Wow, it’s been a little while since a good ol blog post on here, eh? I just finished my fourth week of classes, meaning that the semester is already 25% complete. I guess time flies over here. Which means, as usual, there’s not enough of it. Hence my lack of posting on here, as could be expected. So I guess the purpose of this post is to catch up and recap on the past four weeks of my college life. Not that any of this is new, especially if you’ve been following me on Twitter. But for the sake of blog continuity, here goes anyway.

iTouch Me Babe: Bye Bye MacBook
I’m writing this post right now not from my computer, but from a week-old iPod touch. And quite frankly, for the past week, I’ve been doing all of my Internet connectivity from this thing. But not by choice.
I swear I wonder if transitioning to life in DC has made me more clumsy. Only six days in (nearly a month ago now) I had a little bit of accidental water damage to my MacBook’s keyboard. It really wasn’t a lot of water, there was very little left in the bottle, but it was enough to knock out the L and P keys, and make the O key a bit iffy. Cost to fix: $215. Covered under the expensive extended warranty I purchased a year ago? Nope. Temp solution: I bought a wireless keyboard to use instead. Not super-convenient, but good enough. Until last Tuesday (the 8th), when I was using my computer in bed. Not the best idea, but I was exhausted, and I’d done it many times before. Then suddenly I had a freak sneezing attack, and my computer fell to the floor. But it was a carpeted floor and less than a 3 foot drop. But it landed on the lid, on the opposite side of the screen, and that was enough to knock out all but about 1/5 of the screen, allowing me to only see the upper-left hand corner of it. The computer still works fine, I just can’t see what I would be doing. Cost to fix: $755. Covered under that pathetic extended warranty? Nope. (In case you haven’t figured it out, AppleCare is NOT worth it’s cost.)

So here were the choices: no way can I afford to fix the computer, and the cost of fixing it is almost as much as a new one anyway. My MacBook was two and a half years old–almost senior citizen status in the computer world. And since the white MacBook isn’t the best-design Apple has ever made, the case has been getting a little discolored and the edges have been slowly peeling off anyway.
Because I won a Linux computer In the OSCON raffle, and had planning to sell that anyway, that could be eventually used to pay for a new computer, but what was I to do for the few weeks before that got figured out?

I ended up opting to get an iPod touch. I had been thinking about getting one anyway, in order to help me keep track of things like assignments, items on my much-busier calendar, daily expenses, etc. in places where lugging my laptop along would not be practical. Plus at $300, it was the cheapest temporary option. It hasn’t been an ideal way to stay connected, and certainly for doing things like assignments and stuff, it has tied me to the library computers (more on that below), but it’s been better than nothing at all. But man, I look forward to having a real keyboard again.

Impeachy Keen: My Hazing Into Student Government
Yes, I did just describe AU Student Government as though it was a fraternity. It really isn’t, but man, my first week there sure felt like it was.

You may have heard that I submitted an application to fill AUSG’s vacant position of Parliamentarian of the Senate. (Vacant because the last parliamentarian was elected to be Speaker, replacing the last Speaker who became President.) In addition to submitting an application with a résumé and answers to a questionnaire a week before I left the Bay Area, I was interviewed by several members of the AUSG leadership on August 25, and finally selected by the President as his nominee on the 27th. I went to my first Senate meeting on the 30th, but that was only the first read of my nomination by the Senate, so I didn’t actually get confirmed until last Sunday, the 13th, in which I presented myself before the Committee of Rules and Privileges, which passed me on to the Senate with a favorable recommendation. Finally I presented myself to the Senate, which resoundingly confirmed my appointment (or so I was told), and I was in. I am now the AUSG Parliamentarian!

That’s not what made my first week in the Senate a fraternity-like hazing experience. You see, at the same time that I was just getting in, one of the Senators filed impeachment charges against the Comptroller. Not for embezzlement of funds or anything like that, but for alleged falsification of his summer timesheets. And thus began something unprecedented: the first impeachment hearings in the four-year history of the AU Student Government (AU had a different student governmental organization prior to 2005.) The whole affair was intensely covered (and as intensely looked down on) by the campus media, and pretty much consumed my life during the second week of classes.

Why? Well, the hearings consisted of three nights in a row at 11:15 PM, and went until 2 or 3 AM. A lack of clear procedures in the AUSG bylaws and any other parliamentary authority, meant that the Speaker had to quickly draft a number of improvised procedural rules the day before the hearing, and there were still lots of procedural conflicts and parliamentary inquiries that came up during the proceedings. And probably the hardest for me: I wasn’t even Parliamentarian yet, and therefore didn’t have any authority than to sit in the back with members of the public and observe.

The process wound up getting more and more controversial. What on the first day was disagreement with some of the Speaker’s rulings and disillusionment with how long and slow the process was going gave way to articles in the campus paper alleging that SG executives had been “plotting” to impeach this Comptroller since the end of the last academic year, right after he was elected. And then there was an anonymous person who appealed to the Judicial Board a question on the admissibility of a piece of evidence (a text message) which led to the Judicial Board ordering that the hearings be halted on the third night, leading to some Senators having some very angry remarks against the Judicial Board. That night, the two sides in the hearing met and reached an agreement that the charges would be dropped and the Comptroller would resign. It was rather an anti-climactic ending, and kind of a slap in the face to those of us who had given up so much time and so much sleep to the charges, but no one was complaining that the nightmare was over. It took me over a week to get back to sleeping normally again.

Nevertheless, I think that my dedication to being there (and privately answering some parliamentary questions of some Senators in an unofficial capacity) played a big part in helping me establish a good working relationship with a number of folks there, and I am looking forward to working with the AUSG in my new role.

I Say, You Say, Essays
I mean, bad enough that I’m trying to get settled into a dorm and living on my own for the first time. And that the impeachment craziness made it take twice as long for me to get settled than it should have. But there is one regard in which college classes and high school don’t differ: assignments due at the same time. I had papers in four of my five classes due yesterday, the first of which you saw in first draft form in my last post. But trying to fit all of that in, plus trying to catch up on the insane amount of assigned reading (which I’m still not caught up on yet, though I’m a lot closer than I once was), is quite frankly impossible to do well. Throw in my lack of a laptop, and you can bet that I spent a lot of time in the library this week. I was in there on Tuesday from 5-11 PM, Thursday morning from 9-11 AM, Thursday night from 10:30 until 3:45 AM Friday morning, and another three hours on midday Friday. I did get all four essays done, though I’m not very satisfied with my last one. Fortunately, most of the professors have a rewrite policy: I can rewrite essays once by the end of the semester and receive an average of the two grades. Fortunately there’s just one other time this semester when I’ll have three papers due at once, otherwise this will hopefully remain a one-time nightmare.

Moving Ahead
I am now happy to say that I’m feeling relatively settled in here now. Stuff in my room is now mostly well-organized, I’m starting to re-establish my work habits, within a week or two I will be fully settled in to my extracurricular commitments, and I’m actually getting used to eating at TDR. (Maybe I’ve completely forgot what a home-cooked meal is like at this point.) At the very least, I’m still surviving, and that’s what counts.