"For West is where we all plan to go someday..."

(2 days to freedom, 2 days to freedom, 2 DAYS TO FREEDOMMM)

It may have come to your attention that my life has rapidly descended into mania and Olympic-worthy procrastination. Luckily, I’m escaping this insane Macalester life in COUNT THEM two days for Thanksgiving break of awesome HUZZAH! I adore my friends and will miss them (even you, creeper Katrina who is reading this right now), but can’t wait to not be here for a little while. YIKES it’s been a long semester. PLUS I GET TO SEE SO MANY AWESOME PEOPLE!

Anyways, this last week has been a bit crazy (THROUGH NO FAULT OF MY OWN (that’s a lie)) and there’s plenty more crazy to come—I have a paper due Monday, a second draft of one due Tuesday, and a proposal for one due tonight at eight o’clock. Eek! So this shall be a bit of a brief blog before I go on to work on all of those crazy things that I should be working on. Or maybe I’ll use this as a break between projects.

I wrote that several days ago, as you might guess. On Sunday, to be specific. Now it’s Tuesday night (I’M FREEEEEEEE) and I’m sitting in the Denver airport staring out the big windows at the rush of airport vehicles and waiting for my second flight. It’s cold and everyone seems exhausted and I needed a break from my book and the melancholy airport-in-winter-evenings feeling, so I decided to actually write up this blog.

School work lately has been relatively uninteresting, with the exception of several massive projects. In the last few days I’ve turned two paper proposals of varying lengths, three (four?) study abroad forms, a draft of a final paper, and a fifteen-page paper on Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece. Plus readings, of course.

I also planned (and started) an art project for my feminist visual culture class, but more on that later.

Anyway, point is that the interesting things in my life lately have been entirely about hanging out with my friends, who are lovely and wonderful.

Wednesday I went to go see Gravity with Charmaine and Katrina, which was…..an experience. Clara had recommended it because of the way it deals with bodies and because it’s main character is a woman (rare in sci-fi). And (I can hear you protesting this, Clara) she warned me that it was going to be very scary, but I hadn’t quite taken into account how scary it would be.

First, some background. Throughout my life, the things that have always seemed the most terrifying to me have been situations in which breathing becomes a problem (and reliance on human ability has no chance of saving you). So, basically, space and deep sea. The idea of being in a submarine or space ship/shuttle/station is horrifying. (I got over the usual little kid wish to be an astronaut very young.) And, of course, Gravity is a movie about an astronaut who gets stranded in space with everything going wrong that could possibly go wrong.

I showed great restraint in not actually injuring my friends’ hands, although I did squeeze Charmaine’s hand so hard I cramped my wrist. Oops.

Beyond that, though, it was a pretty incredible movie. Bad dialogue, unfortunately, and George Clooney’s character was pretty uninspiring. But otherwise, it was visually gorgeous, very interestingly crazy, and crafted Sandra Bullock’s female astronaut as a kind of primordial archetypal human (like you might find in mythology). I plan to write my final paper for Texts and Power about that, actually. It should be exciting.

Anyway, I’m really glad I saw it, but it was also one of the more frightening experiences I’ve had. Ugh. Space. *shudder*

Then, on Saturday, I really intended to write my blog (since I knew otherwise I wouldn’t really have time until today) but instead I had a glorious day of hedonism and procrastination with Charmaine and Katrina.* We watched some more Firefly (including my absolutely favorite episode—HUZZAH!) and then went off to watch Doctor Who. As many of you know (since you saw that AMAZING Google doodle), Saturday was the release of the 50^th anniversary episode of Doctor Who, which started in 1963 (although it hasn’t been on the air for all of that time). My friends and I went to join a bunch of other Mac Whovians who had co-opted the student lounge television to watch the episode. And it was really fun watching it with everyone (especially since we all had watched enough of the show to get all of the silly references to earlier episodes), but unfortunately Katrina, Charmaine, and I all ended up really hating the episode. I mean, it had some really cute moments, but it also re-wrote about ten years of the show’s history. Grrrrr.

We went back to the dorm to eat our feelings via RA-provided-pancakes-and-Nutella and then “worked” for a little while before giving up and deciding to re-watch Up. Those Pixar people should show Moffat how storytelling should be done. We all got teary and ridiculous over that movie—which continues to be impressive, beautiful, and entirely adorable—and then actually went to sleep at a semi-decent hour. Which was impressive of us.

Sunday was spent in Cahoots (although this time it was Charmaine’s fault, I swear—she dragged me there!) and then in the library as I finished up my paper on Ono. It was actually kind of nice, despite the lost sleep—it’s kind of fun to do to the whole staying-up-late college student thing if you’re managing to be productive and also create work that you’re proud of. It was very cold, though, which makes walking back from the library rather less nice. Before I’d left for the library, Katrina tried to get me to stay by playing “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” on repeat as I gathered my things. Unfortunately, her “lifelong sorrow” probably wouldn’t be a feasible reason to ask for an extension form my professor.

[On that note: it has gotten terrifyingly cold these last few days and I’ve been wearing my super-special über-winter-coat-of-awesome. It’s very cuddly and nice, except that when I’m wearing it my knees get very jealous of my torso. They have requested that I obtain a leg-version of the coat.]

(we've gotten snow only twice this year--this was the second time)

Monday was a morass of fatigue, stressing about packing, and trying to be productive about planning for finals week/projects. Last Monday, Joanna suddenly brought back to life a project thought long dead—our feminist activist art project. She hasn’t brought it up since the beginning of the year (and it’s not on the syllabus), so we all assumed it had ceased to be a thing. But NO! Anyway, she suddenly wanted us to have coherent plans for the project, which required some quick thinking. This Monday I met with her to talk about it—my plan is to create posters to put around campus that (hopefully pithily) explain why we still need feminism.

After my meeting, I met up with Rachel to spend the evening working—I meant to finish all my readings for Tuesday, etc., but I was so accidentally focused on the art project that I ended up accidentally spending several hours on that. I made three posters, though, so that’s cool. And this morning (Tuesday) I managed to finish up my readings before class, so that worked out just fine. I just got very little sleep (again).

After classes, I immediately gathered my things and set off for the bus stop, where I nearly froze to death waiting for the (very late) bus and then light rail. I am not exaggerating when I tell you that it took more than an hour for me to regain all feeling in my legs and feet. Brrrrrr. Then I made my way through the (surprisingly empty) airport and on to my first plane.

I almost never fly at nighttime, and when I do it’s always been into Phoenix (or during international flights, but you can’t see anything on those flights—you’re too high up and possibly over the Atlantic ocean). Phoenix at night is a circuit-board—perfectly squared, brightly lit, and massive, with chords of light snaking away from it as you fly away from the city itself.

Tonight, though, I’ve flown out of one city and into another (so far) in the darkness and I was rather naively amazed to see how different it looked. Denver is like spilled salt—piles and scattered whorls across the back tabletop of the flatlands. It’s haphazard and sprinkled and lovely.

But it was St. Paul that really caught me. As we first rose out of the cities, we were leaving behind a mass of gold and silver lights that glittered—actually glittered—as we moved, individual ones blinking in and out as they passed behind trees. And the light was so much less harsh than it is in Phoenix, softened by the shadows and the moisture in the air. Amongst the lights there were swoops and dots of pure black (water, I assume), sometimes with a light or two spreading out into them. And as we got farther and farther from the cities, the lights began to move farther and farther apart until they looked like stars across the sky, with occasional heaps of light here and there. It was shockingly beautiful.

(A note: sorry for my unusual sentimentality/poeticalness—I’m very tired and feeling rather melancholy as I pause in my reading to write this. I’ve been working my way through The Book Thief for the last several hours and my heart hurts, not just because it’s achingly sad, but also because it is beautiful and funny and sweet and kind and lovely. I’m not quite done with it yet, but I’m already in love.)

Anyway, now it’s time for my to board my last plane and head off to San Diego. It will be so lovely to see all my lovely family people and get many hugs (especially after the emotional walloping that is The Book Thief). I send all my love to those of you I won’t get to see this weekend (I can give the rest of you my love in person) and hope you all have marvelous Thanksgiving celebrations. I am so thankful for all of you.

<3

(pretty stair shadow)

*I say this, but it’s kind of a lie. Katrina NEVER procrastinates—it’s very impressive. If I were her, I’d have already finished all of my final homework assignments and would have nothing to do. She regularly complains of boredom, in fact. *sigh* I’ve decided—as a consolation to myself—that she has a time-turner. It’s the only explanation for how she has time to have jobs, do all her homework, get plenty of sleep (and by plenty I mean sometimes eleven hours and rarely less than nine), and still have time to watch TV, read books, and listen to the entirety of Welcome to Night Vale. IT MUST BE A TIME-TURNER—the alternatives are too shameful.

(Shameful for me, that is.)

P.S. I just spent the last forty minutes of my life on an airplane high above either Arizona or Nevada weeping my heart out over The Book Thief. I have cried this hard over a very few other stories in the course of my life:

1. a production of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan

2. Fiddler on the Roof, specifically the scene where he refuses to acknowledge his daughter

3. the parts of Titanic in which the (annoying, poorly written) main characters are absent but the ship is going down

4. and now The Book Thief

I am in awe—a book that could have been so deeply clichéd and hackneyed (it’s a book about the Holocaust narrated by Death) was instead truly moving, gorgeous, and altogether incredible. I kind of want to start going around to my fellow passengers and recommending this book, like a door-to-door salesman or something.

Wow.

P.P.S. Obviously I am posting this on Wednesday--I meant to post it last night but was too sleepy to figure out the internet connection at the hotel. Oops!

P.P.P.S. My title is from a lovely quotation by Robert Penn Warren that I am using for no particular reason except that it is pretty and also I am currently in the west:

"For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire."

 (blueeee and warrmmmmm and sunny San Diego)

Suddenly, out of the bushes, a wild blog appears!

HELLO ALL!

It has been a hectic few weeks—much chaos and many papers! Plus two separate two-and-a-half-hour-long study abroad orientation sessions and some excellent times with friends.

The Sunday after my last blog, I had dinner with Emma (who I haven’t seen in forever) and Charmaine at the newish café near my dorm that serves crepes. Their crepes are distinctly neither French nor authentic, but they are pretty tasty nonetheless. Plus we had this bizarre yet tasty desert:

(Notice the snazzy gold leaf on top….pretentious, yes?)

Then it was time for HALLOWEEN PREPARATIONS! I got these lovely cards from my lovely parents in a lovely care package, so I put them up on our door to make it more festive.

I also made Anna a really cute Halloween postcard, but I forgot to take a picture of it. L Suffice it to say that it was adorable. There was a cut-out bat and a shiny moon and a jack-o-lantern with golden backing.

On Wednesday, I went to the English Department Halloween Treat Night, where they had remarkably adorable themed-snacks. Why are they so cute??

Near the end, Charmaine came to fetch me so we could meet Katrina and head off for Super-Target. Katrina and I bullied Charmaine into going in to get a new prescription (she had to lean in really close to see her computer and admitted that she couldn’t see the board in her classes) and we figured the least we could do was go with her. We took the bus there only to discover that they’d closed an hour early (those jerks), but at least we all managed to obtain things we needed. And by needed I mean that I got a pair of socks that I fell instantly in love with (they’re pretty and spotty and fluffy!!) and some unnecessary but excellent tights.

On the way I home I was inexplicably hyper (actually, probably it was because of consuming ridiculous amounts of sugar) and the dementors had been visiting, so everything was ridiculously foggy,

so naturally I turned the ride home into a beautiful musical. Basically every time anyone said a word or phrase that seemed relevant, I’d sing a song that reminded me of it. This started because of the mist, actually—it made Charmaine and me think of the Misty Mountains song from The Hobbit.

Charmaine got super into it.

Katrina just judged us a lot.

But in a nice way.

When we got back to the room, Charmaine and I started working on the final touches of our costumes. I made Fairfax’s costume and then made a goatee for Charmaine while she made herself a really lovely and detailed lamp. Then we decided to force Katrina to wear a costume, despite her disinterest in the whole process. She agreed to wear a costume if we figured it out, so we worked on that for a while before going to bed.

Fall interlude—because PRETTY PICTURES LOOK GUYS THERE ARE LEAVES.

AND THEN HALLOWEEN! I had classes, of course, but YA was basically just chaos and joy. We had a costume contest, which I was one of the four-way tie winners. So I got snacks. Plus Megan brought in VAST QUANTITIES of candy for everyone, which we ate excitedly while playing Halloween bingo. At the end of class she read everyone’s taro for them. She used to work at a New Age publishing house, so she knows all of those sorts of things—horoscopes, star signs, etc. She mentioned the taro cards and we all got really excited, so she promised weeks ago that she’d bring them in for Halloween. My future is apparently going to be very tumultuous.

After class, Charmaine and I went to go watch Monsters University (the Pixar prequel to Monsters Inc.), since Mac was showing it for Halloween. It was shockingly good, although also unfortunately sexist. Not so much that the one interesting female character was presented in any sexist way, but that there was one interesting female character. Damn it, Pixar. I thought you were improving since you made Brave. But, despite this major flaw, the messages of the movie were really well done. One of the characters has an unrealistic career dream—and it doesn’t work out. He finds a parallel job that he loves, but he doesn’t end up doing the thing he’d always dreamed of doing. He isn’t able to overcome the obstacles in his way, and that’s okay. It’s such a thoughtful message for a kid’s movie—and one that I think is really important.

Afterwards, Mac was hosting a Halloween party, so we stuck around for a while for that. We went to the least scary haunted house that has ever existed (I’m not even exaggerating—those ones at my elementary school fall festivals were scarier, and they were terrible) and then we took many absurd photos in the photobooth Mac had rented for the evening. I’d post them, but Charmaine still hasn’t posted them on Facebook, so I can’t. They’re crazy, though, because we tried to fit four people in an incredibly tiny stall. It was ridiculous.

And now, PICTURES!

Fairfax as Bilbo Baggins from The Hobbit (notice his furry toes!!)

 From left to right: Rachel as Jasmine, Charmaine as the Genii (both from Aladdin), Katrina as Megara (from Hercules), and me as Tonks (from the Harry Potter books).

Wesley as Westley (!!!) from The Princess Bride

On Friday, I went to see the new Ender’s Game movie with Katrina and Erin. We had a really fun time but were ultimately pretty disappointed in the movie. It wasn’t very true to the book, alas. Not that we should be surprised, at this point.

Saturday, I had dinner with Charmaine and spent the evening hanging out with my lovely roomies. On Sunday, though, I had to escape to Cahoots again in the hopes of getting some work done. I spent the whole day there, mostly alone—although Rachel and Charmaine each joined me for an hour or two during the day. I also had the most incredible cardamom cookies—mmmm. They kind of taste like Dad’s famous cardamom rolls. Not quite that brilliant, obviously, but still delicious.

The following week was pretty insane, unfortunately. Monday was that presentation for my book on colonial and postcolonial Indian art history and then there was a paper due, those two study abroad presentations, and my final workshopping piece (for my creative writing class—ten to twenty pages of my final story for the class to edit) due.

Plus, we had some exciting weather updates! We had our first real frost this week, leaving the fallen leaves traced in ice. Charmaine said they looked like they were outlined in icing, which was a nice description.

AND, on Wednesday, IT SNOWED! Unlike our official first snowfall, this snow actually stuck for a while. It was kind of lovely having the contrast between the bright fall leaves and the clean, fresh snow.

(I stole this photo from Charmaine because it was so nice.)

The snow melted very quickly, which was a little sad. 

 (about an hour after the snow pictures)

And then all the trees that still had leaves dropped the rest of them in embarrassment, 

(look at them raining from the sky!!)

so everything looks very sad and wintery now. No more color or crunch, alas!

I barely had any breathing room until Friday, when I watched Firefly with my usual group of friends. That was pretty lovely.

Then, on Saturday, I went to see 12 Years a Slave with Katrina and Charmaine—as you already know.

In the few days after seeing the movie—including Sunday, when I last posted—I wasn’t sure how to react or think critically about the experience. It’s a truly exhausting movie—my friends and I walked back to the room without talking and then sat around in semi-stunned silence for a while—and it’s incredibly difficult to separate one’s emotions from the experience. Part of this is because the movie takes care to simulate some of the psychological conditions of slavery—obviously to a much lesser extent. The audience, like the character, goes through every scene terrified that something is going to happen but never knowing—there’s a constant feeling of tension. Additionally, the movie has the most brilliant sound-editing I’ve ever heard. I never notice sound editing (soundtracks, yes, but not sound editing) unless it’s for an animated or heavily CGI-based movie (like The Hobbit), in which case I’m interested in the way they use sounds to fill out the character.

But in 12 Years a Slave, the sound editing is well-done because it is relentless—because watching this movie with your eyes closed would be nearly as horrifying an experience as with your eyes open. The audience is always submitted to the sounds of the violence—often even more than the visuals. So you can’t escape—you can’t just look away from what’s happening. The music is sometimes similarly oppressive. At one point an overseer sings “Run, N——, Run” and the sound of it is harsh, mocking, almost painful. It goes on and on, even continuing onto the next scene—it’s entirely inescapable even as the characters move into a new visual location. And, conversely, the only moment of true relief throughout the movie is a minutes-long rendition of “Roll, Jordan, Roll” in which the movie’s visual barely changes at all while the song builds and builds.

(Oh man, there's just so much text. Here's a beautifully simple poster for the movie.)

Point is, it’s an incredibly well-made movie and very deserving of the Oscar(s) it is predicted to win. The violence walks the fine, fine line between honest and gratuitous, the acting is incredibly good, it is beautifully filmed (there are some truly gorgeous moments), and there are—at most—one or two flawed moments overall. But it’s also the kind of movie that’s impossible to recommend because it’d feel like recommending that your friend go have someone punch them in the face. I think it’s a movie people should see—in the way that one should see wartime photos—and it’s one of the best-made movies I’ve seen in a long time. The craft of it is awesome in the original sense of the word. But it is also deeply and truly painful, unrelenting in its message, and without catharsis. It’s not one of those movies where you weep your heart out, but leave the theater feeling renewed (if shaky). You weep and get cramps in your hands from clinging too tightly to friends and leave feeling entirely unsure of where you go from there. If you go, budget several hours afterwards just to recover.

Basically, when my friends and I got back from the movie we had no idea what to do with ourselves. Katrina, being the magical procrastination-free human being that she is, wrote the movie into a paper she was working on, although she said that analyzing it hadn’t really helped at all. Charmaine and I just kind of huddled up with tea and blankets and stared at the walls. After a while, Hannah asked if I need to talk about it, but I couldn’t really figure out what to say—even though usually verbally processing things is exactly what I need. As some of you may remember, last semester Clockwork Orange threw me completely for a loop, leaving me weeping and miserable until I critically deconstructed it with my parents. And then wrote a completely therapeutic analytical paper about how much I hated it (that paper remains one of the better ones I’ve written). But I couldn’t do that with this movie.

Eventually, my friends and I decided that hanging out with each other and watching mindless TV was the solution to our overwhelmedness, so we watched an episode of a show (Chuck) Charmaine has wanted me to watch for years (it only just was added to Netflix).

Since I’d naturally gotten almost no work done on Saturday, I spent Sunday working at—well, I think you can guess.

(If you guessed the moon, I award you points for creativity. But you’re also wrong. If you guessed Cahoots…DINGDINGDING CONGRATULATIONS. Correct answer.)

As I also mentioned in my [very brief placeholder] blog last week, I had a paper and the first draft of another due on Tuesday, so I spent the first few days entirely exhausted. Monday night, as I was trying to exhaustedly work on the papers, Katrina and Charmaine stayed up to keep me company and ended up falling asleep on each other. I took a bunch of adorable pictures, but they ended up as broken files on my computer. I think their cute broke my camera.

 

After Tuesday, I kind of blearily coasted through the rest of the week. There were some lucky circumstances that let me have very little homework—like an assignment to read part of Said’s Orientalism for Texts and Power; luckily I’d already read the whole thing for Postcolonial Theory weeks earlier—so it wasn’t too much of a problem that my brain had ceased to exist.

Thursday night, though, I finally had my long-anticipated Doty 4 reunion with pumpkin bars!! 

Clara sent me two different homemade mixes weeks ago, so I finally found a time to gather all my friends and feed them baked goodies. We all had tea out in the lounge of my building and taste-tested the two different recipes to figure out which was better. The general consensus was that the first batch tasted more delicious, but the texture of the second was better.

It was so nice to see all (most—Emma had the flu) of them together again—it’s been quite a while. The tone was a bit somber, since everyone seems to be feeling pretty much the same way. We’re all feeling kind of detached and directionless in a surprising way—I think we all expected that we’d feel more settled junior year and we just don’t. I think part of that is that we’re all planning for our imminent departure and that inherently separates us from campus life.

On Friday my roommates and I had a board game night with Erin and Justin (Hannah’s brother). It was very silly and very fun, although we all missed Charmaine, who’s out of town this weekend. We played Apples to Apples and then Taboo and then a very confusing game called Ten Days in Africa and then dispersed to collapse in our separate beds.

And now it is Saturday! Katrina and I went to see the new Thor movie today as a lighthearted contrast to last weekend’s movie and then I spent the afternoon and evening lazing around my room. I’ll have to work hard tomorrow—final papers and their proposals are making themselves known on the near horizon—but it was nice to have some space to recover from the chaos of the last while.

I plan to post a blog next week, per my original schedule, since the week after that is Thanksgiving (and three quarters of my reading audience will be present at my adventures). It’ll be pretty short, though, since this one had to cover so much time.

See you (in a very metaphorical way for many of you, but COMPLETELY LITERALLY HOORAY for others) soon! I love you all!

P.S. I keep forgetting to show you all this. Katrina made it for me, after I awarded her a ribbon on Facebook for being the “Actual Worst.”

I put it on my door, since I don’t have a real refrigerator to display it on.

I’m so proud.

P.P.S. Katrina and Charmaine are the kind of wonderful friends with whom you can have a sudden, unexpected moment of mourning with for the library of Alexandria prompted by something read on the internet. And then you can read the passage from Arcadia to them:

“THOMASINA: ....the enemy who burned the great library of Alexandria without so much as a fine for all that is overdue. Oh, Septimus! -- can you bear it? All the lost plays of the Athenians! Two hundred at least by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides -- thousands of poems -- Aristotle's own library!....How can we sleep for grief?

SEPTIMUS: By counting our stock. Seven plays from Aeschylus, seven from Sophocles, nineteen from Euripides, my lady! You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?”

and all of you can agree that Tom Stoppard is amazing and that, as much as we adore Septimus's answer, we're still going to mourn.

Why am I so lucky??

Equivocation and Regrets?

Dear everyone,

As you are all by now very much aware, I am once again late with my blog.
(Oh the shame, the shame!!)

This time I swear I actually have really good reasons. In the famous words of Inigo Montoya:
 "Let me 'splain.
           ...
No, there is too much. Let me sum up."

1. Yesterday, when I was planning to write my blog, I made the fatal decision of going to see 12 Years a Slave around midday.

Following this, I felt as though I had experienced the emotional equivalent of being walloped over the head. Repeatedly.

I therefore did not have any emotional energy left to work on a long piece of cheerful creative writing (as my blog always ends up being).

To clarify: I knew the movie would be really sad, of course, but I had no idea exactly how brutal a watching experience it would be. I mean, this is Hollywood, yes? So their handling of serious and/or emotional issues is notoriously bad. I expected to see some good acting, some really upsetting parts, and some other upsetting parts that made me too angry to feel bad about. Instead, the entire movie was so heartbreakingly well done that I couldn't use frustrated critical analysis to block out my feelings. For those of you who wish to see it, I heartily recommend it as an incredibly well-crafted movie. But I also heartily recommend bringing along a friend whose hand you can squeeze mercilessly. Or two. Two is good.

2. Today, I am still all emotionally fatigued.

3. Tuesday, I have due a paper and the first draft of another. I also have my usual sundry reading assignments (Foucault, Hamid, Lacan--you know, the usuals) due Monday and Tuesday. I therefore have much that I need to do.

4. Tragically, this means that my schoolwork must come first. (I know, I know, where are my priorities?? For shame.)

5. My blog will be much later than planned or hoped. I might be able to get it to you guys on Wednesday afternoon or Thursday morning, since my big assignments for this week are at the beginning. At worst, I'll have to wait until Saturday to post it.

6. I'm sorry!

Love,
Lily

Pumpkins and Puffbombing (Or, Io Mangio la Torta al Mela!)

Yippee ki-yay, it’s fall break!

And what a lovely thing that is, after all of the exhaustion and chaos of the last many weeks. Fall break only consists of canceled classes on Thursday and Friday, but even that is a major relief (although the end already looks too close…).

The week before last (the Monday of which I posted my blog last time) was pretty standard fare, although Katrina and I have also decided to excellent friends. We share a mutual love language of insults and aggression; it’s fantastic. She also plans to become me when I leave for fall break, so beware, all of you. If I suddenly appear to have grown several inches and start to say ‘caramel’ incorrectly, DO NOT TRUST ME. I AM PROBABLY AN IMPOSTER (and not the strawberry kind). These plans have also required that she begin to stage a subtle invasion of my usual spaces, so she’s taken to sprawling on my bed and distracting me as I try to peruse the internet work on homework. We have also had some magnificent brainstorming sessions, though, so it’s probably worth it. I mean, we already came up with a brilliant plan to turn the main room of our suite into a pool.

(Charmaine was added later upon her request, as she is our official honorary roommate and practically lives here:)

Charmaine has also been spending lots of time with us, ostensibly studying, but really getting up to various giggly shenanigans. We are such children, it’s amazing they let us interact unsupervised. It’s become pretty clear that, in the universe of GDD 204, Hannah is the long-suffering mother, Katrina and I are the eight year-old siblings who bicker a lot but secretly love each other, and Charmaine is the friend who comes over for play dates and doesn’t want to leave.

Class-wise, the week was occupied by much writing and reading, avoiding studying for a giant quiz, and frantically studying for said giant quiz. We had a so-called ‘Megaquiz’ that Friday in Postcolonial Theory, an absurd test the covered what appeared to be the entirety of the history of colonial occupation worldwide. As my YA professor would say, “Uffda!” Well said, Megan. Moore (the postcolonial professor) gave us this ridiculous stack of information to study from, including a six page tightly-packed excel document listing independence dates and occupying empires for every once-colonized nation ever, a stack of maps showing various colonizing empires across time, and a long document containing information about twenty major subjects and twenty major figures in anti-, de-, or post-colonization. We were expected to come prepared with dates (within three years) for all of these things and information on all of the above.

As it is nearly humanly impossible to learn the exact date of decolonization for, oh, about a hundred or so nations plus the birth/death/major life event dates for forty events and people WHILE TAKING OTHER CLASSES AT THE COLLEGE LEVEL, I decided to limit my studying a bit—I memorized the dates for the people and memorized by the decade for the other stuff. Which seems like plenty of information to me!! I definitely could have done better on the test, but I did well enough to be done with it, which is a relief (if you don’t get a B or better, you have to re-take it until you do (or automatically fail the class)).

Anyway, that occupied a major portion of my time near the end of the week. The rest of the week was taken up by studying for other classes—lots of reading, some fretting about the upcoming art history midterm (which Joanna had not yet given us slide lists for…), and some creative writing that I’m pretty proud of. This sounds strange, I’m sure, but I’d been having a lot of trouble focusing on my main/narrating character in my writing—I kept being more interested in my other characters and not really spending enough time in my main character’s head. Part of this was an attempt to adhere to the whole ‘show, don’t tell’ thing, which leads to the advice to avoid using “I think/feel/believe” very often and to instead show with body language or physical sensations what’s going in the character’s head. I think this lead me into a trap where I wasn’t really letting my main character feel much at all—and letting him think even less. I wasn’t slipping in information and backstory about him nearly enough. Part of this was also the way that I think this character would be, especially at the beginning of his story, but I definitely can’t excuse that as all of it.

Megan’s been asking me to work on this, but I kept ending up writing situations that just don’t feel like the right space for it. But finally I did! I’m excited to see what her comments will be—hopefully she’ll be pleased. This class is making me a much more intentional writer, which is fantastic. Megan’s comments are exactly the right kind—praise when earned and questions where there are problems. She never says ‘this part is bad/doesn’t work/sucks’ or anything of the kind. Instead, she asks questions: “Why did you do this? What does this say about your character? What is he thinking in this moment?” That kind of thing. It’s really very impressive; I guess some of it comes from her experience as an editor.

All of this thinking in narratives has also had an entertaining side: I made a story-postcard for Anna!! The other day in Postcolonial Theory, one of the other students described Said’s Afterword to Orientalism like this: “It’s like Said lit a match, went for a walk, and came back to find that the entire neighborhood had burned down. Then he looked around and said, ‘Well, I really didn’t mean to burn down that house. I always liked it. But I’m glad that house is gone, it was terrible.” Her description was so vivid and fantastic that I naturally had to draw a little comic of this in my notes (for educational reasons, of course). And then I was kind of proud of my tiny hat-wearing Said stick figure. I wanted to tell more stories about him and then I suddenly thought of the story-postcard idea! So I spent the rest of class making a storyboard for the little stick man’s adventures (and listening!! I swear I was also listening…). Then, on Wednesday, I took a much-needed break and sat down to listen to the new episode of a radio show I love (Welcome to  Night Vale) while drawing and coloring my little story. I’m pretty proud of it, I must say.

I mailed it out on Thursday, when I also checked my SPO (SPO (spō): n. 1. Student post office, the USPS post office located on Macalester’s campus. 2. An individually-owned post box located in the Student Center, where students can pick up their mail. v. 1. To spo, to send through the on-campus mail system.) I found A TINY PUMPKIN!! I was labeled with my name and a salutation, but nothing else—someone had anonymously spoed me a pumpkin! 

It made everything about my entire life better to find that tiny pumpkin sitting there in my box, fitting perfectly.

(I later discovered that it was Keo who’d sent me the pumpkin, as she is a spectacular person.)

Friday was the Megaquiz of doom, which has already been discussed at plenty of length, but afterwards I walked through the crisp fall afternoon, bundled up in my brand new Hufflepuff scarf (ordered for my Halloween costume), past all of the Victorian-era houses, to Keo’s girlfriend’s apartment in order to bake! 

 (seen along the way, this sidewalk poem and this ivy-overgrown cottage)

Keo organized and cooked the meals for a food conference recently and got to take the leftovers home. So she sent me this e-mail: 
Lily,
I have recently come into large quantities of butter and apples. Obviously THIS MEANS PIE or cake or bread or cookies...

You have options:
1) come cook with me Friday afternoon.
2) become the somewhat sticky recipient of a piece of pie mailed to your spo 
3) gasp! you hate pie and would rather not

Keo 

because she is a lovely and charming human being. Since I obviously picked the first option (although the second one sounded very tempting, I must say…). We decided to make both apple pie (really, apple tart, but pie sounds like more fun) and apple cake. We also then discovered that Ashley (Keo’s girlfriend) did not, in fact, own a pie plate. This briefly stymied us before Ashley came up with the brilliant idea of making cup-pies—tiny pies, like cupcakes!!

We, naturally, jumped on this idea, not least (for me) because the beloved but short-lived TV show Pushing Daisies featured cup-pies and I have always wanted to try them.

We then set about peeling many an apple, making up the cake batter, and creating tiny piecrusts using a wine-bottle-rolling-pin and a water-glass-cookie-cutter. Ah, the culinary innovations of the inadequately supplied college student! We then placed the circles of pie dough in a muffin tin (that being the only thing on-hand), put in the apples, and poured the filing over. Then we put them in the oven to bake

(picture of cake to build narrative suspense and also show off our cooking prowess)

I must say, I was deeply skeptical that the piecrusts would cook well in the muffin tins. I was sure they would turn out chewy or completely fall apart or burn or something.

BOY, WAS I WRONG. Instead, they came out gorgeous and perfect in everyway—I’m not sure I’ve ever had more perfectly cooked crust in my life, which is saying something.

And, on top of that, they were freaking DELCIOUS! Keo had found the recipe for the pie/tart filling on some random cooking blog, so that was another risk we were taking. It was a custard-based filling with the apples sliced up inside, which sounded good, but who knows, right? Man, that is a possible new favorite pie. Or at least a contender for the throne. Peaches-and-cream still might win. Or cherry. Or prune plum. Anyway, point is that it was amazing.

Later that evening, my friends and I watched Firefly, keeping up with the tradition we started earlier. The plan is to keep watching one a week until we finish the series. Tragically, this is actually a pretty achievable goal, as there’s only one short season. So far, it’s been mostly my roommates, Charmaine (who’s practically a roommate), and Erin, who is one of my favorite people from Victorian Lit. last semester and a good friend of the others. This time, though, we had two other guests who’d seen Firefly before and it was a rollicking and jolly party.

Saturday was also lovely. The my three roommates and I took the bus up to Rosedale mall, where Hannah went shopping and the rest of us went to go see The Fifth Estate (she’s not a big fan of movies and doesn’t share our infatuation with a certain British actor with a silly name). For those of you who don’t know, it’s a movie based on the middle of the WikiLeaks story, from when it started to gain traction to just before Julian Assange became a wanted man and was forced to seek political asylum. I was expecting it to be a pretty bad movie and, interestingly, early reviews gushed while later ones panned the film. Really, I was going to see this movie because I respect Cumberbatch’s acting choices (he plays Assange in the film) and enjoy watching him on-screen (and not even because he’s hot—he’s spectacularly unattractive in this role). I expected it to be quite one-sided, as various people—including Assange himself when he released a statement along with the script on WikiLeaks months ago—have claimed. But I was pleasantly surprised—it felt like a very fair and balanced portrayal of the situation, up to and including a fourth-wall breaking end-scene wherein Cumberbatch-as-Assange was interviewed about the movie. This could have been the cheesiest, most-unfortunate idea ever. It could have, as Assange claims in his statement, “attempt[ed] to make the film immune to criticism by WikiLeaks or by Assange himself.” Instead, it was a brilliant reminder that the entire thing was fiction, that it was based on versions of the truth (and not Assange’s versions). What a thoughtful ending, right? Especially for a movie based on the life a several people who are still alive. I was so impressed by the inherent fair-mindedness of it that I’m shocked by Assange’s criticisms—I feel like there was an incredible good-faith effort to portray the whole story as fairly as possible.

The movie was in no way perfect—it had a tendency to get overly enamored of its own artisticness and there was an abundance of inevitable melodrama. But I’m really glad I saw it and I think it deserves some credit for trying so earnestly to be balanced in its portrayals.

[The wind just started howling past my room à la The Secret Garden and then it poured for about two minutes and now everything is (relatively) still and calm again. Minnesota, I don’t understand you.]

After we got back from the movie, Katrina and I went back to Charmaine’s house with her to make banana bread, which she later brought over for us to snack on as we chatted.

Sunday was entirely taken up with studying and homework and avoiding studying and homework, although I also started working on my Italian with a free online program that Clara recommended to me. It’s called Duolingo and structures language learning like a video game—you get rewards for achieving different levels, loose ‘lives’ for mistakes, etc. Basically, it’s like a free, fun Rosetta Stone. Which is pretty incredible, given how expensive Rosetta Stone is. I’ve been working on it faithfully every day for the last week, so I’m almost done with the first portion which includes food words, basic verbs, animal words, plurals, greetings, etc. The last section before I’m done with this portion is possessives, so soon I’ll be able to talk about my cats instead of just the cats.

(Fairfax picture to break up all of the words. Also because it’s adorable.

Katrina wanted Fairfax to try on my new (ten-foot) Hufflepuff scarf.)

Monday through Wednesday were occupied with midterms preoccupation. I had my midterm for Feminist Visual Culture on Wednesday, but Joanna only gave us the slide lists on Saturday. And then she added another one on Tuesday afternoon!! She’s been kind of driving me crazy lately with how disorganized she’s been, but this kind of takes the cake—slide lists should show up at least more than twenty-four hours before the test. Plus it had some errors! One of the dates listed for an artwork was five years after the artist in question had died, which at least made it relatively easy to catch. Still, I’d already fixed the incorrect date in my mind before I realized something was wrong! Grrr….

Doesn’t matter, though, because I’m pretty sure I did well on the midterm. I tend to enjoy art history exams and this one was no exception—my memory works such that seeing the image reminds me of all of our conversations around it, making information recall spectacularly easy.

Wednesday after the midterm, when everyone else was celebrating the beginning of fall break, I was trying to finish up my weekly writing for YA, since I’d been more focused on the midterm up until then. I headed over to the English student lounge for treat night (the English department was gifted a dedicated food-for-students budget by an alum, so they have a weekly treat night). One of my friends (Erin, mentioned above), has been trying to get me to go again, but I’ve always had lots of important work to do and haven’t had time. Last year, the two of us went almost every Wednesday after Victorian Lit and we had some magnificent conversations, so I’d been missing that. We chatted for a while as I worked and then Charmaine came to fetch me for dinner.

(cheese shop sandwiches….mmmmm……)

After I’d worked for another few hours, I finally finished all of my writings and sent them in, at which point Katrina and Charmaine and I decided to watch Legally Blonde to celebrate the beginning of fall break. That movie really is shockingly good. Then we stayed up ridiculously late talking about random things and half-falling asleep on each other, until finally we realized how absurd we were and decided to go to sleep. Charmaine ended up sleeping on our couch because she was too tired to walk home in the dark and cold.

Thursday (FIRST DAY OF FALL BREAK HUZZAH!), I met up for morning tea with Rachel, who I hadn’t seen in forever, and then the two of us went on a wander, ending up eating brunch in a diner, sampling cheese in Whole Foods, and crunching through many fall leaves. Rachel and I never manage to actually catch up when we meet up like this, which is to say that we never actually talk about what’s going on in our lives. Instead, we always end up having these fantastic philosophical conversations about life and morality and politics and basically ALL OF THE THINGS. It’s magnificent.

After she had to leave to pack for a visit home, I headed back to my room, where I lazed around doing absolutely nothing useful (except some Duolingo, but that’s fun too) before heading over to Charmaine’s to make applesauce. Katrina and I had been stealing apples for a week in advance—we’d managed to gather quite a few! I’ve never made applesauce, and I always assumed it would be a pretty difficult process, but it was actually really fun and easy! Pretty delicious, too, although we made it a tad bit too lemony. We also tried to make apple jelly from a recipe that said you didn’t need pectin, but that was a complete failure. Those liars—it ended up just being a really sweet apple-flavored liquid. Oh well. Then we watched some more Firefly together before heading back to our rooms.

Friday morning I got up early in order to go PUFFBOMBING!!! Clara sent me a care package a few weeks ago which included a puffbomb and instructions for detonation—I was to distribute tiny puffy friends anonymously across campus (although I was allowed to tell one friend—Charmaine, of course) in order to spread joy and happiness. What followed was a joyous occasion wherein we snuck around campus giggling madly and depositing puffy joy everywhere. Naturally, there are pictures.

(naturally, several of them ended up in the children's section of the library.)

 (can we all just take a moment to admire the adorable props they came with??)

 (we decided this guy needed a buddy, since we put him in the fourth floor library stacks next to the Lincoln books--he might not be adopted for quite some time.)

 (they're just so adorable!!!)

 (this guy was originally cape-less, but then we realized that, since he was the only one outside, he need to have a coat so that he wouldn't get cold. so naturally we went back to give him his cape.)

In the afternoon, I watched Nightmare Before Christmas with a different friend from last year’s Victorian Lit (Aubrey) and a few of her friends as a celebratory pre-Halloween extravaganza. I’d never seen it before, but I really loved it! And I’m so surprised that it’s always described as creepy—the main character (the skeletal, long-limbed figure seen on most advertising for the film) is actually one of the sweetest, most earnest animated characters to have ever existed. The animation definitely has creepy bits, as does the story, but the overall narrative? Shockingly adorable.

That afternoon, both Katrina and Hannah left for their respective fall break trips, so I got dinner from shish and lazed around in my room watching an episode of television without headphones. It’s a big deal, I know. (I also wrote most of this blog, but I got too tired before I could finish it.)

And now it is Saturday and I must begin the frantically-catching-up-and-trying-to-get-ahead-on-homework part of fall break. Ah, well.

Love you all!

(Here, have a spectacularly unattractive picture of me being the Beast to Erin's Belle. Hannah and Erin and a bunch of their friends decided to be hipster Disney princesses--Erin was carrying this hat around as part of her costume. So naturally I put it on my head.)

P.S. MOM, LOOK. SEE?? I AM FEROCIOUS!

 (Daily odd compliment is a tumblr account that posts adorable and strange compliments every day--this is one of them. It's relevance to me comes from the fact that I have been told that I look like a bunny on multiple occasions (ahem, Leslie, ahem) and from the fact that every time my mother or sister says I am adorable, I say, "No, I'm FEROCIOUS.")