orichalcum

So, the Bad is that, of course, the mail today continued to fail to contain Compaq's Emergency Recovery CDs. I wound my way through the 15 different options on their phone help menu last week and was finally informed that, when they say "1st Class Mail," they mean "5-7 Days", and when they say "5-7 Days", they mean "not counting weekends," and when they say "not counting weekends," they mean that something mailed from them on July 30th should get to me by the middle of this week, or, say, sometime around August 11th.

The Good was the irony that I got Pantsie's mix in the mail, which I'm now listening to, and is very cool. We'll ignore the fact that Pantsie mailed her CD to me by normal person mail on Friday the 6th, and it arrived today, when thinking about Compaq, and try and be happy about the cool music.

Amusingly, I don't own but have very fond summer memories of Liz Phair's "Fuck and Run," which is on the mix. Back when I was at the Telluride Association Summer Program in high school, my friend Darby used to play this on her guitar. But the first or second time she did so, another friend, Eric, misheard her, and thought the song was called "Fuck Ayn Rand." This led, of course, to the rapid creation of alternate lyrics, now mostly forgotten, sadly, but containing lines about "Even when I was seventeen, Fuck Ayn Rand" and a whole verse about Atlas Shrugged falling on the narrator's head. Ah, the hijinks that 20 really smart literature geeks get up to in the summer they're 16.

And now, of course, one of my students this term, the really smart high school rising senior girl, was rhapsodizing to me after class about the Fountainhead and how incredible Ayn Rand's writing is. And all I could think of was, "yes, dear, you'll grow out of it." Of course, what I _said_ was, "Yes, I liked Ayn Rand myself when I read her, but that was a long while ago. But you should be very careful to examine her philosophy critically, because there are a lot of flaws in it..."

In the sad news, one of my other students, who's been having other issues, missed class last week due to an operation for cervical cancer. She's 20. Prognosis sounds vaguely good, but...life is really depressing sometimes.