The Intuitionist, A Book in Review

The Intuitionist is a novel by journalist and author, Colson Whitehead. While any number of themes can be pulled from the book (much to any English teacher's delight), The Intiutionist is mainly praised for its social commentary about racism. More than that, however, Whitehead remarks a lot on sexism, politics, and big business.

Written in a sort of parallel world, the novel revolves around elevators. Lila Mae, the main character, is an elevator inspector who has overcome society's stigma against not only women, but also her color, and her methods. The elevator inspectors world is split between Empiricists (who check the actual parts of the elevators) and Intuitionists (who feel and see what is wrong with an elevator using only intuition); Lila Mae is a firm believer in the latter. After she is the last person to inspect an elevator that later crashes, she is thrown into a world that awakens her--and the reader--to what goes on behind the curtains of politics and society in general.

After only one reading, I am sure I didn't grasp even half of the commentary in the book. There's a lot to process, sometimes, but it's a fun read and an eye-opener. I'd definitely recommend giving it a read.

-M.

Goal 19

With as much time as I spend on the computer, and more recently, the amount of time I’m spending at work, standing at a register, I’m hardly ever outside. Seeing as it’s summer, it’d be nice to go out and enjoy the weather every now and then. Apparently I need more motivation than just the weather to leave my precious computer, though.

So, this week’s goal: Try and get at least 2 hours of outside time a week. I don’t mean little snippets of “oh, hey, I’m watering the garden for 5 minutes”. I mean going outside for the sole purpose of enjoying summer; laying in my backyard and reading a book or getting in the pool.

Besides my goals of cleaning up my life and getting on a schedule, I want to make sure I actually set aside some time just for enjoying the summer and life in general.

I did a good amount of work on cleaning up my computer this past week, and I’ve been doing really well with scholarships. I’m applying to at least a couple each week, even if most of them don’t require full-out essays. I’ve also started picking up speed on reading books for enjoyment, so I’m hoping my increasing work schedule won’t interrupt that too much.

-M.

Goal 18

Now that I’ve started getting a handle on my summer, I’m going to slow down on how many new goals I’m trying in a week, so I don’t get overwhelmed to the point of throwing everything away.

My computer is a virtual mess. My desktop has about a zillion things on it, and I currently have 46 tabs open in Firefox, not to mention the 3 windows/72 tabs I have open in Google chrome. I’ve been trying to organize my folders, but with all the stuff everywhere, it’s not going so well.

Needless to say, my computer is not very thrilled with me. This week’s goal (18) is to go through all of my tabs, close out the ones I’ve forgotten about and don’t need, read the stuff that I intended to read months ago, and start working on clearing off my desktop, not to mention clearing my browser histories and cleaning up my disk registry.

Also, I’ve started falling behind on the going to bed at 2am, waking up at 10 schedule, but I’ve still been waking up before 11 every day, so I’m going to try and focus a little more on that.

What counting calories this week taught me about myself:

I don’t eat anywhere near the same amount of calories every day. There will be a couple days where I’ll only eat 1000-1200 calories, and then there’ll be several days where I eat somewhere between 1800 and 2000 calories. I really like dessert (and anything you could potentially call a dessert), and it’s not exactly healthy, but it’s enjoyable, so I eat it. I also eat a lot of ice cream, even though I inevitably end up in a small cramped ball somewhere on the floor 15 minutes later, because I’m lactose intolerant (you’d think I’d learn my lesson, but it just tastes so good…).

I don’t eat the healthiest, but I don’t eat less than what I’m supposed to be eating on a daily basis, and I don’t eat extra on a daily basis, either. I rotate it through, and that’s good enough for me.

Goals 16 and 17

Another week of summer is already gone, so I'm here to post another goal to keep me on track, and to avoid losing time. This week's mainly body-focused. I've been meaning to exercise for years, and last year there was a time-span of about 2 months where I actually got some crunches and push-ups done on a regular basis. And then I failed again.

Thus, goal 16 comes in to play. I plan on walking or using wii fit for half an hour, twice a week. It's not much, but it's a lot more than I've been doing, and it's a step in the right direction. If I can incorporate this in well enough, I might bump the number of times a week up, later in the summer.

My other goal this week is paying attention to what I eat. Overall I'd say I eat a pretty balanced diet (especially when I'm at home, with no Starbucks or bakeries around...), but I couldn't tell you how much I eat. About the only thing I know is that I probably eat way too much in the form of candy and dessert and such, and the calories there are killer. So, for this week, and only this week, I'm going to try and see how many calories I eat a day.

I don't want to become obsessed with calories or numbers. Quite honestly my brain does not function in math terms. Poor Kyle spent like 20 minutes the other day trying to explain to me percentages and such (100% more than 1 is 2. For some reason this was a hard concept for me to grasp. Yeah, I suck at math.) But this week, I want to experience what it's like, force a little bit of addition into my brain, and make myself see exactly how much I'm putting in my body. For my height, weight, and age, I'm supposed to eat somewhere between 1580 and 1780 calories a day. (So I'm going with roughly 1700.) If I'm feeling really motivated, I might use Livestrong's calorie counter, which also tracks what foods I've eaten, which will give me heads up on how "round" my diet actually is.

So, goal 16 is to start exercising again, and goal 17 (for only this week) is to pay more attention to what I'm eating, and how much of it.

-M.

Goals 14 and 15

Keeping in mind my rapidly passing summer, and the fact that I want to do something with my spare non-school time, I’m adding on more goals that I’m hoping to keep for the summer months.

During the school year, I’m kept pretty busy studying text books that range from interesting to the most deadly weapons I’ve ever seen (either useful as blunt objects to hit people with, or to force people to read until they die from the horribly written thing). If I’m not reading straight-up text books, there’s usually websites and research bits of text to read to help with whatever essay I have to write for class. Needless to say, I rarely get any time to just read what I want to read, and trust me, I love to read. Depending on how many hours my new job gives me, I’m hoping to get through a book a week. I might change that—to fewer, or greater—next week, but I guess we’ll see. Currently, though, goal 14 is to read at least one book a week.

I usually have trouble with scholarships, because I know I need them, but I usually forget about their deadlines until they’ve passed, which is pointless. I also have trouble getting over the idea of writing an essay that won’t get me a good grade, isn’t necessarily on a topic I enjoy, and might have been written for no purpose (such as if I don’t get the scholarship). The thing is, I need the scholarships, and it’s actually worse to do like 5 scholarships in one day, than if I’d spread out a few across a couple of weeks. Not to mention that the written portions of my scholarships get significantly better if I haven’t already written something unappealing earlier in the day. At the very least, if I don’t get the scholarships, I can help improve my writing. So, goal 15 is to find and complete at least 1 scholarship a week. (Preferably in some kind of order that correlates to when they’re due.)

As far as last week’s goals, they’re going pretty well so far. Except for yesterday, I woke up between 10 and 10:30 every day, and I went to bed by 2 on most days—though that could use some improvement. And here I am, writing another weekly post, so hopefully I keep up with that, as well. I have orientation for a new job this evening, so that might put a little bit of force behind my time schedule, too…

-M.