Fall leaves

What Crystal thinks I look like

Yesterday, as I was flipping channels, I landed on Fox News.

At the bottom of the screen, on the news ticker tape, it said:

"TOP STORY: PARIS IS BURNING"

The headline is a little more dramatic than the actual events. There was apparantly a slew of arson attacks in France; Fox interpreted this as meaning the entire city of Paris was on fire. They also took the occasion to invite a French expert who they ensured spoke in a thick accent and made inane comments about America.
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I'm studying for the second Math midterm. Because the first one didn't go so well I resolved to redouble my efforts for this next one.

However, despite a weekend's worth of studying, I can still only answer a spare few questions on the practice test.

The people in my class seem to have no difficulty at all with this material. One girl can discern the convergence of a series in her head. So everytime our math teacher asks us to make a guess as to the convergence of a series, the Converger will thoughtfully survey the question and then after a beat, correctly solve the problem without making so much as a scratch on a piece of paper.

One time our math teacher asked me what I thought of a problem, and I said I didn't know. She looked at me and asked me, "Could this be more convergent?".

This isn't even a higher level math class, with genius math majors. Everyone is just good at everything here.

Why is it that in Math there's no in between? Either you're stupid or a math genius.

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I had to co-lead a discussion section on Stem Cells for one of my half-credit courses, "Perspectives on Science" which is for people with "unusual preparation" in math and the sciences.

Although we started out carefully analyzing the basic scientific principles, we ended by shouting haphazardly (most notably our facilitator, a professor, who became very red in the face). It was strange to see that a room full of intelligent people, who were intimately familiar with the actual science behind stem cell research, could not discuss it rationally. How can we expect the government to be any better?

Rachel interjected at one point, near the end of the discussion, trying to be reasonable and fair but everyone ignored her and went back to the screaming. It was chaos.
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Chemistry test came back. Yay, I did better than the last one!

It's by far my favorite course, I think, next to perspectives. Mostly because my classmates are so colorful. And because of our professor, a young-ish English fellow who is witty in a very British kind of way. He also has a very characteristic greeting with which he starts every class. It kind of sounds like he is calling souls from the land of the dead, "Helloooooo!"
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If Nick tries to relate a story about me being confused about fertilization, ask him for context. We were talking about chickens!
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The carollineurs finally played something decent and fitting: Harry Potter. And I missed it!

On the subject of things I missed, I also definitely didn't go to the YSO Hallowe'en show. Shara made it sound like I missed a watershed moment at Yale, so I'm feeling like an idiot for not going. Carl reminded me I had three more opportunities- but still, I missed Dean Salovey relating the integral of e^ x to sex. Get it?

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I did, however, make it to the YUAGS (Yale Undergraduate Anti-Gravity Society) show which involved people juggling fire. It was pretty cool, although I was frightened the entire way because a) I thought I was going to be pushed off my precarious perch on the lip of the giant "pool" in the middle of Beinecke b) I thought someone was going to put the Commons on fire.

I might be wrong about the acronym YUAGS. I get my acronyms confused; there are more here than IB, and that's saying something.