green tears

I believe that's what people think when they see Ulquiorra's facial marks. Personally I think he's truly devoid of human emotions and such, notwithstanding the fact that I enjoy studying him for these very qualities. It makes him the more frightening. Anyway, that has precisely zero relation to the rest of this entry. Well, just one, I suppose, in that I would shed green tears, if I could, in bemourning a summer wasted. It's already July, and it seems that neither I nor my hapless undergraduate partner on this project has much to show. Much of our time is consumed in fruitless conjecturing as to how the code works, while the grad students are loath to help us out. They say we need to learn to read code better. And I suppose they're right. But the fact remains that, at this rate, we shall have merely begun coding, if we're lucky, by the time we go back to school in the fall. The professor's ominous warning that the project was a most tedious thing, and that he didn't expect a summer to be enough time to complete it, lead me to believe that such a thing is to be expected. As many a wise man has been caught saying at some point or other, "I wish this project would complete itself."

I'm reading Three Men in a Boat. It's funny. Jerome K. Jerome seems to (to use odious academic parlance) anticipate Wodehouse, though that doesn't detract from Wodehouse one bit. Or it could simply be that I as an outsider, both to their age and British upbringings, see both of them as having similar styles. We shall never know. Suddenly I find myself being drawn into a digression:

I came across a user on Reddit claiming that no one ought to use the word "wherefore" in everyday conversation. He's probably right, of course, since people today are quick to denounce anything they don't understand as pretentious. And he's probably right, in that such a thing would indeed indicate some level of pretentiousness. But I wonder, Wherefore has the word "wherefore" fallen out of use, when its partner "therefore" is still very much in use? Such asymmetries are not a little irksome, but there's not much we can do about them. Our only consolation is that the worst is yet to come, and we shall likely not be around to witness it. Linguists would, of course, squirm if they heard the natural evolution of language being spoken of thus, but some might consider that a reward.