EPISODE 5, in which Vicodin are free for the asking

et me get something unrelated out of the way before I start. The Cub Foods a block from my house is perhaps the worst grocery store I've ever had the misfortune of frequenting. The only close alternative is Woodman's, which, while a much better store, is fully a mile away and doesn't, that's right, doesn't take plastic. Cub only carries one kind of alfredo sauce -- not one brand, mind you, but one variety of the many produced by Ragu. Cub doesn't carry Marzetti's slaw dressing, a crucial ingredient in my preferred pasta salad, and they don't carry the little jars of Miracle Whip, which are also quite pasta salad-friendly. During their recent renovations, when the shredded cheese refrigerators were switched out, they simply didn't have shredded cheese. I don't get it; the Cub I occasionally went to in Green Bay was never this bad.

Anyway.

Monday I went to Milwaukee for a Chuck Palahniuk reading/signing. He's touring to promote Lullaby, which I didn't buy there because $27 is too much for a single book that doesn't say REQUIRED next to it. He didn't actually do a reading but instead took questions and talked with the group for about an hour. None of the questions was likely anything he hadn't been asked at his last appearance but some were interesting nonetheless. Lullaby went from initial concept to completed first draft in six weeks, which I found astonishing; meanwhile, he's working on next year's Period Revival and a screen adaptation of Katie Arnoldi's Chemical Pink. I also discovered that Milwaukee has a nice area -- who knew? Granted, it's only a few square blocks but, truly, nice it is.

Once I got back here things turned to ongoing exam prep. This coming Tuesday is the mid-term for 658, which will be my first exam in five and a half years. I don't anticipate it being difficult, as such, but keeping things like inductive vs. deductive and concurrent vs. convergent straight in my head is kind of a task. If the quizzes are anything to judge by, it's going to be fairly definition- and recitation-intensive, so I've just been trying to memorize as much as possible. I have yet to be convinced this level of analytical formulism is altogether necessary (and, honestly, I doubt I will be) but as long as I don't have an office that says DEPARTMENT HEAD on the door, people don't seem to care.

Elsewhere, our 970 youth civic engagement project is plowing forward one step at a time. We've spent the past couple weeks trying to determine what our sample set will be; we're not quite there yet and now it's time to revise our questionnaire. I get to handle the organizational background info -- why were you founded, how do you recruit, etc. Since I have yet to finish the Research Methods class, I'm looking at this questionnaire as the control case for an experiment that asks what effect two years of the Wisconsin Method will have on me; if I write a questionnaire for my thesis that's markedly different from this one, I guess I'll have been substantially changed.

Saturday (and Sunday, I think) was the big pot rally on campus. It was amusing, mostly because I spent the afternoon in a computer lab listening to the potheads outside get berated for not voting. I was so moved I almost bought some hemp goods. Almost.

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Aaron Veenstra is the managing editor of Etc. House Productions and a Master's student in Journalism at the University of Wisconsin.
Matriculation Reloaded appears weekly.