When your boss tells you to “go ahead and relax today.”

So, here I am, with my cup of coffee, updating my blog, listening to A Silver Mt. Zion. Maybe I’ll even design another banner graphic for my site. Who knows?

I’m scheduled to fix computers for two different people today. After work, I go straight to my mother’s office (a urology office) to tinker with some computers for her boss. Then, after Allison gets home from Driver’s Ed (good luck, baby!), we have to go to her grandparents’ house to fix their computer. We were there on Sunday, but it’s been so long since I’ve used Windows 98 DOS that I’d forgotten the command I wanted (specifically, C:/format /mbr), and had to leave to look it up. I just hope it will work. I think they managed to FUBAR their Master Boot Record, so the system just starts up to DOS now. If this doesn’t work, I may just have to system restore.

Imagine for a moment that you are a very competent chef. You’ve been cooking and baking for years, and everyone respects your culinary skills. One day, a friend informs you that s/he’s having the damnedest luck baking a cake, and s/he wants you to come over and see what s/he’s doing wrong. So you go and watch as they bake their cake.

They throw the eggs in the bowl whole, not bothering to remove the shells.

Instead of regular shortening, they use a 3-year-old bucket of Hooper’s Gen-u-wine Lard.

They substitute packets of Sweet n’ Low (also unwrapped) for confectioner’s sugar.

They substitute flour for baking soda, because “it looks the same.”

Finally, instead of a cream cheese frosting, they use a Cheez Whiz frosting, because it was already in their pantry.

Now I ask you, as a chef, and as a reasonable human being, wouldn’t you be violently possessed by the urge to toss this friend into a big polymer vat and laminate them for archiving in the Glossy Colour Photo Edition of the Darwin Awards?

Yet, people do this kind of nonsense with computers all the time, and then they want me to kiss it and make it all better. 3 out of 4 times, it’s not a fatal error, or a virus, or a hacker; it’s just plain old idiocy on the part of the people, installing stupid programs like CometCursor or Gator or Bonzai Buddy, having a million redundant programs that all want to start at once, devouring system memory like Roseanne at a bake sale.

Sometimes, though, I calm down and think to myself, “Maybe I’m being too harsh on these poor people. Just because I’m good with computers doesn’t mean they automatically are.”

And then they yell at me for throwing out their cake. Retards.

We have an assignment for "Core II" (a mandatory liberal arts class), which is to create a narrative detailing how our ideas have been challenged or changed by the class discussions and assignments. Yeah, right.

I’m afraid mine is rather vitriolic, though I wisely stop short of lambasting the teacher herself. Here it is, as of 2 days before it’s due.

I did all my changing in high school. Mostly senior year. Mostly from arguing with political scientists and physics majors online. I radically changed by faith, political alignment, philosophical views, life ambitions, and not-so-radically my poetic/prosaic style.

I change because I was confronted by intelligent people with whom I had long debates and masterful lingual exercises.

I sit here now, assigned to write a concise narrative detailing how my ideas have been "challenged" by the discussions in my Core II class. Besides being a bit puzzled how to narrate what is in effect a summation of ideology, I struggle to find even a single instance wherein I was "challenged," so to speak.

In an effort to comply, however, I will chronicle (or "flash back," for semantics’ sake) each story.

Golding’s "Thinking As A Hobby" was the first text we attacked, followed by King’s “Letter From A Birmingham Jail.” As I recall, I stirred up trouble by suggesting that King was a Grade 1 thinker because his motives for a civil rights crusade were based in his perceptions and emotions rather than a logical system of thought. Other students suggested that he was an iconoclast because he simply wanted to bring down the establishment. When I pointed out that King wished to reform, rather than destroy, said argument went silent, and my classmates lapsed again into a critical apathy.

Next, we read "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas," where I recall being disgusted by the class’s inability to even discuss "dark" ideologies. What? Schadenfreude? Nonsense! I’m a good person… everyone else must be too! I also recall being driven almost to anger by a certain response to the teacher’s question "What do you consider a perfect city?" that was the possibly the most inane, banal, impertinent thing I’ve ever heard. More specifically, someone asserted that heaven is a perfect place, and we’ll all be there someday. I think I died a little inside that day, not because I don’t agree, but simply because it had absolutely nothing to do with the inquiry or the discussion at large. Once again, there was no challenge to my ideology; everyone in the class agreed immediately upon their thoughts and their course of action.

Next came Wolfe’s "The Night In Question," where the obvious parallelism was apparently lost to most. In this respect, the class was the most divided (pragmatism v. humanism), but my thoughts were that the question posed (namely, "Would you save your child or the people on the train?") was unanswerable because we were all childless, unmarried teenagers sitting in a classroom. Most people aren’t comfortable with flatly admitting to pragmatism. If they chose to save their "child," they rationalised it somehow, rather than confessing that sometimes you have to look out for Number 1.

Newman’s essay confused almost everyone (who are frightened, apparently, by dense prose), but it really didn’t offer anything revolutionary. After all, it is essentially a lengthier, sesquepedalian precursor to Golding, who we already digested and found little controversy in.

No further exemplification is necessary. In essence, there is little to be gained in attempting to goad an apathetic and ultimately static group of students into cognitive dissonance, except perhaps irritating me. The teacher’s unwillingness to voice her own opinions (in the interest of fairness, I’m sure) more or less leaves me (backed only by Dave’s non-sequiturs) arguing against a dozen petty associative comments, none of which manage to succeed in piercing my panoply. I have learned nothing, I have not been challenged, and I do not foresee such an event occurring at the present rate.