chat roulette, ect

I got up this morning and said to myself, among other things, that I would get a lot of work done today while I work my 4 ½ hour shift at the weightroom. When I got there and checked my email, I realized that I had told the students from intro to film studies (I’m a T.A) to email me their papers on Citizen Kane. I will read a few, I said to myself, and then move onto other things. Now it is nearing the end of my shift, and I have read several. I found it highly disagreeable. Two were good, one was quite good in fact, but the others were…wanting. I don’t even know what to say to these students. Can I tell them they should rewrite? Because that is what I did in one case…Well anyway, Hampshire has evaluation inflation…and I might as well stand up against that, knowing I will be resented.

In other news, I discovered chat roulette yesterday! Dinah at media services told me about it. Then I had the idea to do it last night while I was drinking and playing Chinese checkers at mod 6. It is a very disconcerting experience, and it involves seeing a lot of dicks. I wondered out loud when some theorist would write about it. It seems like something out of a Cronenberg movie from the eighties.

Somehow, I feel that this post is lacking…the things I wanted to say seemed more interesting than they do now. Whatever it was that compelled me to write regularly here seems to have dissipated…

Disarming the assholes

It’s been a while. Today at media services I worked a shift with Dinah for the first time. I knew her from office meetings, but I wasn’t sure what to expect. She seemed on the level. Dave came in and we all complained about the people who hang out in the library and don’t study and annoy us. There are a couple of regulars that are especially irritating, despite the fact that they never actually talk to us and we never talk to them…we just see them there, wasting time and fucking around. There was a guy sleeping on the couch right outside of the office. This we found especially irksome; it is not as if it is the end of the semester and the guy is just so stressed out that he needs a nap amidst all his studying. The motherfucker probably didn’t even have any books with him. I tried to wake him up first by throwing paper planes at him and then by coughing really loudly as I walked past, but to no avail.

Later on, some dude came in who, based on seeing him around school, seems kind of like an unsavory fucker/douche bag. Sometimes when these types come in I try to be particularly charming to catch them off guard and make them crack a smile or laugh a little bit, and give up their generally affected demeanor (for this guy I made a joke about the other guy sleeping on the couch, among other things). Dinah, in fact, remarked that that was the first time she saw that guy not being an asshole. Well, sometimes I like to disarm the assholes, I said.