Planning

It's been a quiet week overall but there's been a lot of planning for the future and some fulfillment of some of those plans. They involve 21st birthday parties (which surprisingly have very little alcohol involved), Salvadorian food, Agatha Christie novels, pumpkin carving, skeletal mariachi bands, and a pilgrimage to Spain. More details will come later regarding the plans as several of them will come to fruition soon enough but I will expand on a few of them. There's also been the usual schoolwork but I'll try to keep that to the minimum.

My dorm is very friendly but we decided that we needed a cohesive group activity since not everyone comes to movie night since tastes differ so much in movies. On Friday Gabriela, whose family is from Salvador, took us out for Salvadorian food which was a vague concept for me. I knew that Salvadorian people ate so Salvadorian food obviously existed but what it was was a mystery to me. I thought that corn was probably involved. I was right in that aspect. Gabriela took us to a wonderful little hole in the wall restaurant, the kind of place that's perfect for 15 college students with a little cash and large appetites. You can get a meal for $5 and if you feel like splurging another few dollars you can get a wonderful drink like tamarind juice or a cinnamon rice drink that I think is called horchata. Most of us got pupusas (imagine two thick, homemade corn tortillas sandwiching white cheese and whatever meat or vegetable you want) and we split several plates of fried plantains. All of the food was new to me but definitely my favorite discovery was fried plantains. They were not what I expected at all as the only description I'd ever heard of them was "tough bananas." As Ms. Austen would say, "we had a merry time of it." The guys were especially entertaining to watch as they competed in eyebrow wars (lifting individual eyebrows in the most comical way possible) and bought bouncy balls and tiny rubber orange ninjas from the quarter machines. We're hoping to go for dinner as a dorm once a month and we're already planning on Indian food next time.

Next weekend is Halloween weekend and there are many festivities that I'm set on observing. We're already scoping out the pumpkin patch at the Methodist church just down the road and there's a book of extreme pumpkin carving in the bookstore that looks very interesting. Roasted pumpkin seeds are so tasty too. And since this is Santa Fe that means we get Day of the Dead celebrations. Sugar skulls and skeletons everywhere! I love Halloween so getting to go to Day of the Dead is pure gold for me. It's going to be madness trying to get there and back but it'll be worth it. My mother in particular wants a miniature mariachi band with skeletons as the musicians. It'll be hard to resist the temptation to buy everything I see as Santa Fe is famous for their artists and I love pretty, morbid things.

I'm afraid that I can't help writing more about my seminar essay but for almost all of the freshman class it's the point around which our lives, fears, and hopes are revolving around right now. We wake up in the middle of the night thinking of how we could rewrite that paragraph to make it more cohesive. I had to throw out the entirety of my rough draft that I turned in last week. Which is a normal activity for me. I have to write at least 1 page of pointless drabble for whatever I'm writing before I figure out what I want to write about and how to go about saying it. In this case it just happened to be 4 1/2 pages of drabble. The problem was is that Agamemnon (the tragedy I'm writing about, see previous post for summary) is not a true tragedy so I forgot that it was supposed to be one. I wrote as if there was a way the whole situation could've been avoided if everyone had just been sensible. But then I read Antigone which is a true tragedy and the wonderful, horrible sense of inevitability of the whole situation awakened me to a sense of what tragedy is again. Agamemnon is not a true tragedy because it has hope at the end of it that there will be some kind of redemption or revenge. Antigone does not possess that so it is a better tragedy and play in my opinion. So I'm rewriting again and I feel like it's going much better this time. Hopefully my tutors will think so too.

I'm afraid I have to call it a night but I will try and expand a little more next time on how our plans are developing.

Greek Soap Operas and Dragons

Lovely last two weeks but somewhat stressful with school work. Last weekend my parents visited me and dropped off so many delicious goodies (including smoke Gouda and ripe pears) that I am still not done with all of them yet and I have a college student's appetite. My mother made Julia Child's Beouf Bourguigon, my favorite meal in the world and reheated it in the tiny adobe my parents had rented. It was also her birthday that Sunday so we went to Mass at the cathedral and afterwards bought fancy, horribly expensive chocolates. But Dad is never happy visiting his girls until he buys them something to make sure they have everything they could possibly ever need so we went grocery shopping. On my mother's birthday. We had fun though because Whole Foods, which is not present in my town, is amazing and a lot of fun to wander around in. We even found a beautiful little lemon cake with birthday candles so we were able to have birthday cake with a homecooked dinner back at the adobe. During this lovely weekend I managed to get my math paper written and turned in on time without feeling like it was a horrible mess. I still haven't gotten any feedback yet on it so wish me luck.

This week I'm working on my first rough draft of my seminar essay. It has to be on one of the books we've read in seminar so I'm writing it on the Oresteia, the only tragic trilogy of plays to survive ancient Greece. I love it because it's reads like a soap opera. Day time television could learn a lot from this. In it Atreus (Agamemnon's father) feeds Thyestes (Atreus' brother) Thyestes' own children to teach him a lesson for betraying him. Next generation, Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter, Iphigenia, to the gods in order to get good winds so the fleet of Greek ships can leave to fight the Trojan War. When Agamemnon comes back from the Trojan War his wife Clytemnestra kills him to avenge Iphigenia. Clytemnestra is also carrying on an affair with Aegisthus, Agamemnon's cousin, who is the last surviving child of Thyestes and is getting his revenge on Agamemnon for Atreus killing his siblings. And finally, Orestes, the son of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, kills Clytemnestra for killing Agamemnon. Orestes gets away with it even though the Furies are chasing him because Athena decides that a mother is not a parent, only the father is, therefore Orestes did not really commit a crime. That's Greek tragedy for you.

So I'm writing about a Greek soap opera while I'm sinking into greater levels of Nerdom than I thought possible. I thought I was a pretty good nerd before I got here. Star Wars, Star Trek, Harry Potter, etc. But now Gabriela has shown me the magnificence of Doctor Who and the guys downstairs have roped me into a Dungeons and Dragons game. I feel that it's inevitable like a moon being trapped by a planet's gravitational force. I'm in close enough proximity with such powerful nerds that I can't help becoming like them. But I'm having so much fun that I can't complain. I get to pretend to be a ninja/demolitions expert on the weekends and I get to explore the universe with the adorable Matt Smith. No problem there.

I miss home but I'm not terribly homesick yet. I miss my dogs a lot even with Seymour and Lucy, the on campus dogs. I miss running into old friends and my local library and my book club. I miss mindless fun novels. I miss fresh fruit runs to the orchards on the weekends. I miss visiting my sister in Denver. I miss couches to lounge on in living rooms at home or friends homes. I miss microwaves. I miss my parents. I miss cooking for myself. I miss having dirt under my fingernails and helping harvest over 50 lbs. of potatoes from my gardens. I miss hearing the train cars crash into each other at night when the train operators are careless. But I do get to hear the coyotes yipping at night. And I get to see amazing sunsets off my dorm mate's balcony. I get to write about Greek soap operas. I like to watch people tease the koi fish in the pond. I get to watch the woodpeckers tap on the pinyons and the resident murder of crows growl at each other. I get to share emergency snacks with friends after an exhausting, frustrating seminar.  I get to wander around beautiful buildings much older than anything I've lived around before. I miss home but I'm enjoying my time enough to make it more sweet than bitter.

From the War Front

I'm a terrible blogger. Now that I've got my mea culpa out of the way here's some updates from the trenches.

I'm enjoying all of my classes but Lab is awesome. It's the only class I'm in that is not focusing on the ancient Greeks and I have to say that I enjoy the break. We've read Aristotle but we read a good number of 17th and 18th century authors simply because before the 17th century science didn't exist in the way we think of it now. The ancient Greeks were not big on experimentation so mostly they argue with each other on points neither of them can prove with a lot of their own philosophy thrown in. This is when I become completely jaded about the usefulness of logic because most of the time their conflicting scientific philosophies are logically sound, they just lack facts. But we've read a lot of real scientists as well so it balances out. We just finished out cat dissection which took 2 weeks. Thank you again Dr. Korow for your Advanced Biology class, it's only now that I'm here that I'm truly appreciating what I learned. I volunteered to dissect the pregnant cat (yes, I am a terrible person and PETA can take me away when I'm done here) and learned sooooooooo much about the reproductive system. I'm still a bit horrified at all the things my lab partners and I did to those cat fetuses but it was not futile mutilation.

Music class is so different from what I expected. The ancient Greeks had a lot of opinions about what made good music and it's surprising how much it influenced the development of music like Gregorian chants and I don't know what else. Plato was so particular about what made good music that in his Republic he only allowed for two modes of music. A man was kicked out of Sparta for adding strings to his instrument and adding complexity to melodies, thereby corrupting the youth with his wild music. Gregorian chants avoid tritones like the Black Death because they are the devil's note and the ancient Greeks hated it just as much as the Christians. People put much greater thought into what made good music, as in good for the soul, not just what sells well. I have to say I'm glad though that we can have more than two modes of music without getting thrown out of Sparta. Although with how my first Greek paper went I might get sent to Sparta.

It's our joke in Greek class that if you screw up you'll get sent to Sparta (which is not a nice place to go if you're not Spartan) and I'm worried that my Greek paper will get me a one way ticket. Papers are so different at St. John's that I'm having a hard time wrapping my brain around them. "Profound Superficiality" is my new favorite phrase from my Greek tutor Mr. Rawn. All the Greek tutors help with student papers along with tormenting us with demonstrative adjective-pronouns. According to Mr. Rawn we're too young to have any good ideas so instead of trying to form an opinion we should just ask questions of the text and wonder why the author decided to write in this way instead of this. Profound Superficiality. I have a feeling that I failed at my first Greek paper and Mr. Rawn will not be afraid to tell me so but he'll have good explanations for why I failed. My math paper is a different story. I had my first real panic attack regarding this paper. I still have a week to write it but that's not preventing me from obsessing about it. How do you write a paper about geometry? I still have two pages to go so wish me luck.

So far I'm keeping everything balanced well, sleep, general cleanliness, study, work, leisure time, everything except for exercise. It's been a complete failure. Swing dancing is usually very little dancing and mostly lessons so I'm not counting that. I will attempt to rectify this situation by going to the Iron Bookworm this week which is supposed to be incredibly tiring. And hiking. There are some wonderful hikes around here so I'm not quite sure why I'm not taking advantage of these. Especially since the weather is so nice right now what with the arrival of fall. The aspen groves on the mountains are a gorgeous gold in the middle of all the pinyon pines and the air is getting just cool enough that I want to freeze time and keep it like this forever. Until I realize there won't be any snowball fights and then I don't mind so much.

As all of the administrators and support staff here keep reminding me, this is a marathon and it wears on you. I can already feel the strain but it's tolerable. I'm not sure when I'm going to hit the infamous wall (I love Run Fat Boy Run) but hopefully when I do I'll be able to push through it.