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Advisers and fliers

Scheeze, April already? Back in January, I had the idea to start an Esperanto club on campus, and I got some of my friends interested. I haven’t mentioned it much since then. What happened, you ask? Well, I certainly wasn’t just sitting around, that’s for sure. We’ve been trying to find a faculty advisor, which is required for starting a club. I’ve been e-mailing professors in the foreign language departments, but the few who have replied did so in the negative. People might find the job interesting but are frequently too busy. It was discouraging.

Andy came up with the great idea to ask the linguistics professors. Ah, linguistics. Odds are, they’ve all heard of Esperanto, so maybe they’d be interested in the idea. I e-mailed them and struck gold. Within days, e-mails came sort of pouring in. Not one, but two linguistics professors expressed interest in being our advisor. A third said he’d told the others in the department and that he’d get back to me with a good candidate. A fourth said that if we couldn’t find anyone in the linguistics department, she would help us look for someone. And a lecturer from the Romance languages and literatures department sent me a reply, six weeks late, saying she would also be interested in being our advisor.

Not all responses were positive. One guy said Esperanto was a useless waste of time. But I didn’t let that get me down. Instead, I worked out times to meet with the faculty members who thought that Esperanto was a useful non-waste of time. Andy and I met with the first professor on Monday morning. He’s an African guy whose main interest is the extinction of languages, and he seemed to recognize Esperanto’s potential for saving the many tongues around the world whose speakers are dying out. I’m supposed to meet with the other professor on Friday. It should be interesting.

Unfortunately, we probably won’t have time to officially start our club this year; we’ll have to wait till the fall, which means we might have to get off to a small start. Well, I was figuring we’d get off to a small start anyway, but the club approval process supposedly takes four to six weeks, and there are only… four weeks left in the semester? Well, maybe there’s some time. It’s worth a shot, anyway, if we can name a faculty advisor by next week. I’ll have to ask the people who deal with approving clubs and see if there’s time to squeeze in the approval. Then we can hit the ground running next year.

That’s not the only thing I’ve got going on this week, though. Get Carded, the organ donation awareness group I’m a member of, is having its second annual Lifeapalooza event tomorrow night. A pretty well-known local band called Umoja Orchestra will play a free show, along with a couple of opening acts. There will also be organ recipients talking about why organ donation is so important. It’s going to be at a cafe on campus called the Orange and Brew (because our school colors are orange and… blue… ha ha?). Anyway, we’re also going to give everyone a free t-shirt and have them form a human ribbon outside (because every cause has to have a ribbon, you know). It should be a great way to end the year.

To help get the word out, I’ve been passing out flyers (actually cards) on campus. If you walk around college campuses a lot, people probably hand you a lot of glossy cards, about the size of a large index card, that tell you about upcoming concerts or parties or what have you. I’m passing out those. I spent about two hours Monday and Tuesday doing it, and I have a few more to give out tomorrow. Hopefully I’ve gotten some people interested. Although a lot of people avoid me as I stand in the middle of a foot thoroughfare, most people take the cards I put in front of them, and a few even come up and ask for one. It all adds up. I think the turnout at Lifeapalooza tomorrow will be great.

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Want to celebrate your next birthday with class while trying to hide your age? Get Roman Candles for your birthday cake, so you can party like it’s MCMXCIX.

Someday, I’m going to get a job. I want to work for a company that’s friendly to Linux and related software projects. Here’s how a number of major companies stand.