According to The New Owner's Guide to Beagles, when beagles are not completely focused by their current task, they are completely distracted by potential tasks. They are an easily excitable breed, and tend to eat anything that could possibly be food, real or imaginary. They are also notoriously loud.

I just knew there was a reason I've always thought beagles were awesome, and not just because I really loved Shiloh. (I've read it again since the 6th grade and not quite liked it...but still love the dog itself.

Not that I've gotten a beagle. And my own mutts are adorable. But...the cute!

If I ever do get a dog from a breeder, it will be a beagle.

What I love about local politics:
Anyone that's interested in talking about issues in local politics tends to have a deep or personal understanding of them. Local candidates may be busy, but there's a fairly good chance of getting to talk to them either one-on-one, or in personal groups. It's unlikely that I'm instantly against (or for) any one candidate (or issue). (This is, however, kind of starting to change due to the growing importance of campaign funds, which feels like a national infection.)

What I hate about national politics:
I seem to have an equal chance of engaging in a meaningful/respectful discourse about issues or candidates as I do of walking into a cave of echoing soundbites about issues or candidates. (Actually, it's probably a less-than-equal chance, biased in favor of the soundbite buffet.)

The news channel I normally watch has mentioned "the lipstick battle" about ten times in the last four hours. I think I would have liked to know more about investigations into the recent homicide wave, instead of the quick shoveling out of murder and population statistics for the last few decades.

This presidential election is making me feel cranky, and overall...just angry. Like a slow-burn of bitterness, where I don't even want to think about the other elections involved.

However, I have also stopped actively looking for work. This is, surprisingly enough, making me feel a whole lot better about the world. I'm also planning on seeing a lot of good friends in the next two months, which gives me something to think about instead of bashing my head into the nearest wall; a major plus, I tell you.

My search for employment continues--because of a major screw-up that I hadn't imagined even I could done. I get a perfectly cheerful response to my application that would have made me squee into the sunset had I received it on time--instead, it sits for three weeks in one of my e-mail accounts because I thought I had routed all the mail to my main one. I even e-mailed the account a few times to check it, but DIDN'T do the simple thing and just log into the damn thing.

I wanted this job, too. Really badly, even if it was only a small internship, because the people sounded so nice and there was so much to learn and and it involved editing and researching and drawing up websites for ridiculously cool nonprofits.

:head: --> :desk:

"Dear --- internship applicant,

Thank you for your interest in the --- internships. More than 30 people applied for our three positions, and most of them were highly qualified. Making decisions to narrow the field was difficult; we're sorry to have to tell you that we ended up choosing eight other finalists.

I wish you the best of luck with your writing. If you're ever in ---, please stop by and visit, and please feel free to reapply in the future.

Sincerely,

---"

::shattered:: I didn't even get named. At least they got back to me quick, I guess.

Is it because I didn't print my application double-sided despite sending it to an environmental news publication? Is it?!

Do you know what is the worst possible thing to hear when you're struggling to drag your bike over 10 lines of train tracks? The sound of an ONCOMING TRAIN. Of course, it was only crawling along at a mile an hour or something, and I definitely would have had time to cut across, but I was so spooked that I rushed back from whence I came. It wasn't really worth the chance that I'd be stuck on the wrong side of a hundred-car-long train...that is definitely the last time I try to cut through the industrial district. Spent about an hour trying to bike around it and kept getting cut off by freeways, which is exactly what I get for thinking that I can improvise a route home.

The good news being that someone at the publication I have been constantly going back to for data references told me that I could send my thesis to them when I'm done, and MAYBE they could see if it has the potential to be an article. It's not like it was a promise, or that I don't adore writing for school newspapers but...

ZOMG! A publication with a shelf-life longer than 3.7 seconds! (We settled that in high school; of course, it depends on whether or not the paper was folded when it was dropped.) I didn't even have to beg!

...this does, however, mean that my thesis actually has to be useful in the real world. Dagnabit.

Failure

I'm about a week late on a thesis deadline, with another one coming up, have two mini-research papers going on for classes, have to write an article by Friday, have to work the desk-shifts I signed up for weeks ago when I thought it was a *fantastic* way to use up work study, and I just realized that on the last internship application I sent out, not only was the date "February 27, 2007", I didn't even sign the damn thing. I wonder if they dock points if they notice that an application was sent using overnight mail? ($17 for postage--I wonder if you could track the fiscal impact of procrastination based on the marginal willingness to pay for shaving a day off of your document's arrival. If you could differentiate between documents, that is.)

My roommate, who is the most on-top-of-things person I know, pulled an all-nighter last night because she's feeling the pressure of coming deadlines, and I've gotten done maybe half (optimistic!) of what she has. CRAP. This is when I know I'm in big trouble.

...and yet I've still taken however many minutes to write this rambling-thing.

I went out to eat with a couple of friends Sunday night, and the topic of cooking (as always, when around food) came up. My friend Alan mentioned this cook book called The Breath of a Wok by Grace Young and Alan Richardson, which got us started on a conversation about what stir fry is, and if nonstick pans and electric stoves mess with its definition.

I grew up in a house with gas stoves and a real, cast-iron wok that had been about $10 when my mom got it in college, and nowadays would probably be closer to my half of the rent. I'm always a little forlorn when standing in front of my nonstick wok, its flat bottom in complete contact with the electric coil. The worst part is the loss in temperature control: not only can you not change the heat as quickly when you don't have a flame that jumps to your command, but the shape of the wok allows for differences in the concentration of liquids, and in turn, how quickly they evaporate or cook the food it surrounds.

I've seen tons of blogs with cooking recipes, so after this conversation I thought, "Why not?"

I guess as my first foray into a cooking post, I'll do something simple and infamous: fried rice.

Fried rice is awesome, not just because it's easy to make, but like the Casserole, it's an incredibly flexible food. Probably the only common string between the many, many combinations of ingredients and methods would be the rice, though in some varieties (especially the vegetarian ones), rice can take a definite backseat.


( Ingredients, etc. behind the cut. )

I'm involved with a mentoring group at my college--I'm sure most schools have something similar; basically, freshman get paired up with upperclassmen who help them get situated. As a networking/resource-type program, I think the most benefit comes from meeting up with other freshmen in friendly-settings, but that might be a personal thing.

This group is aimed toward students of underrepresented ethnic backgrounds, or first-generation college students: racial minorities, lower-income students, and/or kids whose parents didn't go to college. The group's mission is to help students adjust to being racial or income minorities, since this is a private college: largely white and historically rich.

At the first meeting this year, the main coordinator of the program stood up and said, "Now I'm going to do something that might seem counter-intuitive. ( I'm going to split you up according to race. )

I've spent the past weekend, the one before that, and just about all the days in-between, goofing off.

It's not like my classes are particularly hard. The research I'm doing on plastics recycling isn't actually hard either, just a little time consuming, but I have so much time this year anyway that I don't really get why I'm so damn behind.

I'm trying not to get sucked back into the stress culture of my school, but it's kind of hard: partially because I'm getting more disorganized by the day, and partially because...it's kind of fun.

Stress is a proxy for work amount, so like many things at my college, the stress culture that has developed does mean something, but nonetheless shouldn't be taken too seriously because it's amplified by rhetoric. Kind of like some articles in our newspaper, or other publications, events and clubs: enjoy the truth and fun in it, but always with a little modicum of academically-emo-salt. Or at least, it's how I'm trying to look at it, and not as missing all my internal deadlines for papers and crap. Even though my friends all joke about being behind, when we actually sit and talk about progress, that kind of talk usually gets dropped.

It's always kind of hard to figure out where you stand in relation to everyone else academically, and the default setting is that you are two steps behind the entire student body in terms of life, the universe, and everything.

::sigh:: As with many things, I wish I had done my assignments on Friday.

I'm currently doing research which involves China's roaring demand in the international market, so that might be why I have China on the brain, but...I just had to share this somewhere.

The National Aquatics Center in Beijing, being built for the 2008 Summer Olympics. Reading about its construction is just kind of amazing (and one factor in China gorging on internationally traded plastic). I don't how far along they currently are, but they started in 2003, and all construction in China halts in 2007, so they must be pretty close.

There's also a scroll-down menu for you to browse through other venues that are being built for the event. They're humongous. Gorgeous, all of them, and extremely extravagant. I know the Olympics are supposed to be some kind of debut-to-the-world, but *cripes*. They're all so huge, I can't help but wonder about the maintenance they're going to need when this is all over. And who's going to use them? Are they going to be open to the public for a fee? Bought by schools and/or privatized?

I'm also finding it a little hard to get into the spirit with the fuzzy friendlies (Beijing's Olympic mascots) because of all the stuff going down in Myanmar (AKA Burma). I don't know how many people in China know exactly what it is their government is supporting financially (just as it's hard to know how many people in the U.S. know what's happening in Iraq), but it doesn't really make the "Let's be green and sustainable and good" approach to construction seem genuine as a whole. I've seen how excited or quietly proud people are about the Olympics, and it is pretty cool, *but* the Chinese government itself...eh. Just kind of wondering if they're using Olympic-happy-hype as a distraction.

On that note, yay for Jim Carey.

(I just learned how to embed hyperlinks into text--could you tell?)

I just found out about this website, FreeRice, that brings up an English word and four choices for its definition. Get it right, and the three sponsors on the page for that given word will donate 10 grains of rice to the United Nations.

I'm never sure whether or not sites like this, or the Hunger Site, along with accompanying pages for breast cancer, child health, literacy, the rain forest, and animal rescue) and its click-based mechanisms really work, but it does generate awareness, at least.

Rice, also, is pretty cheap. I'm sure the price varies, but if you can buy a 50 lb. (about 22.7 kg) sack for $20-25 USD, each pound is about 40 or 50 cents.

A single grain (unit "gr"), which isn't exactly equivalent to a grain of rice, but still close enough, is about 0.000142857 pounds (or 0.000064799 kilograms, for the metric system folk). So 10 grains costs a little over 1/10 of a cent.

It's pretty easy to get at least 100 grains, and the vocabulary level changes according to how many consecutively correct answers you get (of course, it's much easier to slip than to gain levels). A little over a month old, and the site totals have been increasing by jumps, holding steady, and then jumping again. (The day before yesterday it remained hovered over 53 million grains; yesterday it was about 73 million.)

Anyway, it's a cool, well laid-out site, and I recommend it as a semi-constructive way of procrastinating on work.

*For reference, assuming that gr is an adequate measure of a grain of rice, there are about 7000 grains in a pound of rice. (Or, 15,432 in a kilogram.)

So...I have decided to commit to using my LJ as something other than a medium for fanfic-comments.

As to what I would actually put in here, I have no idea. If no one is going to read it, what's the point? And would I really want people reading my nonsensical ramblings in the first place?

( Well, I guess there is one thing. )