A hell of a week, Bathurst, Nice, Summer of Work and the Union... can you see the link?
This last week was a blur. Full of assignments, lab reports and even a test to keep me on my fingertips. It's a pretty sad life, I've decided, when you get to uni at 9am and go for lunch at 1 and then sit in the computer lab til 9, 10,11, 1, etc. The worst part is that everytime I've left the lab this week, the place has been still humming with activity. I left on Thursday at twenty past one, and the place was just as full as it is during the day. It doesn't seem like much of a life to me. At least there were only two other people when I left at just after 8pm yesterday (Friday).
The good news is that I managed to submit a couple of assignments and polish off a prac and hopefully pass that Friday morning test. (We'll see about that).
Anyway, Bathurst is on this weekend. It's one of those things that I couldn't really give a damn about (even as a mechanical engineering student), but that I wouldn't mind watching a bit of with some mates. I think I'd prefer to see a Holden victory, but no tears will be shed one way or the other. I'll probably just look at the result and maybe a thought might pass through my head along the lines of "oh, that's nice".
Which gets me onto the word "nice". What a fantastic word. I love it. It's so succinct, so inoffensive and so full of meaning. Most other adjectives just accentuate a noun. They want to proclaim an event or a thing as the greatest thing ever. Nice doesn't do that. For example, "it was a nice evening" says it was an evening that won't be remembered as one of the greatest nights of all time, but I came home from it satisfied - unless of course there was such a massive buildup for it and it was expected to be one of the nights of your life, in which case, it means that it could have been a lot worse, so you're relieved it wasn't.
That example is starting to get a little convoluted. But you compare nice to any number of expletives. The expletives can be used in any context - even in the context of nice, but who's to say that you interpreted the meaning of the expletive correctly? Where as nice maintains its meaning, no matter who says it.
As Simon Bultman once pondered: a fantastic week consists of a couple of outstanding events and nothing going wrong in the rest of the week. ie, a couple of fantastic days surrounded by nice days. It doesn't get much better than that.
Thus, I conclude that nice (synonimous with good) is not a nice word.
Another thing that has come up of late is work experience. To graduate, I have to do between 8-12 weeks of engineering work experience. So that is happening this summer, which is quite daunting. What is even more daunting is the fact that I'm going to Lonnie for it - George Town. So that'll be interesting, no doubt. But I'll definitely miss the diving, the tennis, the summer bbqs and the backyard cricket. I think there might be a few Friday afternoon "long drives home" to make it home in time for the weekend's festivities and frivolities. We'll see. It'll be nice to earn a bit of cash too. Surviving a summer on my winter savings, earned from boundary umpiring and writing for Togatus resulted in a few nervous moments last summer.
So, I should put in my tuppence worth on the university union. The university union is, apparently, being crippled by voluntary student unionism laws. As one of their employees (as a casual Togatus writer), I find it amusing that I still haven't been paid for work that was published about three months ago. Who is my union when the union won't pay me? Why would I voluntarily join a union that can't even look after its own? Oh, and in case anyone's wondering, I was published in the last "Politics" issue, with an article called "Offended or Offensive" -they failed to credit me with it. Hmmm, a little dodgy. Oh well.
Anyway, I really should print out my Structures lab, have a shower, get dressed, mow the lawn, have a run or a game of tennis or something and generally get off this slothful computer...
The good news is that I managed to submit a couple of assignments and polish off a prac and hopefully pass that Friday morning test. (We'll see about that).
Anyway, Bathurst is on this weekend. It's one of those things that I couldn't really give a damn about (even as a mechanical engineering student), but that I wouldn't mind watching a bit of with some mates. I think I'd prefer to see a Holden victory, but no tears will be shed one way or the other. I'll probably just look at the result and maybe a thought might pass through my head along the lines of "oh, that's nice".
Which gets me onto the word "nice". What a fantastic word. I love it. It's so succinct, so inoffensive and so full of meaning. Most other adjectives just accentuate a noun. They want to proclaim an event or a thing as the greatest thing ever. Nice doesn't do that. For example, "it was a nice evening" says it was an evening that won't be remembered as one of the greatest nights of all time, but I came home from it satisfied - unless of course there was such a massive buildup for it and it was expected to be one of the nights of your life, in which case, it means that it could have been a lot worse, so you're relieved it wasn't.
That example is starting to get a little convoluted. But you compare nice to any number of expletives. The expletives can be used in any context - even in the context of nice, but who's to say that you interpreted the meaning of the expletive correctly? Where as nice maintains its meaning, no matter who says it.
As Simon Bultman once pondered: a fantastic week consists of a couple of outstanding events and nothing going wrong in the rest of the week. ie, a couple of fantastic days surrounded by nice days. It doesn't get much better than that.
Thus, I conclude that nice (synonimous with good) is not a nice word.
Another thing that has come up of late is work experience. To graduate, I have to do between 8-12 weeks of engineering work experience. So that is happening this summer, which is quite daunting. What is even more daunting is the fact that I'm going to Lonnie for it - George Town. So that'll be interesting, no doubt. But I'll definitely miss the diving, the tennis, the summer bbqs and the backyard cricket. I think there might be a few Friday afternoon "long drives home" to make it home in time for the weekend's festivities and frivolities. We'll see. It'll be nice to earn a bit of cash too. Surviving a summer on my winter savings, earned from boundary umpiring and writing for Togatus resulted in a few nervous moments last summer.
So, I should put in my tuppence worth on the university union. The university union is, apparently, being crippled by voluntary student unionism laws. As one of their employees (as a casual Togatus writer), I find it amusing that I still haven't been paid for work that was published about three months ago. Who is my union when the union won't pay me? Why would I voluntarily join a union that can't even look after its own? Oh, and in case anyone's wondering, I was published in the last "Politics" issue, with an article called "Offended or Offensive" -they failed to credit me with it. Hmmm, a little dodgy. Oh well.
Anyway, I really should print out my Structures lab, have a shower, get dressed, mow the lawn, have a run or a game of tennis or something and generally get off this slothful computer...
posted by BSJ-rom at 10:29 am
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