The College Experience ~ Spring '08 (GRADUATION)

Family History Day
Flag Day (US)
National Flag Day USA: Pause for the Pledge
National Nursing Assistants Day and Week
World Juggling Day
Anniversary - US Army
Birthday - Burl Ives (singer/actor)
Birthday - Harriet Beecher Stowe (writer)
Rice Planting Festival (Japan)

 

What I Learned This Term:

 

• You can get injured while juggling.
• Cytotec was a drug used in the 1990s to induce labor in women who had had a previous C-section, which turned out not to be a good idea because it was causing women’s uteri to EXPLODE.  HOW BONKERS IS THAT?!
• There are five tablespoons of orange grit in a packet of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.
• Latah is a condition recognized in Java in which the affected person startles easily and, when startled, will swear involuntarily and sometimes act out. Arguments still abound as to whether this is cultural or biological. I say both (come on, dudes, are we really still arguing?), especially since my mom exhibits some of the behavior.
• You really can’t please everyone with your writing. (It’s good to internalize this.)
• Far from being some crazy granola dirty hippie movement, midwifery kicks ass, and now I want to look into it on the side of actually being the midwife.
• Spine tattoos do hurt like a mutha.
• It turns out there’s an answer to something I’ve wondered for years: what do creationists think about the possibility of aliens? Seems that all answers can be found in Genesis.
• Apparently I’m not the only person who is always either wearing or carrying comfortable shoes, in case of space pirate abduction, getting on the wrong side of the shadow government, transports to other dimensions, velociraptor attacks, or hikes through the ocean.
• If you go ask the lady at the information desk downstairs in the UO Bookstore if you can buy a roll of electrical tape because your headphones are a mess, she will kindly offer to just tape them up for you.
• Apparently, my spine does list to the left. Who knew?
• While a lot of people could stand to apply it a little more, cultural relativism can go way the hell too far, to the point where the scientific, empirical method of figuring out biomedicine is seen as totally equal to, say, an exorcism in terms of healing. This is getting subjective and objective reality mixed up, and is wrong.
• I fall for hardcore Catholic names, like Mary Margaret or Vincent Francis. And the name Joseph Mary or Mary Joseph? HAWT let me tell you internet.
• You know when you’re lying in bed, blissfully drifting off into dreamland, and suddenly WHOA your whole body spasms forward like a claptrap? There’s a name for that: myoclonus.
• If there were an award for the most adorable cult ever, that award would definitely go to the Unarius Academy of Science.  The Unarians are a flying saucer group that believes that there’s a united civilization of 33 planets of various aliens out there, known as the Space Brothers, and that they’re going to show up and usher in a new age of enlightenment through Science. This group has an elaborate styrofoam and plywood 3-D representation of the planets that lights up, and ther leader was an octogenarian lady who wore giant clown-color cloaks and crazy outfits and called herself the Archangel Uriel.  They sang enthusiastic hymns with lyrics like “From OUT of the spiralling GAL-ax-ies …” The date for the amazing arrival was 2001; I’m not sure what they did when it didn’t happen,* but it probably involved a mild sigh, an affirmation that it would definitely happen next time, and an adjournment for a nice glass of lemonade on the front porch.
• “Shave and a haircut” is a tap dancing move. Specifically, the steps go“step shuf-fle ball-step step beat ball step stomp.”
• Bleach doesn’t just kill mold.  It blasts it into another dimension.
• The relationship between pirates and ninjas actually seems perfectly logical when people start to articulate it.
• In some classes your grades actually do go down when you start disagreeing with the teacher.
• You can elicit an amazingly fast mobilization if you announce that they’re giving away free kittens a few blocks away.**
• Titus Andronicus is the most hardcore Shakespeare play ever written—a play involving rape, mutilation, and cannibalism. It’s so overdone that a lot of people argue that it’s some kind of metaphor, but as far as I can tell it’s completely done for the sensationalism. This is not just Shakespeare crossing the line; this is Shakespeare jumping the line and twelve schoolbuses on a flaming motorcycle, nude, while flipping off the audience and biting the head off a kitten.***
• Tattooing was actually quite a common fad among upper-class women in the Victorian and Edwardian times. The tattoos were “small and decorative,” although I can’t find out what, exactly, they are. I do know that Lady Randolph Churchill had one.

 

*Of course, given the fact that they also claim you can only see the saucers if you Truly Believe, it may indeed have happened and nobody else noticed.

 

**Any of you Eugenians want a kitten?  They’re free, but need vet work.  I can tell you where they are, too! 

 
***Which is why I'm not going to tell him where the free kittens are.