Author Archives: Christene

Doubt

After reading my post last night, Sean emailed me. Aside from trying to piece together half forgotten memories, he sent me a link to a song because he heard it, and I was the first person he thought of.

It would make sense that if I remembered half of an event, and he remembered half, then we would be able to put it all together. But it doesn’t work that way apparently.

Anyway, the song he sent is Doubt by the Corin Tucker Band. I have never heard of them before, but I like the song. I am unable to upload it (there are no good versions on youtube). So, after searching for this all over the vast internet, I found a site that plays a good version of it. Click here.

After I heard it, despite liking it, I didn’t know what exactly reminded him of me. Sean classified this as a “getting pumped” kind of song. I see it more as contemplative. Of course I had trouble understanding pretty much all of the lyrics. I looked them up. Okay, now I see.

P.S. Yes, you are right, the picture above has absolutely nothing to do with this post. I just liked it.

Better Than I Expected

I just got home from taking the GRE. The two essay sections have not yet been graded (obviously), but I received my scores for the multiple choice sections immediately. I don’t know what it means percentile wise since I don’t have a complete score, and the percentile is calculated in terms of how other people did, but I scored far better than I expected, or could have hoped for.

Out of the eighty questions I got five wrong. Two on the verbal, and three on the math.

Unlike on my practice tests, I don’t get to see which ones I got wrong. I wish I did solely for my own curiosity. Were those the questions I had some trouble with and that took me forever to solve? Or were there other, deceptively easy questions that I misjudged? Did I get the same kind of questions wrong on the actual exam that I was getting wrong on the practice tests?

Yes, I know none of this matters. But still.

Once the test ended I figured out which one was the experimental section. I thought it might have been, but I wasn’t about to anger the GRE and not try my hardest on it anyway. And who knows, maybe I am wrong. They don’t actually tell you, but considering the score I got, the experimental section must have been the math one in the middle that made absolutely no sense. If it had been a real section my quantitative score would have been far lower. Like so much far lower I would have dove into negative points. “What did you get on the GRE?” “Negative five.” “What??”

I don’t have to do this anymore. Oh my God. I don’t have to do this anymore!

Now I can really start studying for the fun GRE. Not that any part of the GRE is fun, but at least the subject test will be about things I am more or less interested in. Not that I am not incredibly interested in trigonometry, but literature is kind of my thing. Sometimes.

With my luck, I will have to read eighty thousand post colonial novels.

 

No Man Is An Island?

No man is an island.

Really? Think about that for a second, when you decide what you will, or will not, allow to affect you. Everyone is so desensitized to everyone else, it is a miracle society even goes on. No man is an island? We have all built islands around ourselves with heavy duty motes to keep out everyone else, isolate ourselves from what we don’t want to deal with.

With everything that is going on in the world we hide out on our islands and ignore it. It doesn’t touch us, so it doesn’t matter. We stand so deep in the middle of our islands and it *can’t* touch us. So it doesn’t matter.

I am not going to pretend I am any better. I take care of my children. I look after my loved ones. I don’t have time for anything else. When is the last time I took up a world cause? Um… never.

I may not have lived in the time of Hitler or Stalin when millions of innocent people were being slaughtered or sent into cold isolation while others stood by. But millions need help now. Am I doing anything about it? Are you doing anything about it? Is anyone doing anything about it? I mean *really* doing something about it. Not the ceremonial stuff you read about where people who have no business getting involved, do, for their own vainglory, and no one actually benefits because that is not what it was really all about.

Involved in mankind…

No one seems to really be involved in mankind. Unless you count the fact that we all share certain genetic pieces. Then sure, we are all involved with one another. Until we need one another. Then the other disappears.

The worst part is that the islands have drifted apart, further than the continents since the time of Pangea.

And the new motto seems to be that as long as I don’t hear the damn bell toll, it doesn’t toll for me.