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
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.")
