Highlights from my day, in no particular order:

• I totally love my cancer professor. She is one reason why I came to school here in the first place, she's totally smart, and I love the way she dresses. She's always wearing tight jeans or some short dress, and today she was wearing a really cool pink ruffley lacey shirt that I couldn't stop staring at. It's not that she's all stylish, but she also hardly seems to try and dress like a "serious mathematician" or something. And smart. Today she was talking about colon cancer, and how to build the equations we're going to build we need to consider how many cells are in each crypt of the colon, but no one knows how many there are. Except that she thinks she does know how many, because of this work she's done with stochastic processes. Damn, that's cool. Also, she pays a lot of careful attention to the many diagrams she draws during lecture. And she's really nice. I would so love to work with her, except deep down I'm not particularly interested in the math involved with the work she does, though the cancer part is damn neat.
• Yesterday I applied for teaching positions with Kaplan and the Princeton Review, except that PR's website was all fucked up, but I did get an audition with Kaplan. So next week I have to go do a 5 minute lesson on something not related to the curriculum, so I think I'm going to do it on how to do a time step (tap dance). I'm kind of excited about this. I've been realizing that in order to pay for all the crazy things I want to do this summer (like go to Vegas, and, you know, pay rent) I'm going to have to work more than part time during only one of two summer sessions. So one of my students works for PR, and he said that if you've got your BA you can make like $24 an hour, so that makes me happy. Also the schedule's really super flexible, which is good. But I'll have to do a bunch of training first, and I don't know if I'm going to have time for that before the end of June.
• Also I'm thinking of trying to get some private tutoring jobs from students in my apt complex, because I can totally tutor in undergrad calc classes, since I've TAed for those classes. And everyone around here has rich parents, so I can charge like $45/hr.
• I think it's lame that I majored in math at Berkeley but I got a Bachelor of Arts, whereas my friends who majored in math at the far inferior Irvine (their undergrad math program is totally pathetic) got a Bachelor of Science. WTF?
• Today is Cary's birthday. I ordered his present from Walmart.com, because they had it for less than half of what I was finding it elsewhere, but they didn't have it in the store. But I didn't order it 'til last Saturday, and I was really hoping it would come today, and sure enough it did, but stupid UPS didn't leave it, so they won't redeliver 'til Monday. Suck.
• Just took out of the oven the brownies I baked for the aforementioned birthday, so the apartment smells wonderful. I'm also going to make penne with meat sauce (TJ's jarred marinara + ground turkey) in a few minutes. Also have vanilla ice cream, for the aforementioned brownies.
• TV watching plans tonight may involve Hostel, which needs to be returned to Blockbuster soonest. Also have Palindromes (the latest Todd Solondzzddzd film), Season 1 Disc 2 of Sopranos, The Machinest, and something else..Love Liza. Next month I'm switching blockbuster.com to 1 disc at a time, because the backlog here is just outrageous. Plus we still have this week's Veronica Mars and Invasion, tonight's Smallville and Supernatural, and like 3 episodes of So NoTORIous from last Sunday. It doesn't help any that Cary likes to go to sleep at 8:30 pm.
• May be going to San Diego this weekend to study and see my kitties.
• I have pictures of stuff that I'm too lazy to post.
• I'm wearing the super cool Sleeping Beauty shirt I got at Disneyland last weekend. It's pink and glittery and is a girl's XL, and it fits perfectly and is really nice material, so I'm happy.
• That may be it for now.
• I should go cook dinner now.
• Okaybye.
  

Oh, I remember what else I was going to say. This evening I got an email from the American Mathematical Society reminding me to update my profile or something, and the email was addressed, "Dear Professor Longo." That sounds good, no?

Today was career fair! Whoooo! It's like Halloween for college students. I don't feel like inventorying my entire pull, but here are the extended highlights:

• Two staplers, both from HSBC. Also got another highlighter from them like I got last year.
• A little brush for cleaning computer monitors, with velco for you to stick the brush on your monitor.
• A 5 piece computer screwdriver kit.
• Luggage tag from the ATF.
• A magnetic darts set.
• A magnetic paper clip holder, with colored paper clips.
• A little button with an iron eagle looking thing on it from some commie farm organization (in Irvine? Whaa?)
• Plastic coffee cup.
• A bunch of candy, and a bottle of water (I was totally dying of thirst, so that made me v. v. happy.)
• A squishy firetruck.
• Two frisbees; one hard, one soft and bendy.
• Some sort of colorful squishy sticky wormy toy thing that made some really satisfying marks on the windows of Tim's car.
• A ton of highlighters and pens.

I have so many pens now that I had to get a mug out of the cabinet to put on the computer desk to hold them all, 'cause the other pen thing is filled to capacity. It was a good day.

Now I'm just counting the days until vendor fair, when I can buy cheap blackmarket sunglasses. You know, my school really isn't half bad. :D

Just added: Sad you don't attend a school with a rocking career fair? For a mere $15/month, you can get your own collection of super cool schwag from Silicon Valley companies at valleyschwag.com. Admittedly, their stuff is way cooler than mine (I love the eff.org sticker...plus oh, the t-shirts!), but at least mine was free, and was a fun way to spend my noon hour today.

I have to leave to see Micah in a few minutes, but I'd just like to share my two favorite lines from television last night:
"Super cool party people bid you super cool adieu!"
and
"What is it about girls who can count?"

PS: I'm hearing spoilers that Mary Lynn Rajskub is going to be on Gilmore Girls soon, which, along with the line from above, may launch GG way ahead in my list of favorite television shows.

Tuesday Beth and I played hooky from algebra and drove to San Diego with Beth's boyfriend Newt to see the Dresden Dolls. We stopped by my mother's house to get ready (I would have loved to have worn a corset dress and intense dark "socked in the eye" makeup to teach my discussion sections, but I couldn't bring myself to put it all on at 7:30 in the morning). Didn't see my mother, since she was at work and Beth wanted to get to the concert early, but Beth and Newt got to meet my kitty cats. Kitty was *pissed* off at me, because she knew I was only staying for like half an hour. But she'll love me again next time I spend the night.

Anyway, Beth got me into the Dresden Dolls when she lent me their CD for my drive up to the yarn con in February, and they are so angry and dramatic, it makes me v. v. happy. Then she bought me a ticket to this show without even consulting me, which was cool. (PS: Hank! Only $15! <$25! Whoo!) The show, in case any of my readers went to high school with me (no), was at the Epicentre, aka the "teen center", aka the former Mira Mesa public library, where I got my very first library card at the age of ~4. Rocking.

But still, we got all gothed up. I am so un-goth, especially next to tatooed-big-thick-earringed-perma-black-wearing Beth and Newt, but at least I have the pale thing going on for me. The corset dress is Beth's, but at least the boots are mine. Oh right, you can't see my boots. But they're 20-i burgundy shiny Doc Martens, and they rocks. Anyway, here are Beth and I pre-show.
So, OMG, the show rocked so fucking hard. I have a new favorite band. If you lived with me, you would have been hearing about it nonstop for the last two days, including 2 am wednesday morning when I got home from the show. One of the opening acts, David J's Cabaret, played songs cowritten by Alan Moore and which appear in V for Vendetta (the comics, not movie). Also, they played Falling in Love from Der Blaue Engel (auf deutsch!), and Bowie's Time, and you could not pick two songs which would make me happier. And Beth is hardcore concertgoer, so we had the absolute best spots in the entire place, *right in fucking front* of Amanda, the singer/keyboardist in the Dolls. (go: explore their website) They covered I Love Rock & Roll and War Pigs, which rocked so hard. Like I said before. And drummer Brian fell off stage during Coin-Operated Boy, and I got one of his drumsticks, and I'm going to become a crazy performance artist and follow them around Europe and HOLY SHIT they had BALLERINAS. *passes out* I *love* ballerinas.

I'm happy. So is Beth. You can't imagine. Beth says they're playing Anaheim in July, which makes me happier than you can imagine. Seriously.

*ballerinas*

I have to go now. You've got me all freaking out again.

PS: Beth gave me a cool magnetic travel Sudoku thingy, which also rocks pretty hard. We're such crazy nerds.

Cary and I went to Disneyland on Sunday (yay annual pass!) because Cary had never been there, and, clearly, we rode Space Mountain. We didn't buy the picture, but taking a picture of the screen at the end worked out remarkably well. Sunday after next we're going to California Adventure (yay 2fer!), where neither of us have ever been, so I'm excited about that. I saw a Sleeping Beauty shirt that I was going to buy, then changed my mind, but now I think I want it, so I think I'll buy it when we go back. It's only in girl sizes, but I think I can make a large fit. You know, I'll lose a bunch of weight and become the size of a rather tall 11 year old. But it's a really pretty shirt.
 

Ooh, in my intense rage at television on friday, I totally forgot to post about the exciting events that occurred on The OC on Thursday! No, not all the happy Berkeley love, which was surely exciting, but the scene in which Seth is reading the infamous Stewart calculus book! Whoooooo! Go math! Of course, he was reading the regular edition, not the Early Transcendentals version, so when he goes to Berkeley and continues on in calculus he'll have to buy a new text book, and he probably won't have as firm a grasp on the logarithmic and exponential functions. OTOH, he could go to UCI, where they use the edition he was reading, and where they don't really teach you any more about log functions than what you should have already learned by junior year of high school. But never mind that.

(PS: the community college where I took my first two semesters of calculus used the Early Transcendentals edition, thus I did not have to buy a new textbook. Go me!)

Also, why are all these people only applying to one school, why do all the acceptance letters arrive on the same day, and how in the hell do they know when that day is beforehand? Dude.

In more Berkeley love, according to Wikipedia, Jack Bauer got his master's degree in law and criminology at UCB. Go Bears!

Okay, I guess you're all lucky I didn't post this this morning, because I had a long ranting rant building up, but then I decided to work on homework instead, so now you get the watered down (but still long) rant, diluted by having spent the last bunch of hours doing math, and not getting pissed off about something I saw on the Today show.

So yeah, I watch the Today show every morning, because I am sort of freak. Every night before I go to sleep I even leave the tv on NBC so that when I wake up I can rewind the DVR up to an hour, in case I don't turn on the TV before 7. Total freak. But I'm obsessed with it (it's SO better than Good Morning America, which I watched when I lived in Berkeley and didn't get NBC), and I have my own love/hate (mostly love) relationship with everyone on it, and I have their commercial schedule all figured out and it's my show. It doesn't hurt that the lead anchor's name is Katie, either. Okay.

Katie Couric did a story this morning inspired by the Pink song "Stupid Girls", and how it's some big horrible thing now that stupid girls like Jessica Simpson, Paris Hilton, and Nicole Richie are role models for lots of girls. Okay, this is not about defending those people, but the only real evidence they had that those three are stupid was the Chicken of the Sea bit from Newlyweds, and a clip from the Simple Life where Nicole and Paris didn't know how to cash a check. Everything else was about how those three are really skinny and wear skimpy clothes and act like airheads a lot of the time. But are they stupid? Paris Hilton owns her own chain of nightclubs, Jessica Simpson has her own line of just about everything, and all three of them have managed to make a *ton* of money doing stuff they enjoy, and you've got to be kind of clever to do that. Wasn't it just big news how Jessica Simpson makes so much more money than her husband? And she's a stupid girl?

Well, maybe. But what's so special about Pink? I just downloaded her song, and she's singing about how she doesn't have to wear a push-up bra and be all stupid like that, or whatever. Well, let's share this picture of her, and try and reconcile everything. "Where oh where have all the smart people gone?" Are we to infer that Pink is one of those smart people? What evidence do we have of that? Calling other people stupid doesn't make you smart, and personally, as a girl/graduate student in math, I don't see that writing a couple catchy pop songs and putting a bunch of gel in your hair makes you smart, okay.

But really this isn't about Pink, because I really just assume that she's as stupid as anyone else. It's this high and mighty notion that any girls who want to be sexy and skinny and who are interested in boys and clothes are stupid. Katie Couric and the woman she had on from Seventeen magazine basically came out and equated anorexic with stupid. Like, god, all these 15 year old girls only have skinny people as role models, maybe they should have nuclear scientists as role models instead. What?

And now we segue into Katie Couric. This comes with perfect timing, as just yesterday I read this article in Slate, which also infuriated me. "Have we seen the last of Katie Couric's legs?" it begins, and goes on to talk about how she's wearing dark pantsuits now instead of more girly skirted outfits, now that she's gonna be a big primetime news anchor and needs to show that she has gravitas. In other words, now that she's going to be the first female nightly news anchor, she has to look and act more like a man. She sure is some role model.

My point, I guess, is that we need to stop equating "girly" with "stupid," and then maybe you won't see so many girls looking up to "stupid" girls. It's certainly not new that girls want to be pretty and sexy and skinny (in fact, later in the show Natalie Morales talked to the guy that made the diet for Celebrity Fit Club, and he said to her that she didn't need the diet, and she said thank you, of course implying that being skinny is a good and desirable thing). But now Katie Couric have decided that those things also mean stupid. Well, that's great. You know, I'm pretty smart, I think. But I want to be skinny and pretty. And I wear sparkly earrings and pink sweaters and write with sparkly gel pens just because their pretty, even though they're awful to take notes with, and I giggle a lot, and I love Hilary Duff, and I judge people on the basis of how they're dressed and how they look, and whatever. And I have a BA in mathematics from Berkeley and I'm working on a PhD and I have the highest grades in my classes, so fuck off Katie Couric and Seventeen Magazine and most of all Pink, because I'm probably smarter than all of you.

PS: The funniest thing I ever saw on the Today show involved a similar hypocrisy. They'd just done a bit about anorexia and body image and all that. And then next they had Katie Couric interviewing Meryl Streep, and Katie told Meryl that she looked really good, and she was wearing skinny jeans, or something like that. The interview had been taped before hand, so when they showed Katie live after that she was completely embarassed, and said something about how sorry she was for that, and how we really need to change conceptions and social norms or whatever. But she's not doing that, and that's the real problem.

Okaybye.

This was the description on my DVR of last night's 24:
"Jack reinforces the importance of finding the terrorist conspirator."
That sums it up perfectly, no?

PS: President Assface, we hardly knew you!