Mar 20, 2007 00:51
I had eleven ILL books arrive for me over break. I am the awesome.
I had trouble printing out my reading for this class because McCabe was low on toner, so I checked out the books instead.
On Sunday I read Christopher Hitchens' book "Should the Elgin Marbles be Returned to Greece?" in my bed. I read a chapter of a German book about Hitler's rise to power in the math seminar room. I have to have my computer open when I'm reading German so that I can look up words--I underline words that I don't recognize and write their English equivalents in the margins, but I know other people do it differently. I also read the libretto of the Mikado while watching a terrible movie version. I did a lot of reading, and then I wrote a three-page paper for German and prepared a presentation for Orientalism.
On Monday I put my glasses on in Old English and could actually see the blackboard. It was amazing. I had class all day, and then I did my reading for this class (which was a bit dry) in bed. I packed up and headed over to Sci 101 to cover a lecture for the Gazette, and I read an article about memorialization of concentration camps in Germany while waiting for the speaker to show. I also looked at Holocaust Museums on the Internet.
After the lecture, I wrote two articles and compiled the Gazette. The weather joke is mad funny. Writing the article about Daylight Savings Time really made me think about how easy it is for me to access information. I would have a question about something I read in some source, and I would just open a new tab and Google for the answer. How did anybody ever find anything out before the Internet?
I'm writing a hella-long article for this Friday about queer history at Swarthmore. I worked on that some after sending out the Tuesday Gazette. I'm genuinely scared to know how long it's going to be, considering that the last one was eight pages and I've done five times the research for this one. As a writer, I always have to weigh what my reader wants--do they want ten pages of everything, or just the highlights? What if some want one and some want the other? WHAT DO I DO?
I should mention that I check my e-mail and read my LJ friends list approximately every two-three hours. One is work, one is play. Both are massively significant parts of my reading life which I don't actually think of as "reading."
I got an e-mail saying I had received a Facebook message from You-Know-Who. I called Leon and told him to log onto my Facebook account and delete the message. I didn't even want to look at the first line because I was afraid that it would say something to make me feel guilty and want to respond. I don't know what it said now. He wrote into a readerless void. I don't have to read what he writes to me anymore, and that feels like power.
Since my entire life is more or less just a series of reading things and writing things and sometimes talking about them, I should really just make this my default LJ entry. "I read X. I wrote Y. I felt like crap because my nose is bleeding from being blown too much. But that doesn't mean I can stop writing! I am the Gazette! Then I read until I fell asleep. I dreamt about the cracks of hell Swarthmore swallowing my mother me."