kim, 
moominmolly, and the_xtina, this is for you.
okay, effective immediately, the following three things mean you owe me fifty bucks (per incident): saying “email is slow” and not providing any details, asking “is the email system down” and staring expectantly at me, and joking about the email system being slow.
fifty bucks. per incident!
i have to send my watch in for repairs. it’s a really beautiful citizen eco-drive watch that s. got for me, back when it was still pretty neat to have a solar-powered watch. i like it a whole lot. i’m really a little bit anxious about the idea of sending it away in a little box to have unknown people mess with it and maybe drop it on the floor or step on it and smash it into tiny tiny bits of ex-my pretty watch.
the problem with the watch, in case anyone cares, is that it’s about six or seven years old now and its little battery doesn’t hold a charge like it used to. i used to have it run down once in the winter and then i’d put it in a sunny window for a day (usually my windowsill at work, as i’d only realize it was stopped after i got to work), and then it’d run great until short-sleeved weather (and ample sunlight for the watch) arrived once more. these days, i charge it for a week in my home windows, and it stays charged for a few days. so, this is obviously sub-optimal. baby needs a new capacitor! i called up the local chicagoland citizen authorized service dealer today, some outfit in scumberg, figuring that if i went to them i could actually drive there and take the post office out of the potential-fuckuppery equation. except the woman i talked to on the phone was really rude, barely spoke english, and there was a baby crying in the background. no. accu-time shall not be getting my business. sketchiness is not a good selling point, especially if your customer is already convinced you’re going to brutally kill her beloved watch (and laugh while you do it). so i’m thinking, very seriously, about sending it off to the authorized blah-de-blah in atlanta. they at least have a website. and i haven’t called yet, but if they don’t have a baby crying in the background and don’t yell at me that i don’t know how to charge my watch, they’re the leading contender just as soon as i can convince myself to actually send the watch off for repairs. which will be any day now. real soon now. my poor little watch!now (well, tomorrow) is the time when i pay righteously for my previous temerity, as i prepare to return to chicago and slog my suitcase and laptop bag through the ten inches or snow they accumulated in my absence. did i mention that the only shoes i packed are chucks? because they are.
dang.at this point i will assume that everyone knows the backstory of the second-year dental student at marquette, in milwaukee, who was recently gifted with a delightfully-long vacation from his studies and relieved of the taxing burden of his scholarship funding, as a result of his remarking on his blog upon the wonder and joy of studying under an unnamed professor and his peers’ intellectual maturity.
i have to say that i really do enjoy situations like this, when me and my right-of-center colleagues can get together and bask in solidarity, in the holiday spirit of “what the fuck is the matter with those people?!” seriously, when something like this comes up where people on both sides of the (so often bitterly divided, lined with broken glass and people bearing sharply-pointed bayonets) aisle can figuratively break bread in companionship, you just gotta enjoy the chance to have everyone around you agree that yes, in fact, those people really do ride the short bus to school. (this is not to be construed as glee at the student’s situation, or really as anything other than hyperbole. actually, i find marquette’s actions as reported to be completely over-the-top. c’mon, you’re a school; you know students! they drink, they talk shit about their professors, they talk shit about their fellow students! some of ’em do it in student newspapers; some of ’em do it on blogs. BHFD. the student should never have been investigated, much less suspended. if you can’t cope with having a faculty member called names by an undergraduate, i suggest you find a new line of work.)
