To start, on
Monday the Doty 4 girls (not all of us, unfortunately, but most of the cool
people) and I went on bus adventure to go to an actual afternoon teatime
(instead of the impromptu ones in our rooms) at a restaurant in Uptown
Minneapolis called Brits’ Pub. It’s apparently a pretty famous place, but since
we went on Labor Day, everything was pretty empty. (Also it was the afternoon.
At a pub.) We all got our own personal pots of tea (most of us chose Earl Grey,
but the more adventurous of us picked some sort of Japanese cherry green tea
that was apparently pretty delicious)
and then they brought out three beauteous
tiered tea trays full of goodies: scones and lavender bread and Devonshire
cream and cucumber sandwiches and bread pudding.
In all honesty, it was way too much food, but
we had so much fun sampling our goodies and chatting and generally being the
ridiculous fools that we are. And most of the food (particularly the scones—YUM)
was actually really good. It was really reminiscent of the tea my parents and I
had when we were in Glasgow, so it must have been at least decently authentic.
Left: What Emma did when requested by Charmaine to make her "classiest Brit face." Why, nobody knows. Right: More goodies!!
[Photo credit for both: Charmaine]
I’ve also
spent much of the last week running errands and going to various old haunts and
generally getting used to being back: I went to Target, CVS, and the art supply store
(gorgeous but intimidating), narrowly avoided entering Garrison Keillor’s
bookstore (Common Good) which is cunningly located directly underneath the Mac textbook
store to lure in unwary students, discovered that my door unlocks differently
from EVERY OTHER DOOR EVER, cried over the end of Coffee News (my supplier of
tea lattes and pumpkin bars of joy), started this year’s poetry wall, obtained
a mini-fridge, got my first sandwich from The Cheese Shop (gorgonzola with pear
confit and arugula), etc. Charmaine and I also attended our first floor meeting
for Big3 (Macalester students have this compulsive need to shorten the name of
EVERYTHING, so the third floor of Bigelow becomes Big3, the Bigelow-Wallace-30
Macalester St. complex becomes 30BigWall, and absolutely everything else is
reduced to initialisms), where we attempted to learn everyone’s name and categorically
failed. Especially since we were going around the room reciting everyone’s name
in order and we had an Allison, Alice, Laurel, Hannah, Anna, and Annie all in a
row. It got extremely confusing. They seem like a nice bunch, though.
Amusingly, my new co-ed floor has 32 girls and 5 boys, which is a much less
drastic change from last year than Charmaine and I were expecting. Afterwards,
the whole floor trooped downstairs to where Mac had ordered an ice cream truck
for the upperclassmen dorms. Charmaine, for whom this was her first ice cream
truck experience, was very excited but simultaneously terribly cast down that
they weren’t playing the music.
And now for
the first day(s) of classes! These were (of course) a source of great anxiety
for me, but they all went pretty well. Here’s a brief run-down of my classes.
Visual
Culture: 9:40-10:40, MWF
I wasn’t really looking forward
to this class, to be honest, but it’s required for my (planned) art history
major and I thought I’d just get it out of the way. But the professor seems
really nice and fascinated by her subject, so that’s always a good sign. It
seems like it might be a really good class—we’re going to be studying not only
traditional artworks, but also advertisements, magazines, comics, etc. Anything
that can be considered “visual culture” is up for discussion. [According to an
amazing statistic my professor, the average American sees 5,000 advertisements
and/or branded objects per day. I found twenty just in my line of sight in my
classroom.) Additionally, I think I’ll be getting a nice foundation in art
language that will be helpful for my art history courses. This is the only
class I’ve already had two days of, and I really enjoyed both.
This class is also in the brand
new Janet Wallace Fine Arts Center that’s been under construction for the last
several years. It’s nice to see campus without the cranes and construction
zones. The new building is really quite lovely, even though it unfortunately doesn’t
hold with the original aesthetic of the college (which is my favorite of the
many confused architectural styles happening on the Mac campus).
Drawing:
1:10-4:20, MW
This was the class I was most terrified
for because, although I have a certain amount of confidence in my ability to succeed
in (or at least pass) any academic class I put my mind to taking, I have much
less confidence in my ability to teach my body and brain to work together to
draw things. Or be taught how to do that. Either way, it’s a much scarier class
for me than most.
But now that the first day is
over, I’m feeling much more confident about the whole endeavor. Our teacher is
very kind and has clearly anticipated the kind of nerves I’m feeling. Not only
was our first assigned reading from Drawing
on the Right Side of the Brain (a passage that I basically interpreted as
saying, “Don’t worry, guys, we all drew in strange ways as children, all got
frustrated with our abilities as we got older, and all gave up learning about
it by middle school. So don’t fret if you still draw like an eleven year-old!”),
but our first project was basically an artistic ice-breaker.
After we’d finished going through the syllabus and doing our “getting to
know you” exercises, she sent us all out into the world (or at least into the
area surrounding the art building) to find sticks. She said they should be
about fifteen inches long, but gave us no other requirements. When we’d
returned, sticks clutched in nervous hands, she told us that we’d be pairing up
to draw portraits of each other with drippy black ink and…our sticks. We were
only allowed to hold them by the very end and we had to use whatever end-type
our stick had—no alterations allowed! We also only had five minutes. The upshot
of this, of course, was that no one
could do a good job and no one could
fuss over erasing and re-drawing this line or that. What we drew stuck (and
sometimes oozled down the page) and we didn’t have much time (or facility of
movement) to make sure that what we drew was good. There wasn’t any of that, “Oh,
hey, that kid has clearly had artistic training before” or any agonizing over
the shape of an ear. We just had to draw.
It really made me feel more relaxed about the whole thing, besides being rather
entertaining.
My stick, released back into nature (as recommended) with a
black tip.
18th
Century British Literature: 9:40-10:40, TR
I’m mostly taking this class for
the professor and, as expected, he is so far pretty awesome. Additionally, if I’m
going to take an 18th century course (and it fills a requirement
slot for the English major), I should definitely take it from someone whose specialty
(and particular love) it is. So far the class is looking pretty interesting,
although there are already some students who I can tell are going to drive me
up wall.
Professor Chudgar’s way of teaching is very different from a lot of more traditional
English classes (less thesis statements, more first person, no historical
criticism, etc.) and this tends to cause a lot of anxiety among his students at
the beginning of the year. Which I understand—I’m still never sure if I’m
doing/have done the right thing for his papers until I get them back—but a lot
of students ask really annoying questions or totally miss the point of the exercise.
On Thursday he was trying to get us to have a conversation about the language
and form of a particular modern passage in comparison to that of an eighteenth
century passage and this one girl leapt in with this (LOUD) angry criticism of
the subject matter. WHICH WAS NOT THE POINT!! (Her arguments, I might add, had
no basis in knowledge, fact, or conviction. The thrust of her justification
was, “I don’t know, I have the notes from a WGSS class to prove it.” All hail
the god of notes!)
Harlem
Renaissance: 1:20-2:50, TR
I’m pretty excited for this
class because not only will we be covering the literature of the Harlem
Renaissance, but also the music, the photography, and the art. So much was
happening in this period—it will be amazing to get to learn about it all as
connected movement. The professor seems really nice but also incredibly
scatter-brained. We got lost on about fifteen tangents while going through the
syllabus, few of which had anything to noticeably link them to the contents of
the packet she’d given us, including but not limited to: the supposed benefits
of organic foods, the current decline of the humanities in higher education, the
life story of my professor, and the phenomenon of reading books a too young an
age to be able to deal with the themes addressed within. It should be a fun
class, but I anticipate lots of discursive conversations.
Although I
am generally very glad to be back at Macalester, I admit to disliking the
return to dorm showers and Café Mac. Luckily, Café Mac is clearly trying to put
a new foot forward. Apparently we have lots of new chefs and new management.
The food is so far about on par with last year (although it’s definitely trying to be fancier—there was
bacon-pear soup today), but maybe it will improve. Additonally, they’ve clearly
tried to fancy-up the building itself. We now have all of these silly, hollow
wooden boxes holding up the utensil containers, jam bowls, and salad dressings,
as well as classier sign boards (although one of them shows these gorgeous
fresh peaches, which is MAKING ME ANGRY BECAUSE THERE ARE NO PEACHES IN CAFÉ MAC)
and cereal dispensers.
On the good
side of a return to dorm life, though, it’s lovely having friends so close-by.
And all my fears that the Doty 4 girls would grow apart now that we’re
scattered across campus seem so far to be for naught—we’ve already had nearly
everyone visit for extended chats. Sorcha even found the time to put a bear on
her head.
And having
Charmaine as my roommate again is really lovely. We’ve gotten pretty close by
now, so we can talk about the serious stuff and then about which Avenger is our
favorite (The Avengers came up for a
reason, I promise) all within the span of an hour or two. Charmaine’s been
going through some difficult stuff right now, but she seems to be doing okay
overall and we still manage to fit in time for total ridiculousness.
As for the
story behind why we were talking about The
Avengers, here’s what happened. Since I moved in, the room directly below
ours (which I pass everyday on the way down the stairs) has had a drawing of
Iron Man on their bulletin board. Naturally, I began to wonder if he was
lonely, so I printed out a picture of Captain America and sneak-attack taped it
up next to Iron Man. Charmaine and I have since decided to just keep adding
Avengers until someone takes them down. We may even have them start having
conversations with each other. Hopefully the unknown residents of this mystery
room will find this as amusing as we do.
This has not
been my only bulletin/whiteboard related prank. A couple of days ago Cassidy
and/or Emily drew a tiny TARDIS on our whiteboard, so yesterday I pinned an “I believe in Sherlock poster” to their
bulletin board in response. Charmaine is planning to add a triceratops (See
below for the explanation. I promise I’m going somewhere with this.). I can see
that we’re going to have an awesome year of drawing/poster exchanges.
I’m not sure
what else to write about, so I guess we’ll just have to talk about the weather……For
realzies, though, it’s been crazy. Up until a few days ago, it was pretty miserably
humid and hot, the kind of weather where you sit in front of your fan whenever
you can manage wearing the least clothing you can get away with in public. But
then, a few days ago, the temperature just plummeted and now I’m wearing jeans
and drinking hot tea. It’s like Minneapolis-St. Paul realized it was time for
fall and ran to catch up.
Pretty popcorn clouds and ominous rainclouds.
The other
day, while talking to Clara on the phone, I wandered down to the river and back.
It was nice to just get to go for a stroll along Summit (the street with all of
the lovely Victorian mansions) and look at all the houses and the campus of St.
Thomas. Besides which, the river is gorgeous as well (although the breeze off
of it is frigid). I saw some adorable stuff along the way that I can’t help but
share, so here goes that (sorry there aren’t many pictures—it’s hard to take a
picture with your phone while having a conversation on it).
A tiny free lending library on the property line between two peoples' houses!
A tomato plant whose sign says (in case you can't read it), "Help yourself!"
Mostly, my
time’s just been spent hanging out with friends and working on homework. Today
Charmaine and Rachel and I studied at The Tea Garden for a couple of hours and
a couple of days ago Keo sprawled on our floor and told us adorable stories
about her girlfriend. I love being back where this kind of easy interaction is
so simple—all we need to do is walk a little ways and there they are!
Today I also
got to watch the newest episode of doctor who with a big group of devoted fans.
We basically took over the student lounge, which was incredibly fun. It’s extra
great to watch it with all of these people who laugh at the same jokes and
bring their sonic screwdrivers to the viewing and shout “Arthur Weasley!” and “Lestrade!”
when they see actors they recognize. I didn’t even know most of them (although
Cassidy and Emily and Charmaine and this kid I recently met named Kyle were there),
but it was kind of like a mini version of going to the midnight premiers of the
Harry Potter movies. Half of the fun is just the energy and fandom love in the room.
(Also there’s free popcorn in the lounge.) The episode itself was pretty good, although
the ending was a bit troubling. And in
the episode (because this is the campiest show out there), there were dinosaurs
on a spaceship. And, inexplicably, the triceratopses (is that even a word?!)
were kind of cuddly and adorable and liked to play fetch. Naturally, this means
that my friends and I all now have a burning desire to adopt a triceratops.
(See, Mom, I told you that Sherlock was a less dangerous addiction!
It only made me want to adopt a hedgehog. Or a John Watson. Either way.)
Anyway, it’s
been a pretty great week and I’m really looking forward to next week when my
classes will really get down to doing
things!
Love you all
and DFTBA!
P.S. I meant
to post room photos this week, but I didn’t get around to taking them earlier,
and now it’s too dark to do the room justice. So tune in next week for a glimpse
of our lovely new room!
The view from my window.
P.P.S. Yes,
I will be posting next week—I’m sticking
with my original schedule of every-other-Saturdays, so this one just counts as
a slipped-in extra so that I could cover the first week while it was still fresh
in my mind.
