Why, Minnesota, Why?! Or, Spring Is a Lie, But At Least the Semester Is Almost Over

So you know how last time I posted I was really excited about how it was FINALLY SPRINGTIME AND EVERYTHING WAS GOING TO BE BLOOMING AND BEAUTIFUL??

I am being forced by the cruel fickleness of Minnesota weather to take all of that back. After about three days of nice weather, the temperatures dropped again and it’s been snowing like crazy for the last few weeks. Which, consequently, is the only thing anyone manages to talk about:

“How’s life?”

“Pretty good. But what’s up with all of this snow??”

“I don’t even know, man! I mean, come on! It’s APRIL!”

“Freaking Minnesota.”

“Ug, I know, my mother/brother/sister/grandfather/friend has been telling me all about their spring weather, it’s so unfair. Come ON, Minnesota! Get your s*** together!”

This is an honest account of far too many of my recent conversations. Sometimes we enliven the exchange by talking about how funny/sad/absurd it is that the PFs (prospective first-years) are touring our campus during this week of classes (and therefore this week of snow) and wondering whether this will have a negative effect on our admission rate for the class of 2017.

Along those lines, here are my obligatory “OH MY GOODNESS IT’S SNOWING IN APRIL I MEAN COME ON WHAT IS THIS CRAP?!” pictures:

 (those are frozen droplets--they're ice, not water)

(the sun and blue sky finally came out on Friday, which made everything much lovelier)

In other lies I told you last time I posted:

1. “And then spring break comes and we all escape for at least a few days and come back to a campus that now feels cozy-small instead of suffocatingly-small.”

Yeah, no. That didn’t work so well. Instead, I came back from spring break missing home and wishing I could be warm again and sick with a minor cold and basically entirely apathetic. So that week was pretty much a draw in terms of interesting and/or exciting happenings, which is part of why I utterly failed to blog. But things have been much better since then.

And spring break really was a truly lovely week. I was so thrilled to be back in California that I got sunburned within the first four hours home, ate way too much food, spent lots of time just hanging out and talking, and generally got absolutely no work done the entire week. Unless we count hiking about twenty miles, which I think we should. If that’s not work, I don’t know what is. I’m going to try to avoid posting too many pictures right now, but I have to share at least a few or else you guys might start to fear it wasn’t me doing the writing. I mean, come on—I visited the Grand Canyon. There are a LOT of pictures.

UPDATE: In fact, there are so ridiculously many that I want to share--even while trying to pick just a few!--that I've decided to move them into their own post. Here is a tantalizingly purple cactus (from the inner-canyon plateau) to tempt you over to look at those:

2. “I’m planning to turn in my proposal [for my self-designed major] at the beginning of April so that I have plenty of time to stop worrying about it.”

Okay, so this wasn’t actually a lie—I truly was planning that, and thought I’d done enough to ensure that it could happen—but it was perhaps a naïve and foolish plan. I still have not turned in my proposal—which is due Monday, incidentally. (The sound my anxiety makes is “NEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP!”)

I have discovered the point at which my childhood surrounded by academics has become a problem.  Usually it’s a good thing—I understand the professor’s side of things, I know better what I can honestly expect from the professors, I’m more understanding of those things the administration actually cannot control (especially regarding funding), etc. But where it becomes a problem is when I expect all professors to be as prompt as conscientious as those I grew up among. So I have learned my lesson: when I next need a recommendation, I’m going to lie about the deadline. Because UGH it’s been more than a month since I asked for letters and I still don’t have two of them.

I met with Dr. J (of Subcultures fame) on Thursday, and she promised to leave the letter outside her office Monday morning so that I can pick it up to turn it in. So that should be okay. But Joanna canceled our meeting on Thursday (for the very good reason of being afraid she wouldn’t be able to get home through the rapidly-snowbound streets) and has so far just ignored my (admittedly not very assertive) questions regarding the letter. But I have a meeting scheduled on Monday and I’ve reminded her about the letters, so hopefully I’ll have hers Monday as well and can go straight from our meeting to the registrar’s office to FINALLY TURN IN MY FREAKING PROPOSAL ONCE AND FOR ALL.

In good news, Professor Warde mentioned that he talked to the registrar (who is on the committee who makes decisions about the IDIM) about my proposal, telling her that it was excellent and that he would have been on my committee had he not been retiring at the end of this semester. So that’s pretty cool! It was so kind of him to provide so much support even though he can’t be on my committee!

3. The implicit suggestion that I would post again according the rules of my usual schedule (and therefore on March 30) instead of being a terrible person and waiting FIVE WHOLE WEEKS (wow I suck at this blogging thing) to post again.

I am sorry about this, but as college students all agree:

April is the cruelest month, breeding

Final projects out of the dead land, mixing

Exhaustion and term papers, stirring

Coughing fits with spring sleet.

Basically this time of year is the hardest to deal with (assuming you’re on the semester system and not that weird quarter system that some freaks use), especially when the weather insists on being dreary and unseasonable.

And, of course, this seems to be when all the personal crises in friends and family occur, so I end up dealing with a lot of secondhand stress. I’m not very good at not being able to fix things, so I end up all upset and stressed up when friends have issues that that they can’t be listened/talked down from. Charmaine has been dealing with some truly horrible crap the last few weeks, so that’s been hard for both of us to deal with. It sounds so selfish to say that it’s hard on me—and of course I want to be there for her as much as possible—but I get to a point where there’s nothing that I can really do and I get kind of panicky, which takes its toll on me. Things are looking much better now, though, and she’s talked to some adults (almost twenty is not an adult, what are you talking about?) who (hopefully) know what they’re doing. Having other people knowing what’s going on takes a huge amount of the load off of me because now I can still listen and help her deal without fearing that my advice/suggestions are the only ones she’s hearing. And she’s at a much healthier and more settled place in dealing with the issue, too, so I’m not nearly as worried about her. At this point, it’s safe to say that things are going to be okay and she’s going to be okay.

(For those of you now stressing about my roommate, the short story is that she has a spectacularly-creepy-but-probably-not-dangerous ex who has been making her life harder for quite some time now. But he’s finally done some (non-dangerous but still unpleasant) things that made it clear to her that he’s not stopping with the creepy anytime soon and she finally felt comfortable going to talk to the administration about it. No need to worry—things are mostly fine now and the people in charge of the school are aware of the circumstances.)

The upshot of all of this is that the past month has been a bit of a struggle and blogging has not been a priority. But I’m feeling better about everything this weekend, so I have time to post. And at least this is better than last year—you’ve gotten four whole posts during spring semester as opposed to zero!

I definitely am not promising to post in two weeks, though, so be forewarned. That weekend (May 4) is the last one before finals, so I’m guessing I’ll have more important things to be doing than blogging. I’ll probably blog the weekend after that instead, when I’m flying home for the end of the year.

(Gratuitous photos included solely to break up the text

…and also because they’re pretty.]

Now that I’ve finished de-bunking the shameless lies of my past self, I can move on to other things. To begin, classes!

Art of the West II: Joanna was sick the week after break, which meant we only got to cursorily study the Baroque period—a true tragedy! Baroque is one of my favorites!! But we got to watch this terrible BBC documentary on Bernini and Caravaggio instead and luckily they were the kind of bad that is unintentionally completely hilarious. Since then we’ve done Rococo, Academy painting, and we’re moving into the Impressionists next week. I’m still enjoying this class a great deal and so far doing very well. As I hoped, I did very well on my midterm (100%!!) and first paper (excerpts from her comments include “exemplary work,” “sensitive, thoughtful, insightful, & well-written,” “you write with confidence and instill it in your reader,” and “this is a beautiful paper!”). On Wednesday I turned in the second paper, an iconographic/semiotic analysis of this very strange painting:

(Judith with the Head of Holofernes by Giovan Gioseffo dal Sole)

It wasn’t my best paper (Charmaine’s crisis reached its peak Tuesday night), but I think it was pretty solid all-in-all. In it, I argue that the painting’s formation completely removes any heroicness from Judith’s character and takes away all of her agency to boot. Basically I really hate this painting.

Victorian Lit: I just really love this class. I’ve discovered this year that I am such an old fogey in terms of literary taste and analysis, so Warde’s old-school teaching methods really work for me. They’re much more comfortable than Dr. J’s (wonderfully) challenging style and I still feel like I’m learning a great deal. We’ve been reading a lot of poetry for the last while, especially the Rossettis, read Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son, and had a lecture on the Pre-Raphaelite paintings that made me happy for a variety of reasons. Next week is Hopkins and Victorian photography, which I’m obviously excited for. I’ve also discovered that I have a certain fondness for Swinburne (when he isn’t being creepy about love) and his lonely, yearning poems. I’ve also gotten back the test I took before break and taken another one (A- and A respectively—yay!), recited “The Windhover”, and just generally enjoyed myself on a daily basis.

British Youth Subcultures: I had some trouble being motivated for this class in the weeks following break, which was unfortunate timing, given that my first paper was due the second Monday after we’d gotten back. I ended up writing it on Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, arguing that Kubrick is trying to do a bunch of fancy, artistic, political things with his film but that he ends up acting out the role of the repressor with regards to his audience through the methods that he uses. This is how I deal with my angst about literature/film/art—I analyze why authors/directors/artists did the things that I hated and then explain exactly why those things were stupid. In an analytical and logical way. Without fail, it makes me feel better about the whole thing. I haven’t gotten the paper back yet, but I hope it was okay. I felt pretty good about it, and Dr. J said (unrelatedly, but still) in our meeting that my work in her class has been “brilliant”, so I think I can safely say that I didn’t fail it, at least. Since then, though, we’ve been focusing on the punks and skinheads and I’ve been enjoying myself a great deal more. We watched a few movies that actually weren’t horrifyingly depressing, which was a nice change, and we’re going to a film festival screening of a new film on Monday. It’s gritty and challenging and occasionally beautiful, all of which pales alongside the sheer difficulty of reading the damn thing. It’s written in broad Scottish dialect, which is approximately like reading a book in French. Just to give you a sense of how freaking challenging it is—the book has a glossary. A glossary. In a non-sci-fi novel. Ugh. 

Shakespeare Studies: This class has gotten a bit more lively since we’ve moved on to King Lear, and I managed to have a spirited debate about the Gloucester cliff scene with a few of the students and our professor. It’s nice to finally have some actual discussions. Next week, unfortunately, those will not be possible, as we’ll be watching a film version of Antony and Cleopatra for both days, but I admit that a part of me is heaving a sigh of relief at having such an easy few days. And on Tuesday we’re celebrating Shakespeare’s birthday (and St. George’s day) by eating cake and there can be nothing bad about that. Next Tuesday our second (and last) paper is due, so it’s nice to have a bit of an easy week preceding that. I’ll probably write it about King Lear and, specifically, the witches—how they are interesting not within the gender politics of the play, but for how they act as the liminal figures (like those in mythology). OH! I also got my last paper back (the one on Richard III), which not only got an A, but was heralded with comments like “The thinking in your paragraphs is mobile, forceful, assertive.”

As Sherlock would say, “I am on FIRE!”

Even more excitingly (and terrifyingly, let’s be honest), I’ve been thinking about the classes I’ll be taking next semester. I’ve decided on the following (I think): Gender, Sexualities, and Feminist Visual

Culture [ART 252], Texts and Power: Foundations of Media and Cultural Studies [MCST 110], Creative Writing: Young Adult Fiction [ENGL 294-05], and Postcolonial Theory [ENGL 367]. Not only am I excited for all of them, but they should work with my plans whether I do my IDIM or double major. And then the semester after that I’ll (hopefully) be in London and Florence. AHHHH!!!

Despite all the hard things this month, it has been, in some senses, a much better one. It’s been much harder to keep track of my Doty 4 friends this year, what with not living on the same floor, but this last month I’ve gotten better at tracking down friends for one-on-one dinners and lunches. It’s a lot easier to arrange a meal with one person than a teatime with eight people (although I say this in the wake of Rachel’s suggestion that we all hang out to study tomorrow). Anyway, I’ve managed to hang out with all of my friends a lot more lately, which has made everything better. In the last week alone, I’ve had (1) dinner with Rachel, during which we discussed her recent rise to Tumblr fame and the nature of literary criticism, (2) dinner with Keo, during which we discussed the fears of our generation and our plans for the future and after which I met a girl who literally squealed with glee when she heard the title of my proposed IDIM, and (3) a coffee-and-ice-cream study date with Emma and Rachel.  On the way to this last the three of us got a bit befuddled trying to pick a coffee shop that didn’t close before seven and therefore spent a great deal of time wandering around getting very wet (since the sky was spitting at us in a distinctly grumpy manner). By the time we’d settled in at Starbucks, we were pretty wet. About twenty minutes after our arrival, we were approached by an incredibly kind old man who said, “I saw that you guys needed these. You can fight over the colors amongst yourselves.” and then walked away, leaving in his wake stunned-but-grateful college students and three newly-purchased umbrellas of differing colors. I am now the proud owner of a bright pink umbrella that gives me warm-fuzzies every time I see it.

On top of this, there’s a girl in my Subcultures and Victorian Lit classes (who I therefore see practically every day) who I’ve become fast friends with. It’s nice to exchange glances with her when we’re trying not to laugh at how adorable Professor Warde can be or trying not to cry at the violence in some of the Subcultures media. AND I spent about thirty minutes after the most recent poetry slam talking to another girl in my Subcultures class about how we should do our final project on British nerd culture and/or Nerdfighteria, something that I’ve actually been thinking for a while. We’ve decided that we’re going to try to convince Dr. J to let us do a partnered project. It could be pretty fantastic, I’m not going to lie.

And, while I’m not as utterly thrilled by the various quirkinesses of Mac anymore, I still see the occasional thing that makes me ridiculously happy. Notably, the April Fool’s posters around campus,

this book I found by accident in the library,

Mac Yarn’s fuzzy attack on the benches of campus,

and these signs that appeared around campus just in time for Spring Sampler (the time when the PFs flood campus):

In the past month I’ve also gone to one awesome performance and one terrible one.  The bad show was an experimental theater and dance performance entitled “Rations” which was so pretentious I almost expired from trying not to laugh. Or cry. One of the two. The less said about it, the better, although there was one brief pre-show performance that was absolutely wonderful. It was called “Vegetable Love” and was basically an ode to gardening and a series of vegetables. It was also performed in the snow, which I imagine was a slightly different effect than was intended…Also they gave us homemade bread with honey afterwards, so that was good.

The awesome one was the Mac Slams’ post-CUPSI  (College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational) feature. All of the poets were performing the poems they’d worked on extra hard for the completion as well as a few random new ones and, possibly for the first time, I thoroughly enjoyed every single one of them. And by enjoyed I mean, sometimes I cried a lot, but they were all excellent. It was also in our newly renovated student lounge—named The Loch (I mean, really Mac??)—which is rather gorgeous and fancy.

In other poetry related news, Thursday was Poem in Your Pocket Day, which I only know because Grandmarina sent me a poster and flyer from the Poetry Foundation which I put up outside my room. 

I also SPOed poems anonymously to a bunch of my friends (although they all guessed it was me, unsurprisingly) in celebration. And, because this month is National Poetry Month, I’ve been decorating our whiteboard with quotations from spring-related poems.

And, lastly, our poetry wall is becoming a bit cramped.

Mostly because I actually cannot help myself. I may have an addiction to poetry. But hey, the first step is admitting it, right?

Anyway that’s all (and by “all” I apparently mean six pages) I have for now, so I will just wish you all a happy National Poetry Month and Earth Day and generally a happy spring!

I love you all!