"I'm not going to talk about fall, I'm NOT going to talk about fall, I'm going to......gush about fall. Again." *sigh*

 

the leaves really were this pink (like rose petals) in real life!

The weather lately has continued be incredible, although it can’t really be called fall anymore. It’s really Indian summer (which I know no more PC name for—anyone?). Anyway, it’s gorgeous, and everyone has been celebrating with sundresses and shorts and blankets on the lawn and classes outdoors. It’s so wonderful and friendly and collegiate, and made better by the changing trees and fallen leaves. And now the trees are changing faster and faster and with more variety. The tree that was the first to change is now bare, and all the others are starting to b half green and half yellow or red or orange. It’s stunning, although it makes me want to take my camera out every day, because the beauty keeps changing and disappearing. Anyway, right now I’m sitting outside in the quad, surrounded by rustling branches and a lawn covered leaves and other people studying or sleeping or reading outside and the breeze blowing. I’m so in love with this place!  [Also the people here rock—Sorcha just came out to collect leaves for an event and said, about fall, “it’s like the whole world is on fire, but it’s not too hot!” And then I taught her how to tie her shoes the Tschudi way, which made her extremely happy. I have now been ordered to add “Sorcha is pizazztastic today!”]

Now, to continue from my last post…

Moving right along after those terrible puns, I have actually been doing other things than just bouncing around eating apples and enjoying the fall, telling bad jokes, and watching Doctor Who. Like, real college school things!

A couple of weekends ago, I went to the Minneapolis Institute of Art (hereafter referred to as the MIA) for an art history project. It was unfortunately more interesting for the random things I found than for the piece I picked for my project, but I’m getting more excited about it since we finished our Egyptology unit in class. The project (did I already explain this? I can’t remember…) is to pick an ancient piece from the museum and then we’ll write three papers about it through the year. The unfortunate part about this otherwise awesome project is that the ancient section of the MIA is teeny-tiny and not terribly interesting. But I picked this piece:

which is fascinatingly titled Striding male figure and is (as is probably obvious) Egyptian. And I’ve written my first paper for it—a formal analysis (basically just a detailed description, without any interpretation)—and got a 94%, so that’s good! And some of the other stuff I found in the museum was definitely worth a visit. I saw my first Rodin in real life, for example,

which I was only able to examine after a pair of fourteen year old girls had finished giggling over it. I also saw this bust:

 which I loved for the gorgeous representation of the veil. It really looks like she’s wearing something gauzy over her face, but the method is actually pretty simple. I also liked this portrait of Eurydice:

not so much because it was a gorgeous painting, or anything, but because of the moment of the myth that it chose to represent. It doesn’t represent the walk back to life, or Orpheus playing for the Hades and Persephone, it only shows Eurydice quietly examining her wounded foot. It’s striking because Eurydice has no idea—but the audience does—what is going to happen: her death and near-return to life. This is almost the beginning of the story.

Speaking of Eurydice, I just have to put in here that I finished memorizing “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes.”! All ninety-five lines! I finished it last Monday, but didn’t let myself put it on my list until I’d slept  on it one night. So as of Tuesday, I know seven poems (actually, now eight, but the latest is very short and not terribly impressive. It’s “Who Are You, Little I” by E. E. Cummings and felt appropriate to my mood lately)! I know I’ve said this before, but I love to memorize poems because then they’re rattling around inside my head and at my beck and call whenever and wherever I am. And Rilke’s poem has always been a favorite, so I’m extra excited about it. Everyone should go look it up and read it, at least everyone who knows and enjoys the Eurydice myth! I also really like the E. E. Cummings that I memorized, which I’ll put in here because it’s rather short (I must say, I find his spacing and capitalization rather silly, but that makes this an especially good poem to memorize—when you say it aloud, you can say it however you want!):

who are you,little i

(five or six years old)

peering from some high

window;at the gold

of november sunset

(and feeling: that if day

has to become night

this is a beautiful way)

The extra wonderful thing about all of this is that my roommate is clearly an excellent person. She mentioned E. E. Cummings, and when I brought up this poem and started citing it (as requested), she got incredibly excited and finished it with me. Also, she wrote this on our whiteboard:

How did I get so lucky‽

In other school-related projects, I watched La Grand Illusion for French a couple of weeks ago (as I believe I mentioned). It’s a movie about World War I from the (you guessed it!) French perspective, but what’s awesome about it is that it’s not really biased towards the French. The German soldiers are presented as very understandable humans who are just stuck on the opposite side of the war. The last scene of the movie really emphasizes this point. It shows the two French main characters who have just barely gotten across the Swiss border, with a group of German soldiers in pursuit. The soldiers take aim, but are stopped by their commander who tells them that the French soldiers are in Switzerland and therefore safe, and the last moment of the movie is one of the soldiers saying, (at least in translation), “Good for them.” It wasn’t the best movie of all time, or anything, but I really appreciated its message and its attempt at fairness, despite that being a really unpopular view at the time.

Badminton has started! I’ve only gotten to go to one of the two practices (the other one as happening while I was at a play), and nobody at practice was very experienced, so it was a bit boring, but I’m  seriously so excited to be back on the courts that it doesn’t matter. I’ve missed badminton so much! Also, I’m finally getting to use the racket Aunt Meg et al bought me for Christmas two years ago, and it’s wonderful! Thanks again, guys!

I think I freaked out some random guy on campus the other day. Charmaine and I were walking back from dinner and (I’m not entirely sure why) discussing the queen’s famous wave. I was telling Charmaine that I thought she did that in order to keep  her arm from getting tired, and demonstrating, naturally, because that’s just the kind of person I am. Charmaine had just put up her arm to try too when this guy who was walking past snapped, “Hello‽" at us like we were being terribly rude! For some reason, this sent Charmaine and I into paroxysms of laughter (since we definitely weren’t waving at him—we weren’t even looking at him!). Excellent roommate bonding experience, but perhaps less fortuitous if I ever want to be friends with that guy!

To move on to another of my classes, Chemistry is going swimmingly! I really like my professor, who is funny and engaging and straight-forward. She’s exactly the right mixture of sympathetic and strict, and she enjoys her subject a great deal, it’s apparent. She also says the funniest things during class, which I’ve taken to writing down in my notes. It keeps me amused when I go back to read them. I’m going to include some of them here (I seem to have inherited a love of terrible jokes--this may become a problem):

• “When you’re a chemist, you realize that 99.9% of everything is a white powder. And if it isn’t, it’s highly poisonous.”
• “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the precipitate.”
• “Water is extremely vain; it likes to hang out with itself more than anything else. But Lithium hates itself. It just wants to be Helium.”
• “Oxygen is such an electron pig!”
• “Water is like, 'if you’re not polar, go hang out with yourself.'”
• “Imagine you can put up a magical stop sign and pause the reaction.”
• “[About the possibility that particles can travel faster than the speed of light] If it’s true, it might make time travel possible.” (!!!!! I KNEW the Doctor was out there!)
• [About the “Ultraviolet Catastrophe”] “This is my favorite experiment name! I also think it would make a really good band name, but so far no one’s taken me up on that.”
• “Do people ever act like waves? If you walk through that door, are you going to accidentally end up on the biology floor? No. Good thing too, life is confusing enough as it is!”
• “I actually measured my son’s speed [for this problem]. He weighed 151 lbs at the time—he’d just had a check-up—and this was when he had just learned to crawl and was using his head as a fifth foot.”
• “It’s a double replacement reaction, which is basically a cation do-si-do. So swing everybody around and switch partners!”
• “My goal in this class is to teach you to understand pop culture references to chemistry.”

In order to live up to that last one, I have to tell you one of my favorite jokes: Heisenberg is driving along in a car when he’s pulled over by a police officer. The police officer comes up to the window and says, “Do you have any idea how fast you were going‽” And Heisenberg replies, “No, but I can tell you exactly where I was!”

We also had our first chemistry test recently (last Friday), which was a bit nerve-racking! It was a pretty long test, and one that I neglected to study much for (my own damn fault, of course, but it didn’t help with the stress!), and we only had an hour to take it! I ran over a bit, and didn’t get to show much work on the last problem, but at least I was glad it was over. And then Keo made the brilliant suggestion that we go to the cheese shop for lunch (instead of the usual, boring Café Mac), a plan which was extra brilliant because it was a gorgeous day and we’d previously discussed wanting to make friends with the cheese shop owner (who is a Mac grad, adorably shy and sweet, and a great lover of France). So we headed over there and discovered, to our delight, that one of the options on the sandwich menu was a Surprise! sandwich! So we each ordered a surprise, bought a brownie to share, and she got Pellegrino and I got clementine Izze. When our sandwiches came, we were extra excited to discover that they were different surprises, so we switched halves and went outside to eat them under the warm sun and blue sky and cool breeze. It was an incredibly lovely meal (and felt very French) and our sandwiches were both delicious. I’m still not entirely sure which I liked best.

The one on the left (originally Keo's surprise) was lettuce (probably arugula or some such), balsamic vinegar tomatoes, salami, and some sort of delicious, mild, creamy goat cheese spread thin on the bottom. The other one (originally my surprise) was turkey, provolone (both of which ingredients were delicious and carefully crafted—none of this lunchmeat nonsense), caramelized onions, some sort of North African chile paste, and (I’m sure of it, but Keo denies it) honey. Mmmm!

Oh, and I got a 92% on my chem test, which was one of the highest grades! Hooray!

I’m so lucky to be finding such awesome friends, one of whom is the Sorcha mentioned above. Last Friday night, she stopped by my room (which was open) to say hi, and ended up coming back and curling up n my chair to chat. We spent quite a while discussing politics (which felt very collegiate and exciting) and then (I’m not entirely sure how we made this transition) decided to play this card game (called Set) that Sorcha loves (while eating chocolate and drinking tea). She beat me terribly, but I shall prevail!! Then we discovered that a group of people were watching Whip It (a movie with Ellen Page about roller derbies that Sorcha had seen and enjoyed) in the lounge, so we went to join them and steal their popcorn. It was really fun, even though I don’t usually like coming into a movie that’s already started. And the movie was pretty good, too! After that, I decided that I was tired and ready to sleep, but when I returned to my room, I discovered that Charmaine had accidentally locked me out! After a minor tantrum (induced because of the lateness of the hour (2:00 AM), my extreme fatigue, and Charmaine’s penchant for coming back to our room really, really late (6:00 AM)), I left a note on our whiteboard and went to hang out in Sorcha’s room while she cleaned, decided to call me T-C henceforth (after I mentioned that my name doesn’t much lend itself to the British way of addressing people (by last name)), and began the long (and according to her, necessary) process of educating me in punk rock. Luckily, Charmaine came back before too long, but it was still rather an adventure!

TO BE CONTINUED…

Isn’t this ensemble incredibly stylish?

P.S. I’ve gotten some questions on what on earth this “chemistry art project” I referred to in my last post was. The answer is that I honestly don’t know, but this is what the sign said:

My best guess is that it’s a contest based on using some specific program that is usually used to draw chemical diagrams, but instead people are supposed to use it for other drawings. Like I said, though, I really don’t know! I just liked the Dalek.

P.P.S. The bagpipes are practicing right now, which I'm usually a fan of, except they keep repeating the same song over and over and over again, and I have a headache! Rawr.