pinchy dot org.

Her: Did you want to take some Co-Q10?
Him: Which one was that?
Her: It increases memory function.
Him: Oh. Yes.

A friend and I were talking in the computer lab at school, and we agreed that this semester’s defining characteristic was the frequent expenditure of enormous amounts of time and effort to produce consistently disappointing results. Not necessarily bad results, mind you, but nothing that we felt especially excited about or proud of. Ah, well. At least we have a semester left to redeem ourselves.

Besides, we’re having fun with our mediocrity. Here are some excerpts from a conversation that I had today with my partner for a group project:

Partner: We never had data on that.
Me: Yes, we did. We scribbled it down somewhere.
Partner: The thing is, we can recreate that data in five minutes just by thinking about it.

Partner: I’ll do the pedestrian “counts.”
Me: No, those are pretty legitimate. We really counted.

Partner: (about our final report) At least if it sucks, there’ll be a lot of it.

(I should mention that we’re not actually falsifying data—it’s just a somewhat abstract project, and it includes a number of estimates that are labeled as such.)

I’ve also started keeping a list of all the important city planning-related stuff of which I’m wholly ignorant. My hope is that I can correct most of these deficiencies over the next several months, making me eminently employable upon graduation and thus enabling me to pay off the $719 million of student loans I’ve taken out.

Not that school is taking up all my time. In the past few weeks, I’ve visited the Scharffen Berger factory and the Ferry Building Marketplace, seen an Iron & Wine concert, assisted in the preparation of cheese bread and potato gratin, and watched fellow students mock my professors at the department’s holiday party. But it’s mostly been all about finishing this semester.

Just a few more days to go.