So, on Monday I need to hand in a paper on the Green party. I picked an examination of the role of preportionate representation on fringe party power, but I’m not quite sure how to narrow my topic down into something I both have lots of data to cite, and is relavant to my topic. Orgionally I wanted to do a paper on the effect of the international nature of the Green Party on Canadian voter perception, but there’s no data to speak of on the subject.
The topic I chose should be relatively easy, but I can’t find the journal article I need. Unfortunatly proportionate representation is a subject that’s been studied to tiny details, and the search systems seem unable to compensate for the common nature of the key words I want. However, this is not my thesis, it’s a minor paper (even despite it’s meaty length), so I think I can cobble something together with the research I did glean.
Basically the thrust of my paper is that a small, fringe party is screwed in a first past the post system, and inroads by the Greens have usually been fueled by a system that favours actual popularity, not majority-in-riding. Now I just need to put this together in a coherent way by 3 PM Monday.
I get a lot of blog spam. Some of it is the usual ‘Buy V1gra!’ ads with very little attempt hide it’s purpose. Sometimes these are fake friendly comments with links to seedy websites telling me in various degrees of coherent english that it is a “Great post, this person agree at link X”. Sometimes these spam messages have gotten more creative, being made of huge blocks of stolen text interspaced with random medication related links so they resemble some sort of post-modern fiction experiement. Recently, however, the comment spam has all been from one bot trying to push various medicines. Each one lists what the pill does in fairly good english, but includes a great deal of randomness in the “If you have X, don’t use Y” list. He’s the highlights:
*Suicidal or already having a suicide shot at.
*Preggers or trying to be productive
*pregnant or infuriating to get in a family way
*if you have alcohol containing drinks
*pregnant or annoying to regain having a bun in the oven
*Bipolar or having the story bipolar
*Chron’s bug
*irregular heartbeat or heart plague
*sentiment fit out
*ISOTRETINOIN treats glowering acne
*if you commonly swig rot-gut containing drinks
*thyroid muddle
*mental problems, such as depression, psychosis, attempted suicide, or a strain retailing of loony problems
*eye or delusion problems, including a rare inherited vision infirmity called retinitis pigmentosa
*fecund or troublesome to get having a bun in the oven
*bend the elbow more than 3 booze containing drinks a time
*an freakish or allergic reply to ketorolac, aspirin, other NSAIDs, other medicines, foods, dyes, or preservatives
*pregnant or worrying to retrieve significant
*an hooch libel pretty pickle
*downcast stomach acid staging
*pregnant or fatiguing to pick up in the pudding club
*sentiment condition
*mental problems, such as dejection, psychosis, attempted suicide, or a family retailing of off one’s rocker problems
And at the bottom of every list-
*breast feeding
So I bugged my poor father about more cash, which should hit my bank account in the next few days. That’s certainly a relief, as at the moment whenever I opened my wallet I saw a yawning abyss. My mother’s feeling dreadfully guilty about not getting the student loan forms to me with any degree of alacrity. The Machiavellian part of me feels like I should almost cheer her on- every moth she doesn’t manage to cough up is a month that I have to be given interest free cash.
She’s actually actively being nice to my father too, who seems to spend a lot of time denying his squirming guilt. This way he gets to feel magnanimous and well organized- and to be honest either one is very difficult for him.
Despite my protests of sleepiness, the year is purring along quite comfortably. My gentleman might be privately screaming in anxiety over his upcoming thesis deadline, but every time my professors give a midterm outline for their respective classes, my workload decreases to what I’ve already covered and my eyes get a bit less buggy.
Relief about financial concerns means time to get a haircut through the salon that did a very good job last time and tame my eyebrows with judicious application of boiling wax. Being a woman is bloody expensive and involves quite a bit of professional mutilation. To add to it, many of my older bras now have a large hole in the band and this means that I’m going to have to shell out more money on other people’s beauty standards. I really wish that bras were cheaper – I’m very lucky because I’m exactly average in size, so stores usually have my fit in a variety of patterns, but the price point for something that feels comfortable is still about $30, and waiting until the sales can be a hit or miss proposition, since being the most common size all the bland basics and pretties models tend to sell out before then, and you’re left with the enormous taupe monstrosity with the rhinestones, and the acid green starched mesh boudoir bra. Granted I feel even more sorry for the plus sized crowd, to whom those seem to be the starting, full price selection. I remember one time sifting through a bin of thongs, and some sweet and innocent designer decided is what fat women really needed was more leopard print and circus themed underpants.
My brain’s gone back on holiday again, leaving me with a sort of fatty pudding between my ears, that makes terrible, churning squoshy noises when I try to use it. I know so because I sat down to focus on my homework and I read half the chapter only to find out not a single word had actually passed from my eyes to my active memory.
Even as I type this, my eyelids are closing temselves. Napping during homework is not abnormal for me- I seem to run near constant sleep deprivation (I have all the symptoms according to the sleep health chart in the dr’s office, allowing me to over achieve in at least one feild in my life), which sleeping extra doesn’t seem to completely remedy. So far I’ve tried thicker curtains and a sleep mask, though sadly both leak. Perhaps I need a better quality mask, since my cutains only filter 1/4 of the light and my large nose makes the mask jut off my face with a big drafty gap on the bottom. Maybe I should also talk to a doctor about it again… Sadly they don’t really seem to be able to do much but check my thyroid a lot and question my caffiene intake suspiciously.
But anyway, these past few days have been especially bad as far as napping. I’ve conked out three days in a row for two or three hour naps and missed yoga because I’m just too physically and mentally stunned out. And now it’s straight to bed, fo another day of being a zombie. Nrrrrr… Need chronic fatigue treated!
So I went out and bought a big sheet of red paper, the most economical way to cut out 13 paper hearts for the various folk in my building. As of the 14th I’ll either be adored or shunned. I’m hoping for immaturity- most people I know are delighted toget noticed, even trivially. The only thing I worry is that people will take it the wrong way.
That and my neighbour, who I share a bedroom wall with, is probably borderline homocidal from the loud sex noises. Correction- loud pleading for mercy, hitting -and- sex noises. There’s really no way to flog someone quietly, and I’ll happily listen to her play guitar round the clock is she forgives us for having kinky sex less than a foot away from her bed.
To facilitate better studying, I gave up web surfing. So far it hasn’t been so difficult, though I find I have more ways to goof off than just mindless clicking. On the other hand I’d rather watch episodes of “Sassy Girl” or write bad fantasy fiction, so it suits me even if I’m not the perfect angel one might hope.
Speaking of Sassy Girl, I’ve noticed that it tends to be an excellent motivator where noting else works. The sort of literature that espouses the power of human potential makes me feel bathed in glurge, and I’m naturally repelled by the genre of productivity porn, where if you just order your contact list the right way, somehow the magic zen wealth gnomes will give you the ability to achieve more than you ever imagined. But give me a happy over achiever story in fiction or some housekeeping books and I’m happily embroiled in my studies right away.
So, the inevitable has happened, and critter hats are invading. This generally proves my ongoing thesis that what shameless geeks are wearing will trickle down eventually. Critter hats seem to be part of a general trend towards stupid stuff on your head to keep warm, that’s also clustered around big parka frills and guys wearing those hats with ear flaps.
I’m of two minds about this trend. On the one hand, I’ve always wanted a kitty hat, on the other hand, I have a personal problem related to these hats- because of the size of my head, anything that isn’t over sized will be dispreportionate to my colassal cranium.
On the plus side, I believe I’m ordering this hat for my gentleman, since he agreed that this halloween we could go as bo-peep and sheep:
I’m under a lot of school stress, and I’ve been fairly sore with bodily tension since classes started. As of the third week of February, I finish my least favourite pat of the school term- midterms. Thanks to therapy and good medications, my strategy has adjusted from placing my head as firmly into the sand as I can, to neurotically trying to organize my tasks.
The other night (not last night, but the night before) my gentleman and I had an enormous misunderstanding related to acedemics. He found me curled into a small ball whining with stress and from my gibbering took the root of the situation to be that my midterms were next week, not that I’m a delicate flower with a low stress tolerance who weeps when things are going well. My lack of sleep and thus incoherence didn’t disabuse him of this notion and he proceeded to read me the riot act about working myself into a corner with procrastination.
Cue sobbing on my part, since I thought he was mad at me for being easily stressed. The next day I wandered off to class and while doing my usual between class studies, it occured to me why he was so upset. I came home to find him clad in clouds of steam, the last of the dirty dishes in his soapy dpaws, with a slightly guilty look and an apologetic declaration that if he was going to chew me up he’d better lead by example by doing all his chores, to which I casually mentioned that I in fact had two full weeks of study for my midterms, not the five days he had assumed and panicked over. There was a pause, and he became the gibbering one.
In any case, I’ve been spending a lot of time in the library lately, or curled up on a couch at school with a reading propped on my lap. I’m about helf done for the assinged readings for everthing up to the midterm, and my goal, which feels very reachable at the moment, is to finish the rest for Thursday. That’s about 5 chapters of Psychology (actually 1 in one class and 4 in another), 4 foreign policy readings, 6 chapters of foreign policy. There’s also a paper due on Wednesday in midterm week, which should be about 10 journal articles, as the page length is ten pages, and an idiot assignment on Freud VS evolution due this Friday, which I’m writing tonight after my voluntary french class.