Wednesday, January 14, 2009

university business

I periodically receive a phone call from a current UCSC student who tells me what is happening on campus and asks about my affairs. This is always a pleasant conversation. They always come at it with a preparation to hear anything and adapt to my circumstances. They know i gave the university twenty dollars a few years ago and they ask if I can give again. I cant but I don't mind them asking.

The physics and astronomy professor who served as my senior thesis advisor, George Blumenthal, has been appointed chancellor of the campus. He is popular. He also doesn't answer my emails.

The UCSC police when I was homeless and causing consternation on campus took me to the base of the hill where campus is located and dropped me off. On a later occasion when I visited I knew they might not want me there so I dropped in at the police station. There they told me I was welcome again.

Yale is not so forgiving. They're still consternated. They sent me to jail a number of times. The last time the judge told me to leave town. They were not comfortable with my use of campus facilities to escape the elements. Any alumnus with a bank balance would never be treated the way I was for doing the exact same thing. I will say the alumni organization office treated me like any other alumnus. They have a big common room and keep hot coffee and current newspapers for free to visiting alumni. And when I wrote from Chicago to the secretary of my Yale class that I was starving he sent me a package of gourmet fruit. That was nice and it changed the whole landscape of my relationship to the university.

IIT has become a combattant against me so I am fighting back. I went to a monthly social hour for graduates at a downtown pub—universities usually treat anyone who didn't graduate but was in good standing for at least one term as if they are full graduates. They treated me nice until they found out a) I have been in fights, and b) I am mentally ill. Then I detected the gearing up of a blackball behind their backs. I asked to participate in volunteer activities for the university. They told me you have to contribute $50,000 if you want to be on the board of directors of the alumni organization. I offered to do something less grand. They said they would contact me. I haven't heard from them in two months.
So I took action. I put the whole school officially at the bottom of the list of lists until I give the signal.
I'm not going to give the signal until they stop blackballing me and make good all the bad will they have created. Like everyone, they only listen to power and don't recognize power until it's too late. My fights and the onset of mental illness occurred before I entered IIT. That didn't keep them from taking my money for tuition and room and board. It shouldn't keep them from keeping a working relationship with me, but for some reason it does. The development office representative who must have blackballed me was named Kristin.

I carry a weighty responsibility everywhere I go and sometimes fallout is violent. Eventually the population will learn, some more some less. I have my lessons to learn. Others have theirs. They are not the same lessons.

my character set mutates

My own character set of sixteen characters is a mutating set. It changes depending on certain factors.

One such factor is the effect of aging. When I got to be a certain age I realized I was less capable of various tasks of locomotion. In response to this I decided to change the three character of my set. It had been a diagonal line descending to the right with a horizontal baseline, the diagonal line being at a slope of two. I imagined the character to be a pitch which I could regularly climb for a protracted distance. With the decrease in my mobility, I changed the slope of the character to one, so that it represented the less steep pitch which I could regularly climb for a protracted distance. My frequent use of the character set reminded me of this development in my mobility.

When my eyesight began to deteriorate I decided to delete all the dots in the character set, for certain uses. There are four dots. They occur in characters zero, eight, ten, and fourteen. I did this as an alternative to starting to wear glasses. I refer to the altered set as “no spectacles”. Later, I determined that there are some cases where I need to treat character ten specially. It is a dot at the top of the character staff. No lines in the character. Leaving out the dots would turn this character into nothing but space. I found in a certain appllication that having a character with nothing but space was an obstacle to the application. So I made the no spectacles version to be a full staff “X”. I have found that this mutation is effective in a certain way relative to use of the character set with advancing age. It turns out that there are consequences to the mutation which add value to my theory of mental illness, a theory which is expressed in my character set.

I have purchased an Acer mini computer.

As I indicated I might, I have purchased a mini computer. It is an Acer Aspire One and cost me $299.99. I have established routine internet use with it. I use the chicago public library's free wifi and the free wifi of a coffee shop near my home, called Zanzibar.

I like the Acer quite a bit. My intense visual and tactile faculties get better control with the small screen and keyboard than they did with the regular laptop i had before. With the laptop my gaze had to move around a lot and it was destabilizing my faculty.

a realization about size of print and visual acuity

I realized recently riding the CTA rail line that my elderly vision acuity is affected by my unsophisticated educational preparation. I look at a piece of type on an advertisement. It has a particular size of print. My preparation causes me to respond to sizes I can read with the thought that these sizes are common and reasonable for anyone to be viewing. It causes me to respond to sizes I cannot read with the thought that these sizes are uncommon and not reasonable for anyone to be viewing. This is a defensive preparation. It holds that whatever I perceive is proper if I can read it and improper if I can't. My more careful consideration of lthis matter leads me to the observation that at any time in my life there are certain sizes of print which I can read and certain ones which I cannot. From time to time the size which is discriminative in this way changes, getting larger over the long run. The automatic response, which I can now see is wrong, is that the discriminative size is a property of the environment rather than of my visual acuity. It would have been useful if the correct concept had been taught at the beginning of my education when I first began to look at print, including public print, with comprehension.