Well, I lied

Contrary to my impassioned rant the other day about having run out of things to write about myself, I ran this article in the Daily today. Maybe you will like it. I was originally planning on railing against vegetarianism at length just in time for Thanksgiving, but I wisely chickened out. Do you know how many animal-rights groups there are on campus? Like fourteen. While I won’t deny that pissing off that many people with sixteen inches of simple newsprint would have been gratifying, I’m not sure it would have been worth the headache. When last winter Nick Dayton, one of the token opinion columnists from the ranks of the College Republicans (make no mistake: they install them onto the paper), wrote an article defending traditional marriage, someone followed him around campus for a week shouting, “This man hates gay people!” Imagine a similar scenario, but involving myself, angry PETA members, and buckets of faux blood. Really, I just wanted to convince one vegetarian to eat turkey in honor of the pilgrims, and while his parents were visiting this weekend, Nathan told me that he plans to suck down the bird meat at their table. Dammit, that’s good enough for me.

Big, fat headline news: I’ve been awarded stewardship of two dozen dewy-eyed freshman taking CSE142, Introduction to Programming, next quarter. Yes, I’m going to be a teaching assistant. Besides grading their homework assignments and answering desperate emails for help, I get one hour a week with the little neophytes where I can lecture about whatever I want (within reason). The possibilities are almost endless, but if Ben Gibbard doesn’t show up on a slide during the first week, I will be seriously disappointed with myself.

Also, I’m starting a pool over which week next quarter I’ll collapse from academic exhaustion. My English professors are expecting me to read fifteen novels over those ten weeks. That is not a misprint. Fifteen. On the plus side: 1) no UrbanSim, except when the build server inevitably breaks; 2) limited / easy writing assignments; 3) no programming projects. Actually, this might not be so bad.