On a Scale of Check to Plus....
My first 2-page response for MENA came back with a + on it. That's the highest you can get, apparently, with the lowest being a check, and the middle being a check and a plus. Lowest of these gets dropped at semester's end.
I feel almost disappointed, but I'm not going to argue for stricter grading at this juncture.
Am I really that crazy? Overachiever?
This week was lovely. Topher purchased a PS3. Naughty. Now I'm drawn to the bastardly thing like a moth to a sexy, sexy flame. Two games in particular we have that I came all over for - Assassin's Creed and Fallout 3. Both very pretty games (though Fallout is so far the less frustrating of the two). I am amused by the perpetual barrage of Arabic-themed games, music, books, and study abroad programs I've been exposed to. If I were a religious man (and sometimes, deep down, I can be), I'd feel like it was all some sort of divine brickbat calling me to a particular area of study. As it is, I am simply intrigued. Whether there is anything so direct as "supposed to" regarding the shape of a human life, I can admit that this seems to be the right direction for me. Who'd have thunk?
On a more immediate level, I have a gadzillion pages of assigned homework, from which I am taking a break to write this. I already have my outline done for next Monday's MENA response (it'll also get a +, I'm sure). Tonight and tomorrow, I work on the outline for my 10 page Guibert of Nogent paper. I'll be exploring what Guibert's memoirs can tell us about the motivations behind the rise in French monasticism in the 11th Century. Was it something in the water, divine inspiration, political motivation, or the urge to escape the violent system of late feudalism? Or not?
Next Thursday, my group gives our presentation on "Anybody's Son Will Do", a piece about the re-socialization of United States Marines. My portion of the project will be a discussion of this paper in the context of other studies done on the same topic. Joy. This part I will be working on over the upcoming weekend.
Pompeii is the most dicey project, in that we really haven't been given terribly specific instructions on what he's looking for. Naturally, I've already looked up a lot about my chosen block and house - The House of the Labyrinth, located at VI.11.8-10. It's so called because of a great walled in garden with a mosaic maze you can see from above with Google Earth, if you know how to follow the location number.
A few days ago, I got to see Avenue Q with fr_defenestrato; most hilarious, though it made me tear up a couple of times (for both laughter and sadness). "It's Only for Now" made me cry. "You Can Be as Loud as the Hell You Want (When You're Making Love)" had the whole crowd in stitches. Perhaps it was the great flashing neon lights and the Puppet Kama Sutra?
I have become something of a twitter whore, and fritterfae accuses me of farstuckery for following a bunch of authors, musicians, actors, artists and whatnot from a variety of backgrounds. I don't care. It's still fun.
My eyes are truly fucking bad these days, because at this point I'm never not reading or watching a screen of some kind. I feel like I'm going to be looking through coke-bottles by the time I graduate.
Because I'm not busy enough, though, Fritter and I are thinking of pulling together recording equipment to create our own series of podcasts. For my part, I'm thinking of creating audio-book type files of public-domain classic works, children's stories, folk-tales, etc., possibly with video components. This will, of course, be a very sporadic thing, but it seems to me like it'd be fun.
Also, I may write a short play in the next two weeks for a politically-subversive project in Buffalo, involving my nefarious Drew friend there. Watch me.
I feel almost disappointed, but I'm not going to argue for stricter grading at this juncture.
Am I really that crazy? Overachiever?
This week was lovely. Topher purchased a PS3. Naughty. Now I'm drawn to the bastardly thing like a moth to a sexy, sexy flame. Two games in particular we have that I came all over for - Assassin's Creed and Fallout 3. Both very pretty games (though Fallout is so far the less frustrating of the two). I am amused by the perpetual barrage of Arabic-themed games, music, books, and study abroad programs I've been exposed to. If I were a religious man (and sometimes, deep down, I can be), I'd feel like it was all some sort of divine brickbat calling me to a particular area of study. As it is, I am simply intrigued. Whether there is anything so direct as "supposed to" regarding the shape of a human life, I can admit that this seems to be the right direction for me. Who'd have thunk?
On a more immediate level, I have a gadzillion pages of assigned homework, from which I am taking a break to write this. I already have my outline done for next Monday's MENA response (it'll also get a +, I'm sure). Tonight and tomorrow, I work on the outline for my 10 page Guibert of Nogent paper. I'll be exploring what Guibert's memoirs can tell us about the motivations behind the rise in French monasticism in the 11th Century. Was it something in the water, divine inspiration, political motivation, or the urge to escape the violent system of late feudalism? Or not?
Next Thursday, my group gives our presentation on "Anybody's Son Will Do", a piece about the re-socialization of United States Marines. My portion of the project will be a discussion of this paper in the context of other studies done on the same topic. Joy. This part I will be working on over the upcoming weekend.
Pompeii is the most dicey project, in that we really haven't been given terribly specific instructions on what he's looking for. Naturally, I've already looked up a lot about my chosen block and house - The House of the Labyrinth, located at VI.11.8-10. It's so called because of a great walled in garden with a mosaic maze you can see from above with Google Earth, if you know how to follow the location number.
A few days ago, I got to see Avenue Q with fr_defenestrato; most hilarious, though it made me tear up a couple of times (for both laughter and sadness). "It's Only for Now" made me cry. "You Can Be as Loud as the Hell You Want (When You're Making Love)" had the whole crowd in stitches. Perhaps it was the great flashing neon lights and the Puppet Kama Sutra?
I have become something of a twitter whore, and fritterfae accuses me of farstuckery for following a bunch of authors, musicians, actors, artists and whatnot from a variety of backgrounds. I don't care. It's still fun.
My eyes are truly fucking bad these days, because at this point I'm never not reading or watching a screen of some kind. I feel like I'm going to be looking through coke-bottles by the time I graduate.
Because I'm not busy enough, though, Fritter and I are thinking of pulling together recording equipment to create our own series of podcasts. For my part, I'm thinking of creating audio-book type files of public-domain classic works, children's stories, folk-tales, etc., possibly with video components. This will, of course, be a very sporadic thing, but it seems to me like it'd be fun.
Also, I may write a short play in the next two weeks for a politically-subversive project in Buffalo, involving my nefarious Drew friend there. Watch me.