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.
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