28.2.11

I am a happy camper.


As my roommates can attest, I was cheering all the way through Best Actor, Actress, Director, and Picture.  I was especially excited for Best Picture.  I wanted The King's Speech to win, but I thought for sure it was a toss-up between Inception and Black Swan.
I'm so very glad I was wrong.

m.

23.2.11

Things are getting all turned around.

Even though next week is supposed to be midterms, I don't have anything.  It's all this week.  However, all things considered, it's not that bad.
The way my schedule works is I have something every week (for the most part) instead of a bunch of things in one week.
For example: a test in complex one week, a paper due in theatre the next, then a test in geometry in week three, then a test (complex) and midterm in-class essays the next week, which happens to be this week.  I'm currently working my way through the prompts my theatre prof will ask tomorrow, finally (finally!) reaping the rewards of being an obsessive note-taker and having a freakishly good memory for remembering what happens in books.  (And yet, oddly enough, it takes me a solid three weeks to learn one person's name.)

Even though I have the essays tomorrow and my complex test on Friday, I partially took yesterday off.  I think, though, that it may have something to do with the way my classes went.
I showed up to advanced geo at 8:00 yesterday morning to find colored paper everywhere.  We then proceeded to make butterfly bombs.  (You can see one in action here.  I don't yet have the guts to do it to mine.  The thing took a solid twenty minutes to put together.)
And as a side note: I was telling Tess about butterfly bombs, and she said her first thought upon hearing the term was some kind of shot with vodka and glitter.  Although I prefer what we did, I like that I have friends with excessively active imaginations.
I then went to subversive theatre, where we spent about 10%-20% of the class listening to Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd.  There was context, I swear.  Tom Stoppard kind of context, too.
Then I spent two hours trying to learn how to solve a Rubik's cube (my goal is to know technically how to do it by break)--hint, orientation is everything--and concluded the day by listening to Ken Burns speak.  No, he wasn't on tv, he was on stage in our auditorium.  He talked primarily about his WWII documentary and a bit about the Civil War, but his thesis (hey, I'm in essay mode here) was:
If history is about remembering, then war is about forgetting.
Listening to him was a lot, I imagine, what it would have been like to hear Lincoln speak.  He was highly eloquent and succinct, and he had almost a triple cadence instead of a double when he spoke, so his sentences rolled into each other.
And he said some pretty good stuff, too.

m.

And did I mention?  It's barely dropped below freezing in the past week and a half.  We even got up to 61 degrees last week.

9.2.11

Can someone please explain how this happened?

You know how you have a switchboard that runs your life?  Dials for "sleep," "stress," "caffeine level," you know, stuff like that.
Okay, fine then.  I have one, at least.

I'm not totally sure how the "homework," "busy," and "stress" buttons got turned up and the "run like you're going to be late, because you probably are" button got hit, but it's all happened.  Just this week, I've had a group project due, a presentation, and a paper, and that's not including all of my usual homework, choreographing a dance for Rugcutters (Coe's swing dance club) to perform at Formal, teaching said choreography, plus teaching basic swing, tutoring, or the occasional things I do for fun, like going to talks on Langton's Ants or row-reduced matrices (and the only reason I get to call them "fun" instead of "homework" is because I currently don't need the extra points for my math classes).

It occurs to me:
Classes:
-History of Western Architecture (okay, I'm auditing it because (1) I've already taken it, and (2) I need the information on Gothic and Renaissance cathedrals for my thesis)
-Complex Analysis (evil most evilistist class of evil ever invented)
-Advanced Geometry
-Fiction Workshop
-Honors: Subversive Theatre (fascinating.  It's all about theatre in Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia communist rule)

It also occurs to me the only reason I'm writing this now is because I'm procrastinating on my paper for Subversive Theatre on Vaclav Havel's The Hotel.  Sadly, my thesis cannot be: "Havel lost his touch for this play, as all of the meaning comes from Pechar's singing the theme from Doctor Zhivago through the whole thing."

m.