Another year, another Thanksgiving weekend, and another Thanksgiving weekend spent wasted doing infinite work because my professors are jerks. I swear, this site is turning into a running list of “What Pissed Me Off in the Last Two Weeks.” Maybe I should rename the site. ::rolleyes::

Instead of rambling on about what I’m thankful for this past year, I think I’ll invent my own holiday and talk about that instead. I call this new, wondrous holiday, “Thankstaking.” This will of course become an official holiday of The NORN Collective, for those of you still paying attention to that sort of thing. As the Imperious Leader, I decree it and it will be so. So yeah, Thankstaking. What’s Thankstaking? To answer that, we must first review Thanksgiving. On Thanksgiving, fuckers are running around thanking nebulous entities and no one in particular for ethereal things and just nonsensical crap. “I’m thankful for my family!” “I’m thankful for a great job!” “I’m thankful I’m not oppressed in my own country!” Well guess what? I’M NOT. I’m not thankful for any of those things (largely cause they don’t exist for me, but that’s another story). Now who is it that they’re thanking for these things? When you watch “a very special heartwarming Thanksgiving episode of Gilmore Girls” the people usually say it while sitting around a table and staring off into space or possibly the turkey.

I aim to correct this.

No longer will I give thanks to random fuckers for random things. From here on out, bitches be thanking me. Why? Because I sacrifice for aforementioned bitches, that’s why. Let me show you my first annual Thankstaking list, and you’ll soon understand:

Thankstaking: Year One
The following people owe me thanks
1) My mom: She gave away my cats. WTF?! She should thank me for not flying into a bloodrage and ending the family line.
2) My workplace: Treated like garbage, disrespected if not outright despised by 99% of the staff, and oppressed by management. Why? Because I do my job better than they do and fuckers don’t like it. These colon cowboys should thank me for doing my job so well and inventing half the processes that allow us to operate way more efficiently than we did before I got there. As an addendum to this: The people I work with directly, those that report to my supervisors would do well to remember that if pushed, I can be an unmitigated ass. I’ve been amazingly lenient to this point, but if I’m continued to be viewed as some sideshow act for their amusement, there will be Trouble. They should be thankful I’ve restrained myself thus far.
3) My marine bio professor: This guy has us analyze data for two months after a field trip on a research ship on the Long Island Sound and shows us his love by giving us a REDICULOUSLY long lab report on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving (or Thankstaking if you’re assimilated), and tells us we have a week to complete it. What is that shit? This may be one of the hardest classes ever in terms of tests/assignments and its only a 200 level course. He should thank the entire class for putting up with the piss poor deadlines.
4) My marine bio professor, again: A Thankstaking first; someone’s on here twice. Why is he here twice? Remember the field trip I mentioned? This guy has us go all over creation to dig mud because this helps us understand marine bio better. Uh-huh. I’ll get right on that. We’ve been to Tobay beach and bay (which wasn’t so bad except for the horribly early hour), Tobay salt marsh (where we were knee deep in mud and the grass was taller than we were and there were mosquito breeding ponds every 10 feet), and the Long Island Sound on the Research Vessel Seawolf courtesy of SUNY Stony Brook. This last one was a real gem, requiring a stupid early start to the day and A COMPLETE LACK OF DIRECTIONS TO THE DOCK. THANKS, ASSHOLE. I almost missed the boat cause I had no clue where to go. On Dec. 1 at 2:30 AM we have to go the Fulton Fish Market at Hunt’s Point in the city and a week later we’re going to the New York Aquarium. This guy should thank us for putting up with his absurd (not to mention eccentric) field trips.
5) My physics professor: Here’s a guy who has a serious disconnect between what he teaches in class and what he gives you tests on. Here’s my grades for the semester: 22, 38, 96, 91. Notice any patterns? The first two tests were when I studied for that test like any other test, by going over the notes and making sure I understood the concepts. Too bad the test was on decoding word problems we’ve never had any experience with. I did well on the second two tests by doing EVERY single example in the textbook for the chapters we were being tested on and cramming all night (literally) the night before the test date. And because he didn’t give us our first test until after the midpoint of the semester, he’s gotta cram in the rest of the tests in a short period of time, which means I have a test the Wednesday after Thankstaking. He owes us thanks for not going insane and mauling him.
6) My extended family: These guys rarely ask me how I’m doing. In any given encounter there is a non-zero chance that they might inquire about my health or emotional state. They appear to be solely concerned with whether I’m making progress in fulfilling the dream of all my genetic relatives. What dream is this, you ask? Why, its the dream that all Indian families have for their kids: To make them into doctors. They should be thankful that I put up with them year after year without telling them what I really think.

That’s all I can think of right now, which is for the best I suppose since this shit is getting long. I’m sure I’ll think of more and add them as Thankstaking approaches. This November 24th I won’t be giving thanks, I’ll be taking it from those who owe me. Line up at the door and cough up, fuckers. Thanks to my little list, you know who you are and you know what you owe. Get to it.

Lab reports. I fucking hate lab reports. It’s not so bad writing a lab report for a lab where you learned something or did something worthwhile. However, it sucks ass to write a lab report for fucking worthless labs. Yeah, cause i really need to make 85 graphs of when there’s a high tide and a low tide. That shit is so useful and enlightening. And yes, physics professor, gravity still pulls you down at 9.81 meters per second squared, just like when you were a kid! Meanwhile, the reasearch I’m trying to do in a real lab setting keeps getting screwed over cause of all this other junk I have to do. How am I taking less classes then last semester and have more work? Well, time to finish this FSM-forsaken physics lab report. Maybe tomorrow in the physics lab we’ll get to play catch and then draw 45 graphs that look the same about objects in motion.

Coming soon: Tales from the Dungeon (aka work)! Story #1 is the tale of innocent Luis being horribly betrayed by the evil known only as the Traitorous Temp!