We were required to write op-eds for our internship to fine-tune our writing. I wrote an article about the Forest Service, and with the suggestion of one of my fellow interns, submitted it to a small journal called The Free Liberal. The publisher liked what I wrote and decided to publish it. It’s kind of neat seeing my name in print. Maybe I’ll write more things occasionally.

Down with IE

I just had to express my disgust with Internet Explorer because it is particularly being a pain with this site. The formatting on my reading list is all screwed up in IE. The code from that section comes from allconsuming.net with me just entering a small javascript on this site. It looks all mangled in IE when I format it the way that I want, which is simply so the hyperlink formatting will remain consistent throughout the sidebar. It works without a hitch in Mozilla Firebird, my browser of choice. The Mozilla project very strictly follows W3C standards, so I blame IE for screwing up my code. I know many more people just stick with the default browser in Windows so I fiddled with the code in order that more people could view without disturbances. Pardon the inconsistencies and know that it is not how I really want it.

Property rights in the fridge

OK. So this was the case with my previous housemates and apparently it hasn’t changed with the new ones. I come home from the weekend and I have no food left in the freezer. I only had a frozen dinner or two and some hot pockets, but it was all gone. The reason I only eat frozen food stems from the same problem: no civil society with rule of law and property rights in my household.

Because I have no avenue of justice after confronting the housemates about a wrong they commit against me, the best solution is to buy non-perishable food. I have mainly survived on Rice-a-Roni and cans of soup. I branched out into frozen dinners because they are all self-contained and I can keep a count of them, as well as keep them tied up in bags in the freezer. Apparently this last effort has been no deterrent.

I can’t even buy butter or milk to cook Rice-a-Roni or pasta with because it will be eaten by everyone else. I’ve bought one or two tubs of margarine since I’ve been here and I’ve never seen anything disappear so fast in my life.

I have no incentive to invest in future meals and so I am left unproductive and inefficient by having to go to the grocery store about every day to buy food for one or two meals. My standard of living cannot increase because I cannot invest in things like milk and butter, or salad dressing, or even fruits and vegetables because if I leave them in the common space (i.e. the refrigerator) they will be stolen.

Today I was reduced to taking some individually wrapped butter cubes from the refrigerator at work in order to make my Rice-a-Roni. Sad.

Hate mail is kind of fun. Who wants to send me some?