Quant is really kicking my ass.

March 28, 2003

So I get up this morning after both going to bed late and not sleeping well, take a shower, brush my teeth, and then I notice that it’s raining. Hard. So I dig my crappy umbrella out from beneath all my towels and Ziploc bags on one of my shelves in my closet–I say it’s crappy because it’s too small to cover both me and my backpack, plus it’s very short–and walk to class in the wind and rain. If the rain were coming straight down, it would be no problem, but since the wind was blowing, I had to constantly readjust my umbrella to keep myself dry. My backback always gets the runoff from my umbrella since it’s so small, but hey, it’s probably waterproof. Anyhow, I jump two inch deep puddles and wade through rivers of runoff, get to my class, and I find that it’s canceled. Well that’s just…uh…great? I’m not sure. Mixed blessing, I suppose. I had to get up and swim over there only to find that I have an extra two hours today and only one class.

Of course getting to the one class with all my work done is the real trick. I have a paper due there today, and I have to reread and revise it before noon, plus write the bibliography and edit the footnotes. So I’ve got a bit of work, although it shouldn’t take me too long. The meat of the paper is done–just needs the gravy. This paper was for my African Politics class again, specifically about Burundi’s involvement in the Great Lakes crisis five years ago. A six to eight page paper. I could barely squeeze six pages out of it, actually, and in the end most, of it is background and not actual facts about the Great Lakes crisis. For those of you that don’t know the background of the Great Lakes war, it’s also frequently referred to as the Congolese civil war or the African World War, due to the number of states and groups that took part in it. It began with the refugee flow out of Rwanda after the genocide in 1994, and when Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi shut down the camps themselves because they were being used as bases of operation for militias to continue killing, they ended up taking the whole of the Democratic Republic of Congo, overthrowing Mobutu. A year later, the man they’d put into power kicked their troops out of the east of the DRC, and once again the militias could use it to stage raids into Rwanda and Burundi. Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi didn’t like this, so they went to war against the man they’d put into power, and he began funding their rebel groups, and then other states like Sudan, Chad, Zimbabwe, and a couple of others that slip my mind came to the DRC’s aid, and so their rebel groups began getting funding. It was a real mess. Didn’t go on for a long time, but pretty bad nonetheless. Burundi didn’t play much of a role in the actual fighting, just helping the rebel group and putting troops across the border in the DRC to protect their territory.

That’s not all that’s been occupying my time. I also have a court case in my Quant class. Yeah, it’s sort of an odd assingment. We’re given a hypothetical court case and all the data, and we have to act as both the firm analyzing the statistics as well as the plantiff and defendent, and on Monday, we present our case to the judges. The case resolves around gaps in wages based on sex at a made-up company, and we have 101 random samples of employee data to create our case with. I’m on the plantiff’s side, representing the company. Just looking at wage and gender, there is a discrepancy and men get paid higher, but taking into account positions and experience, it comes down to the more experienced people in different jobs get paid more, having nothing to do with sex. For instance, male engineers get paid more than female engineers, but the men have more “experience” which we’ve taken to be years with the company. Along the same lines, in the clerical department, women make more than men because they have more experience. Not a very fun project, especially since it’s a group project, but it’s a significant portion of my grade in this class. My job is to write the personnel manual for the company in which we outline the firm’s employment policies, including how we pay our empoyees. I’m fairly fluent in corporate crap-lingo, so I figure a line like “Papa Bell [the firm I represent] takes pride in rewarding its employees for years of commitment to the company” will sound about right. I can’t forget the equal opportunity employer clause, either.

Well, I’m pretty much done with my war movies. I didn’t get around to Empire of the Sun before it was time to return it, and since I’d seen it before I just dropped it off and didn’t rerent it. After having seen fairly realistic conditions of war based on what I’ve read that veterans have said about the movies I watched, I’ve come to a pretty poignant conclusion about war, with my apologies to Marlon Brando and his character Maj. Kurtz from Apocalypse Now: “The horror. The horror.” I’ve pretty much sopped paying attention to the news coming from Iraq because I can’t wade through the “holier than thou attitude” the US is taking and the “you’re the Devil” attitude Iraq is taking. There’s a quote that I’m familiar with that I think works quite well for this war: Understanding is a three-edged sword. Your side, their side, and the truth. Buried somewhere between our propaganda and their propaganda is what’s really happening, but since I can’t tell what’s actually going on, I’m not going to even bother.

I did rent two more movies when I returned the first batch of movies I rented, thugh I think these are the last ones for awhile. Not because I can’t afford it, but because I don’t have the time to keep watching movies. The two I rented were The Ring, a pretty scary horror movie that came out last year, and Lawrence of Arabia which I’m sure everyone except me has seen at least once. I saw something the other day that brought it to mind, and since I’d never seen it, I figured why not? It’s due on Sunday, though, so I’d better watch it soon.

I think that’s about it for now. It’s been a long week, and I’m sure glad it’s Friday. I’d like to have a nice, relaxing weekend in which I could kick back and watch Lawrence with some popcorn and a beer, but instead, I’ll be working on the court case and the second draft of my independent project paper all weekend. Huzzah. Cheers everyone, and I’ll catch up with you later.

Do not ask for whom the facehugger crawls. It crawls for thee.