China spouse market!

Maybe I should consider this...

Volunteers soldiers are amazing.

Don't stories like this leave you awestruck? What really got me was the 18-year-old kid. He was 10 on Sept. 11, 2001. That would be... 4th grade. I was 14, a freshman in high school. And as I sat in my gym class and the proctor came to our class and read the note that said two hijacked planes had crashed into the World Trade Center towers and two more were still in the air, that was the first time in my life that I actually feared for my life. (I had been in high school for all of two weeks. That was a pretty overwhelming welcoming present.) And the very last thing in the world I wanted to do was to join the Marines and go fight the guys who felt justified flying commercial jetliners into skyscrapers. And here is this kid, 10 years old, deciding right then that that was what he was going to do.

I'm not patriotic by any stretch of the imagination, but there is something about a person who volunteers for military service that absolutely blows my mind. Not in an are-you-kidding-me way, but in a that's-not-a-natural-thing-for-human-beings-to-do-and-it's-amazing kind of way.

I learned something about pee today.

If you eat a ton of asparagus, when you pee it out the smell will almost knock you off your feet. Good gravy. It doesn't even really smell like asparagus pee. It smells like death. As my good friend Chris put it, "It's worse than rank beer shits."

Today was my last day to be a college tutor.

I hate college more than just about anything, but there are some things to which I have become very attached. Tutoring physics is one of them. Today the class I tutor - or rather, the ones in the class who actually come to tutoring on a semi-regular basis - all signed a card for me and gave me a Starbucks gift card. It was then that I realized just how much fun I've actually had there. And part of me worries that tutoring/teaching in the future won't be the same because in the future there will be an age or professional gap between me and my tutorees, either as graduate student vs. undergraduates, or teacher vs. students. When there's nothing to distinguish me from anybody else, the atmosphere becomes very relaxed and comfortable, and people don't feel stupid asking questions. It is my sincerest hope that in the future I will be able to foster an environment at least somewhat reminiscent of what we've had here.

My house is full of WTF.

My housemate makes our house the only place on this planet in which one could open the freezer door and find this:


Did you see? Look a little closer:


Apparently those Walmart receipts spoil pretty quickly if you don't freeze them. *Sigh.*

How to [Lose] a [Social] Life

The Fray has a song called How to Save a Life. I am learning how to destroy one. A social life, anyway. This is how you do it: