Last night my Astronomy professor, who is young and new to his trade, brought candy for the class as sort of a pre-emptive apology for next week’s midterm. All through the lecture, I watched the teeny tiny skater boys in front of me dropping stick after stick from their Tootsie Pops ™ on the floor for someone else to pick up later. I was enraged. So enraged that I failed to gain a proper understanding of triangulation. Finally, one of them dropped his stick and I kicked the back of his chair so hard that his head snapped forward a little bit. He turned around.

“Oops,” I said sweetly.

I got over the thrill of dropping stuff on the ground when I was about eight months old. It is sad to see that the youth of today is so spiritually stunted. And suffering slightly from whiplash.

It’s tough to wrap my plastic elastic head around this “forever” concept. I keep thinking, Oh God, it’s so sad, Elliott Smith is dead and there will be no more music. But then I comfort myself by thinking, At least there will be music again when he stops being dead.

Thanks to everyone who saw the news and thought to let me know.

“And if you go way, way back in ancient Chinese texts, you find references to this all over the place,” said my cowboy boss. “It’s the reason that Chinese people tend to have a bigger gap between their thumbs and first fingers.”

“So, what you’re telling me is…”

“Way back in B.C., Chinese people had six fingers on each hand.”

Written in response to this article, which really should be read first.

Will teens stop using electricity?

I first heard about using my parents’ electricity in middle school. Up until that point, I had assumed that my television and toaster were being run by a small, surly gnome that lived in the wall. But in sixth grade one of my friends, who also frequently used his parents’ electricity, explained the process to me. It turned out that pretty much all the kids I knew were using their parents’ electricity on a regular basis.

At first it didn’t seem like a big deal to me. But I soon realized that using my parents’ electricity was addictive. In fact, electricity was an electronics-addict’s heaven. With electricity, you could do anything from turning on a light in your house to turning on all the lights in your house, whenever you wanted.

At first, it seemed that using my parents’ electricity wasn’t a problem. My peers had grown up using their parents’ electricity and had never been forced to read by candlelight or wash their clothes on a rock in the stream. Because it is so prevalent, it seemed natural to me that it would also be free.

But it shouldn’t be free. Nothing should be free, ever. And parents are beginning to fight back, by nagging their kids all the time to turn off the lights they’re not using. Among the targets of this nagging was a 12-year-old girl.

This is not the way to solve the problem. While I agree it is important to protect your parents from declaring bankruptcy due to crippling electric bills, I am afraid that the threatening message that parents are sending to teenagers will not achieve its goals. Worse, the threat is counterproductive.

Rather than following the demands of their parents, teens simply will stop using electricity altogether. They will begin building small fires in their bedrooms to toast their pop-tarts over, and they will probably build some kind of cranking device to run their computers on; I don’t know, something. Although nagging isn’t life-threatening or really even a big deal, it’s still annoying — too annoying to put up with, that’s for sure.

Despite the fact that parents are willing to permit teens to use electricity in exchange for being nagged about it, parents do not understand that if you are going to be nagged then you might as well just get your own damn apartment and pay for the electricity yourself. If parents would quit nagging all the damn time, maybe we would have some time to turn off the damn lights, we were just about to do it, jeez.

Wishful thinking? Hardly. Some single parents who are working two jobs have reduced their nagging to only twice a week. And I may some day find a parent who only nags once a semester.

Although this idea sounds different, it is certainly feasible. Who knows?:

When my parents lighten the fuck up, I might finally turn the lights back on and quit banging my shins against my desk chair all the damn time.

Didofoot, 23, is sophomoric at SF State.

My Russian coworker just flashed me. She was talking about how she wished she was wearing the summery cotton frock that I am wearing, and then she said “I should walk around like this” and rolled her Russian shirt up to walk around in her Russian bra.