(no subject)
Wow. I didn't get up until noon.
So the Firefly thing was sponsered by the Truman State Pan-Geek Alliance, better known as the RPG club and Computer Gaming Assocation. They showed the first four episodes, and provided popcorn and soda. Rather a lot of people were there at first, including people I sort of vaguely knew from two different classes, but things thinned out after the pilot--I don't think most people realized how long this was going to run. They also had some trouble with the DVD player and the projector, which lead to a late start, but I still ended up at home right at 2 am, so it wasn't too big of a deal.
There were some annoying things, principally the two guys louding comparing the whole thing to Star Wars (wtf?!) and another guy in an excellent shirt who sat directly in front of me. Most of the audience seemed to be new to the show; I know the girls sitting behind me (who I vaguely knew from class) had seen part of the pilot but not any substantial pieces. At least there weren't any dorks yelling out lines or being obnoxious during the shows. Plus, it's really cool to sit in a big group of nerds and share a hearty belly laugh.
The theme song was not nearly as annoying as I'd been warned.
And I will repeat: everyone on that show is pretty. Wash is, of course, the greatest ("Curse your suddenly but inevitable betrayal!") but Kaylee and Jayne and Mal. Oh, Mal. I think I played you in an RPG once, actually. (Or a character very much like him.) Inara I can more take or leave, especially because I wasn't seeing much of the chemistry between her and Mal that was apparently meant to be there, but whatever, it's just the fourth episode. And I cannot possibly say enough about Book.
Simon is hot, but it might just be because he wears vests. I have a thing for a man in a vest. (And swords. A man with a sword is hot. So you can imagine what my ovaries were doing when Mal was running around in a vest with a sword...PRETTY.) He's more woobie than anything else, with his ickle spacesuit and all. I'm waiting for him, River and Zoey to get a little more developement before I make judgements.
Because...they're doing this again next week. And the week after that. It's a countdown to the release of Serenity.
I am so there.
Things I need to do today:
1. Update my Swahili notes. I need to sort out all the phonetics and phonotactics, badly, plus I've got more vocabulary cards to file, and there's a bunch of verb morphology I don't think I've actually written down. Damn you, negative prefixes!
2. Make flashcards for Chinese. This actually puts me in a dilemma: what combination of pinyin, hanzi and English do I put where? Or do I make seperate sets of cards, one for actual vocab and one for hanzi? And do I dare even trying to draw the freakin things myself? ::angsts::
3. Reading for Language and Learning. This class would be great if the textbook weren't so damn BORING: right now we're reading Ways with Words by Shirley Bryce Heath, which is an "ethnography of communication" about people in rural South Caroline in the desegregation era. The book is interesting: the lives of the people she's writing about are almost as alien to me as people on another planet, and her thesis has to do with how language differences in the community play out in the classroom setting. The problem is the level of detail: Heath doesn't seem to be able to make a concise point if her life depended on it, and she seems to believe that she's conveying a great deal of information about a particular person by describing the doilies on the furniture. I don't care about the doilies on the furniture, because they don't convey anything to me: I also don't really need the history of Western settlement of the Piedmont, interesting though it was, when the ultimate point is simply that attitudes towards the town mill shape language differences across the generations.
4. Finish reading The Odyssey. We're supposed to be drawing pictures, which I've had a hard time doing because, well, I suck; but also because these pictures are supposed to have more behind them than "ooh, pretty." On one hand, I really like the mental image of Odysseus on the little raft, sailing away from Ogygia, but on the other, I feel like I can sound smarter talking about the role of the feminine in the story and drawing pictures of, I don't know, Athena turning into an osprey or somehting.
And then there's my schedule for next semester.
See, there's three different kinds of honors you can get at Truman. Regular old honors are pure GPA, and at this point I could pull off a cum laude as long as I keep a B average. Departmental honors are particular to the major, and for linguistics majors we basically just have to do a kickass job on our senior research project. I figure I can make a good go at that, especially if Dr. Shapiro or Dr. Stewarts is teaching the seminar; they like me.
But because we are a hoopy Liberal Arts school, we also have General Honors. To get those, you need to take five higher-level classes in four categories, those being math, physical science, social science and the humanities--one of each and then one of your choice. You're also not allowed to count classes with the same prefix as your major unless you're a double major; for me, that means nothing in the English department.
Aaaaand I have a minor already. It's psychology. I enjoy it. Problem is, I'm discovering I'm not really cut out to be a cognitive scientist; I don't care nearly as much about how language exists in the brain as how it's used in the community. I really enjoyed my anthropology class last fall, and I've been trying to fit a class on linguistic anthropology into my schedule for ages now; I can take it in the spring.
What do these two have to do with one another?
Most of the courses offered for general honors suck. However, there's two anthropology classes offered for general honors, World Prehistory and Anthropology of Gender, which I'd actually be interested in taking and would probably enjoy. If I take those, and Linguistic Anthro, I'd be one class away from my anthro minor. But that 1. kills my plan of an easy eight semester with plenty of time for my senior sem, 2. will prevent me from taking more than two more linguistics classes, unless I forego my plan of taking Russian, Latin or Greek as a senior. I only need two more classes to graduate, but...I'm a language whore. I actually enjoy this stuff.
Things I could do to help the situation:
1. Not take Chinese next semester. I can take Anthropology of Gender instead.
2. Drop Language and Learning and switch into something else. This would not only royally jank up my current schedule, it'll cost $50, and I'd have to catch up on two and a half weeks of whatever the hell the new class was doing.
3. Apply for overload. If I take six classes next semester, I'll be at 19 credit hours, when the upper limit is supposed to be seventeen. I won't have SEE tutoring then, though, and I don't know if I'll still be working at the MAC, which would ease the situation some. Renee did it, I don't see why I can't, too...well, except for the fact that I'm lazy.
So the Firefly thing was sponsered by the Truman State Pan-Geek Alliance, better known as the RPG club and Computer Gaming Assocation. They showed the first four episodes, and provided popcorn and soda. Rather a lot of people were there at first, including people I sort of vaguely knew from two different classes, but things thinned out after the pilot--I don't think most people realized how long this was going to run. They also had some trouble with the DVD player and the projector, which lead to a late start, but I still ended up at home right at 2 am, so it wasn't too big of a deal.
There were some annoying things, principally the two guys louding comparing the whole thing to Star Wars (wtf?!) and another guy in an excellent shirt who sat directly in front of me. Most of the audience seemed to be new to the show; I know the girls sitting behind me (who I vaguely knew from class) had seen part of the pilot but not any substantial pieces. At least there weren't any dorks yelling out lines or being obnoxious during the shows. Plus, it's really cool to sit in a big group of nerds and share a hearty belly laugh.
The theme song was not nearly as annoying as I'd been warned.
And I will repeat: everyone on that show is pretty. Wash is, of course, the greatest ("Curse your suddenly but inevitable betrayal!") but Kaylee and Jayne and Mal. Oh, Mal. I think I played you in an RPG once, actually. (Or a character very much like him.) Inara I can more take or leave, especially because I wasn't seeing much of the chemistry between her and Mal that was apparently meant to be there, but whatever, it's just the fourth episode. And I cannot possibly say enough about Book.
Simon is hot, but it might just be because he wears vests. I have a thing for a man in a vest. (And swords. A man with a sword is hot. So you can imagine what my ovaries were doing when Mal was running around in a vest with a sword...PRETTY.) He's more woobie than anything else, with his ickle spacesuit and all. I'm waiting for him, River and Zoey to get a little more developement before I make judgements.
Because...they're doing this again next week. And the week after that. It's a countdown to the release of Serenity.
I am so there.
Things I need to do today:
1. Update my Swahili notes. I need to sort out all the phonetics and phonotactics, badly, plus I've got more vocabulary cards to file, and there's a bunch of verb morphology I don't think I've actually written down. Damn you, negative prefixes!
2. Make flashcards for Chinese. This actually puts me in a dilemma: what combination of pinyin, hanzi and English do I put where? Or do I make seperate sets of cards, one for actual vocab and one for hanzi? And do I dare even trying to draw the freakin things myself? ::angsts::
3. Reading for Language and Learning. This class would be great if the textbook weren't so damn BORING: right now we're reading Ways with Words by Shirley Bryce Heath, which is an "ethnography of communication" about people in rural South Caroline in the desegregation era. The book is interesting: the lives of the people she's writing about are almost as alien to me as people on another planet, and her thesis has to do with how language differences in the community play out in the classroom setting. The problem is the level of detail: Heath doesn't seem to be able to make a concise point if her life depended on it, and she seems to believe that she's conveying a great deal of information about a particular person by describing the doilies on the furniture. I don't care about the doilies on the furniture, because they don't convey anything to me: I also don't really need the history of Western settlement of the Piedmont, interesting though it was, when the ultimate point is simply that attitudes towards the town mill shape language differences across the generations.
4. Finish reading The Odyssey. We're supposed to be drawing pictures, which I've had a hard time doing because, well, I suck; but also because these pictures are supposed to have more behind them than "ooh, pretty." On one hand, I really like the mental image of Odysseus on the little raft, sailing away from Ogygia, but on the other, I feel like I can sound smarter talking about the role of the feminine in the story and drawing pictures of, I don't know, Athena turning into an osprey or somehting.
And then there's my schedule for next semester.
See, there's three different kinds of honors you can get at Truman. Regular old honors are pure GPA, and at this point I could pull off a cum laude as long as I keep a B average. Departmental honors are particular to the major, and for linguistics majors we basically just have to do a kickass job on our senior research project. I figure I can make a good go at that, especially if Dr. Shapiro or Dr. Stewarts is teaching the seminar; they like me.
But because we are a hoopy Liberal Arts school, we also have General Honors. To get those, you need to take five higher-level classes in four categories, those being math, physical science, social science and the humanities--one of each and then one of your choice. You're also not allowed to count classes with the same prefix as your major unless you're a double major; for me, that means nothing in the English department.
Aaaaand I have a minor already. It's psychology. I enjoy it. Problem is, I'm discovering I'm not really cut out to be a cognitive scientist; I don't care nearly as much about how language exists in the brain as how it's used in the community. I really enjoyed my anthropology class last fall, and I've been trying to fit a class on linguistic anthropology into my schedule for ages now; I can take it in the spring.
What do these two have to do with one another?
Most of the courses offered for general honors suck. However, there's two anthropology classes offered for general honors, World Prehistory and Anthropology of Gender, which I'd actually be interested in taking and would probably enjoy. If I take those, and Linguistic Anthro, I'd be one class away from my anthro minor. But that 1. kills my plan of an easy eight semester with plenty of time for my senior sem, 2. will prevent me from taking more than two more linguistics classes, unless I forego my plan of taking Russian, Latin or Greek as a senior. I only need two more classes to graduate, but...I'm a language whore. I actually enjoy this stuff.
Things I could do to help the situation:
1. Not take Chinese next semester. I can take Anthropology of Gender instead.
2. Drop Language and Learning and switch into something else. This would not only royally jank up my current schedule, it'll cost $50, and I'd have to catch up on two and a half weeks of whatever the hell the new class was doing.
3. Apply for overload. If I take six classes next semester, I'll be at 19 credit hours, when the upper limit is supposed to be seventeen. I won't have SEE tutoring then, though, and I don't know if I'll still be working at the MAC, which would ease the situation some. Renee did it, I don't see why I can't, too...well, except for the fact that I'm lazy.