Quodlibets

Every Friday Morning at My College Library

Every single morning, someone from campus food services brings over two carafes of hot, fresh coffee to replace the stale, cold coffee from the day before.  She also brings an assortment of fresh baked goods, and sodas and chips to replace whatever has sold the day before.  This happens at approximately 8:32 every morning; the library opens at 8 a.m.  I have this conversation with the same student every Friday:

Him:  I'd like coffee and a muffin, please.
Me:  Okay, but the coffee isn't fresh yet.  It's still last night's coffee.
Him:  *stares me down, like his eyes boring into me can make the coffee suddenly fresh*
Me:  I'm sorry, but the coffee doesn't come until 8:30 or later.
Him: ..........
Me:  Do you want last night's coffee?
Him:  *snidely* I guess I'll have to go where the coffee is fresh.
Me:  Ok.  Sorry.

Now, this wouldn't be so bad if it didn't happen EVERY goddamn Friday, but it does.  I've told him the same thing EVERY Friday, and every Friday, he seems to hold it against me, as if I'm telling the food services lady to not come until later, so that he then has to go to the coffee bar in the student center (a nationally recognizable coffee chain that serves the exact same coffee we do), which is literally less than a minute's walk from here.  And the worst part?  It's not like he actually wants to be in the library, because he doesn't come back on Friday mornings.  I see this kid in the library all the time.  ALL THE TIME.  But not Fridays, because after we have our coffee discussion, he leaves, and doesn't come back all morning.  I presume he's stopping in here to pick up coffee before class, but what I don't understand is why he doesn't just stop at the student center on his way to class.  Buildings here?  All about two minutes walk from each other.  The student center is also centrally placed, as student centers usually are. 

I'm telling you, if I have this conversation next Friday, I'm going to scream.

The Flu

I think a workplace is unhealthy when unhealthy employees feel so compelled to come to work, they'll risk getting their coworkers sick.  The stomach flu is sort of making the rounds here, and today one of my co-workers said that her child was throwing up yesterday, and she wasn't feeling so hot, and yet, here she was!  At work. 

I've never worked in a place where it was okay to be sick, and I've also never worked at a place that didn't ration sick time like it were the most precious asset on Earth.  And I've read article after article about how fatigued and sick employees actually cost their employees money.  And no employer I've ever known has encouraged its sick employees to stay home.  It pisses me off, because I don't want to be sick anymore than you do, but by coming here, to the workplace, with your germs and diseases, you're putting all of us at risk.

I've seen employees being reamed out for taking sick time, or for asking to leave work early because they were sick.  It's never happened to me, but then again, I'm minus sick time (like, I have to earn my way back to 0 hours of sick time) because of my illness in December.  I'm working under the assumption that as of right now, if I get sick, I can't take sick time.  I'd either have to come to work sick, or stay home without pay.  I can tell you right now that any day of the week I'm staying home, because working only seems to make me sicker, and I have enough respect for my job and the people I work with to not bring my disease here, and spread it around.  I don't think my work is the same when I'm sick, either, and I hate doing shoddy work.

(And you know, I'm not talking about mental health days, or just plain cheating.  I think that you can generally tell when someone is sick, or has been sick.  You know, when they're coughing up a lung in their office, you can be pretty sure that something's not right.  Or when all they're eating all day is chicken broth--yeah, that makes you suspicious that something's not right.  In fact, it feels to me like the people who are actually getting sick are paying for the people who aren't, and who are using sick time as personal time, thus making employers reluctant to be generous with it, and reluctant to be nice to their sick employees when they do make it back to work.  It's another one of those blanket rules that harm the good people.)

Either way, I think I'll reach the zenith of my working life when I work at a place that doesn't treat getting sick as a personal failing, which as we all know, it's not.  Sometimes people just get sick.  It'd be nice to know it wouldn't hurt me professionally.

Boo Hiss

Don't you hate it when you plan a nice dinner out for Valentine's and the dinner ends up being crap?  Yeah, yeah, that happened to us tonight.  We've been going out so little that I thought it might be nice to try somewhere new, but now I'm kicking myself.  Dinner just wasn't very inspiring.  It's sort of depressing for a foodie.

But!  I love S very much still, which is pretty freaking amazing, because in about four months, we're hitting the big 5 years.  Yep, five years.  Maybe we should have a party.  Maybe people should give us props because we've been together longer than some marriages last.  And I'm still, today, in love with him as much as I was four years ago.  It's nice.  I like it.  I hope he likes it as much as I do.

So yeah, now I'm going to sit on the couch for the rest of tonight, reading Moneyball (for the 2nd time) and at about 9, I'm going to ask S to please put lotion on my feet, and that will be our romantic Valentine's day.  Sigh.

Sigh.

Turns out I was right.

But you know what?  It was still a great season.  We looked bad, true, but I had a lot of fun watching football this year, and we're #2.  Out of a lot of teams.  Two ain't so bad.

Off to sleep, and then to work work work.

Must-See Film

S and I just watched "This Film is Not Yet Rated".  You should watch it.  You should watch it right now.

The film is infuriating.  It's infuriating because it brings to light just how corrupt the MPAA and the ratings system really is.  I've been fighting ratings since I started working in a bookstore, and telling people that the ratings system has nothing to do with law.  And it's only gotten worse.  Libraries that restrict children from renting films that are rated above PG really, really bother me (and I'm quite certain that I couldn't possibly take a job at one), because librarians treat this rating system like it's law.  Like it's just as illegal to sell Requiem for a Dream to a 16 year-old as it is to sell Playboy to said minor.  In fact, there's nothing illegal about it.  The ratings are guidelines, and not laws.  There is no US law that says that 15 year-olds can't see NC-17 films; there is just a cabal of theaters enforcing the will of a group of people that purport to be representative of America's parents.  Watch the movie, because you will see that it's a group of older people, men mostly, of the white persuasion.  One minority, who also happens to be a woman.  No African-Americans, no Mexican-Americans, or Latinos.

So these people, this small group of people decides which movies get rated which ways.  And shocker of all shockers, women and gay individuals come up short.  In so many ways.  More than one individual (women, if I remember correctly) point out that any scene that shows women experiencing sexual pleasure immediately gets an NC-17 rating for a movie.  Hmmm, wonder why?  And homosexual sex acts that are identical to straight ones draw an NC-17 where the straight ones draw R ratings.  This isn't surprising.  This shouldn't be shocking.  And of course, the whole violence vs. sex thing.  Lots of directors want to talk about this, want to talk about the fact that you can shoot hundreds of people (no blood!) and get a PG-13.  Yes, let's glorify something that destroys lives every day, but send the message that something that is about pleasure is dirty and wrong and not fit for peoples' eyes.  It's not an original point, and I feel like the directors in this documentary are truly baffled by how fucking backwards this whole system is.

It made me want to scream, and to boycott someone, anyone.  I'm sickened by these sorts of censorship.  And make no mistake about it, it's what it is.  Just watch.  I'm trying to think of something I could possibly do, and there is no easy answer.  Only see films that are unrated?  Unfortunately, that's not going to be realistic.  Never watch movies?  I barely see films in the theater as it is.  Stop using Netflix?  See, but I genuinely enjoy movies.  So what?  What can one person--or two, if you count S--do?

L'Ultimo Bacio

I just watched a movie that I absolutely had no feeling towards whatsoever.  I can't say that I hated it, because I didn't.  But I certainly didn't like it.  To be honest, I cannot believe that Zach Braff chose to make "The Last Kiss" as his follow up to the outstanding "Garden State", a movie I felt so passionately for that I went to see it twice in the theater. 

It's incredibly, horribly hard to feel anything for a character in a movie who does something so shitty as what Braff's character does to his girlfriend.  He's too freaked out to marry her, but pretends to be cool when she gets pregnant.  I mean, they're both on the cusp of 30, and it's a pretty natural time to be starting a family.  So he acts cool, plays like he's happy, and quietly and completely freaks out.  Fine, okay, I can understand all this.  But then he cheats on her.  He kisses someone, and when she freaks out, he drives to this little chippy's dorm room and fucks her.  There's no other way to put it.  And understandably, pregnant girlfriend doesn't want him to come back home.  She's having none of it.

I wasn't sympathetic to Braff's character in the least.  He was a shithead for cheating, and he was a shithead for making excuses like "I'm scared" (whine whine whine).  Maybe I'm an unforgiving bitch, but real partners don't cheat on their pregnant girlfriends when they're scared of the pregnancy.  And I don't think that she should have taken him back, though that is the indication given at the end of the movie.  I know she's pregnant, but dude, he cheated.  Once a cheater, always a cheater.  I've never had a real-life experience that didn't bear this maxim out. 

I'm not sure what the filmmakers were going for.  Were we supposed to feel for him?  Were we supposed to root for her to take him back?  Either way, the movie wasn't successful, because I didn't do either.  Anyway.  I was so angry about a film that would make excuses for a cheater that I had to write about it.

Yes, sigh, it's 2007

And sadly, my luck hasn't changed.  This time, it's my computer.  It's not as bad a situation as the car thing, because my computer is still under full warranty, and I have the AppleCare thingy, so yeah, it's not goig to cost me anything.  You know, except being without my right hand.  Because that's sort of what it feels like.  I'm typing this on S's computer, because I'm reluctant to pull out the old Powerbook.  Nothing is updated on it, and I haven't used it since July.  I'm taking my computer to the Apple Store Genius Bar and I'll know more then, but I'm pretty much positive that I'll be leaving it there, and that I'll be pulling out the ol' PB when I get home.

Here's the MacBook situation:  the speakers crackle and pop, and then some length of time later (variously hours and seconds at times yesterday; this morning it was up for about an hour before it quit, but last night it was literally up for less than a minute at one point) the computer just shuts itself down.  I've updated the firmware, which is what the man on the phone told me to do, and then he told me that my computer would be fixed!  Hooray!  But it wasn't, and for a good long while, we couldn't get it to stay awake long enough to update.  So when we did get it to update, I breathed a sigh of relief, thinking, phew.  At least my computer will stay on.  But no.  Still shutting down.  I had a good 25 minutes of optimism this morning, because there was no crackling or popping, and then just when I was happy and going to cancel my Genius Bar appointment, Pop.  Crackle.  It was a good 35-40 minutes before the computer died, but die it did.

Anyhow, this will go down in history as the holiday season when everything broke:  my car, my body (that horrible sickness) and yes, now my computer.

So, um, yeah.  Happy New Year!  I'm already ready for 2008.

Update (Jan. 2):  Well, my computer is in the hospital.  The logicboard (one word?  two?) failed.  So yeah.  Apple does the repairs in house, so it's not getting sent anywhere; someone at the store on N. Michigan Ave. is hopefully going to work on my computer soon, so that I can have it back in the three days of 3 to 5 days to complete the repair.  I did dig out the Powerbook, and though I love the feel of it in my hands again, the screen is blurry, it's very slow, and it's not current.  And I couldn't get it to connect to the internet yesterday.  So I was still computerless, for all intents and purposes, yesterday afternoon.  S did some mumbo-jumbo work on it, and it connects now, but I'm a little suspicious that it might not when I get home today.  We'll see.  It really can't do what I want it to anyway, so it's mostly just so I can look up directions and menus and IM people.  Sigh.

Remember how unlucky I've been?

It gets worse.  Or it might get worse.  My throat feels as if it might erupt into a full-blown soreness tomorrow, which might indicate that I'm getting a cold.  If it is a cold, this won't be my first Christmas with one.  The first Christmas that S and I spent together, I had the kind of cold that knocks you on your ass, and knocks you on your ass voiceless.  By the end of Xmas Eve, I was completely dead, in that "I'm sick, but it's okay" kind of a way. 

The thing about this Xmas is that I've got to work extra hours tomorrow and Thurs. (though if I'm really sick, I won't; I'll just have to deal with it all), because I took yesterday off, a day off that was pre-planned far in advance of the sickness of last week.  See, that's the other thing that sucks.  I exhausted my sick-time last week, with that little bug (or whatever it was) that had me chained to the couch (and toilet) in pain and misery.  And I've got no options tomorrow, because S is coming out to meet me at my work (on the train) and I'm going to then drive us both to meet his mom, who is in town for one night only, and that night is tomorrow.  (It's a long story, and I don't really feel like explaining right now, but suffice it to say that we were not supposed to be going to her; she was supposed to be coming to us.)

Anyway, the long and the short of it is that I'm probably getting sick again (and I have a pretty good hunch why, and that is another long story that involves pretty disgusting facts of my life, facts that I'm not sure if I'm ready for my dad and other assorted family members to read), which is incredibly unlucky, no?  First my car, then me, and wait, then me again.  Remarkably, S hasn't been sick yet, and didn't get sick last time I had a cold, so maybe this one will spare him too.  He didn't get that stomach thing (which sort of reinforces the idea that it was something I ate, but still.  Yeesh.) either, which is good.  He's apparently more hardy than me.  I'm pretty sure I would know if he had the stomach thing.  But actually, if he got a mild cold, I might not know.  He's kind of stoic like that.

But that wasn't the point.  The point was:  Could my christmas season get any more unlucky?  (Knock on wood, cross your fingers, jeez.)

OH MY GOD

It's too preliminary to tell, but it looks like my car might be very badly broken.  I have no earthly idea what is wrong with it, but I'm just smart enough to realize that the sounds it is making, coupled with the maniac shaking and icky smell coming out of are enough to spell bad news.  Earlier panic (complete with panicked tears) has given way now to forced resignation and miserable worry.

I swear to God, if the car needs more than $500 of work, I'm going to cry for days.  Just my luck, right before the holidays, my car decides to be an absolute piece of shit.

Help!

Yesterday was a BAAAAAD day at Casa EfroMano.  I had stomach troubles all day (Chinese finally rearing its ugly head?), the Bears lost, and to top it all off, S is now facing the possible loss of thousands of pictures.  I'm not kidding.

He shoots with a digital camera, and all his photos from the last however long are stored on four hard drives.  They're arranged in raids (?) of two.  I'm not 100% certain what that means, except that each pair of hard drives functions together.  One of the pair is a mirror of the other in the pair.  This is supposed to stop you from losing anything if one hard drive some how corrupts.  Yesterday, at about one, his computer stopped recognizing one of the pairs of hard drives as a raid.  (arrayed?  not sure.)  This is catastrophic, because he can't get to anything on EITHER hard drive if his computers (and yes, he tried two) don't recognize the set-up.  He can't find anything online about fixing the problem, and he worked all day well into night last night on it.  He called pretty much everyone he knew who knew anything about such things, and he ended up nowhere.  At least, when I went to bed, he had gotten nowhere.

Again, this is a pretty catastrophic loss, if he can't figure out how to rescue these puppies.  We're talking about 250 somethings of pictures, I think.  I think 250 is the capacity of both drives (so 500 total).  I know I sound like an idiot, but I really don't know anything about this at all.  He explained it to me like 40 million times yesterday, and I still don't really get it.  Essentially, though, he is facing the loss of probably the last year's (at least) photos.  I'm wrecked over this, and though he seems calm, he must be insane inside.  It's just such a huge loss.

If ANY of my readers have ANY ideas, please pass them on.  Nothing is too stupid to suggest, and anything might help, because I get the sense that he's up shit creek without a paddle here.  Maybe I'm panicking more than needs be, but I don't think so this time.  Somehow, I don't think so.