Thursday, April 29, 2004

I feel awful about the research paper I’m turning in today for Media Effects class. I’ve never done such a half-assed job on a research paper before. Not only did I purposefully muff up APA style just so I wouldn’t have to cite pages, because I didn’t know the pages the info was on, because I never read the articles, instead, I just found some other article on the internet that made a point similar to the one I wanted to make, and stole the citation after that. And apparently people on the internet aren’t big on citing pages either.

Also… I thought maybe my craptacular disregard for APA style might elicit some sympathy from the prof, because it IS hard to get those damn things straight sometimes. How do you cite a paper written by four people, in a magazine compiled by 8 other people, that is technically something besides a magazine, and you found it on an online database…. Who the hell knows or cares? But of course, yesterday he sent us a great APA cheat sheet, so I have no excuse now.

But what I have to say was the worst thing about this paper, is it’s supposed to be 10 pages, and I barely got a paragraph over 5. The first 2 parts of the paper (of 4) aren’t too bad despite the fudging I mentioned earlier. They pretty much lay out aspects of the theory I’m talking about, and research that supports it. But the second 2 parts are tiny and awful. They’re supposed to be “relevance” and “importance.” Which, to me, are the same thing. But for importance, I tried to link it to other theories. This didn’t work that well, because I only knew one research article that linked it to another theory, and the rest I had to pull out of my ass. And it’s obvious that I pulled it out of my ass, because I cite no one else in this section. And the importance section is pretty much, “It’s important to us all because everyone watches TV, and even if they don’t, they hang out with people who watch TV and that affects their views too, blah blah blah.” Also pulled out of my ass and barren of citations. Frankly, if I were a professor of a 300 level class, I’d be offended if a student turned this in to me.

I don’t know what my problem is… I’m not fond of research papers in general, but no matter how much I dread them I usually do pretty darn good, if I say so myself. How can I write a whole huge thing like this simply ABOUT writing a paper, but can’t write the paper itself?

Anyway… it took me so long to do the last page and paragraph last night that I had to go to bed at 2:30. And on top of that, I had no luck falling asleep, so it was more like 4:30/5:00 by the time I finally fell asleep. Boo. Especially as I have another paper I have to work on today (though—thankfully—not a research paper, a “how-to” paper on directing at TV-10).

I had to get the research paper rant out of the way first, but now I have to mention that I’m typing this in Word. It’s been almost a week since googlies.net went down. AND, as I have told several people: since it’s Bitsy’s space, and the only contact I know for her is an e-mail addy @googlies.net, I don’t really have any way to get ahold of her and ask what’s up.

I waited awhile to see if things were going to straighten themselves out, and maybe they still will, but I’ve gotten so used to blogging every day that it feels like I’m bottling things up if I don’t post, so I’m going to be making these secret Word entries until googlies.net gets back or I manage to fix my blogspot account. Which, I dearly hope that googlies.net gets straightened out, because I was a moron and didn’t make backups. That’s almost a year of my life lost.

Good news: I keep the comics on the school server, so they’re at least safe. Until someone hacks in and messes it up, anyway. I have made a couple new ones, partly as a procrastination technique during the making of the research paper:

http://www.ilstu.edu/~alscove/comix/monkeys.jpg
http://www.ilstu.edu/~alscove/comix/grammar.jpg
http://www.ilstu.edu/~alscove/comix/t.jpg

The last business for this entry is probably to mention some of the little things I’ve wanted to blog in the last few days. Of course, I can’t remember a lot of them. And some of them, I can remember the subject, but only vaguely. Like, I had a whole thing about how I saw Man on Fire, and though it’s not my favorite or anything, I realized that Denzel Washington NEVER makes a bad movie. If there is a bad Denzel Washington movie out there, I have not seen it.

Also, how I want Jake Gylenhaal (sometimes better known as Donnie Darko) to have my babies. I had thought that that movie, “The Day After Tomorrow,” looked stupid, but then I finally saw a trailer with my future babies’ daddy in it, and he looked so good in it that I totally want to see it now.

The last thing I can remember, also to do with movies, is the Shrek II ads. And how they have a snippet of Ben Folds’ “Rockin’ the Suburbs” in it, and how I appreciate them taking the time to stick something great but a bit obscure in between the requisite Smash Mouth songs.

That’s about it for now.

(later)

Oh, I forgot to mention another thing I totally wanted to post! I’m not sure why, because it only points out how self absorbed and absent minded I am, but hey. Anyways, there’s this guy I sit behind in two of my classes and does weather on TV-10 every Friday when I’m there to crew the newscast. Up until yesterday, the third to last day of the semester, I thought that he was two separate people! It’s not like he acts all that different in class from TV-10. Or that I would have ANY reason to believe that he’s two separate people. Yet, I thought he was. And I was just staring at his back in class yesterday, and something in my brain was like, “Dude. That’s the weatherguy from TV-10!”

He also probably thinks I’m a psycho with a split personality, I always talk to him at TV-10, and never in class. Which, I don’t think he’s a split personality for not talking to me in class, because he never initiates talk with anyone in class or in TV-10. I get the impression that he’s painfully shy, which makes me wonder why he’s willing to be a weatherman at TV-10. Thanks to equipment malfunctions, we make some unsuspecting weather-person look like a giant fool at least once a week. Diff’rent strokes for diff’rent folks, though, I guess.


Tuesday, May 04, 2004

Hunh. I stopped thinking about blogging as much since I have to type it down in Word. Also, I have been awfully busy this weekend preparing for finals/finishing up last minute projects that profs stupidly assign DURING finals. Anyway, I just came back from the Japanese cinema final, and I think I did fairly okay on it. Go me!

Also, I had a dream last night. I was in a movie or watching a movie…. sometimes it becomes not so clear when it’s a dream… and the same song kept playing over and over. And the first time or two, I was like, “Whoa, this is a good song, I like it,” but after awhile I got really angry, because I couldn’t get anyone to stop it, and it was driving me nuts.

Anyway, the problem is I fell asleep while having my headphones on, with Lifehouse’s “Cling and Clatter,” on repeat. Which, that same dream thing happened to me a long time ago when I did the same thing with a Red Hot Chili Peppers song, but I obviously do not really learn from my mistakes. And most often, I only do the one song thing to myself when I want to lull myself into being calm before I sleep, I don’t actually fall asleep while listening. And I did it for like two months with the same Better Than Ezra song, because I was trying to train myself into a pavlovian response, but after awhile I got tired of it. So that’s the overly long explanation.

Oh, another funny thing about the dream—the song would go on in the background for awhile, and I wouldn’t really pay attention, but every time it got to the part of the song where it says, “Well it’s all good if you would stop the world from making sense,” I’d get like, really homicidal. Like, “Shut UP! Stop this song! Stop it!” And I actually like that bit of the song really well usually. Good times.