet. (A and I exchanged looks of complete resignation at that point. Packet? What is this packet of which you speak? Where do we get the packet? Distribution Center? Oh, good, another place of which I have NEVER HEARD OF. Yippee.)
But the Stupid? Oh, it is moving in quickly. A now takes the bus home, and I take the metro, so we walk out of opposite ends of the building. Yesterday he went one way, I went the other. I walk to the door and realize… I am not on the right side of the building. (Ok, y’all, don’t EVEN GET ME STARTED on the building. I KNOW it’s a big open square with 8 classrooms around the edges. I KNOW this. And I also KNOW that I get lost in it Every. Goddamn. Day. Shut up.) So I run through the building and chase after A.
Me: “A! Are you taking the metro??”
A: (stops, looks confused). “No… I, bus?”
Me: “Then why are you on this side? I was just on the wrong side because you went this way so I assumed I went the other way.”
A: “But I went this way because you went that way.”
Me: “Oh my god. We are exactly the same kind of stupid.”
Law school notwithstanding, I have also had the opportunity to be frustrated and made to look bad by my other favorite inanimate object, the Computer. So we all know my computer broke. And I sort of don’t blame it, because it gets kind of beat up coming with me to work and school. So I decided to buy a cheap new computer off e-bay and leave that one at school. So I bought the computer, and I installed the wireless card, and…. Nothing. So after several hysterical phone calls to poor S (who was at a dinner in Chicago and did not CARE that now my second computer was acting like a spoiled 5 year old, but is wonderful and noted the “rapidly approaching Crazy” note in my voice) we decided I had to download new drivers. So! Download driver to disk, install on computer, love and sunshine and kittens!
There is no love, sunshine, or kittens.
Of course, a disk is exactly .07 mb too small. So I burn it to a CD. Yay! I am useful!
I am not useful.
My computer is old enough that the CD reader does not really read burned CDs. It does that whole spinny spinny SPINNYSPINNYSPINNY Whhheeezzee... "Please Insert A Disk Into Drive D thing." And no matter how many times I tried, and no matter how many times I explained to the computer that there WAS a disk in drive D, I couldn't. Get. It. To. READ IT.
This is now the second time in my life my entire concept of reality has been challenged by an inanimate object. See, I was a philosophy major, (bet you didn’t see THAT coming), and I have a MA in philosophy, and during finals time a philosophy student can get a little crazy. So I was writing paper after paper dissecting reality, from Plato’s forms to Decartes’ “I think therefore I am”, and ran straight into an ontological brick wall.
See, I was printing a paper. Well, the computer and I were trying to print a paper, the printer was not so much cooperating. See, in the printer’s reality, it had no paper. Therefore, it couldn’t print. In MY reality, there was TOTALLY PAPER IN THE PRINTER. I could see the paper, I could feel the paper, I believed the paper was there. But the actual outcome was that there was no paper being printed. Therefore, the printer’s reality must have been correct. And then my head exploded.
So you can see why this bothered me. And nothing I did, no amount of reasoning with the computer, yelling at the computer, hitting the computer, or thinking bad thoughts about the computer would change the computer’s view of reality.
So now I own two laptops, (well, three, but just forget the third) and neither of them are currently doing ANYTHING I want them to do. I have been beaten by my own technology.
But just think! If this is only the first week of the semester, how much fun is November going to be!?
posted by Citycat @ 12:05 PM
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