Lately I’ve seen this blogging meme making the rounds where you Google “your name+needs” and then list the first five or so things that come up. Being nothing if not a Shamless Troller For Stuff I Can Write About On My Blog I googled, and I came up with these results:

-Jenny needs a job. (No thanks, I’m good.)
-Jenny needs to find herself a baller. (First, Jenny needs to know what the heck that even means.)
-Jenny needs a cold shower. (Yes, but only because of the fever that’s accompanying this damn strep throat!)
-Jenny needs a smack daddy. (This scares me.)
-Jenny needs attention (Hm, truer words were never spoken.)
-Jenny needs to see herself as a good reader. (Not a problem.)

I had no idea what a baller was (and I’m kind of afraid to know what a smack daddy is), but I wasn’t worried because today I was tutoring the high school student who is my source of knowledge for all things “hip” and current.

“So, what’s a ‘baller’ “, I asked her when she got here.

“Is that a serious question?” she asked in disbelief.(Sarcasm: the price I pay for knowledge.)

When I assured her that it was, she informed me that it had multiple meanings. On the one hand it can apparently mean that “you have pimps and ho’s around you”, or it can mean that you’re really good at something.

“So, you could say that you’re a baller at Spanish. And I? Well I could say that I’m a baller at life.”

(Gee, thanks.)

We went on with the lesson until we got to a tricky problem involving a certain verb conjugation.

“Why is that the answer?” she demanded, when I corrected her mistake.

“Because [involved grammar explanation that you probably don’t really care about].”

“That really pisses me off!”

“I know. It’s because Spanish is out to get you.”

“Jenny, the whole world is out to get me. I’m a baller at life. That’s just the price I pay.”

While watching the Science Channel TV show entitled, “Most of Our Universe is Missing“, I learned the following helpful model which explains how the composition of the Universe breaks down.

5% is composed of atoms

21% is composed of “dark matter”, which no one can prove exists

and the remaining 75% is composed of “dark energy”, which no one actually understands

Now this is the kind of math that I can totally get behind, math which basically says “Um, yeah, we don’t actually know so…let’s just go with ‘magic’.”

So, thanks so much, World’s Top Cosmologists, but could I just make one, tiny suggestion? The next time you need to come up with a model which basically rests upon The Presumption Of Magical Particles, hows about you just come to me first? I’m way less expensive than launching satellites into space and can come up with just as magical a solution, and then with all that money we’ve just saved we can apply ourselves to some important issues here on earth. Such as convincing the CW not to cancel Veronica Mars before we learn whether or not Logan and Veronica can ever work out all their problems and become the happy, stable, staying-together-forever kind of couple that we are looking for in our television viewing. (And yes, I AM bitter!!)

Just a thought.

AKA, “Why I Majored In Spanish”.

“We get to answer the question of whether or not the Universe is one day just going to collapse. That’s the fun of this project.”

-a scientist on the TV show entitled, “Most of Our Universe Is Missing”

Yesterday in class I taught the Spanish words for the days of the week and the months of the year. Then, in order to give the students a chance to use the new vocabulary, I did some oral drills.

Me (in Spanish): What are the months of the summer?

The answer I was looking for: June, July, and August.

The Answer I Got From An Engineer: Well, summer doesn’t officially start until June 21st, when the month is almost over. So in order to get 3 full months included in the season you will need to apply the ANSI Standard Of Rounding Up. So the answer would be July, August, and September.