From the favorites file

So, I have a problem. I am a constant bookmarker. If I read an interesting article, see a funny website, or just think that sometime in the vague and distant future I may want to see whatever it is I stumbled upon again, I bookmark it. But, the problem comes when the bookmarking gets so excessive and so unwieldy that the original purpose, finding things once thought interesting, is nearly impossible.

I've had Percy, this computer, for over two years, and during that time I haven't deleted a single "favorites" link. Kind of like I can't throw away old papers. And I don't just mean freshman-year-too-embarrassed-to-read-rubbish. No, I have my Socail* Studies notebook from sixth grade and my write-up from an Oregon Trail game** in the eighth grade. So, never deleting any links, my "favorites" list is made up of well over 250 websites.

I decided I was going to clean them out as an end-of-the-semester, getting organized kind of thing. It felt right. But, soon I got lost in memories. Looking through those links is like tracing an intellectual history. I can see where I was obsessed with certain topics. I can see where I was doing research for papers. I can look back to when I got on a grad-school-hunting kick****. I can fondly recall my desperate search for presidential debate drinking games*****. I can tell when I was in arguments with people about gay marriage, abortion, or affirmative action by noticing the trends in links.

In short, I decided that I am not going to clean out my favorites. There's too much history there.

I'm trying to work out a similar justification for not cleaning out my car and closet.

*Yes, it was spelled like that on my folder. This makes me so sad now. In fact, the handling of social studies throughout the school district I grew up in saddens me greatly. The folder had several checks and stickers, one for each six weeks of the school year. Yet the teacher never corrected my spelling.
**No, I don't mean the computer game (but, dude, that computer game rocked!). In my history class in eighth grade, we split up into teams and drew fate/circumstance cards (or something) and had to make it across the U.S. We then had to write up our experiences. I'm considering turning this paper in for my graduate school application writing sample. It's quite good.***
***Well, perhaps not, but I do believe that I can honestly say that it's better than the freshman-year-too-embarrassed-to-read-rubbish. I am ashamed that I ever turned that stuff in. Particularly papers from Intro to Sociology (which I hated, ha) and Race, Gender, and Class (throughout the course of which I was gaining a sociological imagination, but not without considerable resistance). I need to apologize to those teachers.
****Yeah, I was all enthusiastic when it didn't matter. Now that I'm in a time crunch with grad school stuff, I can't work up the motivation.
*****I bookmarked many, but actually did none. They're kind of funny, you know, take two drinks whenever Kerry says "purple heart," or Bush says "9/11." Not being 21 at the time, my intentions were, of course, to use soda or juice.

Well, now that I've taken this quiz, I feel like I can legitimatley submit my grad school applications... haha

You Should Get a PhD in Liberal Arts (like political science, literature, or philosophy)

You're a great thinker and a true philosopher. You'd make a talented professor or writer.

What Advanced Degree Should You Get?

read it yourself

I think I am going to start talking about books I've never read on here and pretend to say interesting and insightful things about them.

You see, I just now looked at my statcounter (which I usually can't log into but for some reason allowed me to this time) and found that many people have been finding my blog by searching for things like "invisible heart by nancy folbre cliff notes," "little women cliff notes," "feminist novel," "left behind reading guide," or other silly stuff. So, in order to help these people out, I am going to start posting plausible yet completely untrue summaries and analyses of random books.

I hate poor causal reasoning... even when it's in the service of good

Radio spots. They're awful about it. I just got out of my car, where I heard a spot by United for Peace and Justice, a faith-based social justice group. They were pointing out that third grade test scores are exactly correlated with the number of incarcerations a few years on down the line, so why don't we focus on education and not building more prisons? I agree. Education > prisons. However, implicit in how they phrased the spot was "low test scores cause future criminality," or, at the very least, "low levels of education cause criminality." Now, undoubtedly, there is a connection. Criminals tend to have lower levels of education (depending on the crime, obviously). But that connection isn't necessarily causal. Could it be that there is a common cause, contributing to both low test scores and high incarceration rates? Poverty, for one. Maybe instead of building new prisons, we should focus on lifting people out of poverty?

Also, I keep hearing a PSA on the radio claiming that if you only have dinner with your family, your kids will be so many times less likely to do drugs. Now, I do not doubt that there is a correlation between having family together time and low rates of drug abuse. But, again, kids do not not use drugs because their family ate together. No, it's something else. Something about families that tend to eat together causes kids to be less likely to do drugs, some other characteristic(s) that are found in families that typically have family-time. Closeness? Openness? Who knows. (I'm sure someone has done the research.) But, while they are in the service of good, they are making claims that simply aren't backed up. Correlation doesn't equal causation.

Another example: MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) has a radio spot telling parents not to give their kids alcohol because they younger that you give it to them, the more likely they are to have an alcohol problem when they grow up. This is based on research showing that the earlier that kids have their first encounter with alcohol, the more likely they are to have problems with it. The problem with their analysis is that when parents give their children alcohol, it's not necessarily the same situation as when a kid gets alcohol from a buddy. I know many parents who let their children sample alcohol at home so as not to create a problem of "forbidden fruit" or whatever. Those kids (I would bet) are less likely to go on to abuse alcohol. At least, that sort of reasoning is behind recent programs at colleges (sorry can't be bothered to find links, I'm lazy) which seek to introduce students to alcohol as a "normal" part of meals, so as to curb binge drinking. But for MADD to say that the earlier a parent gives a child alcohol, the more likely he or she is to abuse it, based on research showing that earlier first consumption leads to abuse, is kind of misleading.

Anyway, that's all I wanted to say. All of these ads: I agree with them. Well, maybe not the MADD one. But certainly the education>prisons and the family-time one. But it seems like it hurts more than helps when they use not-good-reasoning.

Happy Birthday!

Today "Random Rants and Ravings" is one year old!

It has gradually evolved. And been, at turns, neglected. But, through it all, I've kept it up. Well, despite that one 2-month-long summer hiatus.

Here's to another year!

*goes back to studying*

The semester is almost over

and I am about to tear my hair out.

This sensation will be much worse next weekend.

(note: this was my justification/excuse for lack of updating)

A feeble attempt at updating-without-actually-updating

You are Michel Foucault! You wrote groundbreaking
histories of prisons, hospitals, asylums, and
sex. Interestingly, you thought basically the
same thing about all of them. Your historical
accuracy is a bit dodgy, but that was never
really the point. You were very obsessed with
power roles - so obsessed that you frequented
gay S&M clubs, and died of AIDS in 1984.

What 20th Century Theorist are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

I have spent an obscene amount of money on printouts recently.

I am literally* swimming in ink and paper. My quarters and dimes are gone.

Pity me.

*Edit at 3:58am: I can't sleep. But I was looking at the post and am amused by the fact that I said I am "literally swimming in ink and paper." Obviously, the statement was metaphorical. Yet I said literal. But it doesn't seem weird, it sounds normal. I hear people use "literally" like that all the time. Interesting**. How did the word "literal" come to mean the opposite? (e.g., "I am literally going to explode," when a person is not actually about to explode.) Am I making any sense? Or are these thoughts that one can only have at 4:01am?

**arguable, granted.

Today was a sucky day.

We had a field trip for one of my classes today. I saw honking huge hogs being slaughtered. (It was a work & occupations sociology course.) Wonderful way to begin my morning. But it got better. Turns out I had locked my keys in my car. At the hog-slaughtering place. So, one of my classmates gave me a ride back to school, where my roommate (shout-out to Ema!) took me back, I got my car, and I came back to school.

Today is/was just a bleh-y day.

I am also theoretically confused. Quite literally. I am confused about theory. Not so much about theory itself, but what I think about it. That makes no sense. Oh well. We need a real feminist theory class at UTD.

I have so much to do this weekend. I procrastinate too much.

Honestly, and I'm not making excuses, one of the reasons I've not updated lately is that for some reason blogger wouldn't let me log in from my computer, saying something about cookies or some other nonsensical thing. So, yeah, I was totally going to update Tuesday night. I was going to whine about my theoretical confusion. I may do that later. Who knows.

In case you care

So, I realize that I'm being an abysmally bad blogger as of late. But I have been busy. This weekend, for example, I have written. Lots. I have written three essays since Friday night. And am about to start another. And I intend to get my reading for next week done tonight as well. And I have talked to all of my letter of recommendation writers and given packets with forms and info to all but one of them (and I'll do that on Tuesday). Tomorrow morning I am going to go to Grayson County College and politely yet firmly demand that they send out my transcript. This is important on multiple fronts: in order to apply for graduation next semester, I need to have my stupid college algebra and Texas government credits. Also, I need them to send out copies to potential graduate schools. On time. This is very important. And kind of scary. For almost four years I have been submitting requests for my transcript to be sent to UTD. No luck. I kind of want to stay there and watch them do it. But that would be rude.

In case you care, here is where I am applying to graduate programs in sociology:

UC-Santa Barbara
Northwestern
Wisconsin
UT-Austin
Indiana
Massachusetts
Arizona

Wish me luck! I still need to straighten out my statement of purpose. If anyone who is vaguely sociology-ish (or even if you're not!) wants to look it over and critique it for me, I would love you forever and ever. Just reply or send me an email or something.

Tommorow I get to register for classes next semester. This is exciting, as always, but presents somewhat of a dilemma. There are only two classes that I have to take to be able to graduate with my Sociology and my Gender Studies degrees. But there are lots of classes that I want to take. But classes invariably sound a lot more fun the semester before you take them than they do when you're in the middle of them. I guess I have tonight to figure that out. Oh. And I'm writing one or two senior honors theses next semester. I'm not sure if I'm going to do one in gender studies as well as sociology. Either way, I need to come up with topics and talk to potential advisors.

Anyway, I'm off to get some writing and reading done. I feel like I am on such a roll this weekend! (Whether any of it is any good, however, is an entirely different issue.)

Excuses, excuses

So, for some reason my computer will not let me log into Blogger. Thus, that is going to be my excuse as to why it's taken me so long to update. Because, clearly, if my computer/the Blogger site was working properly, I would be updating like mad, at least twice a day. Yeah.

Anyway, as for general updates:

I am so over the GRE. I've taken it, it's done. I did really well on the verbal; I could have done better on the quantitative section. But, you know, I'm ok with that. None of this, "omg, I have to take it again!" I am just glad that it's finished, given how far behind I am on everything else.

I am so behind in writing. Guess what I get to spend the whole of this weekend doing?

I'm sitting in the computer lab here at UT-D, and I can't think of anything else to say. So I'm going to head off to a meeting with my advisor.

Um.

So, Republicans are testing out how they're going to deal with charges coming down later this week in the Plame affair.

Talking Point #1? Well, the prosecutor is going to try to come up with something so it won't look like he wasted two years. Anything. Even something stupid that doesn't matter. Sound familiar? My senator, Kay Bailey Hutchison: She hopes "that if there is going to be an indictment that says something happened, that it is an indictment on a crime and not some perjury technicality where they couldn't indict on the crime and so they go to something just to show that their two years of investigation was not a waste of time and taxpayer dollars." (emphasis mine)

Um.

Let's recap: Kenneth Starr, special prosecutor for Whitewater "couldn't indict on a crime" and thus a president was impeached on "some perjury technicality."

Who's a flip flopper?

I do it sometimes, too, but...

So, I'm taking a break from doing loads of reading and writing to be annoyed at something I've noticed recently, from both me, the news media, friends, and various pundits.

Why is it that when we're talking about Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, we feel sufficiently close to her to refer to her by her first name? Only her first name. CNN.com right now has a headline: "Condoleeza's Alabama Homecoming." Would we do that for anyone else in the administration? Donald to go to visit troops in Iraq. Dick to take lollipops from young children.

It's because she's a woman. I hear the objections already. 1) We don't call Margaret Spellings "Margaret" (or other women in the admin.) or 2) Condoleeza just has such a unique name, of course we use it.

1) Well, that's true. I think because Rice is the only woman in a major policy making, highly public role, her gender is particularly salient.

2) Well, what about other women to whom this happens?

I've even seen this about Harriet Miers: "Harriet blah blah" not "Miers etc etc." Now, did we see stuff like this about John Roberts? Or judges (umm... well, potential judges) anyway? I've, personally, never seen "Antonin to go to gay rights parade" or "Clarence seen at porn store."

This happens to Hillary Clinton, too, who we are free to call "Hillary."

Why, though, is this the case? Is it because we just feel less respect towards women in these high-power positions? Research would seem to indicate that when women are in more leaderly (is that a word?) roles, they are evaluated less favorably than men in similar roles (Eagly and Karau, too lazy to look up date). Do we feel more "familiarity" with them because they're women? This is interesting.

Anyway, I know this post contains no insightful analysis or interesting perspective. But, do think about it! And I'm going to get back to work--currently in the process of reading Battered Women and Feminist Lawmaking by Elizabeth Schneider. The part I'm reading now is fascinating: about the different legal strategies used by feminists to draw attention to and define battering/abuse/gender violence and the struggles over naming and the implications coming along with different names. She talks about the role of "rights talk" in shaping identity and public discourse and expectations. But, of course, talking in terms of legal reform and rights can't really get at fundamental issues of social structure and gender inequality. Asking for a right is asking to have access to the system as it is, not asking to fundamentally alter it. Legal activism isn't sufficient for those sorts of goals.

She talks about different conceptions of domestic abuse and about how recent/not so recent attempts to project a gender symmetry ("women do this just as much as men"), or to paint victims as somehow pathological, or to think of it as have solely to do with issues of power blinds us to the gendered dimensions of power.

Where I am right now, she's discussing tension within the battered women's movement and within feminism more general between victimization and agency, arguing that that's really a false dichotomy: focusing on victimization ignores agency, but we can't act as if women are free agents in a vacuum, outside of social constraints and power relations.

Wow, I've gone on far too long and probably not made a whole lot of sense. I tend to ramble when something is interesting. Maybe later I'll post a more logical and coherent summarization of Schneider's arguments.

Get stuff done or die. Those are kind of my options this weekend. Wish me well.

Yeah, sorry I suck at updating.

I am so unbelievably busy. This weekend, not only am I determined to be productive, but I have absolutely no choice but to be productive.

First, before I can do anything, I have to clean. I can't work in the mess that is my room/desk at the moment. That's what I ought to be doing right now. But, it's amazing 1) how clean my room gets when I need to get homework done, and 2) how good a blogger I become when I need to be cleaning.

Tomorrow, I have an appointment at 12:30 and then I get to go see LaBoheme (go Lauren!) at 8pm. During the interim, I will concentrate on doing GRE math reviewing. On Saturday morning, bright and early at 8am, I have a practice GRE to take! Then, on Saturday, the rest of the whole honking lot of stuff to do begins:

--read book on Affirmative Action & begin to think about paper
--start reading loads of stuff for paper on fatherhood and welfare reform (may want to change topic?)
--start writing/write essay on a book I've already finished (thankfully!) that will probably be due in two or so weeks
--write short paper about advertising back in the day (which requires reading quite a lot of stuff that I didn't read when I was supposed to earlier in the semester for various reasons)
--decide definitively what graduate programs I am applying to
--write up Statements for each program (I already have statements for UT-Austin, Northwestern, and Wisconsin. They may suck, but they're done, and that works for me at the moment)
--decide who to ask for letters of recommendation and begin to gather needed materials to give to recommenders (resume, transcript, SoPs, etc)
--begin to fill out applications and gather supplemental materials--writing sample?! ahh!
--read for various classes next week
--read fascinating new book by political scientists about the Christian Right and American politics
--read exciting book Ema got from the library in which Jane Eyre is set in space. I'm totally not kidding.
--(but I may be kidding myself if I'm thinking that I'll actually get to those last two agenda items)

I am such a dork.

So--UTD decided that professors had to give all students midterm grades starting this semester (rather than just the freshmen). So, I decided that I'd check my midterm grades to see how I was doing. And, I see this B- in one of my classes. A class that I've been doing well in (or so I thought) and for which I had taken the midterm on Monday. Maybe, I thought, I really, truly screwed up on the test??

I was freaking out. I reasoned that it must be a mistake--there was no way I could have done that badly on the midterm. But it was still bothering me. In between classes all day, I have been ducking into computer labs to see if it had been changed because there was an error. In fact, I am sitting in a computer lab right now, having just finished my last class of the day.

I had seriously been thinking about what I was going to do had I actually bombed the midterm. This is a required class for my Gender Studies major. I contemplated dropping it. If it weren't offered next semester, I figured I could just do without the gender studies major and just stick to the sociology. Seriously, these contingency plans were going through my head. It would have ruined my GPA. If I stayed in the class, I was figuring out how to send out transcripts to prospective grad schools before grades were in at the end of this semester, so they would see my current GPA rather than my marred-by-midterm GPA.

So, I stop into the computer lab just now, check my email, and what do I find?

Just a warning: I was misinformed about when midterm grades were due. Ithought I had until noon on Friday to enter them, but the actualdeadline was 10 a.m. on Thursday. I could not possibly get all yourexams graded by then, so I have entered a "dummy" grade of B- forEVERYONE enrolled in the class.When you get your examinations back, you will have a more accuratereflection of your grade so far.

I feel so ridiculously relieved. I am such a dork.

Instead of writing a real post, or, you know, working on my paper that's due in the morning...

...I'll give you a quiz.

You Are Likely a First Born

At your darkest moments, you feel guilty. At work and school, you do best when you're researching. When you love someone, you tend to agree with them often. In friendship, you are considerate and compromising. Your ideal careers are: business, research, counseling, promotion, and speaking. You will leave your mark on the world with discoveries, new information, and teaching people to dream.

The Birth Order Predictor

Pretty good predictor, I guess!

Anyway, I am now addicted to Rilo Kiley, just so you know. Back to work.

Midterm grades

So, I've gotten two of my midterm grades back so far and I'm happy with them.

I took my final midterm last night. I finished it, turned it in to the professor and walked out of the room. While waiting in the hall for a friend to finish, I happened to look over the test itself, noticing for the very first time that there were bonus questions on the back of the page. Bonus questions that I had not seen and thus had not answered. There were five points there, so I was darn well going to get them if I could. I sheepishly walked back into the room. I got a weird look from the professor and said, "I know I probably can't do it now, but I totally didn't see the back of the page." And--he let me go sit back down and do the bonus questions! I could have gone out in the hall, looked them up, and then gone back in and gotten them right (I was out there for a good five minutes). But, he (and he knew my name! and I never talk in that class! and it's kind of big!) let me do it again. Now I have this guilt that I should actually read for that class and start paying attention and participating. Just 'cause he was so nice.

In other midterm-related news, I got my grade back for one of my classes today. And, there was an error. The last page, where all of my partial credit, etc, was added up showed that I had missed a short answer question. I hadn't. I looked through the test like five times. Now, because of very generous bonus points, I still had over a 100 on the test (101, actually). But, darn it, I wanted those four points! So, I felt like a crappy person, standing in line to have a correction when I wanted to get a 105 instead of a 101, but, it IS four points, you know?

Anyway, I just was working out and am kind of gross, so I'm gonna go take a shower.

Edited to add: I know that last bit sounds a bit annoying... oh no! 101! how tragic! But, seriously... four points... may come in useful later if I don't do so hot on other assignments.

Reason #1,568 why google is cooler than dry highlighters*

I was looking for an article that is stored in an encyclopedia that one can only get access to through a paid subscription. So--when I googled what I needed, the first result was a page in that online encyclopedia. I click. It tells me to join for access. I click back to my search results and, in my computer illiterate style, wonder what "cached," a link right under the page I need, means**. I click on it. Apparantly google takes snapshots of pages when they crawl the web. And a cache is that snapshot. I have everything I need. I have cheated the system. I feel cool and special. And am now returning to writing my essay***.

*and those are ridiculously cool. Other than that, though, they have no relation to this post whatsoever.
**please do not ruin my illusions by commenting that any idiot would know what a cache is. I feel special in my unique knowledge at the moment, and I'd prefer to leave it that way, thank you very much.
***from which I was procrastinating by writing this post.

So, Roberts ditched the Gilbert & Sullivan stripes.

I'm kind of sad.

In better news: Roy Moore is running for Governor of Alabama, which should provide me with quite enough newstainment.

Move over chess people--

UTD, ever the nerdy school, can now boast, in addition to its number 1 ranked chess team, the third best debate team in the country.

Finishing ahead of UTD in the latest rankings were, in order of finish, Missouri State University and the University of Kansas. Rounding out the top 10 were the University of California – Berkeley, Wayne State University, the University of Michigan, the University of Iowa, Emporia State University, Miami University of Ohio and Dartmouth College.

I admit, I like going to a school where our top "sports" are chess and debate, even if I am myself am a pathetic slacker.

Of course, our football team is undefeated...

And, you know, nonexistant. (For now at least.)

But, seriously, congrats debaters! I only know a few of y'all, and even though you're weird, you make me proud(ish) to go to UTD.