a new new critic

it's just past 4am and i've finally completed the first draft of my thesis proposal - talk about putting the cart before the horse, i haven't touched a book or watched a movie relating to the papers i'm supposed to be working on, and two of them don't even have the benefit of a vague direction...

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i spent the morning filling out forms (it took ages) while waiting to be stood up on a telephonic appointment with the secretary of mmf's company. i don't understand how it can take more than six months to receive severance pay.

i arrived at work around 3pm, and left around 6.30 - 7pm, and in the time i lost an hour to IT issues and another hour or so to weird code environment behaviour and bad error messages. by the time my epiphany came to the rescue, i'd become so lost that the relief brought me to the verge of tears.

that was the first time that happened today. the second was towards the end of the rollerblading route, when i suddenly realized that i don't have to get up at 6.30am, and that i can stay out for drinks (can, not must) or even carry on rolling... the way i was feeling, i could've handled another 25km quite happily.

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an incident that occurred on saturday came back to haunt me this evening, i don't know why it suddenly became relevant. retrospectively, i have no idea why i said what i said (the details aren't important, but i said something that was self-aggrandizing and served no purpose) but i used a word that i hadn't realized carries misogynistic connotations and i don't think the guys realized that i wasn't aware of that.

and i can't bring myself to say anything because i don't want to remind them of the context :(

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tel aviv's "white night" is becoming a "black night" in response to the weekend's brutality, and i'm pleased that our english department has postponed its end-of-year event in protest. i gives me pleasure to note that there have been a few things going on here and there that indicate that at least a few of our politicians are realizing the error of their ways...

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i just became a milton friedman fan. i watched half of waiting for superman earlier, and that plus a couple more links are enough to get the gist. and the gist is that the american teacher's union is bad for business (also, this). also, i think it's safe to say that now that we have always-on, ubiquitous and cheap access to online educational material, official or not, the idea of teaching in classrooms is primitive and counter-productive. most teachers can be easily replaced by software.

let the robot revolution begin :)