The issues I've been grappling with over winter break

1. What kind of brakes do I want to put on the Mercier? And then, what kind of handle bars?

2. Should I choose between economy or style (initially this question was for the brakes, but really, it applies to most of my decision making processes)?

3. Is Dwight Yoakam great, or the greatest?

4. Harry Potter. Harry Potter. Harry Potter (Leah let me borrow the seventh book and I could only read it one and a half times before she took it back to Branson).

5. Is it okay to have black bar tape when you have a brown leather saddle? Answer: no, but unfortunately your father has already bought you the black bar tape upon your specific request.

6. Is it really worth driving nine hours to Tulsa for the thrift store that usually has cool clothes in your size? (They didn't this time. Boo.)

7. Seriously, how can LAH live in Branson? (When I visited Branson I was told to stop asking that question every five minutes. Other comments that fell under this command were "This place is awful. I would have left by now. I could never live here. Comparatively, Champaign is paradise. The rest of the year is really going to suck."

8. The fickle, yet reliable nature of the '91 Honda Accord.

9. Woody Guthrie. Great, or the greatest?

10. The difficulty of having a caffeine headache with no caffeine or aspirin in the house.

Best Quote of the Week, Possibly the Semester

In Andrew's final thesis presentation:

Andrew: "Oh my god! We're gardening ILLEGALLY!"

Coup

I don't know what happened this afternoon. I gave a presentation, one that the only preparation I had done was spend about an hour collecting images from the internet and putting them into powerpoint.

The assignment was to propose a museum exhibit and in the grad student meeting with the professor she rejected my first proposal and suggested I make an exhibit on Cold War Architecture. However on Friday my presentation wasn't on Cold War Architecture, it was on Cold War landscapes. And when the professor read the title on my first slide she couldn't hide her confusion/frustration/contempt with me. During the first part of the presentation she told me to speak up, that she couldn't hear me. All the while I was clicking through my slides as fast as possible because after all, I was running on no sleep. And then, and then I played an audio clip. It's a sound track to an Air Force Training movie, it describes in detail how a missile guidance system triangulates to find out where the missile is ("it knows where it is because it knows where it isn't"). During the three minute clip she laughed until she had to put her head down on the desk and I totally won her over. She also said the clip sounded like how she balances her checkbook.

The other MLA student and I walked out together, me laughing and he shaking his head in disbelief. He kept saying, "I don't know how you did that." And I can't say that I know either.