Shameless self-promotion

Three times. That's the number of times I threw up yesterday morning. I wouldn't mention it, except that it corresponds to the number of times people have, in the last week, asked me to qualify for the October primary against a certain state representative. The money's there, the people are there, but I'm not.

Aparently, since I'm a "non-traditional college student," they think I have all this free time and resources to devote to kicking someone out of an office I really have no interest in holding. It's understandable, really. I'm politically active, I'm seen frequently around public, and I'm always involved in activist causes. That makes me a prime target for certain undesirable jobs like helping friends move, cleaning out gutters on old ladies' houses, and running for state representative.

But I decided against it. I'm going to go to Europe for a summer instead.

Maybe that was what my body was trying to tell me, while I was confined to the Ceramic Palace praying to the Porceline Gods. "Don't run for office!"

Green Lizard Regulation

This morning, I overslept, demanding that I request an emergency ride from my grandfather. When he arrived, there was a lizard perched on his hood a la hood ornament. I laughed, thinking that he had glued a fake cameleon to his hood. It turned out to be real. Later that day, I had a conversation with the financial aid people at the University. Oddly enough, the conversation with Financial Aid ties directly into the green lizard on the dashboard.

It seems that every year, the award letters go out with a disclaimer printed in fine print on the back: This award is contingent upon payment in advance for your classes and satisfactory completion of the semester before a refund will be issued.

Knowing in a school where 75% of students are on full financial aid, I thought that there was absolutely no way this rule was enforced. However, my past dealings with the university have led me to the belief that you follow *every rule* absolutely until told otherwise. So I went to the office and asked. The man behind the desk shook his head. "No, that's not real."

"In other words," I replied, "it's one of those fake requirements?" He nodded.

"Yep, a fake requirement. Sorry."

I left financial aid and figured out what the green lizard and Financial Aid have in common. Just like no one bothered to tell the green lizard that it is probably not a good idea to ride around on the hood of a GMC Jimmy, it's not a good idea for the financial aid people to put crap on their letters that they don't mean. Both can lead to very bad experiences, both for the lizard or financial aid, and for us the viewer and the student.

C'est la vie.

Specificity

My high school English teacher had a nifty little shorthand she used when grading our essays, the only part of which I remember was "B.S." *BE SPECIFIC*. If you received an infamous B.S. scrawled in one of the margins, follow the arrow and you would no doubt find a sentence, phrase, or word that lacked specificity. If there was more than a sentence, she might frame entire passages with nifty little red-ink borders, doodling notes like clip-art. And somewhere, deep down inside the dark recesses of her mind, there was a specificity threshold that, once crossed, would send her over the edge. I learned fairly quickly that "things" and "stuff" were instant B.S. words. Push her hard enough, and she would explode--the result of which would be a huge "B.S." scribbled across entire pages.

Today, those two letters came screaming back to me when I received the following quote in an email from a mailing list:

I'll have you know that I my philosophic ideas don't require "tricks" to "come," and I resent the implication that they do. I may be forty-one years old, but I'm still healthy and intellectually virile as a horse.

I paused for a minute and re-read this line. Now, the more demented of you who read this will understand why. Others, it might take a minute. But immediately, I replied to the e-mail with something akin to the following: "Hey...don't leave yourself open. You could be a mare or a gelding!"

It just goes to show that, be it in the heat of passion of an email or in an academic paper, or even in a Presidential state of the union address, specificity is completely void. I recall fondly the last paper I ever turned in for my aforementioned high school English teacher. Eight pages long, I was shocked to find not a single red mark on the first seven. Flipping to the last, where I knew I would find my grade, I saw why. In very ornate, articulate penmanship, she had written, "Mr. DeVault, this paper is a load of B.S., and I *don't* mean Be Specific."