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27 august 1997

9:19 p.m.

Dear diary, Don't look at me like that. School started on Monday. Do you know how long it's been since I've had a credit load in the double digits? (And my day starts at 7:30 a.m. -- even my instructor considers that inhumane.) Thirteen credits, nine of which are upper-division writing-intensive wastes of time, and four in Hawaiian -- which to date has taught me only that I know a hell of a lot less about the language than I thought I did in May. Aue. Pa`akiki kela papa aka, hau`oli au ia ia no ka mea he ko`u kumu akamai `o ia. Another of my professors has a fetish for Latin. He drug out the tired "carpe diem," but later expanded it to "carpe futurum hodie" -- seize the future today. Although he made it clear that he also has a dark sense of humor, I kept my high school quote, "seize the fish" ("carpe carp"), to myself. Now that I'm in classes in the three-hundreds, I'm finally getting my share of eccentric, occasionally loopy professors. I'm not sure if I'm going to learn much, but I'm thinking I'm going to at least double my collection of useless trivia. After taking linguistics (or rather, "ringuistics") from an ESL grad student whose mouth simply could not make half the sounds she was supposed to teach us to recognize, my money better not net me nothing below PhDs. It's a cartoon. Badly animated at that. Yet it's changed my life forever. Not since the golden days of "Duckman" has there been an animated series that so confidently pushed the bounds of taste. My eagerness to catch the premiere of "South Park" was powerful enough to push me into futzing with my VCR again, and though it was as aggravating as ever (I swear, I'd take DIP switches to this thing's "on screen menus"), it was well worth it. I've watched the tape so many times, I hear the South Park kids' voices when I go to sleep. Of the four darling tots, I'm most fond of dear Kenny. Part of his appeal is because his presence is so fleeting -- he's assasinated at least three times per episode (gunshot wound to the head, falling lava ball, stampeding cows, etc.). And his snow parka, which muffles every word he says, is adorable. But it's his dirty wit that's got me hooked. Granted, every one of them has a foul mouth... Cartman (a.k.a. The Fat Kid) has me saying "Sonofabitch!" again. But my boy Kenny? He'd make a Marine blush. Cartman: Maybe you can kiss her! Stan: Maybe you can slip her the tongue! Kenny: Mmmph fmum mmmph phummph! Kyle: How did you know she had a cat? Considering the blatant crudeness of the show, I honestly don't expect it to last long. So I'm going to treasure every episode, and spread the gospel as much as I can. Fortunately, there are one or two fellow disciples out there. Campus jobs. Now there's a scam I should've tapped into years ago. Sure, you've got an excess of coffee-making, memo-typing jobs, but there are a couple of gems. I broke down yesterday and trudged over to the student employment office (which, I might add, looks like it employs half the students it "places") and got referrals to three student help spots. All involved computers or the web in some way, and all paid at least $7.20 an hour. I'm limited to 20 hours a week, but it's better than minimum wage at McDonald's. I only got up the nerve to call one, and got an interview tomorrow afternoon. Reason tells me I should schedule meetings with the other two before they get snapped up, but I've never taken well to kissing up for table scraps. We'll see how insulted I am tomorrow.