Phyla, Panini and Paperwork

To supplement the course of botanical inquiry I've been on lately — mostly reading a book on plant systematics which should help me keep the classes, orders, families, etc. of flora straight and enlighten me better about the tiny characteristics which distinguish them — I decided to look around YouTube and quickly found an apt lesson on classification and evolution from a course at Berkeley. So I spent roughly an hour on that, including the times I had to pause and repeat it so that my notes would be more accurate, and since then have begun copying down a diagram of the outdated higher orders of life, in the back of our Oxford English Reference Dictionary. We covered those quite thoroughly in Biology 11 and most of the evolutionary elucidations were already familiar from that class and previous science classes, but then I came across brachiopods (which were probably not brought up at all, probably because most species survive only in fossil form) and so have been launched on a certain-online-encyclopaedia session. I might review flatworms and nematodes, too, which quite lastingly put me off 1) ponds and 2) soil, if one grubs around in them without washing one's hands afterwards.

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My sister purchased a panini grill, or a hot sandwich press if you prefer, and is very enthusiastic about it. As far as I have observed, it does not reach a very high relative heat because it is adapted to the conventional electrical outlets; secondly, frying things in fat and achieving a strong Maillard effect (if you'll forgive the pedantry) greatly improves their flavour. My sister presumably bought it because one thing she liked about the first two years of university, even when they were otherwise dire, were the grilled ciabatte with salmon and our choice of topping from the residence cafeteria. They were freshly assembled and if we liked grilled in a press with generous splashes of olive oil.

Anyway, I feel nostalgic about the cafeteria too, but we do have a cast-iron pan to 'grill' food on even if it leaves no stripes on the food. So what I feel more nostalgic about is, for example, having fish and chips, chicken fingers, enormous sticky cinnamon buns, Belgian waffles and nacho chips without having to bake them, and a salad bar though the time I assumed that what looked like feta cheese was feta cheese was frightful, and having several flavours of ice cream at hand at all times of the year if I feel like having some, etc. In fact I ate quite healthily but the possibility of eating sinfully was highly exciting. (The 'feta cheese' was tofu, by the way. In one of my Foods and Nutrition classes in school we had cooked it two ways to show that it isn't horrible; as I recall it we ended up with a tofu stir-fry and warmish slabs of the stuff inundated — purportedly 'fried' — in maple syrup, which indeed weren't terrible but gave the tofu all the dynamic interest of a flavourless piece of gelatinous white bread.)

Possibly the least delicious thing I had came from the prepackaged food section: a little tub of pineapple cottage cheese, which I tried as a novelty. Either I am genetically engineered not to like it or it is really abhorrent in a neutral sort of way. Once the wasabi sauce that went with the sushi packages also gave me something like stomach cramps (nothing worse) and I figure that was because though I'd eaten wasabi several times it was still too unfamiliar to my Teutonic digestion.

* (Continuation, in which I say a lot of tactless things:)

As far as university present is concerned, I have my student card and transit pass and e-mail account now, and soon I can register for my courses. That registration process is worrying me a little because the FU has regulations the way that the seashore has grains of sand, so it sounds terribly uptight and labyrinthine and I always worry about getting into trouble because someone in the university administration might not have enough common sense to see that even if I make a huge effort to research and ask questions at the right spot, there are some arcana or even obvious things which cannot be found out, deduced, intuited or otherwise perceived by the ordinary mortal who is not up-to-date on which office is handling what, how, and when this particular year. For instance, the structure for one of my minors has changed this year without notice, splitting into four specializations, and (though cautiously optimistic that it will turn out for the best) I'm hopping mad that there was no notice. Anyway, I'm grateful for many things, but even the mildest bureaucratic surprises (what a terrifying combination of adjective and noun!) tend to make me explode in irritation.

*

I know that I'll have to let go my idealizing allegiance to UBC and its administrative practices eventually and transfer it to my present institution. But the highest echelons of the FU also horrify me because of their blather about becoming business-aligned and 'elite,' etc.

If you have to talk about becoming 'elite,' you're not it; though to be fair a former president of Georgetown University was also recently dropping 'prestige' all over an article in the Huffington Post (?). I go to university to learn well, to train the mind and my ability to research and process information in a productive way, and (this time) to hide from reality for four or five years; and frankly I don't want to be a shining example of intellectual superiority or careerist ambition, either on my own behalf or on the university's, because that would make me a terrible person.

If the FU presidency has a monomania for the American university system, it could at least take a better and more astute look at how humanized as well as successful it is — and that what drives it are (as far as I can tell) not managerial acrobatics but the lashings of private money that flow into it.

For instance I think that UBC is good because of geographic position i.e. at a kind of nexus of Asia and North America, because of the somewhat exaggerated payment it extorts from non-domestic students, because of its liberal environment, because of its capacious endowment, and as far as I can tell because it treats its students and employees reasonably well.

I think it's more in backward states like Texas where troglodytes like Rick Perry are demanding that airy-fairy students have success in the business world and get jobs right away. I think it's incredibly dumb, too, to blame one's university on not getting a job. People who do get jobs right away probably do it through their own or their family's connections; and for people like me who'd rather jump off a cliff than acquire influence, I should gather job experience during the studies or the holidays or take extra pains to find positions where any university graduation as well as the ability to write well, informedly and coherently is already sufficient qualification. Frankly I think that employers who demand a diploma without a pertinent reason are snobs or lazyboneses who can't be bothered to test applicants' talents properly; but that's the way the world apparently works.