Time to fire up my printer and get a story sent out to them, then. WOO!
Remember a week or so ago, when I was unleashing my amazing Powers of Sarcasm on the topic of Powerforce bands being sold with the CU logo? I’ve gotten a reply, and I thought I would share it with the internets.
To review: Powerforce power bands? Still total bullshit. Still claiming that “ions” are going to “give you confidence from within.”
Reply to the e-mail I sent to the Chancellor’s office:
Dear Rachael:
Allow me to answer your query regarding the University’s athletic marketing of the “Power Force” Power Band.
First, let me explain that the previous response that went out to a few individuals who e-mailed Chancellor DiStefano was supposed to be a reply on behalf of the chancellor by a staff member in our Buffalo Sports Properties office, not a reply from the chancellor himself. I apologize for the way the reply was worded – it was confusing as to who the author actually was.
Regarding your query: members of the senior administration staff have carefully reviewed your concerns, looked into the University’s contract with the company that markets the bands, examined our peer universities’ relationships with the company, and reached the following conclusions:
· As you suggest, the claims of the company regarding the efficacy of the band aren’t based on firm scientific ground. However, the band is being marketed by through the athletic department as a novelty with affinity- inspired athletic branding that is unique to CU Athletics. The symbol it uses – the charging Ralphie – represents CU sports teams, not the university as a whole, and certainly not its research entities.
· In the same spirit, our sports-labeled products include everything from sweat bands to golf tees to lawn gnomes. These are all designed to create affinity and build school spirit, not to be literal representations of the University and its academic work.
· Likewise, the company is offering the same Powerforce Power Bands for universities that include Cal, Penn State, Missouri, Pitt and a host of other peer schools. These are quality institutions that, like us, have elected to promote a novelty item with an athletic logo for affinity and commercial purposes.
I appreciate your concern and that of your fellow graduate students and other skeptics. Your respect for science and the scientific method is manifest inyour concern, and your dedication to advancing our highest academic values is impressive.
We do not believe in the end, however, that novelty items like the “Power Force Power Band” are threats to these values.
Sincerely,
Bronson R. Hilliard, director of media relations and spokesperson
University of Colorado at Boulder
I believe that, in legal circles, this is what’s known as “the novelty item defense.” Right up there with “the metaphor” defense.
Rather than write a completely separate blog entry, I thought I would simply publicly repost the reply I sent to Mr. Hilliard a few minutes ago. While I admit that I would dearly love to say some snarky, snarky things, I don’t think that would be fair to Mr. Hilliard, who has been very polite to me.
HOWEVER. If you can’t survive without your daily requirement of snark on this one, Please see Stuart’s blog. He has taken up the baton of sarcasm and run with it most admirably.
Thank you for taking the time to respond to my e-mail. I would like to address a few of the points that you’ve made, so please indulge me in that.
[Snip: Mr. Hilliard’s point about Ralphie representing the athletics teams rather than the academic departments.]
My impression has always been that in the public view, the sports teams and the university are inextricably linked. The student athletes that make up our teams are just that – students as well as athletes. In many ways, what sports teams do and promote can represent the school in some very profound ways. At an extreme, bad behavior by student athletes (eg: assaults, etc) can reflect extremely poorly upon whatever school that athlete belongs to. I bring this example up not because I would in any way equate a violent assault with the promotion of a pseudoscientific product, but more to exemplify my view that the athletic team of a university is not necessarily viewed as a completely separate entity.
And likewise, while Ralphie is most assuredly the emblem of the athletics teams, he is likewise associated completely with the name of the University of Colorado at Boulder. I think that it’s important to note that those of us here primarily for academic pursuits still have a certain level of team spirit and affection for our mascot. We don’t view Ralphie as the property of the athletic department alone and completely separate from us either. School spirit is school spirit, whether we are taking pride in CU because we’re fans of the football team or because we’re building a mission to Mars – or both.
[Snip: Mr. Hilliard’s point about novelty items.]
I think the salient point here, however, is that neither golf tees nor lawn gnomes are claiming to power one’s “inner force” with “ions.” There are novelty items, and there are novelty items.
Items that tacitly promote nonscientific or pseudoscientific ideas often get a pass with the label of “novelty item” – dowsing pendants, Ouija boards, and some very questionable medical devices spring to mind here. While many people doubtless consider pendants and Ouija boards to be nothing but silly novelties, it’s also undeniable that some people do take these items, and their claims very seriously. Sometimes to their very real harm. Another example of this would be ear candles, which have not been approved for medical use by the FDA but can still be sold (with a nod and a wink) as “novelty items.”
My concern here is, if we are going to promote the sale of a “novelty item” that makes such a questionable claim, where will the line be drawn?
[Snip: Mr. Hilliard’s point about the other universities.]
I actually find it quite distressing that such prestigious universities are associating themselves with this company and its carefully non-specific but nonetheless embarrassingly unscientific claims. I also feel like I have less standing to voice a complaint to the faculty at those schools, as I am not a student there.
That Penn State or Cal have decided to promote an item such as this should, I think, not be a justification for CU to do so as well. Rather, this could be an opportunity for CU to lead the way in standing on principles of both scientific rigor and team spirit. We can show our team and school pride in many ways (even with the occasional lawn gnome) while subtly brandishing out academic credentials as well.
Again, I think you for your time.
I will admit that when I first read Mr. Hilliard’s point about the other universities involved with this “novelty item,” I heard my mother’s voice very clearly in my head, asking me, “If all your friends were jumping off a cliff, would you do it too?”
Hm, do ions help you develop psychic powers?
Categories
Second Chances
You may recall that back in July, Isaac helped me get a cat out of a tree. I tried to shove the poor, frightened animal into a carrier then, and it escaped. I kept an eye out for the cat after that, and thought I might have seen it a couple of times, but it was always far too wary.
A week ago, the kids that live next door told me there was a cat, hiding under one of the cars in our parking lot. It was the same cat. It was wary, frightened, skittish, but it also wasn’t running away like it had been. I went inside and grabbed a bowl of cat food. Despite the fear, despite the little kids that were trying desperately to help and in reality only getting in the way and scaring the poor thing more, it came out from under the car and started eating. And eating. One of the kids went and got it a bowl of water, and it sucked half the water down.
The cat was the same one Isaac helped me get out of the tree. It was also rail thin, with big awkward feet that would have been white if its fur weren’t so filthy. After it sucked down one bowl of food, the cat let me pet it, and even managed a rusty, uncertain purr and a sad, squeaky little meow.
Mike wasn’t that happy when I dragged him outside to see the cat. He’s always been more pragmatic than me. I was all for dragging the little cat into our house right that instant. He pointed out that it might have FIV, or feline leukemia, or fleas, or who knows what else. But he also knew that I wouldn’t be able to sleep, just leaving the little one outside. My next door neighbor was in the same situation; she has two other cats as well, and he husband wouldn’t have been happy to suddenly acquire a third.
So Mike and I made a deal; we’d take the cat to the emergency vet, have it checked out, and then we could keep it overnight in the spare room so I could take it to the shelter the next day.
The cat turned out to be a she, was 6-8 months old, and got a clean bill of health other than being incredibly thin – just six pounds. We sat in the chilly exam room while the vet took the cat to the back room to the quick tests for FIV and leukemia, and I sent a text message to Evan, one of my fellow grad students. He’d mentioned that he wanted a cat. I told him that I’d found one, and the first thing he asked was, “Aw, is she cute?”
For the last week, she’s been living in my spare room. I’ve spent time with her every morning, and when I come home, and before I go to bed. She has a purr twice as big as her body, and a meow like a rusty gate. I’ve been just calling her Squeaker. She’s sweet and loving, but also skittish; it’s not hard to imagine how hard her life must have been up until now. She loves to be petted, to lean against my leg and purr. She doesn’t know quite how to play right with humans, and gets a little bitey. I’m glad that Evan decided to take her. After just a day, I don’t think I could have taken her to a shelter. But I can let her go to a good home.
Evan’s going to make a good dad for a skinny little cat that needs a lot of love. He decided to name her Shiraz (hopefully I spelled that right). When he loaded her into his car a couple of hours ago, she was wailing and carrying on. It’s hard, not being able to explain to someone that their life is about to get better, so much better.
So tonight the cat we dragged out of a tree four months ago went to her forever home. And I’d be lying if I didn’t say I’m already missing her, but the two brats are already much happier without another cat lurking behind a closed door. I’d also be lying if I didn’t admit I was crying, just a little, right now. But I think I’ll get to see her again soon, in her new home.
I don’t think that second chances in life are all that uncommon. They happen all the time, little opportunities to correct mistakes or backtrack on bad decisions. But I also think that the second chance to save a life, even a small, humble life, doesn’t come around all that often.
A while ago, there was a rash of postings all over the internets about the sinister Happy Meal That Would Not Die or the utterly disturbing McDonald’s hamburger that had been preserved since, I don’t know, the last ice age or something. The conclusion of the woman with the ancient hamburger is:
Ladies, Gentleman, and children alike – this is a chemical food. There is absolutely no nutrition here.
Note: everything is made of chemicals. Everything.
This even got a mention on Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe (#274), with many a good hypothesis as to why a hamburger might act this way. It was something that definitely could be tested scientifically, and no one had bothered.
Every day, I monitored the progress of the burgers, weighing each one, and carefully checking for spots of mold growth or other indications of decay. The burgers were left in the open air, but handled only with clean kitchen tools or through clean plastic bags (no direct contact with my hands until the last day).
This is why I love, love, love reading Serious Eats. Some of the contributors are made of 100% pure WIN.
Read the post, but the punchline is that the author made his own (“all-natural”) hamburger the same size as the McDonald’s one and set them head to head. They both dehydrated nicely and turned into hamburger jerky. This comes as no surprise to anyone who doesn’t ascribe to the idea that McDonald’s is trying to destroy the world by feeding everyone food made out of plastic. Or whatever.
Of course, it’s a small sample size and yadda yadda. We must need some replication! It sounds like an awesome way to flavor the air of your house with the stench of old hamburger. This would, I think, make an EXCELLENT science fair experiment for a kid with extremely tolerant parents.
Good on you, J. Kenji Lopez-Alt. Good on you, Serious Eats. You get a skeptic gold star today.
Categories
Happy Voting Day
I can’t begin to tell you how happy I am that it’s election day. You know why? Because that means this will hopefully be the last day that Robert Ramirez, Grover Norquist, and some lady named Cynthia who claims to be from Arvada robocall me multiple times in the space of 24 hours and urge me to vote for Ramirez. This is even more aggravating because:
1) Robocalls leave voice mails, which I have to keep going into my mailbox and deleting.
2) I’ve already voted, and it sure as hell wasn’t for Robert Ramirez. I’m certain he’s a lovely human being, but I like my current state representative (Debbie Benefield).
3) And, let’s be honest. Having Grover Norquist pulling for you is really not something to be advertised if you want to impress me anyway.
It’s enough to make me want to ask for my mail-in ballot back, just so I can make sure the circle next to Debbie Benefield’s name is good and dark.
There’s no need to even go in to detail about the amount of spam (both digital and analog) I’ve gotten over the last week. Though I am a little disappointed that I didn’t get any crazy mail from Focus on the Family this year. That’s always good for a rage-filled cackle.
Anyway, if you’re American, go vote! And while I normally try to just emphasize the awesomeness of civic duty because I don’t want to sound like the Cynthia from Arvada robocall, I do have one request for this year – please remember that women are people too, and it would be nice if the government didn’t want to lodge itself in our collective vagina. Shocking, I know. (PSST. That means if you live in Colorado, for goodness’ sake VOTE NO ON 62! And non-high-heels wearing senate candidate Ken Buck doesn’t think much of women either, it should be noted.)
And tomorrow we can all celebrate the end of robocalls and political spam for another, oh, year and a half. Right up until the Presidential race really gets cooking.
Recently a friend of mine – who wishes to remain nameless at this time – saw a product marketed at a CU Buffs football game. It’s the Power Force Wrist Band.
I will note that the Power Force website is actually fairly unimpressive, particularly since it looks like a lot of the pictures are badly trimmed. But even more unimpressive is the description of the product in question:
Power Force’s Innovative Products were developed to work with your body’s natural inner force. Within each Power Force powerband are ions that work with your body’s energy to give you confidence from within. Your inner force is limitless. Channel this force with Power Force powerband. Power Your Inner Force.
Emphasis mine. Now, it could be that I just haven’t gotten far enough into chemistry, but what I do recall about ions tells me that they’re ubiquitous, important, and have absolutely nothing to do with one’s self-confidence1. The phrases “your body’s natural inner force” and “your body’s energy” are essentially meaningless. They also strongly call to mind the justification behind many types of “alternative medicine,” which is that the body has some sort of energy field that permeates it and can be manipulated. (Reiki is one example of this.)
I will also note that, upon inspecting the site, the products look eerily like another silly energy bracelet, the Power Balance Wrist Band, which claims:
Power Balance is based on the idea of optimizing the body’s natural energy flow, similar to concepts behind many Eastern philosophies. The hologram in Power Balance is designed to resonate with and respond to the natural energy field of the body.
The claims of Power Balance have been thoroughly taken apart by Dr. Harriet Hall at the Science-Based Medicine Blog and Device Watch.
To be fair, there is no solid proof that Power Balance and Power Force come from the same company; both are owned by LLCs of different names, and the two sites were registered to different people. Rather it’s just the similarity of the claims and the look of the products that caught my attention. And frankly, it’s an alt-med rip-off whether the silly plastic bracelet is claiming to optimize your body’s non-existent energy flow or promote your “inner force” with ions. Both statements are the sort of thing that cause physicists (and biologists) to laugh uncontrollably or curl up in a corner, sobbing, because it’s just not any fun to watch somebody torture your beloved science.
For more science and less sarcasm on this topic, I urge you to go read Stuart’s post over at Exposing PseudoAstronomy.
Beyond the normal skeptic grumbling about ridiculous products, there’s another reason this silly “ion” wrist band is upsetting. CU Boulder is most well known for two things – our football team, and our research. The University of Colorado at Boulder is a Research I University, which means we award a lot of doctorates and get a lot of federal research funding. We have three Nobel laureates in the physics department – a poster outside of the physics building advertises this fact.
So to advertise the brain power and research acumen of CU in one breath and then advertise a bunch of pseudoscientific crap in the next seems like a real problem to at least this little nerd.
It also sounded like a problem to my friend, who wrote an unhappy e-mail to the Chancellor of the University and the Athletics Director. The answer they got back was most unfortunate:
Dear [Name redacted at request of original e-mail recipient],
I asked our athletic department for an explanation for you regarding how products receive permission to use the CU logo and its endorsement. Buffalo Sports Properties owns the rights to all the advertising and sponsorship opportunities so this is their response.” The company Powerforce went through all of the appropriate channels for approval to use the CU marks and logos. They applied for the CU license through CLC and based on the company’s information, goals and objectives, a license was granted. Additionally, the company has paid for a sponsorship with CU Athletics, which is the product was promoted on the video board.
As for the actual product, there has been research about magnetic therapy and its effects on pain, stress, fatigue, and concentration. While I don’t have access to our campus library (which may have better access to scientific research), here are two links to websites with articles about magnetic therapy.
http://www.articlesbase.com/medicine-articles/magnetic-bracelet-therapy-case-study-by-dr-carlos-vallbona-usa-2268067.html
http://www.magnetictherapyfacts.org/magnetic_therapy_research.aspThanks,
[Name and contact info also redacted by request of the e-mail recipient]Thank you for your interest and support of CU.
Go Buffs!
Philip P. DiStefano, Chancellor
University of Colorado Boulder
Okay, I have no idea where this magnet therapy thing came from, considering the Power Force website only mentions ions. But lest we forget, magnet therapy is also largely crap as well. Dr. Steven Novella has a nice historical overview at the NeuroLogica Blog, which ends on this lovely research note.
I’ll be writing my own e-mail to the office of the Chancellor shortly, just to add my voice. I ask that you consider doing so as well.
Oh, but it’s just a silly little plastic bracelet. Really, Geek, what’s the harm?
1 – Well, except maybe for the tungstate ion. It makes me feel all warm and squishy whenever I think about it.
MileHiCon 42 was a lot of fun. At least the little bit that I saw of it was a blast. While I paid for a full weekend, I didn’t make it on Friday since I was too busy punching things, and today I was helping someone move. (Or more accurately, waiting up in Westminster to help someone move who didn’t get there until much later than expected due to a flat tire near the Wyoming border.)
So yes. Fun.
I got to go to several very interesting panels. One was a little workshop to make a two-sentence elevator pitch. I was very pleased with how mine turned out, since I tried to come up with one for Throne of Nightmares. I wrote my two sentence summary, the panel chopped about half the words out, and now it’s quite lovely. Are you ready to witness its awesomeness? HOLD ON TIGHT!
Drew suffers a traumatic injury at the hands of his former friend, and emerges able to see interdimensional predators. Soon Drew must choose between godhood and a normal life, between saving his friend and saving himself.
BOOM.
Yes. I can sense that you wish to shower me with dirty handfuls of cash now. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
Also I went to a panel about applying fiction skills to writing non-fiction. I was expecting it to be more about the actual writing process, but the panelists had a lot of useful advice on how and where to look for non-fiction work. So if I ever have time to do so, I will try to apply that advice. Some extra money would be quite lovely.
Late in the afternoon there was a fun panel about all sorts of misconceptions about fighting (of all kinds) that get perpetuated in books and film. Dan Dvorkin moderated it, and it was mostly a ridiculous amount of fun. I think “boisterous” or perhaps even “rowdy” would be a good word to describe the panelists.
And now… are you ready for the name dropping portion of this blog post? Because here it comes.
An event that I almost chickened out on – since I’m absolutely crap at meeting new people and not acting like a giant space moron – was “Speed Date a Science Fiction Author.” I’m pretty sure that’s what it was called. Anyway, I’m glad that I hung in and gave it a try. Something like 20 authors got packed into a room, and you could go around for three minute “dates” to get to ask them about their books.
I can’t quite go down the list of all the lovely people I got a chance to (briefly) talk to. It took about thirty seconds to cover the “What of yours should I read” and then after that, conversations normally veered off into all sorts of random topics.
Ian Tregillis was the only one of the authors in the room I’d actually heard of, since I’d seen his book Bitter Seeds mentioned in io9 and it sounded like something I wanted to read. He was very sweet and seemed a little shy, but he was a lot of fun to talk to. His day job is as a physicist at the National Laboratories in Los Alamos (that’s one hell of a day job) so I mostly just asked him questions about that. I’m really looking forward to reading his book.
Rather than repeat again and again that each and every one of these authors was nice, and charming, and lovely, I’ll just say here that they all were. Then again, I wouldn’t expect a writer willing to participate in an event like this would be an egotistical jerk. But yes, everyone was a lot of fun and I’m glad that I didn’t wimp out.
I spent a lot of time before the event chatting with Donita K. Paul prior to the event. She’s also doing an MDA lock up, so if you’ve got a few extra dollars, maybe consider helping her get out of jail a little quicker, since it’s for a good cause.
I’ve actually sort of heard of Daniel Abraham before, to the extent that I’ve seen the book cover for his short story collection on a blog and thought it was very nice looking. (I’m a sucker for watercolors.)
Rob Rice was definitely the most snazzily dressed of the bunch. And yes, he was wearing exactly the same thing as he’s pictured wearing on his website. He’d also been on the panel that did the elevator pitches, and he told me that he thought my novel sounded interesting. Squee!
Sarah Hoyt and the rest of the Hoyt trio were quite fun. I actually finished off the event talking with her son, who is in pre-med. We spent a lot of time mutually complaining about just how awful it is to be in school and have no time.
Melinda Snodgrass has the best last name ever. And I love her hair. And she wrote the script for the freaking “THE MEASURE OF A MAN” Star Trek: The Next Generation episode. I am unashamed of the amount of fangirling I did.
Nicole Kurtz was one I spent more than my three minutes talking with. She gave me a lot of really excellent advice. And she writes books where the heroines are best described as “sassy,” which I just can’t get enough of.
So that was at least some of the highlights of the speed dating. And I of course must also mention that I went to the one hour reading/Q&A that Paolo Bacigalupi did. I now now how to pronounce his last name, which means I’m at least one IQ point smarter than when I started out. (Clue: Not “bunchachalupas”) He read a bit from his new novella, and talked a lot about his interest in environmental issues, economics, and the interactions between them.
I want to be Paolo Bacigalupi when I grow up. But with a last name people can pronounce. And still be a girl. But really, I just mean I want to be able to write stories that involve big issues like that, and still have them be compelling and fascinating stories.
I fled from MHC at five, since I needed to get home for the Not-Quite-But-Almost-W00tstock in Boulder. I was hoping to get to eat dinner beforehand, but that was not to be. There was construction on I-25 and so I got home barely in time for David to collect me for the ride up to Boulder.
W00tstock was definitely worth it. Paul and Storm were HILARIOUS. Phil Plait’s litany of astronomical dick jokes was likewise hilarious. (And even funnier, that was the first time David had actually seen Phil lecture. So there you go.) And Adam Savage? Oh, the glee. He got the one standing ovation of the night for making an absolutely horrific Michael Jackson joke that almost caused me to pee my pants, I was laughing so hard.
The Captain’s Wife’s Lament took 23 minutes to finish. I know that’s not a record, but I still feel like I did my part.
ARRRR!
Categories
Goodbye, Realms of Fantasy
Realms of Fantasy looks like it’s gone for good now.
The more I think about it, the more depressed I feel. I’ve actually been a subscriber to RoF since its first issue. It was what motivated me to start really trying to write, in a half-hearted, teenaged kind of way. While I make a lot of jokes about my collection of rejection slips now, the first rejection that I ever got was from RoF, years and years and years ago. It was my goal to some day get a story published in the magazine, because I just knew I had it in me to write stories that could make someone laugh, or sniffle, or cheer, or cringe, or think like the ones in RoF did.
And now it’s a goal that I will never attain. I guess it says something that until this day, I’ve kept alive one of the dreams that I had as a nerdy, awkward fat girl pecking away at the keyboard of a 486. I’ve come far since then, but not far enough. What I took out of high school was mostly a lot of stupid insecurities and confusion. But RoF remained something that my adult self could share with the awkward teenager of my memories, and it was without question wonderful.
I’m going to miss you, RoF. More than I can say.
I’ve been reading a lot of scientific papers lately; I’m in two classes, and I’m trying to get in a sufficient amount of reading on topic before my research starts up. Easier said than done… for the most part, scientific papers tend to knock me out, even if I’m not tired when I start reading. And it’s not a fatigue issue, anyway; if I’m reading something that I’m interested in, it doesn’t matter how tired I am. I’ll stay up until four in the morning just because I need to read One More Page.
I think papers just knock me out because, for the most part, they’re badly written. There’s a lot of jargon, but that’s unavoidable in a specialized field. I think the bigger problem tends to be writing style. I’ll go out on a limb and guess that most scientists aren’t like me (writing fiction as a masochistic hobby) or my friend Evan (who has a BA in English). When I took my “writing in the geosciences” undergrad course – which I wasn’t terribly impressed by – most of the other students were just miserable about being there, because they hated writing so much.
Actually disliking the process of writing is not going to help when it comes to producing a coherent, interesting paper. I suppose the more the writer feels like he or she is fighting with the English language, the more the reader will feel like it, too.
There are a lot of things that make scientific papers a giant slog to read. I think one of the major ones is the ubiquitous use of passive voice. In prose, passive voice is the kiss of death. It’s something to be avoided entirely or used only sparingly, because it tends to interfere with the reader’s ability to connect with the action.
Of course, scientific articles aren’t fiction. Most of the time.
But the thing is, a lot of people who write scientific papers tend to use passive voice. I think it’s because it makes them sound somehow more impartial – one of the big uses of passive is to remove the doer from a sentence. “A simulation was run” as opposed to “we ran a simulation.” I can understand that desire, but it makes it damn hard to read and stay interested, particularly when it sounds like the methods section is just kind of running itself without any sort of human intervention.
I bring this up because I read an article in Geology over the weekend that didn’t hammer the reader with passive sentences, and it was a treat to read. I was tired, and it didn’t knock me out. I was interested. I felt engaged by the writing. Now, I can’t really say too much about the subject itself, since it deals with climate modeling and that’s not something I personally do. But the writing was definitely a step above most of the other articles I’ve read lately.
Go check it out for yourself, if you have Geoscience World subscription: CO2-driven ocean circulation changes as an amplifier of Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum hydrate destabilization (Lunt et al)
It’s a sad statement on the writing in this field when article that doesn’t make me fall asleep at my desk warrants an excited blog post.
Categories
The Weekend That Wasn’t
I did survive the Rocky Mountain Rendezvous, though at this point I’m still not sure if that’s an entirely good thing. Two days of questionable food and a ridiculous amount of stress have taken a toll on my insides. I’m a miserable human being at the moment.
I did all of the driving, which was awful in a special way. I normally drive a Honda Civic with a manual transmission. On the trip I drove a Suburban with an automatic transmission. It made me feel strangely bloated. I think the only reason I was able to handle the car without going completely out of my mind was that I’ve still got some memory of the ol’ ambulance driving days. As it was, the defensive driving I learned then served me well when someone did a dead stop in front of me on Grand Avenue without signaling their intention to turn. I apparently did a masterful swerve into the right hand lane, which I got a lot of compliments for once my passengers had gotten their hearts restarted. I also apparently reached across the seat to hold on to my friend Gaby with my hand that wasn’t clutching the steering wheel. I don’t actually remember this, but Gaby insists it’s true and it likely means that I’m turning in to my mother.
The Suburban and I disliked each other to the bitter end. I managed to lock my luggage in the car and then returned the key before I noticed, and I blame the Suburban for that as well. I had to drive up to the motor pool early this morning to retrieve my luggage. The woman behind the counter handed over the key without argument, though she did accompany it with a look that clearly said, “You are a moron.” Which I suppose I richly deserved.
And if you haven’t figured out how this works yet, the minute I do something mortally embarrassing and stupid, I have to tell everyone about it.
Generally I feel like the weekend was a colossal, stressful waste of my time, and I’m sorry to say that. I only had three interviews, so I should be grateful just for the chance at practicing my interviewing skills. However, once I got there I realized that the meeting was more supposed to be a chance for students to schmooze potential recruiters. And to say that I’m not much of a schmoozer is an understatement. A couple of my fellow students were Born To Schmooze, so to speak, and watching them in action just left me feeling like the awkward fat kid on the playground.
We’ll see if I get an internship out of this, but I’m not going to hold my breath. I only feel like one of the interviews went really well. And everyone was surprised that I only got three, since I have five years of industry experience on my resume. Considering that in one of the interviews I was asked pointedly if I couldn’t just go back to my old company and get a job this summer, I’m thinking it’s something of a two-edged sword.
There was also some excellent highschool-style drama during the trip, which is a good reminder for me that while we all can’t help but get older, we definitely aren’t required to get any wiser. And I ruined my dress shoes somehow; the sole on one of the shoes developed enormous cracks in three places. Cracks bad enough that they cause me to wobble as I walk. This means that there is shoe shopping in my very near future. All I can hope is that the evil fascist conspiracy taking place in my digestive tract will finish me off before I get that far.
On a positive note, the Comfort Inn we stayed at had waffle irons in the breakfast room, so I got to make a fresh belgian waffle for myself two days in a row. And that’s certainly worth something.