Classes
continue at an alarmingly rapid pace (have I really only been back for three
weeks?!), with major projects already approaching. I have my first big test
next week and a big paper due soon. Besides which, of course, my study abroad
proposal is due a week from Tuesday and I need to turn in my study abroad
application (to the program itself, instead of to Macalester) and my
self-designed major proposal by mid-March. *NEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP* is the sound
my anxiety makes. So yes, things are crazy and stressful and fast-paced already—but
also surprisingly awesome. And at least I have my hoard of stolen fruit to get
me through each week.
Including,
of course, the oranges Charmaine and I decorated because we are, in fact, five
years old and generally far too easily amused.
A quick
overview of my classes so far:
Art of the
West II (10:50-12:20, MW): Continues to be awesome, even if Joanna is at times
a little overenthusiastic. Which is
the best fault for a professor to have, but it means that we occasionally have
an extra hour-and-a-half of class in a week (keeping in mind that classes (other
than studio arts and lab sections) are generally three hours per week) and we always run over. On Friday (during one
of our extra class sessions), the guest lecturer asked if she still had time to
discuss Botticelli’s Primavera as the
minute hand clicked over to the exact time class was supposed to end and Joanna
said, “Oh, yes, definitely!” *sigh* It’s still been pretty amazing, though, and
I love getting to study Renaissance art.
19th
Century British Literature (2:20-3:20, MWF):
I love Professor Warde so much. Seriously, the man is awesome. He is the
quietest professor ever, but always has complete command of the class’ attention.
And, to my great glee, the class is not just a literature course. We’ve studied
history and culture and, best of all, art
and architecture. We’ve looked at train stations, engravings, photography of
Glasgow slums, paintings, and schematics for the spinning jenny—all while also
doing a careful and close reading of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (which we’re to finish for Monday) and several
Victorian opinion pieces. This is probably my favorite class (even if I’m not a
huge fan of Victorian non-fiction
prose) because of the wealth of information we’re getting and the way Professor
Warde gets us to look at tiny moments in Mary
Barton that end up having fascinating connotations for the novel as a
whole. Favorite topics right now? The narrator as a character in Mary Barton and Gaskell’s comparison of
the lower classes to Frankenstein’s creature (who she mistakenly calls
Frankenstein) and what this signifies as to her political opinions.
British
Youth Subcultures (1:20-2:50, TR): This class has an absolutely horrifying
amount of reading (one night we had more than a hundred pages of a theoretical
analysis of an ethnographic study—oof!) and it’s forcing me to work much harder
than most of my previous classes, which is excellent.
Dr. J also has us mixing disciplines in a fascinating way—we have a Sunday
night movie screening every week, we read a substantial amount of cultural
theory, and almost always start out class listening to at least one song. And,
of course, we’re reading plays and novels and short stories as well. The
downside of this class so far is that it has a several annoying senior theater
majors in it who rather dominate the classroom and that we tend to spend a
little too much time re-reading passages from the readings and re-watching
clips from the movies we watched. And while I definitely understand the
benefits of renewing our memories of these moments so that we can better
discuss them, I fear that we do it to the detriment of our class discussion
time.
Shakespeare
Studies (3:00-4:30, TR): We have the same problem here, although to a much
greater extent. Honestly, we’ve never yet had a discussion in this class.
Mostly, it’s the professor lecturing in a sort of haphazard way (like the way
professors sometimes do a little lecture/intro to kick off discussions, except
without the discussion part) and students reading out loooong passages from whatever play we’re reading at the
moment. Although Professor Krier clearly
has a great deal of interesting and stimulating things to say, they’re kind of
scattered among the ‘translations’ and unnecessarily simplistic questions (“Why
would Hamlet hesitate to kill Claudius?” MAYBE BECAUSE DECENT PEOPLE DON’T JUST
AUTOMATICALLY COMMIT MURDER ON THE ADVICE OF VENGEFUL GHOSTS WHO MAY OR MAY NOT
BE DEMONS?!). Honestly, this class is frequently boring, but at least I’m in a
situation where I’m being required to read and consider these plays (many of
which I’ve been intending to read for years). And being in a classroom setting
forces me to think academically about them, not just read them quickly and
without enough attention to detail. So even while I’m ‘listening’ to an
explanation of the concept of a metaphor (in a 300 level English course!!), I
can be simultaneously half-writing inside my head an essay on prophecy in Richard III or on whether/when Hamlet
goes mad.
[Side note:
the downside to having perpetually shaky hands is that not only do I have no
chance of being a surgeon (because that’s clearly something I was planning on
doing) or ever winning the board game Operation, but I have now spilled
recently-boiling water on my hand while making tea for the third time this week. OUCH.]
In other
news: Charmaine and I have decided to become exercise buddies and we’ve started
going to the gym three times a week. Although I’ve always really hated running,
it’s actually been really nice to have an hour or so to turn my music up a
little too loud and turn my brain down a little too low and just run. And the “Couch to 5K” running
program I’m doing has made slowly ramping up the actual running time pretty bearable.
After Charmaine and I run, we do various other exercises and then wander around
trying various exercise machines. One of these days we’re going to have enough
time to play ping-pong on the special Kofi-Annan-autographed ping-pong table
(This is not a thing that I am making up. Macalester actually owns a ping-pong
table that has been signed by Kofi Annan in honor of a table tennis
championship he won while at Macalester. You can tell how proud we are to have
him as an alum—apparently we think even his ping-pong skills are impressive.)
as a reward for all of our hard work, although we haven’t managed it yet.
Thank you
all for the ridiculous amounts of tea I received for Christmas this year! I had
to clear out a drawer to be designated my “tea drawer”, since my previous
storage place (on top of my desk) was rapidly making it impossible for me to do
my homework or use my computer on the piece of furniture constructed for that
purpose. This is a photograph of that lovely drawer—the source of much of my
joy:
I also got
to try out my brand new tea duck (from Grandma Tschudi) recently (it’s a
container for loose-leaf tea that is also adorable),
so I took a picture of that too because LOOK HOW CUTE IT IS.
In our continuing
quest to be the least stereotypical college students of all time, Charmaine and
I stayed up extremely late last Saturday night making Valentines for our
friends and family. We gathered all of our craft supplies and stickers (a surprising
amount, put all together, considering that we’re supposedly adults),
and made
lots and lots of Valentines. Most of mine were absurdly dorky puns and most of
Charmaine’s were gorgeous paper cranes with notes inside. I’m concerned about
what this says about our respective characters. Here are some of the ones I
made:
Then, on
Thursday, we went on an expedition to all of our friends’ rooms to surreptitiously
tape them to their doors and then dash away, madly giggling. Campus has never
seemed as big as when it was way below freezing and the wind was blowing like
crazy and we had to walk across its entire length on our quest. Without hats. Brrr!!
I also received
these fantastic Valentines,
and a care
package from my parents, so all-in-all it was a pretty fantastic Valentine’s
Day.
It’s mostly
just been cold lately, without a lot of snow, although we did have one of those
gorgeously light snowfalls the other day that coated all the trees and covered
up some of the ugly grey slush that had accumulated on the sides of the road.
Although living here has taught me about a lot of downsides of snow that I’d
never considered as a kid (snow is supremely ugly when mixed with dirt. snow
can be really sharp and unpleasant on your face. snow makes you wet!), I still have moments where I’m
just completely struck by the wonder of it all. Even if I live somewhere warmer
for the rest of my life, I’m so glad to have had this experience, nose freezes
and all.
And, as a
last little note—I finally managed to memorize T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of
J. Alfred Prufrock.” This is something I’ve been meaning to do for a while, but
before other (shorter) poems have managed to knock it further down the list.
Now it’s the eleventh poem I’ve got memorized and I’m so glad to have it
knocking about inside my head (even if it will be another week before I really
want to think about it again).
That’s all I’ve
got to tell you guys for now, but I’m sure to be back in two weeks with more
excitement/chaos/anxiety/childish-pranks-with-my-roommate/adventures.
Love you all!
P.S. I
forgot to show you this last time, but I’m too proud of it not to share it
anyway. This is the whiteboard I made when Charmaine and I went to the midnight
premier of The Hobbit. I think it’s
pretty good, considering the (rather fiddly) medium of whiteboard markers.
