Can I Take A Message?

Honey

Once upon a time, I had horrible allergies for about 9 months of the year and the remaining 3 months were spent in a pseudo-allergy state. You'd think I'd be spared in winter because everything is frozen and dead but no, my nose would seek out the struggling pollen/allergen and get a good whiff and make me sneeze up a storm.

If my nose couldn't find any, it just stored some so that it could make me sneeze at will. I think evolution could've done a better job on this one and found a different way to get rid of germs other than through rapidly expelling it through my nose.

Sometimes I'd be driving on the highway and BAM, I'd sneeze and be all over the road going at "65" mph (75 mph). It would come out of nowhere and I probably looked like some kind of drunk to the other drivers- all of whom mysteriously made way and made distance between me and them.

Then, at the age of 18, I was told of the wonderful side-effects of honey. Honey is made from bees getting nectar from flowers. When you eat enough local honey, your body builds an immunity to the pollen in the local flowers and your allergies would decrease significantly.

I was skeptical but when my parent's were willing to fork over the two or three dollars it costs to get honey, I was game. Every day I had a tablespoon of plain honey. I probably should have mixed it with tea but I wanted to just get it out of the way.

It was Winter when I was trying so I couldn't be sure of the effects. Now it is Spring. Now I get to watch everyone else suffer through the sneezing attacks while I am mucus-free for once in my life.

So, if you take any moral from this it is: eating sugar (in this case, in the form of honey) will always work out for you in the end.*

*Note: It may work out for you in gaining immunity to allergies, make coffee bearable(, get diabetes) and other things.

Clorox® Spray

I'm not sponsoring the product, this is a story about my day. [Note: If you work for Clorox® and would like to pay me anyway, I'll gladly accept]

Today, after classes, I went with my girlfriend to the Student Union Building at our school because they were having a carnival to promote recycling and Earth-Day related ideas [though Clorox® may not be sponsoring me, the Earth is - by letting me live on he/she/it]. 

At the carnival you could make the rounds and enjoy a bunch of free events to win raffle tickets. Typical carnival games were offered, but they revolved around the theme of recycling and they were purposefully made fairly easy to win. One game, for instance, was throwing used products into recycling bins from about ten feet away. 

The raffle tickets could be used to purchase food (ie Cup of Worms or popcorn) but they could also be used for, well a raffle. I won three tickets going through a few games and went and filled out my name on each and put two into a Clorox® Spray and one ticket into a raffle to win a bike. 

I didn't realize the bike was part of the raffle till I had already put two tickets into the Clorox® raffle box. I wanted that bike. It wasn't a great bike, it had only one gear and was otherwise fairly ordinary (handle-bars, two wheels, the works) but even so I wanted it because when I learned that my car only gets 6 miles to the gallon, I essentially stopped driving it and living a mile and a half from classes means a lot of walking (not always fun to do for an 8AM).

The bike was an out. If I won the bike I'd have a gas-free option of getting to classes that also meant I didn't have to walk the whole way (which takes at least twice as long as taking a bike). I suppose that was the whole point of having it there at the raffle, to remind people of the gas-free alternative to driving - but I didn't need the reminder, I already avoid using gas because I'm too cheap.

Anyway, back to the carnival, I made a few more rounds at the games and won another eight tickets, and once all filled out I submitted them into the bike raffle. 

My girlfriend knew that the bike raffle would be too popular so she didn't even bother with it and so put her tickets into a variety of other things that she never won either.

When it was seven o' clock the event was just about over and they were going to announce the results of the raffle. Opening with the smaller prizes, they decided it would be best to build up to the main prize, they began to announce winners.

My sister's won a goldfish at a fair and that's about the closest I've ever been to winning anything, so I didn't have high hopes or at the very least I pretended to myself not to.

The second prize announced was the Clorox® spray, the only thing that wasn't the bike that I had submitted tickets to win. The Clorox® spray was all natural and EPA approved and yada-yada-yada.

Then I hear her, the lady calling out the winner's names, announcing my name. Awkwardly, I make a huge loop over to towards the desk.

About half-way into my slow paced, overly arching route to the front desk she said I could just get the prize, I didn't have to go up to the table. I stood there stupidly for a moment as if trying to understand the abstract idea she had just presented me.

Slowly I made my way back to where I was standing and got the Clorox®. A few moments later my wits caught up with me and I anxiously awaited the announcement about who would win the bike.

Soon enough I find out that my luck's extent was winning me that Clorox®, but at least it was something.

Tonight, I had to walk back to my place. I usually don't walk back till it's dark and walking in the dark makes everything around me appear to be something that wants to viciously attack me.

I assume that anyone and anything that crosses my path is a potential threat - during the daylight everyone is the greatest person alive but at night, evil doesn't just lurk around every corner, but it's omnipresent (everywhere).

But tonight, I was armed. I had the Clorox® spray bottle in my hand, index finger on the trigger, just awaiting the attack that never strikes. Whenever any potential threat, be it a deer or a baby or one of my housemates walking toward me from a distance, I prepared myself. 

With my finger on the trigger, I used my other hand to turn the nozzle to "ON", ready to spray anything that leaps to attack me. Once I'm passed them (by 20 or more feet), I feel safe enough to turn the 'safety' on. I pull the trigger a few times to make sure it's on and I don't have a mis-fire and I carry on till the next potential threat crosses my path.

I took a new route today, so it was especially important to have my extra line of defense (the spray bottle). The route included more pedestrians, who eyed me wearily, either sizing me up for attack or wondering why I was arming myself with a Clorox® bottle and continually turning ON and OFF the nozzle.

In the end I made it back safe, no doubt due to the intimidating effects the eco-friendly Clorox spray had on those who ventured near me.

Supply And Demand

Now, as evidenced by my having less than a quarter thousand page-views to having 15 posts (a ratio of a little over 15 views per post), I am not that popular.

I want to be popular, I want to have a blog with a million page-views or even 50+ million, getting tens of thousands of hits a day - this would be great. As it stands, I am not getting anything close to that.

That is a supply and demand model. I have a small demand, so if I want to increase my "price" (page-views) I have to match it with a high supply. This would mean generating a lot of posts so that my very minor following would visit my page for each one thus increasing my page-views. The fundamental problem here is that my demand may decrease, because who wants to spend all their time reading my blog?

Probably everybody should want to eat up my every word, but as it stands, people like variety in their life, so I have to be realistic.

Now, conversely, if I had a high demand, I could have fewer posts so that multiplying my high demand by my fewer posts, I'd get the same number of page-views. Now all I need is to get that huge following and I'm willing to wait.

I'm waiting right now.

In fact, I'm still waiting, even now.

Still waiting.

Waiting.

You get the picture, I'm waiting.

Unfortunately, waiting won't generate a large following, I have to take an active approach, but I can't do it alone, unless of course I produce a massive number of kids and have all of them read my blog, but in a society where monogamy is what's socially acceptable - producing a massive number of kids would require one incredibly fertile and patient wife and an impressive life-span on my part.

Since it's not very feasible to go that route, I have to hope for readers other ways. I promote my site through StumbleUpon and Facebook as well as word of mouth and email and links on my page to promote it on other sites but alas that has only gotten me so many followers (and this isn't to say that my followers aren't great, they just aren't great in number, because they are great and I'm quite thankful for you!).

What I need to do is make my site have more "resonance" so that people, when they read it, decide it would be great to let their friends know about it. If it was a matter of personal opinion, I think that I should have great resonance, but so far evidence suggests otherwise - so I'm going to suggest variety.

I'm going to post blogs and web comics and as time goes on maybe I'll even add more things to post.

Persistence is also key. I'm going to make a new post every day and if I don't, I'll make comics - some days I might miss, but I'll try to warn my followers ahead of time.

Ah, puns! Don't be discouraged by this little comic. In the future they'll be a little more thought out - though I can't guarantee they'll be drawn any better - MS Paint and my artistic skills don't generally culminate in masterpieces.

Signing Up For Classes

When it's time to sign up for classes, hearts race, adrenaline courses and nerves take over. As the time for signing up for classes draws nearer, people begin to check Course Availability more and more - right until it's time to sign up and then people are just on the page to sign up hitting refresh repeatedly.

Once classes are signed up for, a wave of relief as well as disappointment blankets the campus. Then, a few moments later people rush to their phones and emails or to department chairs and start requesting overrides so that they can get into the classes they want.

Some of the most unlikely classes will get filled while others will have many open spots remaining (ie Calculus III fills up but other classes have 30+ spots open).

In the weeks before sign-up time, people draft up a dozen "perfect" schedules that combine either the most easy classes, the most GE classes, the most core classes or most time efficient. 

As seniors sign up people get a little more realistic and make minor compromises and changes to their schedules but often find that some perfect schedule still exists for them. Freshmen often have it the worst, by the time they get to sign up their schedule resembles a hodgepodge of classes that meet the minimum standard of 'still have some spots left'.

One group has it worse than the freshmen: the transfer students. When we first arrive at the college, it's after all the classes have been chosen and only the unwanted scraps are wanted. 

Sometimes it works out and with enough overrides you can manage a half-way decent schedule. Some classes are pretty much designed to be those left over classes for transfer students so that they can congregate and commiserate in communal understanding of each other's difficulties.

I'm not saying that transferring is a bad choice, it often works out but sometimes you'll have to wait a semester to reap the benefits.

There are some fun perks of being a transfer student, a) when you're in your final semester at a school, just before you transfer, you get to watch everyone around you become anxious about their classes while you can relax and enjoy the serenity of knowing that you don't have to sign up for classes yet and b) when you do sign up for classes, there isn't the same hunt, you aren't competing against thousands of other people - you don't have to worry about the servers crashing mid-signing up - and so you can go into the whole process a little relaxed and calm about the whole ordeal.

Of course, when next semester's signing up time rolls around: The hunt is on!

from Google Images

Applying For Jobs

As someone who has held two jobs both due to nepotism, I think I'm fairly qualified to talk about applying for jobs and getting jobs.

*Note: Nepotism is getting hired by someone related to you (ie uncle or girlfriend's mom, just to name a couple that worked out well in my experience). *

As I understand it, the process generally works like this:

*note: if the picture looks too small you can click on it and then zoom in*

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------And that's that. I hope you got a job, be it the noble way or the PREFERRED way.

Happy Job hunting!

Running Out of Gas

I was driving my Ford Bronco around town with my girlfriend, we made a couple stops for me, a couple stops for her and then we were back on campus heading back to her dorm. My fuel gauge told me I had between 1/8th and 1/4 of a tank, and that tank holds 32 gallons, so I was operating under the understanding that I had 4 or more gallons of gas.

My car, I believed, got a dastardly 10 miles to the gallon and so I figured I had 40 miles remaining. What I soon found out was that I had about a quarter mile remaining.

I was about a third of the way into campus (it's not a very large campus) when I realized that my car was beginning to lurch and hiccup (the kind of hiccuping where surprising it just won't help). I ease off and then back on the gas and for a moment things seem fine.

It's only fine for a moment more and it dawns on me that the car is running on empty, or at least very near to it, so I head for the parking lot and hope to roll down the hill into it with enough velocity to not stop in the middle of the street and maybe even glide into a parking spot. 

Well, I did avoid stopping in the middle of the street, but I was only just able to get into the parking lot. Spots were empty all around me but in my 2 ton car, I wasn't going to be able to just stick a leg out of the car and skateboard it into a spot. I put my blinkers on.

So, instead I first see if my girlfriend can push the car while I steer into a spot (she's a pretty strong girl and pretty confident in herself) but alas, we rolled in the wrong direction a few inches before I realize it was futile to have her keep straining against it - like trying to get an ant to push a person over (ants are incredibly strong but it just isn't going to happen).

Now I give it a shot and the thing just won't budge. I'm pushing and pushing and I can't get the thing to move much at all.

My girlfriend puts the car in park and runs back to her dorm to see if she can get some guys who hang out there a lot to come out and help give me a push. While she's gone a guy in a Volvo pulls up and asks what the problem is (the first of about five cars that passed me to say anything). I explain the car's out of gas and I need help to get the thing moving. He acts as if he'll help, he hangs out for about a minute and then he just takes off - so that fell through quick.

A lot of people at this point are in classes still, so about five minutes later my girlfriend shows up with three of her suite-mates/friends coming up the walkway to the car and I begin to wonder if we'll get this thing rolling much better with them - because they don't look exactly built like lumberjacks.

But I have hope nonetheless and my girlfriend and the three girls she got try giving the car a push while I steer. I'm steering because I'm most used to the car and so I can direct it as need be without too much wasted effort.

The car remains stationary as the girls push and I'm getting pretty annoyed at the car at this point. We decide to exchange me and my girlfriend - I push and she steers.

Finally the car begins to move. Success! We push and we push and it gets rolling and we build up a momentum that a turtle would be ashamed of. Even so the car is going and we start to decide where to park it. 

The closer spots are visitor-only and since we are finally able to move the car, we decide to bypass all the visitor spots and go an extra 50-ish feet to another spot. Since we're going painfully slow, it becomes positively exhausting after 20 or 30 feet and I begin to weaken my push a bit and until I stop for a breather.

The car rolls back a tad but my girlfriend hits the brake and I catch my breath while I'm sure my car-pushing-helpers are relieved to have a moment too. 

They really want to get it over and done with so together we push again and we get it rolling, though there's a slight incline and it becomes a little tougher. 

As we close in on the last 10 feet, after several people passed us by, two young women offered their help and together we got the car into the spot. There was barely enough surface area on the back for all the helping hands but we managed and it was all thanks to the power of all those helpful young women, the ones my girlfriend got (who I later gave small trinkets to in thanks) and the ones who just saw someone in need.

In the end all of my helpers rejoiced in their herculean strength, proud of the feat they accomplished. I was glad for their help and that I wasn't going to be ticketed for leaving my car unattended in a non-parking spot.

10 minutes after we got the car into a spot, it began to pour so I was also glad that we were done and back inside before that extra obstacle!

Later I got a one gallon fuel canister that I've now made use of two extra times (those stories I'll have to tell another time).