Drills, Birds, and Pages
My Hillsdale inbox has informed me seven times in the last three days that there is an Emergency Preparedness Drill on the campus today, and that I Do Not Need to be Alarmed. The irony that the email itself was a kind of alarm seems to have escaped someone. Thing is, all seven came from the same someone. With most of the campus in hibernation for spring break, who left the clock on? (Who? Who, who, who-who?)
Addendum (12:45pm): We now know that there was a fake shooter on campus, that a fake student's death was a fake homicide, and that the fake shooter has been taken into fake custody. And now it's all clear. But that's not fake. No, ma'am...that was real. Real fake. In an emergency, we're gonna fake 'em to death.
--
Watched The Seventh Seal today, and it's barely lunchtime. Shows you what kind of morning I'm having. Now that we've seen death and the Apocalypse, how's about some chicken?
I've begun work on some papers this morning, too. Helps to be on Hillsdale time, I guess. I'm writing my Girard paper on Wicked, and I'm realizing--to my scholastic dismay--that I'm probably going to have to cite from Baum's book, the 1939 movie, and Maguire's book to set up my argument. Poops McGee. I've also visited the Voy forum for the class, posting like rabid to make up for weeks when I didn't make my quota. I'm proud to say that I've cited "Garfield Minus Garfield" and my father's midlife crisis, and have named one of my posts "Von Mises Mimesis."
Birds have been crazy here. One almost nailed the windshield as I drove to the orthodontist, and another tried to kamikaze me when I passed under a tree with a nest in it. But they're singing, too, distant symphonies, and with the pallid blue skies and the sun hard at work to rid the world of ice, the days have been nice.
And now my dog Ajax is chewing on the frayed cuff at the bottom of my jeans. And so on.
--
I also finished the "Firefly" series last night. Good stuff. I want to see the movie now.
My sister is writing her senior thesis on the Inferno, and when she told me that, I laughed too loudly and said, "How many hundreds of pages are you planning it to be?" Since then I've helped her wrangle her intro into cohesion, trying to remember what it was like to write papers in high school. Seems like a cakewalk now. But the song remains the same, mostly--trying to hit main points and seeing structures within structures, dissecting words and sentences until the life is utterly spent. What horrid paragraphs, in educational prose! (You should see the stuff I've churned out lately...that'll turn you to stone, lads.)
In any case, she's writing about the parallels she's finding in modern politics, arguing that the archaic sins of Dante's time haven't left us. Nice.
My mom listens to talk radio now, and this morning she freaked with joy when the host mentioned Hillsdale's Imprimis. Do I really have to go back?
Addendum (12:45pm): We now know that there was a fake shooter on campus, that a fake student's death was a fake homicide, and that the fake shooter has been taken into fake custody. And now it's all clear. But that's not fake. No, ma'am...that was real. Real fake. In an emergency, we're gonna fake 'em to death.
--
Watched The Seventh Seal today, and it's barely lunchtime. Shows you what kind of morning I'm having. Now that we've seen death and the Apocalypse, how's about some chicken?
I've begun work on some papers this morning, too. Helps to be on Hillsdale time, I guess. I'm writing my Girard paper on Wicked, and I'm realizing--to my scholastic dismay--that I'm probably going to have to cite from Baum's book, the 1939 movie, and Maguire's book to set up my argument. Poops McGee. I've also visited the Voy forum for the class, posting like rabid to make up for weeks when I didn't make my quota. I'm proud to say that I've cited "Garfield Minus Garfield" and my father's midlife crisis, and have named one of my posts "Von Mises Mimesis."
Birds have been crazy here. One almost nailed the windshield as I drove to the orthodontist, and another tried to kamikaze me when I passed under a tree with a nest in it. But they're singing, too, distant symphonies, and with the pallid blue skies and the sun hard at work to rid the world of ice, the days have been nice.
And now my dog Ajax is chewing on the frayed cuff at the bottom of my jeans. And so on.
--
I also finished the "Firefly" series last night. Good stuff. I want to see the movie now.
My sister is writing her senior thesis on the Inferno, and when she told me that, I laughed too loudly and said, "How many hundreds of pages are you planning it to be?" Since then I've helped her wrangle her intro into cohesion, trying to remember what it was like to write papers in high school. Seems like a cakewalk now. But the song remains the same, mostly--trying to hit main points and seeing structures within structures, dissecting words and sentences until the life is utterly spent. What horrid paragraphs, in educational prose! (You should see the stuff I've churned out lately...that'll turn you to stone, lads.)
In any case, she's writing about the parallels she's finding in modern politics, arguing that the archaic sins of Dante's time haven't left us. Nice.
My mom listens to talk radio now, and this morning she freaked with joy when the host mentioned Hillsdale's Imprimis. Do I really have to go back?