I dunno, lately I've just had a hard time feeling bad for ESF employees over this no-more-free-tuition-to-SU-for-offspring thing. And that's probably bad because, after all, I am an ESF student and I should probably want to protect my own. Thing is, I don't see why that was ever fair to begin with. We don't give SU anything. Honestly, we don't. We don't give our own employees free tuition to our institution.

I guess I feel like the ESF employees who are making a big deal out of this need to calm the heck down. Look here. If your kids are in sixth grade and third grade, then they are much too young to have you setting their hearts on SU. They have time to grow into different people, who do not necessarily need to go to SU. You probably didn't take the job ONLY BECAUSE your kids could go to SU for free.

The way I see it - and in general, I see SU as an overbearing dictator most of the time, when I can't take more than one of their courses even though the credit quota is per department rather than per student and we're not using all of our allotted credits. Why not? When they don't take me for an REU when I am obviously, far-and-away more qualified than someone that I know who they took - because what the heck, SU?

But this is within their realm of reason. We're not giving anything back to them. I don't see that it saves them THAT MUCH money in the grand scheme of things, but it's perfectly fair for them to rescind the offer. I mean, what wouldn't be fair would be for the students who are already committed as freshmen next year and counting on that tuition to have it ripped from them, or for current students with the free tuition to have it yanked from under them. THAT would be unfair, but SU is not doing that, because they are already committed.

Your nine-year-old? Not committed. Come on, you WORK at ESF, whose tuition is about 1/7 of SU's tuition. You've been trying to convince your kid that SU would be great. Okay, so convince your kid that science is awesome (not hard, by the way). Suck it up. You're not going to die because now you have to pay some tuition. Hey, convince your kid to work for really good grades and nab some scholarships. But STOP COMPLAINING. Your nine-year-old is not devastated by this news. YOU are devastated by this news. Don't make it out like SU is crushing the dreams of your kids.

In other news, I am going to have to run the whole synthesis scheme that I have been following again. I don't know how much HMPA we have left. Hopefully enough. It is going to be not very much fun, but at least I know what I have to do.

My back is starting to act up again, which is pretty miserable, actually. I'm hoping that it kind of goes away, because sometimes it accompanies that time of the month, if you know what I mean. I don't want to go through another excruciating week of back pain.

I wish I had my diff eq book with me today. It would be nice to be able to work on the homework, because I understand what's going on but we have a quiz on Thursday. Which, if all goes according to plan, I will be attending. Mmmm I'm so tired. I really just want to nap. Maybe I'll go back upstairs to lab and wait for a negligible amount of my diol to crystallize and do some inorganic. In a comfortable chair that hopefully does not hurt my back. And soon Christina will come up to visit and she'll be around about until I have to TA.

And then after I TA we will move cars and I will get some dinner and then maybe go to Carnegie and if I'm lucky, I will still be able to take out a diff eq book and do some of my homework! Oh boy. I just have a lot of stuff to do. Unfortunately.