I've posted my resume online, finally. The job search should be on full steam. Unfortunately, other forces have conspired to make me too busy to look for a job at this point. blech. Gotta go finish that problem set now....

"Wedging is an event in which the contact forces between peg and hole can set up compressive forces inside the peg, effectively trapping it part way in the hole. To avoid wedging, one must keep the angular error between peg and hole at the moment of first 'two point contact' small enough. The equations describing succesful assembly, developed in Section 10.C.4, show that there is a relation between avoiding wedging and ensuring that the chamfers meet."

-Chapter 10, Mechanical Assembly and its role in Product Development

I'd really rather not think about it, but I don't have much of a choice. It's all over the place; in the newspapers, on the TV, and everyone talks about it. After all, the phrase "september 11" is the most used one in the English language now (I shit you not). And now I'm guilty of perpetuating it too.

I think my way of dealing with it all was to block it out. I had a horrific week after the initial event. I couldn't sleep, and then when I did I couldn't get out of bed. I couldn't concentrate on anything, so schoolwork was shot to hell. Luckily, I think many people were reacting the same way, so our professors were very lax for a few days. After awhile, a numbness sort of set in, in which I never thought about what I saw that day. I stopped reading articles about it, stopped watching tv documentaries/specials on terrorists. I even shied away from looking at photographs. Not that I actually knew anyone personally who was in the planes or at the Pentagon or the WTC, but just the mere thought of all those lives smothered at once, of how I watched it on tv just made me lose it.

Today I was on CNN.com and decided to browse through the TIME section on Sept. 11. Just doing that made my breathing and my heart rate faster.

I'm not sure what I wanted to say here. Somehow this has turned into the story of how I dealt with it, which was not my intention. I guess I just want to express my sadness, and my hope that everyone out there is ok, and dealing with it in their own way.

I don't understand the rules of flirting at all. For some reason, most men seem to think that it's a-ok to whistle or slurp at women when walking down the street. The other week, I was followed for 5 full minutes by some guy who kept slurping at me and saying "yeah baby!" I was seriously grossed/freaked out by the whole thing. But then, when at a bar or a club, a huge set of rules are suddenly in place. As long as you don't maintain eye contact and stay in a close circle with friends, guys leave you alone. At first glance, this doesn't make sense; a good amount of young people go to bars to meet people. It seems more socially acceptable to pick someone up at a bar, then right off the street!

Maybe I need to think about it some more.