Chapter 32: To Eleven!

Wednesday, November 7, 1984

Not that the election had been that disruptive, but things were back to normal. That is, if ‘normal’ was exams, early information about how to prepare for finals, and some assignments for semester-ending papers.

The workload looked manageable, but that was from the perspective of someone who’d done two demanding extracurriculars in a school not known for letting students off lightly when it came to exams and papers. Some kids were undoubtedly in a panic about the upcoming month or so.

When Cammie and I were nearly home, we spotted Phil and Craig, our ‘righteous’ neighbors, walking towards campus. It’s not as if we never saw them, but we mostly avoided each other, and our schedules didn’t appear to align.

Both of them glared at us, which didn’t surprise me. They didn’t say anything until we’d actually passed them.

Then, from behind us, I heard, “We’ll get you dykes and dyke-lovers in January. You can’t keep fooling everyone forever.”

I was pretty sure the speaker was Phil, but I wasn’t sure. And ‘we’ll get you’ didn’t sound like the sort of thing that someone who knew about our graffiti would say.

Cammie turned and said, “We’re not fooling anyone. We’re completely honest. It’s you that are fooling people.”

“How’s that?” Craig said.

“You’re trying to make it seem like Jesus hates gay people. He doesn’t. He never said a thing about gay people. Now, He did say to love your neighbors as yourself, and since I still try to honor His teachings, I’m doing my best. Some neighbors make that hard, but following Him was never supposed to be easy.”

Phil made a face.

“Jesus didn’t have to say anything. The Old Testament makes things clear enough, and Paul wrote on the subject,” he said.

“The Old Testament also makes it clear that you can’t eat shellfish, eat cheeseburgers, or wear clothing made of mixed fibers. I wonder if you’re as concerned with people who violate those injunctions,” she said. “As for Paul, Paul himself said he wasn’t speaking for God, and he also proclaimed that women shouldn’t wear gold jewelry. I’ll be waiting to see you picketing the local jewelry stores.”

“You...” Phil said.

“She’s not worth it,” Craig said.

Simultaneously, Cammie said, overly sweetly, “Remember: love thy neighbor!”

Phil just growled a bit, then turned to go.

Cammie took my hand as we continued on our way.

I said, “Points for trying, I guess.”

Cammie said, “I meant what I said. I try. It’s hard, but I...”

She sighed and squeezed my hand.

“Talking with Carly has really helped. I should’ve said that earlier. Thanks for pushing on that.”

I smiled and said, “I’m glad! You’re welcome, but just hearing that it’s helping is thanks enough.”

She sighed again, then said, “Carly helped me see that what I can’t stand is the hypocrisy, the sanctimoniousness, the misogyny and homophobia and all of that, not Jesus. I still believe in the core teachings, really, if you boil it down enough. Love your neighbor. Don’t judge people. Turn the other cheek. Pay attention to the beam in your eye, not the mote in your neighbor’s eye. Faith, hope, and love, with the greatest being love. All of that speaks to me! It’s also really hard! There’s some ... I mean...”

She hesitated, then started again, saying, “Some preachers try to make it sound like all you have to do is ‘believe’ and ‘put your trust in Jesus’ and it’s all easy. You just sail through life. It’s not easy. Jesus wasn’t about ‘easy.’ He challenged all of us.”

I nodded, and said, “We’re not in the same place, but we’re close.”

“Yeah, I know that,” she said. “But that’s sort of the point. We’re close on the things that matter. The rest ... it doesn’t matter. It’s not about following a bunch of rules, it’s about asking questions and paying attention. That, and giving God a chance to work on your heart and guide you.”

“Definitely!”

“Do you think they did it?”

“If they did, it’s pretty brazen to say ‘We’ll get you,’ even if that just means politically. I’m guessing probably not.”

She nodded.

“That’s about my take on it. I think it was someone else. This time. Maybe they’ll be a problem down the road, though.”

I shrugged and said, “Maybe so. I don’t think they’ll be a big problem. That could be wishful thinking, though. Sometimes people go off the rails, and ‘God told me to’ is a big reason people give when they do that. Still ... most people never go off the rails nearly enough to be a real problem. Hopefully, they’ll just be obnoxious neighbors and that’s it.”

“I just had a very un-Jesus-like thought,” she said, giggling.

“I think God cuts us a lot of slack on what we think, for the most part,” I said.

“Me, too. Anyway, it just occurred to me that some of the problem might be solved if the right investors bought their house and jumped the rent.”

I chuckled.

“Yeah, that probably doesn’t work with ‘love thy neighbor’ all that well.”

She sighed.

“I can love my neighbors here or at a distance. At a distance would be just fine with me.”

“Me, too!”

We had three more study groups tonight, still with no whiteboards and no decent furniture for the basement. I — or we — really needed to get on that!

Still, it was good to see us branching out and making new friends. It was even better to occasionally see the disparate study groups occasionally bonding during snack breaks and the like.

Lindsay seemed to like a girl in Angie and Paige’s accounting class. My gaydar had nothing to say either way, and Angie and Paige seemed to have no idea as well, but it certainly could’ve just been friendship and no more.

Or, perhaps, unrequited attraction.

Thursday, November 8, 1984

A different letter writer seemed to have picked up on one from quite a while ago. He entitled his letter ‘Sodom and Gomorrah 1, Morals 0.’ It was a lament over Straight Slate’s defeat combined with an exhortation to vote to repeal the anti-discrimination ordinance and a plea to A&M’s regents and Supreme Court to keep GSS off campus.

I was pretty sure none of the Supreme Court justices read the Batt. Indeed, it seemed fairly likely that none of them had ever, even once, read the Batt. Perhaps the regents did, occasionally, since they did meet on campus.

This obviously wasn’t over. Not by a long shot.

We were hardly to blame (or deserving of credit) for all of it, but our ripples were involved. They were just going to keep rolling along now, too, no matter what we did.

Of course, we would almost certainly be creating even more, and doing so intentionally.

Our computer science exam was a debacle. While I could only admit it to a select few people, at this point in my life I was in my fifth year as an undergraduate (and my second as a freshman), and had spent nearly a decade in higher education at various levels. This was, without question, the single worst exam I’d ever seen.

For one thing, one of the questions was simply factually wrong. It asked for a routine to manipulate a series of inputs in various ways and output them in registers. The problem was, there were both more inputs and more outputs than the System/360 had registers. It could not be solved.

Without wanting to give it away — because that could be perceived as cheating, or unethical, in some ways — I asked Mr. Baker if any of the questions might be answered in ways other than writing code. His response was that, no, all of them could be answered as sections of code, and that was all he wanted.

I wrote a piece of code that was liberally commented with things like ‘Here I’m passing in a pointer to a block of data, since there are not enough registers’ and the like. It was in code, but it documented the problem. Perhaps my question would clue some other people in that there was a problem with the test — I’d gotten a (well-deserved) reputation for knowing my stuff.

That wasn’t the only problem, though. Another problem was interesting, but impossible as a practical matter. Mr. Baker gave us the problem of a routine that would output every possible shuffle of a deck of cards. The code for that itself isn’t really hard to write, and I did so. However, the running time on a 1984 computer would be ... long.

Really, really long.

Considerably longer than the lifespan of the universe.

What was not possible within the known limits of the universe was his requirement to store all of those values. There are more possible shuffles of a standard 52-card deck than there are atoms in the universe, at least according to a 2021 understanding of the universe. While a Turing machine (which no one in the class but me understood — likely including Mr. Baker) has an infinite tape, real computers do not.

A third problem was simply typo-ridden to the point where I had to guess what he intended. I was pretty sure I knew, but (for instance), ‘You must not not destroy the values in registers 0-5.’ Does that mean I had to preserve them, or that failing to destroy them would be an error?

Thankfully, he didn’t also ask us to solve the halting problem. I wouldn’t have put it past him by this point.

I was fed up. For the first time in my undergraduate career, I was ready to go to the department and complain. It wasn’t even my department, and I didn’t need this class, but most of the students did. It was grossly unfair to them to teach it this way.

I spent the last 5 minutes of the exam time copying the exam questions onto my scratch paper. In theory, one could think I was perhaps going to put it in an exam bank or use it for some other nefarious purpose, but alleging that would require reporting me to the department, and I was already going to report myself to the department anyway.