welcome to summer.

i have 9 mosquito bites.

new jersey is a dangerous place.

"so now i am off to the doctor to get my turbuculosis test checked and start the hepatitis b vaccine series."

"are you going somewhere?"

"princeton."

still angry.

this has been going on for several months, and i have not yet made a post about it because it is making me angry and i was hoping it would go away.

several republican governors and members of various legislative bodies have decided that cutting funding to education would be a good way to balance budgets in this not-quite-post-recession era.

i'm going to say this as simply as possible: cutting public education is anti-democracy.

i wish i could engage in wild conspiracy speculation, but part of me is cynical enough to think it really is just short-sightedness.

however. a democracy needs an educated public to function. that's all there is to it. if your unwashed masses can't think critically, read at more than a third grade level, and understand statistics, you don't have a functioning democracy. you might have an oligarchy, or a plutocracy, but you don't have a democracy.

while i'm ranting, education isn't job training either, so mr. president, you can shut the fuck up about needing to graduate more engineers. no one needs to do multinational corporations' job training for them. their job is to train workers. the job of education - primary, secondary, and tertiary - is to educate citizenry who are able to use the limits of their natural intelligence.

admittedly, the united states as a country is anti-intellectual, so everything that's going on fits right in and no one really cares. except me, apparently. and this is my soapbox, and what else is the internet for?

besides cats, of course. i have no objection to cats.

new car feature.

forget all those fancy things like remote start. what i want is a car that, while turned off, detects rain and closes its own windows.

news.

yesterday, my "application status" for transferring to princeton theological seminary changed from "your application is being reviewed by the committee" to "you have been accepted!"

i thought the inclusion of the exclamation point was cute.

i've had mostly good experiences at palmer, but i was an outlier in their student body to begin with, and starting in the fall, they are changing their curriculum to make me even less of a fit. since i have two years left to go, i figured applying for a transfer to another school wasn't a bad idea.

so i will be spending the next two years at princeton and receive my master of divinity there.

this was a pretty tough decision, made partly more difficult by having been in this exact same place about 10 years ago. mcgill decided to get rid of their classics department because it didn't have enough students to make it financially viable. unfortunately for me, i was majoring in classics at the time. i remember doing the research about transferring to other schools with the tension building in my shoulders. it was literally painful to think about transferring. in the end i didn't, partly because i had 1 year left at mcgill and would have had 2 at any other school. in retrospect, that might not have been the best decision i made - my last year at mcgill was my worst academically, emotionally, physically...

on the other hand, i did learn something from it. i learned when to run away. so about a month ago, i applied to princeton. i have, naturally, been ridiculously stressed out since then, but now at least some of that stress is relieved. the other difference about this situation is that i would have 2 years left, whatever school i went to. and there were some people who thought i should have gone to princeton from the beginning.

so. princeton. huh.

now we just need to get the house sold, and life will be completely overhauled. eek.

alternative uses for hebrew textbooks.

killing yellowjackets that built a nest outside your window and get in the office.

kicking and screaming.

so this post (and several more) is way overdue. life has kind of sucked for a while.

anyway.

about 2 months ago, my phone started getting stupid. it was kind of a halfway smartphone, a nokia e71x running symbian 60. it had all of about 2 apps, which didn't bother me. it surfed the web fine with a real browser, which was something of a novelty when i got it. the only real main issue i had with it was google refused to make a gmail app for it, and i couldn't sync my calendars live over the air. instead i had to remember to do it manually from my mac via bluetooth.

then, suddenly, it lost the ability to cross-reference incoming text messages with the address book. all text messages were coming in labelled with just the sending phone number. which was fine when it was his and i had memorized it, but i was sending a lot of "my phone has gone stupid, who is this?" text messages back to people because i had no idea who they were or what they were talking about. grr, etc.

so i log into my account and discover, hey, i'm eligible for a new phone upgrade. w00t.

i was thinking maybe a blackberry. he said he thought it would be the best option for me. i am just not a fan of the iphone. not that i'm an anti-apple person, i like my macbookpro and ipod nano just fine. but i don't like the iphone. the touchscreen feels weird under my fingers and i like to keep my email accounts separated, which apple disapproves of.

so i'm wandering around the store, playing with some of the demos, and i see this motorola phone running android. it looks interesting. one of my co-workers loves his droid. and it's all googly, so i know i can get my email on it. and not only my regular email, but school went google too a while back, so i could use it to check both, which i thought might be helpful, since i'm a TA this semester and i am not giving out my phone number. and it's smaller than the blackberry torch.

also, much to my surprise, the sales guy seems to know what he's talking about when it comes to technology, and while he's an iphone fan, he says that people have been having problems with the blackberry torch and complaining about it.

so i buy the motorola atrix. somehow, when it rings up, it's $50 less than he quoted me, but i'm not arguing.

then i go home and set it up and start googling it.

turns out, it's a brand new phone and i got it - again, somehow - before the quoted launch date on the internet. wtf? i'm an early adopter??

i can say, having used it for a bit now, it's pretty cool. it uses different glass than the iphone and doesn't feel so weird under my fingertips. and i'm getting email and calendar updates on the fly, which is pretty cool. it flashes a little green LED at me when i have email or a text message. i like it. and you can remove the battery, unlike the iphone, which was really nice when the fingerprint scanner/unlock button decided working. i started freaking out, all "oh shit, my brand new phone has a hardware issue," but always the first thing to try is a hard reboot. which you can't do on an iphone. pulled the battery out of my atrix, popped it back in, turned the phone on, and hey, it's working again.

i'm not into apps, so i've only downloaded like, 3. got the sony reader app, so all of my purchased ebooks are on the phone, but the screen is tiny and bright, so reading them kind of sucks. the southwest airline app is pretty cool, though. we took a vacation to boston last month and i checked into our flight home while laying in bed in the hotel. got in the 'A' boarding group too (if you've ever flown southwest, you know what that means. if you haven't, just know it's a Good Thing).

also, the browser crashes occasionally, but as android is based on linux, i just have to go into the applications menu and force quit. yay.

so yeah. apparently, i'm an accidental early adopter. huh. i have joined the twenty first century. or something.

i hate march.

yes, there's been a lot going on and no, i haven't blogged about anything.

i fucking hate march. suicide watch month almost over.

for the time being: my parents and my brother are safe in tokyo. he lives on the southwest tip of honshu and has been mostly unaffected by the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear power station repercussions. will be picking mom and dad up friday night.

when is it going back to 70F? seriously.

march. bah.

deception.

so earlier this week, it was sunny, with temperatures in the 60s F. i was driving around with my sunroof open.

now they are forecasting 1-3 inches of snow tonight.

i know, i know, it's still winter. that doesn't make me any happier about it. what the hell is going on, getting a taste of spring in the middle of february?

damn you, weather!

i suppose on the plus side, we've been cleaning out our house in order to get it ready to sell. i found all my warm, thick winter sweaters yesterday.

i have been remiss.

so, it's already wednesday. and apparently, i forgot to tell people that i got a new laptop last saturday. whoops.

my sister lost her job in the fall, but just started a new one at the beginning of the year. her new job gave her a mac. and the only computer she has at home is an ancient dell that dad bought her when she was in college (i don't know why i got laptops and she got a clunky desktop. i assume it's what she asked for). so we agreed that she would buy my old macbook and we would set it up for her and teach her how to use it.

so i now have a brand new, shiny macbook pro. the smallest, cheapest one, admittedly, made cheaper by apple's edumacation pricing. there are some weirdnesses to it, like why did apple change the functions of the F-keys? and the tap-to-click functionality of the giant mouse pad/button comes turned off by default, another wtf? and oh, there's a difference between mini-dvi and mini-display-port? well, shit. that's two more adapters i had to buy and i couldn't use my nice 19" lcd monitor until yesterday.

but in general, it's a nice upgrade over a macbook. the backlit keyboard alone is almost enough to justify the price. and the 4gb of ram ought to make running windows on it a lot easier, so maybe i'll finally get rid of my giant gaming box that i keep for playing the odd windows game and writing papers in wordperfect (i hate word. hate, hate, hate).

if a cheap white macbook lasted me 3 1/2 years with only a ram upgrade, i'm hoping this one will last me at least as long. so, through the end of this degree (2 1/2 years left, including the semester that starts saturday), and then some. i guess my next computer will be bought just before i start my ph.d.?