Time to Wake Up

I’m not really a morning person. ‘Not really’ in the sense that I despise them and tend to avoid them whenever possible through sleep. Sleep can make you oblivious to a lot of things. And that’s why I’ve decided that I like it.

Normally I hit the snooze alarm at least four times. I initially set my alarm to compensate for this and everything usually works out. Note that I said, ‘usually’. The other morning was one of those outside-of-normal-circumstances mornings: the revolt of my alarm clock. It went off at the usual time and I hit the usual snooze alarm. Repeat ten minutes later. Snooze number three, however, went terribly wrong.

I wasn’t awake enough to remember hitting the button the first time to stop the CD, but I do remember being confused as to why the music wasn’t stopping, so I know I must have at least slapped in its general direction. Yet the music continued and Mr. Tommy Roe began to sing. (Sweet Pea is a good song, but I’m not so sure of its catchiness when it won’t stop playing when I want to sleep. Most mornings I don’t hear anything beyond the CD whirring and the initial drum solo.) As I woke up more and more I pressed all the buttons I could find, but to no effect. My only goal at this point is to stop the music.

The buttons are not working. I quasi-rationalize that if the cover is open, the CD will not play and therefore the music will stop. With the press of a previously untried button, the lid slowly raised. The music stops… but the beeping begins. High pitched, shrill incessant beeping that was a hundred times worse than the crooning of some teen idol of yore. At least I could turn the music volume down on the music- there is no relief from this new torture. The beeping bores into my head and begins to quicken. When will this foolish nightmare end??

My only way to kill this obnoxious monster is to remove its power source… it must be unplugged. I jump (read: fall) out of the top bunk grumbling unprintable and unintelligible phrases at the clock, Tommy Roe, and the world in general. Reaching behind my roommate’s bed I unplug the clock- and then there’s silence. I plug it back in, hoping that it has reset itself or something and has forgotten its mission to wake me up. But when I plug it back in, the noise continues. ‘Fine,’ I think angrily, tossing the cord at the wall. ‘Stay unplugged.’ Gosh, if only I could wake up this way EVERY day!

I managed to schedule most of my classes at reasonable times. All except one. At the risk of once again bringing fire upon myself from the science department, I don’t wake up until about two hours into my chem lab. Sleep can make a lot of things go away, but not eight a.m. chem lab.

Feb 23, 2001

Math Sucks

Sometimes I wonder about those upper level classes that I will never take. For instance, math. One semester of calc one was more than enough to make up my mind never to take math again. I just don’t understand what possesses people to take calc one million or DiffEq (or even what it means). Personally, I would rather melon-ball my left eye out than do one more derivative. I didn’t need the class, and I pretty much dreaded every day.

One time, I was walking there and hoping against hope that Gellerson had burned down or been hit by a meteorite or my class had been canceled in some other way, shape or form. As I passed Kretzmann, I heard a loud beeping noise. My heart leapt. Maybe class is canceled! I thought in my calc-hatred induced mindset. That sounds like a fire alarm! My pace quickened. I didn’t mind going to calc if I would be able to turn around and go straight back home. As it turns out, the sound of a bus backing out the VUCA parking lot makes that same noise. I ended up having to go to calc anyway. Probably only to fail a quiz.

Maybe that’s the purpose of calc one: to weed out the ones who aren’t ‘math department’ material. (Me, for one.) After you get past that milestone, you’re home free. I bet calc is pretty much one big party. For all I know, anyway. Calc two: you throw confetti every time you open that math book. You party so hard, integrations by trigonometric substitution make sense. There’s music, dancing, laughing, and 3-D graphic plots of hyperbolic sine function. Or something. Calc three? Yikes. Non-stop action. Sometimes you wake up the day after class with a notebook full of equations, neat boxes around each answer, calculator calluses on your fingertips and no idea how any of it got there. DiffEq- I can’t even fathom the crazy fun that goes on in there. I hear there used to be a calc four, but no one had the stamina for a semester long party of that caliber.

As far off as my guesses might be, I’d rather be dead wrong than find out the truth. At least in the case of upper level math, ignorance is bliss. I don’t claim to have knowledge about any of those math terms beyond the names. I had one semester of calc, and I can guarantee I’ll never make a withdrawal from those short-term memory banks again. That account is closed, and I have a nice ‘S’ on my report card for my trouble. Yahoo for pass/fail courses.

Spread the... Word

I think the idea came to us the night of February 13th, 2000. It was another one of those all too familiar ‘let’s stay up far too late for our collective good and pretend to do homework but all we really do is talk in the lounge’ evening/ mornings. A flower sale had been organized through the Union or something – my memories are hazed by lack of sleep – and someone was delivering flowers to the girls on our floor.

She had come to solicit our help, and some of us, most likely those with less of a responsibility towards our homework and probably less of bitterness towards Valentine’s Day in general, offered to help. Anyway, my then future-roommate and I had decided not to have boyfriends. You know, to better concentrate on our grades. The others stayed in the lounge uh, doing homework, and eventually a campaign was born.

We noticed that the initials for Valentine’s Day were, by some crazy happenstance, also commonly recognized as the initials for something else. That’s right, VD also stands for venereal disease. Can you believe it? We couldn’t.

Also, by what can only be classified as more luck, the school we happen to go to began with a ‘V’. In the interest of alliteration (quasi-bonus of having a writing minor: the ability to throw around literary terms) the slogan was coined. VD @ VU. Perhaps it was the lack of sleep but I, at least, thought it was pretty catchy. Still do, for that matter. We wrote it on the lounge window in dry-erase marker, proclaiming our clever genius for all to see. I don’t remember much after that. Maybe I slept. More likely than not, I didn’t.

On the 14th, went about our days clad entirely in black to symblify our general disapproval of the holiday and what it stands for. Unfortunately, our VD @ VU campaign was rather short lived, for several possible reasons. First of all, perhaps not all of the campus is as familiar with the initials of STD’s (sexually transmitted diseases, in case you are a member of the aforementioned group) as we had thought.

Second, there is a slight possibility that everyone on the entire campus does not feel the same way about Valentine’s Day. Maybe this day is more than just empty symbolism to them, and they were maybe offended by our implication that Valentine’s Day is equivalent to venereal disease. This is no excuse.

Thirdly, the possibility remains that our message never made it off of the starting block. Dry-erase marker is a lot harder to read on windows than on the actual boards, and one brush (purposeful or not, we are looking into this matter) of a sleeve could have negated its existence. In any case, this year we are not taking any chances. By broadcasting our message through the popular medium of the campus paper, we ensure that the message will reach far and wide, from Urschel to the frats. VD @ VU: Spread the love.