Didn't get the job. Whee! The relief! Seriously, my psychic radar seems to be up big time these days.

(Odile, the next part in here is for you. Enjoy!)

With the nice weather, it seems like spring 2002 has become the Protest Season. It seems like at least once a week (usually more often than that) there's some big protest/speech/art exhibit thing going on on the quad. Usually it's the Israel/Palestine mess- I think that's been going on at least every other day for two months. They had a whole week about it recently.

Then there's the lecturer problem. The snotty humanities dean has decided to work on eliminating English lecturers (not giving them new contracts, canning award-winning lecturers after this year, etc.) so she can hire more researching faculty. She claims this means that more faculty will teach, but everyone knows this means that more grad students are going to be teaching instead. The lecturers here are some of the best teachers- my favorite teacher here is a lecturer and I rue the day he leaves school- so the English students are naturally quite pissed off. They've been writing letters and holding meetings and the lecturers have been refusing to grade Subject A (a writing requirement here) exams in hopes that faculty would actually do it for a change. Nope, they hired outsiders to do it. Anyway, today and yesterday they've been on strike. If I were still a student (I feel silly doing it when I'm not one) I'd be out there with them. I don't think it'll do them any good though, given the snotty dean's attitude. "Gee, I hope they don't walk out, because it'll only hurt the students. It sure won't hurt ME any." She's very obviously not listening in every thing of hers I've read claiming that she is. Uh-huh.

I was down to one lone buck of cash, so I wandered over to the Coffee House restaurant today because some of the registers there take ATM. Well, my timing sucked, because it was closed today? Why? The workers there all walked out in protest against ASUCD. Apparently at last night's meeting, the president wanted to hire a full-time chef and replace one of the food service managers. Since the food is cooked by students and most things there are run by them too, apparently the workers are very pissed.

It's not that these issues aren't important, but sometimes I just feel like walking across the quad without something chaotic going on.

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