Dear Administration
You make me tell you my e-mail address when I register, but you refuse to use it. Instead, you tell me I must check my college e-mail address everyday on the off-chance that some professor needs to contact me. Whatever, I’m nice enough to comply. I’ll suffer that annoying pop-up window once a day for you.
But your screwy system won’t let me change my password, so anyone who knows my student ID (*cough sneaky administrator cough*) can get in. Then you convince your business professors to insist we use our college e-mail addresses on our resumes (because they look more professional than Hotmail, you claim), even though our accounts will be deleted upon graduation whether or not we’ve secured jobs.
Because my inbox fills up with just three short messages in it, I don’t get half the messages professors send through your system. And who do they chew out? Me, of course. I’m the one who wakes up for an 8:00 class only to find it’s been canceled, “which I would have known if I’d checked my e-mail.”
And this just in — I tried to check my e-mail on a school computer, and some Internet screen told me I couldn’t access that site because of “adult content.” I could argue that, as college students are adults, adult content is really none of your concern, but that’s a different argument for a different day. The point is, I love the irony in not being able to check school e-mail on school computers.
I later checked my e-mail on my own computer, and there was no adult content. In fact, there was nothing but a reminder for a meeting which I consider myself lucky to have received, given the e-mail system. The site should be blocked because it’s a headache-inducer.
You are the administrator, and I hate to be dogmatic. Therefore, you have two choices. Either get a new e-mail system or work with the ones paying students already have.
Thank you,
Brittney
Disturbed at the Grandparents
I looked through my grandparents’ photo albums yesterday and found one with the most disturbing title:
Our Children’s Wedding
It featured pictures from my aunt and uncle’s wedding — that is, my aunt and her husband, who is no biological relation to us. There’s no incest going on, as far as I know. But still, no one made them buy that album.
My mom is the biggest scrapbooking nerd on the planet. She has an entire room in our house devoted to it, and she has scads of scrapbooking magazines. I looked through some once, and I found a sample scrapbook page that read, “Mom loved to dress we three girls alike,” even though, grammatically, it should have read, “Mom loved to dress us three girls alike.”
Mom insists that grammatical mistakes are OK in scrapbooking. She calls it “poetic license.” I’m an English major. I understand poetic license. I’m also a descriptivist grammarian, meaning I believe language is an evolving tool for human use, not something we should slave over or respect.
But you can’t just make a mistake and call it poetic license. Grammar rules, just like all other rules, have to be broken with a purpose. Rosa Parks didn’t stay seated on the bus just because, but to make a point about the injustice of the law. If you break the law for no good reason, you could go to jail.
And if you break grammar rules for no good reason, your grandchildren could worry that their aunts and uncles are incestuous.
Mississippi Wants to Ban Restaurants from Serving Obese Customers
Read this article to learn more.
Luckily, even the obese idiot who proposed the bill knows it will never pass, but his having the audacity to suggest it ticks me off. Like the fattest, poorest state really needs the rest of the country thinking it’s stupid as well.
Restaurants are not the sole cause of obesity.
People can become obese from frequenting too many vending machines, attending too many potlucks, baking too many cookies, or just eating too much of a healthy thing. On the other hand, people can order a salad or food in reasonable portions from a restaurant and remain healthy.
Also, metabolism and heredity are bigger factors than skinny people like to admit. Some skinny people eat dozens of candy bars without gaining weight, so they assume obese people must eat hundreds. That is simply not the case, and many obese people actually have lower cholesterol than those who are skinny by luck. And smokers are rarely obese, yet they have diseased lungs. But since you can’t see high cholesterol or diseased lungs, the proposed bill claims they’re ok, while obesity isn’t.
Even if restaurants were the sole cause of obesity, sometimes they are necessary.
Believe it or not, some people vacation in Mississippi. If nothing else, it’s on the way to Disney World for a lot of people. Travelers have to eat just like everyone else. I can’t say restaurants are their only option, but if this bill passed, obese people would have just two eating options:
- bang on a stranger’s door and beg for food, or
- buy a hot dog, a bag of chips, a candy bar, and a soda at a gas station.
They say Southerners are friendly, but option one is still a bit extreme. As for option two, the obese people would be eating more calories than they would at a restaurant, and since gas stations don’t have tables, they would have to eat while driving. It’s obesity, nasty tasting food, and dangerous driving in one neat little package.
Besides, this is America!
Americans are capitalists. Their people have the right to clog their arteries if they want to. Their restaurant owners have the right to stay in business if they want to. Americans are not children whose Big Momma Government can tell them to eat their vegetables before dessert.
Legislators who don’t think before opening their mouths make the rest of the world hate America. I wonder how many calories their feet contain.
On Egomania
I am the editor of my college literary journal. We pick the works to include, both writing and art, through blind judging. In case you’re unfamiliar with the term, that means we number the entries rather than label them with the authors’ names, and we get off-campus judges to rate them.
In my time on staff, I’ve heard a lot of conspiracy theories by sore losers. They complain that the same people place every year and that those winners are staff members. It’s true that officers win fairly often, but I’m positive there is no foul play. Officers don’t win because they’re officers — they’re officers because they win. To me that makes sense — we want the better writers to edit so they can help others improve their writing.
Of course, I can’t defend the staff to them. Call me old-fashioned, but I believe in tact. Even though I’m the only person to place first in two categories, I don’t dance around singing, I’m a better writer! I’m a better writer! I feel a bit tacky even typing this entry.
But sometimes it seems to me that the people who have the least to brag about are the ones who brag the most. Read the rest of this entry »
People are particularly stupid today
There is a number of ways I could prove this thesis, but I’ll focus on one that happened in my American Lit class this morning.
We were discussing impressionist literature and how it related to impressionist paintings. So the professor did the predictable thing and pulled out some prints by Monet. Then she asked us what was different about his paintings. When no one answered, she asked us to compare it to this painting depicting a scene from Washington Irving in the back of the class:
Then she said, “See, Monet’s impressionism isn’t realistic like the painting in the back.”
The sad thing is, she was dead serious. And no one bothered to correct her by saying, “Um, dipstick, that’s a cartoon. I mean, it’s not exactly Charlie Brown, but it’s probably less realistic than Winnie the Pooh.” We just went on talking about Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser and pretending that real people had black outlines around them.
Though I thought about it, I didn’t say anything either. So I guess I’m particularly stupid today, too.