Maintenence and Decay

In response to two people's comments about my JLAP author, I'm choosing Baldwin. And for the record, like all of the left-hemispheric, linear-thinking people that read this blog, I too, as a general rule, don't like poetry. Agee actually wrote two fiction works, three non-fiction works, and only one collection of poems. In addition to that, he was a journalist. He's a pretty amazingly brilliant writer too. A Death in the Family, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize, is a gorgeous book. I like Thoreau, but it's very dense, and I want to read works of fiction for my paper, so that I can do a more proper literary analysis. So that leaves Baldwin, with his interesting mix of vitrolic social commentary and exploration of people and their interactions (or so it seems from what I've read).

The largest news of late is the speech and debate tournament at Pacific University tomorrow and Saturday. I should be gone for a cumulative 28 hours over two days. Anyway, I've got a bad feeling about it. I did extremely well at the past tournament, but I'm nervous about this one, especially considering that practice today was so-so. The topic was absolutely terrible for various reasons, and we made a number of serious missteps. The only reason why we probably won was because our opponents did not exploit our errors. Furthermore, I feel badly about missing yet another day of school. I just missed 3 days last week because of my surgery, one day for another speech tournament, and two days for Thanksgiving. It's an incredible pain to miss school and have to make it up, and I think that some of my teachers are getting annoyed with my recurrent absence.

The end of the semester is approaching, so I have a truly obnoxious amount of work to do. My personal favorites are: a worksheet of 50 integrals, many of which cannot be solved using Maple or TI-89 calculators, and final in physics consisting of 16 conceptual essay questions in which no math is allowed (this makes absolutely no sense...). Out of a 160 possible points on the physics final, the highest score ever was something like 145. I think he said that the average was around 100. This is why grade curvature was invented. Anyway, I'd better stop wasting my time and start doing some of this junk.