Hello. Again.

So. It's been a year. How about that?

Anyhow.

Major Life Happenings: I did indeed go on that pilgrimage to Spain. It was one of the best experiences of my life. I made it through my first year of college with a reasonable degree of success and I'm now in my sophomore year at St. John's.

Smaller (But Significant) Life Happenings: I will eat large chunks of raw tomato in certain foods but still not on the pesto pizza in the cafeteria. I can walk 20 miles a day if I want to and can order ice cream in Spanish when I'm in Spain. I think in Mexico they use a different word then helado. My current favorite book is Freddy and Fredericka by Mark Helprin which I am reading out loud with my room mate.

Ramblings:

So I've been thinking about writing lately. It's writing season here at St. John's instead of exam season which means a lot of time is spent in my room hunched over my laptop. And I begin to remember that I actually enjoy writing. And because I'm hunched over my laptop that means I find new ways to procrastinate, i.e., watching VlogBrothers videos and reading blogs. Which means that I think about this blog and debate about if I should try to resuscitate it. To be frank, I was a little hesitant. The internet is a funny place. It allows us to create virtual temples to ourselves (I mean, how many people honestly care that I like the music I do? Maybe 5?) with the hope that more worshippers will come along to pay homage to us. This is a belief that the internet facilitates and consequently I was nervous to resurrect this blog because I know that I like to worship at the Small Temple of Me.

However, the internet facilitates a lot of beliefs besides the belief in Self. It encourages people to believe in cooperative communities and artistic expression and there are websites for practically every philosophy and religion and conspiracy theory under the sun. But the people I almost always think when considering the internet is the VlogBrothers. I love them both but Hank Green is kind of my favorite. Which is funny in light of my recent rant of how the internet is creating cults of personalities and Hank Green does have an extremely fervent following. However I don't think that Hank Green views his vlogs in the same way that all of those 13 year olds who made MySpace pages did. But Hank Green always renews my belief in the amazing opportunities that the internet has given us and will give us in the future and his video yesterday regarding human creation got me inspired to create again. You should just watch the video, it's very inspiring.

After watching this I remembered the excitement of creating things, good things, bad things, crafty things, writing things, all of the things! I wrote five pages of a math essay in a few hours that would ordinarily take days of thought. I talked with my mom on the phone for two hours and had a leisurely lunch with my room mate. I remembered where this blog was. And hopefully not all this creation will be for my ego as I sometimes fear, but as Hank Green says in his video, that I will eventually begin to consciously create myself. Not exalting in the self, but seeing the deficiencies or the opportunities for improvement or just how to be happier. Which I think is the hope of most philosophies or religions or conspiracy theories, that the people who hear of them will bear witness to a truth. And that that truth will cause them to see themselves and others in a new light and they will begin to consciously shape themselves in accordance with that truth.

So I will choose to see this blog as an opportunity to make myself a better writer for future school papers and if I happen to entertain anyone else that's great. There's no thoughts for a format other then that I will try to write at least a paragraph or two for this once a week, but the topics will probably be diverse. I think I'm going to try to be less autobiographical but not entirely academic either since that's what school is for. Ultimately, this is for fun.

I'll be talking to y'all soon.

Wrapping Things Up

Hah! Lab essay and Greek essay are out of the way, just leaving my don rag this Tuesday and my math essay due just before Christmas break. I realize I neglected to mention what a don rag is in my last post. Since St. John's doesn't emphasize grades (you have to ask to see your grades) don rags are how we get an idea of how we're doing, what we should keep doing, and what we need to work on. The format is once a semester until our senior year we meet all of our tutors, excepting music, and they talk about us in the third person. For instance, "Miss SoandSo is doing well in participation regarding her math class perhaps too well..." etc. After they finish talking you are able to respond to their comments, ranging anywhere from "That's wildly unfair!" or "Yes, I had noticed that I needed to study my Greek paradigms more, I will do so in the future."It's a bit intimidating but most people find it extremely helpful. We don't do it in our senior year unless we request it as the assumption is is that by that time you should be able to assess your own work fairly. I'm not anxious about my don rag but I'm hoping I'll get some useful criticism out of it. There are definitely areas I need to work in but overall I feel I'm doing pretty well, although that assessment might change afterwards.

Regarding academics we've just moved out of biology in Lab and now we're on physics. I'm not sure if I like this change but it's difficult for me to not like Lab. In math I feel like I understand ratios for the first time but I'm still not looking forward to that essay. For Greek I read a work by Nietzsche for the first time even though he's definitely not an ancient Greek. But he wrote an amazing book at the age of 25 titled The Birth of Tragedy. I don't like nihilism but the book is not about nihilism, it examines how Greek tragedy came to be and what it means to man. It's a bit of a downer for college students. "See what he did at 25? Will you be able to write something so astounding in seven years? I thought not." I've read a great deal of Plato lately for seminar even though it's nowhere near the collected works. Meno, Gorgias, Apology, Crito, are fairly short dialogues but The Republic is twelve books (or chapters) long and it has metaphors within metaphors making it easy to get confused. I still have six Platonic works to go before the end of the year and a good portion of Aristotle that we'll continue next year. But it's nicely broken up with the plays including the Oedipus cycle and more history. It's terribly interesting most of the time, a little boring at others, and a lot of hard work. But it's a blast.

The day after my don rag I will be coming home for Thanksgiving with a couple of friends as well! I'm very excited as this is the first big Thanksgiving my family has had in several years. The guest list is coming out to ten people, maybe twelve instead of four or five. My mother has been giving me regular updates of all the work she and my father are doing to clean the house, the yard, and get cars ready. They've been working very hard for over two weeks now and I'm quite proud of them and how our house is going to look. It's rather ridiculous how much I miss my mother's cooking and I'll get to taste some of her best work in just a few days. And I have the pleasure of distributing presents too for even though I'm trying to be miserly with my own wants I find it very difficult to resist buying things for other people.

Nothing earth shattering to report in my own social life other than settling into a comfortable pattern with some of the nicest people I've had the privilege to know. There is the Christmas celebration we're planning even though we won't be spending Christmas time together. One friend suggested that we have a gift exchange on December 6th which is St. Nicholas Day. St. Nicholas Day is when the French used to have their own feasts and gift exchanges since Christmas was a religious holiday. I already have a person who I'm supposed to get something for but I have no idea what to get him/her. Hopefully a thought will occur. I have been introduced to Pablo Neruda recently so I'm having fun getting acquainted with his poems and maybe other Latin American poets later. I'm starting to know Santa Fe and the area around it better but I'm looking forward to further exploration.

I can't wait to see all of you at home, some over Thanksgiving, others over Christmas but it'll be wonderful to see you! If only I could bring home all of my friends from college to meet all of you and then what a party we would have!

The Novelty of November

My seminar essay is done! November is here, Thanksgiving is just a few weeks away! Of course, don rags, a math essay, a lab essay, and a Greek essay are also just a few weeks away but I will be able to enjoy my Thanksgiving in relative peace. I can't wait for the food, the family, the realization that I'll be home in just a couple of weeks for Christmas break! Yes. November is good even if there's a lot of school still to be done.

Here's an update on the plans I alluded to last time:

Unfortunately I did not get to any Day of the Dead celebrations. Not for lack of trying, I just misread the webpage and the place I went to had no celebrations going on. I still got Day of the Dead souvenirs though because they're so beautifully and hilariously morbid. No pumpkin carving happened either because seminar essays were due Halloween day and no one had time or energy to carve, least of all me. However I still did celebrate Halloween in some small ways. I dressed up for seminar as Jekyll and Hyde and afterwards some dorm mates and I went on the college student version of trick or treating: vending machines. We watched It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown! while we ate our Snickers and Butterfingers.

We have officially begun meetings of the Offbeat Domestics, an organization dedicated to all the things we would have loved if any of us had taken home ec classes: knitting, crocheting, baking, and possibly fermentation (yogurt, kefir, sauerkraut, kimchi.) Our main purposes meeting currently are to read Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot mystery, Death on the Nile, out loud while the others knit and crochet. As you might guess most members are female but men are welcome. We're especially motivated to knit and crochet now since the weather has finally taken a turn to the brisk (we had a lovely snow this morning) and we're all thinking of hats and scarves. It's one of my favorite things to do now, not just because Death on the Nile is a masterfully crafted novel, but I get to spend time with some of my favorite people.

I've avoided mentioning this in the fear of jinxing it even though I alluded to it last post but I'm going to be brave: I'm planning on going to Spain next summer to walk the Camino de Santiago or The Way of St. James. I'll be walking it with a college friend's family and some other friends as well. The Camino de Santiago is one of Christianity's most famous pilgrimages, comparable to the pilgrimage to Jerusalem and Francigena to Rome. We'll be taking the French Way, starting in a tiny town in France and walking across the border into Spain. Our final destination is Santiago de Compostela, home to the cathedral that houses the remains of St. James, patron saint of Spain and one of the original twelve disciples. People have been walking the 500 miles through Basque country in order to do penance or receive a miracle or to find themselves for over a thousand years. Martin Sheen just starred in a movie called the Way that tells the story of a father estranged from his son who died before he could be reconciled with him. The son was walking the Camino de Santiago but he died before he could finish so Martin Sheen decides to walk the Camino in honor of his son. Here's a link for the trailer: http://theway-themovie.com/. I've been wanting to go on pilgrimage ever since I read The Sacred Journey. I'm not completely sure what I'm in for but it could be amazing, terrible, or amazingly terrible. It's worth the risk.

I hope all of you have a great week. I know I'm planning on it!

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. 

These Are a Few of My Favorite Things

There are so many things that I love about college. Here's a few of them. 


Weekends are lovely. I never really appreciated weekends until I got here. It's so easy during the summer when both parents are retired to lose track of what day it is or even how far into the month you are but there is no possibility of that here. Or more precisely if I want to do well it's not possible. I have to know what day it is because my Greek class is at different times on different days. Do I need to read Goethe for Lab tonight (he didn't just write Faust) or can I postpone it? TGIF has taken on whole new levels of meaning for me. It means that I get to go to a lecture for fun about how the brain is formed in infants and the best part is I don't have to take notes. It means I can try to sleep in the morning although my internal clock refuses to let me sleep past 8 anymore. But I can lay in bed and pretend that I'm going back to sleep. It means I won't feel rushed about squeezing in study time between classes and sleeping. Weekends. They're the best.


Last Sunday for instance was a particularly good day. I felt like such a grown up at the end of it. I'd done almost all of my homework on Saturday and so I felt perfectly able to take the bus to church by myself. I'd already done it once with one of my dorm mates and I'd been downtown a couple of times so I was pretty well acquainted with the plaza area. All was going well until my bus driver dropped me off at a stop that was definitely not where I had gone last time.
"Today there's a big parade going on for Fiesta and they've blocked off the usual stop for it so you just turn left down there and you'll get there just fine."
"Ok." I assumed that this was going to be the place where I'd meet the bus again since they were already blocking off streets but I discovered later it was not. 


Fiesta is a big deal. It's a three day weekend with a parade every day and Sunday is the last day, culminating in the biggest parade of all lasting two hours and you're sure that 3/4 of the Santa Fe natives are on one of the floats. Everyone with anything to sell be it an idea, a politician, a hot tub, or a Boy Scout troop has a place. But the parade hadn't actually started yet so all I had to wend through was several vendors and the early birds grabbing the best pieces of sidewalk to watch. I got to the cathedral just in time to hear all of the bells pealing wildly and see several costumed characters emerging, Conquistadors, Franciscan monks, Native Americans, and the Donnas and their beautiful daughters. I assumed that since a big event had obviously just finished that there wasn't going to be a noon Mass in 15 minutes. I made a lot of assumptions that day. I wandered around to waste time until the 1 o'clock bus but when I wended back by the church I was informed that I couldn't go in because Mass was ongoing. So I slipped in in time for Communion and found myself with another hour to waste until the 2 o'clock bus. Luckily for me the parade had just begun. 


I didn't understand how there could be enough people for a two hour parade. I live in a town larger than Santa Fe and a parade lasts maybe an hour. But Santa Fe is much older and has a richer culture. And everyone here understands that half the fun of a parade is being in it. I walked past a yellow bus disguised as the Yellow Submarine with the Walrus and the Eggman escorting it, several bands including bagpipes and mariachi, more Conquistadors mounted on horses, and Ninja Prairie Dogs fighting Crows. I finally reached my most recent bus stop to discover that it too had been blocked off by the splendid parade. But if you stand around looking confused with a bus route map traffic directors will take pity on you. I managed to get on the bus and out of Fiesta with very little difficulty and I felt positively adult at the end of it.


Mail is another thing that makes me feel adult except without most of the annoying bills. Even in this age of blogs, email, Skype, and cell phones there is something very exciting about sending and receiving mail. Notices about lectures, concerts, hikes, paychecks (yes I've managed to keep my job long enough to get paid) and plenty of uninteresting info is stuffed into my tiny box every day. I've sent postcards to my family and I've received packages in return, my favorite being the most recent once containing fresh fruit, books I forgot, photos, and notes from my parents. Hopefully I'll be able to keep the pattern of outgoing mail as it seems rather unfair that I'm getting so many treats and I'm just happily receiving them.


Movie nights. 3:10 to Yuma is amazing. I'd never seen it before and the amount of time we spent talking about honor when we were reading the Iliad was actually useful. Up was not any more meaningful unfortunately but I still love it. I'm hoping I can talk someone into watching a musical with me this week. I do not love all musicals *cough Oklahoma! cough* but they do seem to dominate my favorite movie lists. I'm thinking Hello Dolly! or My Fair Lady. Barbara Streisand and Walter Matthau or Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison. Oh the dilemma. 


I'll try to avoid having a blog post where I talk about all of the things I hate about college. Greek for instance is really messing up my perception of the letter "p". Because in Greek the letter Rho looks just like a lower case "p"  but it's pronounced like the letter "r." So now when I see a "p" I have to think about it for a moment even if I'm not in Greek. So yeah, college stinks if that's my greatest problem.