Take A Look; It's In A Book

A recent post on reddit reminded me of yet another reason things were better back in childhood—remember Book It!? Sure you do. A collaboration between Pizza Hut and schools that began back in ’84, where students would collect tiny star stickers for each book they completed, culminating in a free pizza from the restaurant chain once they’d received a whole button’s worth of stickers.

For a few sweet, sweet years in elementary school, the personal pan pizzas seemed to come faster than we could devour them. We’d happily trade the latest Babysitters’ Club for a pepperoni, or the spookiest Goosebumps for extra cheese, please. For me, it was a reward for something I enjoyed doing, anyway. For others, maybe it took a little effort, or a little cajoling on behalf of their teachers. But come Friday night, when your parents took you to Pizza Hut all because you’d plowed through a couple of quick chapter books? Well worth the effort.

Now I’m 25, and nobody is offering me pizza in exchange for doing anything, let alone leisure reading. But why not? Why do the incentives for good behavior—pizza for books, prizes for good grades, crisp $1 bills for lost teeth—end at childhood? It is, as they say, not fair.

Being an adult is hard work. I wouldn’t mind a little incentive here and there for getting things done. Put the laundry away? Here’s an ice cream sandwich! Show up to work on time every day for a week? Have a cheeseburger. Pay your taxes? Gee whiz, have a whole pizza party!

And it doesn’t all have to be food. I’d happily accept incentives in the form of beer, material goods, or even better, cash money. Sure, we get paid to do our jobs, but who’s rewarding us for getting up when our alarm clocks go off or cleaning errant hairs out of the sink or checking the oil in our cars? This grown-up stuff is tough, and a little encouragement would be greatly appreciated.

I put away three separate loads of laundry last night. I’ll be expecting my ice cream sandwiches shortly.

Another Monday Routine

Today will be a short post because I have an exam for which to study. But I'm going to cram this blog full of links. Last week I told you about my proclivity for reading in place of... anything else on Monday mornings. Today I will again offer up those things holding my interest.

• The first bullet has multiple links all spawning from one source. Unpublished photos of cave drawings in Lascaux from the late 1940's. At upwards of 18,000 years old, these drawings are pretty fascinating. The same photographer covered all sorts of crazy stuff: the liberation of Paris; the day of Einstein's death; Apollo 11; Babe Ruth's last days on the diamond. He has lived through and photographed some amazing things, and I'm jealous. But history will be made in my days, too; I just probably won't be as close to it as he was.



• Stone megaliths were uncovered in 1994, and some archeologists consider it to be the most important dig site...ever. The title is a bit sensationalistic, but this is the oldest such site ever found, predating agriculture. This suggests we need to rethink our commonly held views about the life and culture of hunter-gatherers.



• The head of British forces says victory over al-Qaeda is impossible. It's a very level-headed perspective, and at least makes sense through a historical lens.



• A piece by Roger Ebert (my favorite!) about Wall Street and the mortgage business. The article speaks for itself, but now I really want to watch Inside Job.



• Dark energy might have been stronger in the past.



• This is old in internet terms, meaning I've seen before sometime in the past, but it's just a little graph to give some perspective.



• Lastly, for the ladies: you may have read recently that demand for chocolate may exceed supply within our lifetimes... But there is hope! The chocolate genome may save the day.

I hope you find some of these things as interesting as I do. If not, OH WELL. You came here and THIS IS WHAT YOU GET SO DEAL. And now I'm off to study....


UPDATE: This is amazing; read it. Guano Islands Act

Morning Routine - Reading

Once again we find ourselves awake (WHY GOD?) on Monday morning.

I work for the Mathematics and Science Resource Center, known colloquially as the MSRC, tutoring a Math for Truly Dumb Idiots course, which is usually called Mathematical Patterns. Perhaps I'm being mean. Actually, no, I'm being really mean, but this course is basically unending frustration for me.
I mention this because that's where I am now, the MSRC, as I type up this blog post. My first shift today is from 10am to 2pm. (Yes, I have another shift later. [But come on, 10am is a pretty sweet deal in the grand scheme; look at Mikey for example -- he works overnights {ANOTHER PARANTHETICAL COMMENT LOL}!]) It's only four hours, which is not long at all, but it's pretty much the embodiment of soul-crushing boredom (but at least I don't just stare at screens like Mik... Oh wait, what am I doing now?). Particularly so given that I have not once tutored anyone on a Monday morning, meaning that I could be sleeping in (my problems are REAL). Instead I'm stuck here -- I have to be here -- while my sanity is slowly drained from me.

But that's not what I want to talk about today, actually. (I could but you don't want me to LOLOL.) Today I want to talk about morning routines. But not really. Mostly I want to talk about how I'm not very good at being a student. But more so than that I want to talk about reading and how I like to do it. So let's talk about all those things (sort of)!

Monday mornings are tough for a lot of people, and I'm no exception. I wake up at 7:30, shower, dress, fix my lunch -- y'know, MORNING STUFF-- and I'm usually out the door by 8 or 8:15 or 8:30 depending on my proclivities for that morning. Rarely do I not have homework on Mondays, because I don't typically finish over the weekends. And every week I go through the same stupid cycle: I say to myself, in my headbrain, "I will go to the MSRC and I will do my homework. I will not be distracted by my computer and its delicious internet tubes. I WILL BE A GOOD STUDENT." Surely you have presumed that this is utterly false in every way, and your presumption is correct, also in every way. But every week, I saythink the same stupid, false things.

So what prevents me from working like a good, studious graduate student? Besides the simple fact that HOLY FUCK I DON'T KNOW HOW TO DO MY HOMEWORK AND GRADUATE SCHOOL IS OVERWHELMING AND I'M BEING ENGULFED IN DISCONTENT, I have a hard time breaking out of my reading habit. Now you may think, "Gosh, reading doesn't seem so bad," but you don't understand. I get sucked into things. I want to read everything. And I try. Rather than study or do my schoolwork, I'm busy trying to READ ALL THE THINGS. So I really want to talk about the stuff that's keeping my attention this morning. Between Twitter links, Facebook links, and the articles I tend to seek on my own, I have a good few things to offer this morning.

• Here's a piece on the fate of net neutrality in the wake of the mid-term elections. I find it amazing that people are not violently in favor of net neutrality (but I find lots of things amazing); freedom of information is something that we all take for granted pretty much all the time.
  
  
• Following SRS BSNS with more SRS BSNS: I follow Roger Ebert on Twitter, and he always links to his blogs, articles, and reviews. Here he has a couple videos concerning the West Memphis Three, and here is the Wikipedia article on them. [He also just posted a link to a video I saw just the other day: Richard Feynman on magnets.]
  
  
• And the last of the SRS BSNS today is an excellent essay about the Civil War, prescient given that this past Saturday, Nov. 6, was the 150th anniversary of Lincoln's (first) election as president. Thus we are approximately six months from the anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War. The last paragraph seems vitally relevant given the current political climate.
  
  
• With all that serious junk out of the way, we can finally (finally!) talk about football, or as Virginia and I have taken to calling it, foobaww. One article I always read on Monday mornings is Michael Silver's Morning Rush. I don't care about either the Raiders or the Chiefs, but I do love rivalries, and I especially love rivalries with history, so the Raiders and Chiefs both seemingly returning to relevance in the same year is actually pretty cool.
  
  
• Changing gears entirely, we have an article concerning the very super serious matter of Spider-Man's impact on the city of New York, an issue I have vaguely considered in past musings, though never to this (half-baked) extent. (Warning: it's pretty easy to get sucked into Cracked.)
  
  
• And for my last link, all I can say is Jesus Christ...
  

The truly sad thing is that this is definitely not everything I have seen or read this morning. Perhaps now you understand why I'm not such a good student? Sometimes I feel like an ADHD child chugging pure caffeine the way I peruse these tubes; in trying to absorb everything, I get absorbed into a horrible, unproductive shitspiral of reading and reading and reading and reading...

I only hope I'm not alone in this sort of thing.