Work time

We're reaching the half-midterms right now, if you will - all classes that take only half a semester for part of the material are giving us midterms. Fortunately we have a spiffy honors system which means take-home exams of longer length rather than short, panicked in-class exams. That's always nice.

In spite of my best efforts to end this week with a decent amount of sleep, though, I seem to be failing. You see, here, as I've mentioned before, studying and working is a community thing. I mean, it takes up most of your time anyways, so why not make it social time AND work time? So we tend to work in groups so we can talk if we get stuck. But early in the morning, when the special relativity still makes no sense and the paper has 873 words to go, concentrating gets hard. And someone inevitably breaks out YouTube.

It started out small at first. The first week, we had finished our homework, the door was open, and an a dorm prez stopped by to show us a little funny clip of talking animals from the BBC (here for your enjoyment). And we thought it was funny, and laughed for a few minutes about the talking animals. The next time it came up, somebody mentioned another clip, so we looked up 2 or 3 "Walk on the Wild Side" episodes, the source of the original prairie dog. At this point, we've probably watched about half an hour's worth of these videos and scarcely a day goes by in which a homework session doesn't devolve into showing the one person in the room who hasn't seen the videos a couple of clips and then yelling out "Alan! Alan!" repeatedly.

Also, late-night homework produces some of the best quotable moments. Our whiteboard keeps having to be emptied so we can get more of the strange things we say to fit. Right now it has a drawing of a lion speaking in secret code, "The JESTER will find you," "I don't understand spoons. Oh wait. Yes I do.", "Lambda the Vampire Slayer", and some other things of equal randomness that may not bear repeating. All I can say is that any absurdity deficiency I had in high school has been quickly remedied here.

I'm super excited that the blog is finally live! Yaaaay!