my ears won't stop ringing long enough to hear those sweet words spoken like a melody
wheee not only is it LEAP DAY (hell yeah!!!), it's time to finally talk about my classes, so I can get the preliminaries out of the way and start complaining about them. hahaha
MWF
9:00: English: Sex, Sass & Suffering in Restoration England. With Alex, who I had for my Heritage 101 small group and didn't really like, but I like him a lot better now. He also has the exact same voice and laugh as a certain recent-ish crush He's always trying to talk about gender roles and homosocial vs. homoerotic vs. homosexual, and I'm totally down with that. Unfortunately, I don't think the rest of the class is, and is just kind of 'huh? why are we making them gay?' which kinda sucks. We're reading a lot of racy plays in this class, which is kind of awesome--hence the "sex" in the title. It's definitely the better out of my two English classes, and even though it's at 9 and I wish it was later, it's not like I dread going to class; far from it.
11:00: English: Postcolonial Literature. Have I mentioned I don't like postcolonialism? Yeah, I don't. I hate interpreting otherwise normal texts with some b.s. postcolonial slant, and everything even vaguely postcolonial is imbued with so much interlinking confusing jargon that it's ridiculous. Whatever happened to just reading books, showing up for class, and talking about our responses to them? Noooo, we've got to have an agenda here, we've got to throw around fancy overblown terms. Baahhh. We already wrote a paper for this class and I got a B. Mostly, I was sick pretty much the whole time I was writing it, but also, I don't like postcolonialism and thus it's going to be hard for me to write good papers about it. sigh, whatever. Peter Anderson, the prof, is more or less pretty cool though, although he's the one throwing around all the jargon most of the time. He's also South African and has kind of an Afrikaans accent, which is cool. Kathryn is in this class with me, but so are quite a few really annoying people (one girl is the fight-with-the-professor type) who make it hard to want to speak up.
1:30: German 101. YAY GERMAN! Starting a new language is always interesting. It's been pretty fun so far, although I despise doing pair work in any language, and we do it in this class every day... makes me feel so grateful to Scott that he never, ever made us do any of that bullshit. But learning German is really fun, I'm liking the language a lot, although this class makes me want to go back to Germany sooo baaaddd. I was only there for a weekend but it was so great and I want to go back and stay longer... ride bikes around... enjoy the culture... it's so cool how when I walked into Chris's apartment building and went up the stairs, the stair area had been decorated by his grandma or so, and I really felt like I was at someone's home in America, because it looked just like a Midwest home, with the needlepoint sampler decorations, and little animal figurines--so much of Midwest culture is German-influenced, it was seriously exactly the same. It was so cool. gaahhhh Germany! I even had a dream about going there. Kinda weird. Anyway, I guess that's another reason why I'm taking German (although only for one semester, sadly, but I'll at least get the basics), so that if I ever go back to Germany, I can hopefully manage to express myself SOMEWHAT and not be 100% reliant on someone like Chris, which Rebecca and I totally were. *laughs*
TTH
2:00: Japanese advanced conversation. Which meets in the Japanese commons, so WHOO-HOO for having access again to my beloved language house. With Chika-san, in her third year of being the Japanese house resident (who, when I think about it, is quite possibly the first Japanese person I ever talked to. Kinda weird). And four other people, one of which is one of my old freshman crushes, although all of those types of crushes have been more 'visual' crushes, in that I think they're attractive and ogle them when I see them around campus, but I have no desire to date them. Over freshman and sophomore year I maybe had 15 different crushes like that. Oh, recently I saw my gay crush, the guy from the Lilly retreat who I was shocked (SHOCKED!) to find out was gay afterwards. But when I saw him again last week or so, I couldn't believe I hadn't noticed; he is so blond and sparkly. Oh well, haha. Anyway, it's kind of weird to actually be getting to know this random guy I thought was hot freshman year (I also think he's secretly gay now, haha). So it's a really small class, and kind of unstructured, which is pretty different from what I remember of intermediate conversation with Hyung-Hye sophomore year. But oh well, we're practicing, and that's pretty much all I'm taking this class for, is practice. (I wish I could take the Japanese prose class this semester, like everyone I know is in it, but it meets right between my English classes, and MW is reading-intensive enough with those two, I don't think I could realistically handle ANOTHER reading class in between them.)
I feel like the AC I used to go to freshman and sophomore year and the AC I go to now is totally different, in terms of the people in my major/minor classes, among other things. It's like I was some forgotten generation--when I mentioned in Japanese class how I used to live in the Japanese house, I could tell some people were surprised. Yeah, that was two years ago, and I was totally a part of it, it was such a MAJOR PART of my life (to the extent that I felt completely fulfilled living there and hated to have to move out and leave; even cried driving away from it on the last day just like I did on my last day of work at TP this summer) but it seems so far removed now. And in my English classes this year, I haven't recognized hardly anyone who was in the English classes I was taking freshman/sophomore year. Almost all these people were/are strangers to me. Maybe because a lot of those classmates were upperclassmen, and now I'M the upperclassman. I guess it's just that I was gone for a year, so the transition instead of smooth is more abrupt, but I dunno. It's really, really weird. Oh, and the people who are taking Japanese have all been new to me too. I've gotten to know quite a few of them, and in general they're really cool people, but they are just not the people who were in my classes before. Last semester in advanced Japanese, Casey and I were the only remnants of our 'generation' of Japanese. Everyone else started the year after us; it was kind of strange.
Oh, and I also got involved in something else which happened yesterday, which was a panel on study abroad in Asia, for anyone who might be interested in it. It was me and 7 other people, including Will, two guys who did IES Tokyo a year after I did (so they did fall 07, and they did Meikai too), this guy that Kathryn's after who went to China, Eric, and some others. We pretty much just sat at the front of a room and talked about various topics while a Powerpoint showed slides of pictures we'd taken. Only about 15 people showed up (I think it was under-advertised--oh well), but it was still really good and I had a lot of fun doing it. It's just weird--I don't get involved in anything, so when I do, it feels pretty odd. hahaha
Okayy it's time for food so I'm off to grab some, then go to German, then WEEKEND YAAYYYYYYYY. My parents are visiting and having dinner with me Saturday, and Sunday night Bernice is hosting a French major/minors dinner at her house, so Jackie and I are going and I'm SO EXCITED!!! YAY GOOD FOOD!!
MWF
9:00: English: Sex, Sass & Suffering in Restoration England. With Alex, who I had for my Heritage 101 small group and didn't really like, but I like him a lot better now. He also has the exact same voice and laugh as a certain recent-ish crush He's always trying to talk about gender roles and homosocial vs. homoerotic vs. homosexual, and I'm totally down with that. Unfortunately, I don't think the rest of the class is, and is just kind of 'huh? why are we making them gay?' which kinda sucks. We're reading a lot of racy plays in this class, which is kind of awesome--hence the "sex" in the title. It's definitely the better out of my two English classes, and even though it's at 9 and I wish it was later, it's not like I dread going to class; far from it.
11:00: English: Postcolonial Literature. Have I mentioned I don't like postcolonialism? Yeah, I don't. I hate interpreting otherwise normal texts with some b.s. postcolonial slant, and everything even vaguely postcolonial is imbued with so much interlinking confusing jargon that it's ridiculous. Whatever happened to just reading books, showing up for class, and talking about our responses to them? Noooo, we've got to have an agenda here, we've got to throw around fancy overblown terms. Baahhh. We already wrote a paper for this class and I got a B. Mostly, I was sick pretty much the whole time I was writing it, but also, I don't like postcolonialism and thus it's going to be hard for me to write good papers about it. sigh, whatever. Peter Anderson, the prof, is more or less pretty cool though, although he's the one throwing around all the jargon most of the time. He's also South African and has kind of an Afrikaans accent, which is cool. Kathryn is in this class with me, but so are quite a few really annoying people (one girl is the fight-with-the-professor type) who make it hard to want to speak up.
1:30: German 101. YAY GERMAN! Starting a new language is always interesting. It's been pretty fun so far, although I despise doing pair work in any language, and we do it in this class every day... makes me feel so grateful to Scott that he never, ever made us do any of that bullshit. But learning German is really fun, I'm liking the language a lot, although this class makes me want to go back to Germany sooo baaaddd. I was only there for a weekend but it was so great and I want to go back and stay longer... ride bikes around... enjoy the culture... it's so cool how when I walked into Chris's apartment building and went up the stairs, the stair area had been decorated by his grandma or so, and I really felt like I was at someone's home in America, because it looked just like a Midwest home, with the needlepoint sampler decorations, and little animal figurines--so much of Midwest culture is German-influenced, it was seriously exactly the same. It was so cool. gaahhhh Germany! I even had a dream about going there. Kinda weird. Anyway, I guess that's another reason why I'm taking German (although only for one semester, sadly, but I'll at least get the basics), so that if I ever go back to Germany, I can hopefully manage to express myself SOMEWHAT and not be 100% reliant on someone like Chris, which Rebecca and I totally were. *laughs*
TTH
2:00: Japanese advanced conversation. Which meets in the Japanese commons, so WHOO-HOO for having access again to my beloved language house. With Chika-san, in her third year of being the Japanese house resident (who, when I think about it, is quite possibly the first Japanese person I ever talked to. Kinda weird). And four other people, one of which is one of my old freshman crushes, although all of those types of crushes have been more 'visual' crushes, in that I think they're attractive and ogle them when I see them around campus, but I have no desire to date them. Over freshman and sophomore year I maybe had 15 different crushes like that. Oh, recently I saw my gay crush, the guy from the Lilly retreat who I was shocked (SHOCKED!) to find out was gay afterwards. But when I saw him again last week or so, I couldn't believe I hadn't noticed; he is so blond and sparkly. Oh well, haha. Anyway, it's kind of weird to actually be getting to know this random guy I thought was hot freshman year (I also think he's secretly gay now, haha). So it's a really small class, and kind of unstructured, which is pretty different from what I remember of intermediate conversation with Hyung-Hye sophomore year. But oh well, we're practicing, and that's pretty much all I'm taking this class for, is practice. (I wish I could take the Japanese prose class this semester, like everyone I know is in it, but it meets right between my English classes, and MW is reading-intensive enough with those two, I don't think I could realistically handle ANOTHER reading class in between them.)
I feel like the AC I used to go to freshman and sophomore year and the AC I go to now is totally different, in terms of the people in my major/minor classes, among other things. It's like I was some forgotten generation--when I mentioned in Japanese class how I used to live in the Japanese house, I could tell some people were surprised. Yeah, that was two years ago, and I was totally a part of it, it was such a MAJOR PART of my life (to the extent that I felt completely fulfilled living there and hated to have to move out and leave; even cried driving away from it on the last day just like I did on my last day of work at TP this summer) but it seems so far removed now. And in my English classes this year, I haven't recognized hardly anyone who was in the English classes I was taking freshman/sophomore year. Almost all these people were/are strangers to me. Maybe because a lot of those classmates were upperclassmen, and now I'M the upperclassman. I guess it's just that I was gone for a year, so the transition instead of smooth is more abrupt, but I dunno. It's really, really weird. Oh, and the people who are taking Japanese have all been new to me too. I've gotten to know quite a few of them, and in general they're really cool people, but they are just not the people who were in my classes before. Last semester in advanced Japanese, Casey and I were the only remnants of our 'generation' of Japanese. Everyone else started the year after us; it was kind of strange.
Oh, and I also got involved in something else which happened yesterday, which was a panel on study abroad in Asia, for anyone who might be interested in it. It was me and 7 other people, including Will, two guys who did IES Tokyo a year after I did (so they did fall 07, and they did Meikai too), this guy that Kathryn's after who went to China, Eric, and some others. We pretty much just sat at the front of a room and talked about various topics while a Powerpoint showed slides of pictures we'd taken. Only about 15 people showed up (I think it was under-advertised--oh well), but it was still really good and I had a lot of fun doing it. It's just weird--I don't get involved in anything, so when I do, it feels pretty odd. hahaha
Okayy it's time for food so I'm off to grab some, then go to German, then WEEKEND YAAYYYYYYYY. My parents are visiting and having dinner with me Saturday, and Sunday night Bernice is hosting a French major/minors dinner at her house, so Jackie and I are going and I'm SO EXCITED!!! YAY GOOD FOOD!!