new times

happy new year, everyone.  

I like new beginnings because even if outside of us changes, it has a symbolic value that we use to allow ourselves to change.  Or to give an anchor to commitments we want to make or renew.  Or to things we want to recognise.  

I'm waiting to see if I got published and trying to figure out what New Year's changes commitments I want to make for this year.  I think time management would be a good one.  And also to get the proper amount of sleep, but what with the complications of the school life and my upcoming schedule, I don't think that's really going to happen much.  Maybe just more kindness.  That's always a good commitment to make.

I'm going to Mexico on Saturday.  It feels a little wrong to take a vacation in a 3rd world country.  I don't really know how to feel about that.  Maybe I'll have something more insightful to offer when I get back.  

In other news, I got straight As this semester.  If you count A-s which I do.  

topsy-turvy

It kind of sucks that I miss home when I'm at school and school when I'm at home.  I wish I could have both worlds at once.  

homely

It is such a mixed blessing to be at this home again.  

Here are four things I love about here:

my bed

friends

such good food

pleasure reading

Here are four things I miss about my other home:

my bed 

friends

eating in the cafeteria with friends even if the food is sometimes odd

going to town

Snow days

Contrary to the idea of this city being pretty close to sea level, we got an arctic freeze (say what?) this weekend and we're snowed in.  But for this area, that means we got a few inches of snow and a lot of ice and so everything is shut down.  People who had finals today either have them online or they've been postponed till we get back in January (thankfully, I didn't have any scheduled today).  Yesterday, we went down to south campus, which is really beautiful during any weather, but especially during snow.  I took about a roll and a half of black and white film over the course of the day, but given that its film, I can't really post any pictures right now.  I hear that it's snowing back home, too, so that's also exciting.  I really love snow until I get tired of it.  Hopefully, that won't happen for a while. 

I'm flying home on Thursday.  I'm finally starting to be ready for it.  I know I'll be really excited to see friends and family in the next few days, and then I'll get to be excited to see my new beloved friends again.  I have so much that I want to do, now that I won't be working over break.  Here's my list of things to do over break:

Finish Lamb

Finish 1984

Knit happy things

Listen to good new music

Find somewhere to volunteer

Read The Road

Read The Autumn of the Patriarch

Go running 

Go hiking

Do yoga

Spend time with friends

Cook

Bake

Play mandolin

I think that sounds like a good plan for break, yes?  Part of me just wants to spend the whole break holed up in my house with my books and crafty projects, but a bigger part of me is more excited about spending time with friends.  It's possible that when I'm in Mexico, I might just be really anti-social... or "on retreat."    Whatever.  The thing is, living in the dorms is fabulous because it's so social but that's also sometimes a downside in ways I don't really think about very much. That is to say, it is really good because it so friendly but sometimes it's a little bit stressful just because it's so hard to get personal time.  Maybe that's just me personally.  I just want to be out in the common room with my friends (even just studying) if I know they're out there.  

This semester has been really good.  I'm only halfway done with finals, but I feel pretty solid about them, especially the Islam one.  That is a reward all by itself, but the knowledge that I can do this and do it well is the biggest reward of all.  

forsooth!

The sun is shining, friends and there's not a cloud in the sky.   It's like home.  It's so easy for me to take it for granted that there will be about seventeen days just like this one before it gets cloudy and cold and drizzly again.  Even though it looks warm, its freezing, though, so I took advantage of the sun and went for a run.  It was beautiful and even though I am truly the worst runner in the world.  I also did some yoga on the soggy football field which was really lovely.  Yoga is great anywhere but it's twenty times more enjoyable in the sun.  

I'm working on a paper about Frankenstein and "Rime of the Ancient Mariner." "Rime" is one of my favourite poems, so I have things to say about it.  That's always a good feeling.  I've been doing alright with my writing up here which is a relief since I see a lot of my friends struggling.  It makes me really glad that I took composition at the community college last year.  I got the same grade (88%) on all of my essays for Islam.  Being that close to (and yet so far from) an A is a little bit painful, but at the same time, I am grateful that I've been doing that well also (I have a little bit of a relativity problem with grades).  My grades in general have been pretty solid.  I expect As and Bs, and I also plan on this having been my most relaxed semester; I plan on as many As as possible in the future.  

I think I'm finding a solid core group of friends.  Last night, one of them, Casey, who is a mind-blowingly awesome person, read to me out of her journal something like "doing something with [college] friends. And the bracketed word is slowly fading."  That describes it better than anything I could have said.  It's really good to have people with whom I am truly finally becoming comfortable.  

Finals are looming nigh.  I am nervous for the potential stress of it, but I feel very certain that I know what I need to do to get ready.  It's going to be a lot of work, but I know how to prepare.  That's a nice feeling.  Midterms were pretty stressful because of their newness.  Also, the reward for finals is getting to go home for a month.  I'm really looking forward to it, but after the last few days, I know it's actually going to be a little bit difficult to leave this other home.  There's something just so right about the way things are.

claire's adventures with purple part deux

It's so nice to be home for thanksgiving.  

 I thought this would be a convenient time to re-dye the purple into my hair.  It's been looking on the light purple to pink side, and since I'm really not much of a pink person, it was definitely time to get rid of it.  I persuaded my mother that this would be a fun Thanksgiving evening project, so we pulled out the dye and tinfoil and latex gloves.  I perched on the edge of the bathtub for optimal angle and we commenced.   Now I'm sitting on my floor in my own home waiting for the dye to set.  Here's a video I made for my friend Raubry.  It's me imitating one of those characters in Princess Mononoke that rattles its head when the forest is healthy:  

dichotomies in truth

One thing that people from anywhere but here will tell you before you move here is that it rains a lot. One thing that people from this city will tell you before you move here is that it really doesn't rain that much. One arrives here confused about what the weather will actually prove to be on a consistent basis. And it turns out that the real story is that the weather is inconsistent and erratic and that is why everyone is so confused about what it's like here. It does rain a lot. Sometimes it pours on and off for days on end. Sometimes the sun comes out a few days in a row. People around here say it's technically a mizzle- that is, a drizzle and mist- but it is often a downpour. And downpours frequently occur when one is traveling from class to class and then conveniently quit once one is safely installed indoors.

can it be next semseter yet?

Here are the exciting classes that I will be taking next semester:


French 202: Intermediate French
Political Science 102: Comparative Political Systems
Religious Studies 355: Sufism: Islamic Mysticism
Exploration and Discovery: The Pursuit of Happiness
Music 220: Intro to Electronic Music
Yoga

Be excited with me for these classes! I was only taking the first four classes, but that didn't feel like enough so I signed up for yoga. Then that still didn't feel like enough either so I signed up for Intro to Electronic Music. I had no idea that class was even offered... but it's something I've been interested in for awhile. Mixing beats and layering sounds should be really awesome. Maybe I can even bring my classical experience into it. It's only a two credit class so it will be lower stress than my other classes. I wanted to take photography, but that was four credits and a lot of class time, so this definitely makes more sense. I've been feeling a little bit super-academic lately, so a creative outlet should be excellent.

on Latitudes with Dostoyevsky

My friend who lives across the hall from me is taking Russian Lit this semester and they just finished reading Crime and Punishment which I do think is probably one of the best books I've ever read. However, the operative and most crucial part of that sentence the fact that the verb to read is in the past tense. Reading Crime and Punishment is not kicks and giggles. My beloved English teacher, to whom I will always be grateful, made us read it my senior year of high school and the whole time I was reading it, I remember feeling so heavy and sluggish. At the time, I was also writing a paper about human testing performed by the Nazis on prisoners in concentration camps, and I know that when I finished writing that essay, the feeling of relief was incredible. I hadn't realised how much of that burden I had taken upon myself while writing the essay. The same feeling goes for Crime and Punishment. Reading it is not fun and games, but the feeling of having completed that incredible feat is quite unparalleled. Anyway, to bring this meditation on random things full circle, watching her slog her way through the novel was delightful because I vicariously relived it with her and knew her excitement when she finished as well as, of course, her disgust with the terrible, horrible, vomitous, nauseating epilogue that Dostoyevsky wrote. (Holy jesus, what was he thinking!?)

hair cuts and hair dye

Yesterday was one of those special days that can only really happen in college dorms... My friend down the hall and I, after several weeks of deliberating, decided to dye our hair. Both of us come from fairly conservative areas of the country and have wanted to do this for sometime but haven't really felt it was appropriate to do at home. So, we each bought some crazy-coloured hairdye: hers fuchsia and mine violet, crowded into the bathroom with about ten other people and dyed our hair. Ian came down from his dorm and expertly bleached and purpled streaks into my under layers while Casey dyed Lauren's underlayer bright, bright fuchsia. We managed to only dye a little bit of the floor and a little bit of my face. So, in a typically collegiate manner, Lauren and I have new hair. Observe the loveliness:














When I put my hair down, you can hardly see it at all... And thus continues the duality of me.

In the haircut vein of things, last night I gave my neighbor a haircut. This also occured in the bathroom only this time it was saturday night and we were all much more mellow. The haircut turned out pretty nice (we have very similar hair and I cut my own frequently, so it wasn't too difficult) and sitting around in the bathroom lead to some fascinating conversations amongst all of us.

Moral of the stories: mess with your hair, it will improve your social life.

Claire's number one tip for energy conservation

Cell phone and computer chargers suck electricity out of walls regardless of whether the device is plugged into the other end. Unplug them when you're not using them.

drill baby drill

flying on the airplane

There was a fly of some sort on the airplane. It must be disorienting to be transported a thousand miles without consent or knowledge. But the intensity of the experience may be completely wasted on a fly since we assume their cognitive abilities to be pretty much non-existent.

home dreams

I'm back in my room on campus again and in a lot of ways, it feels like I never left. Except that everyone is really excited to see everyone else so there's all this extra happiness flying around.

falling dreams

I'm in the airport waiting to fly home. From home. I don't really have a perspective yet on which of the places I live is "home." School is home because I live there most, I have a family of friends and a dreamy life there... but home where my parents raised me is viscerally still my home. It's actually a little bit frightening how easy it is for me to just slip into living in my hometown. I thought it would be kind of hard. Really, though, it's frighteningly easy. Its almost as though I don't live elsewhere, and I literally can't go anywhere without seeing at least two people that I know. The anonymity of living in the city is something I've really been embracing. It's part of really being myself in a new place, I think.

I'm supposed to be working on reading the Aeneid. Seriously, though, I understand that it's really important beautiful literature but.... guh. It's frankly a bit boring at times. And confusing because Virgil took the works of Homer, put them in a blender, poured them out onto a roman tablet and then called it a new epic poem. My brain feels a little blended just reading it.

My flight isn't for another three and a half hours. God save me.

anticipated a lot

I was actually kind of nervous to come home and see my friends... I've heard from a lot of people that reuniting with their high school friends is a mediocre experience, so I anticipated a lot of awkwardness. But it turns out that I really just have extraordinary friends that I met in high school. I have forever friends. I really do. And I am so incredibly lucky. And incredibly tired from being out with them all night. Good-night, big bright world.

flying dreams

Welcome to my fall break. Two extra days off of school apparently turn a weekend into an official break. I flew home late on Wednesday and I'll be heading back to the city on Sunday night, so everything's haphazardly sort of been thrown together in a way that I get to see most people before I head back to the big place.

It turns out that it's a little bit challenging to keep up with school work and a blog, so the blog was the thing that went out the window over the last few weeks. But don't worry, it was for a good cause. Aside from the obvious stress of academia, school has been going really well.

In my core freshman class, we've been reading Socrates, Sophocles, Kant, the Bible, and the Aeneid. Sophocles was excellent. We got to go see Antigone as previously mentioned, which was very community-theatreish, but still quite enjoyable. I find it quite sad that the high school theatre programme killed my love of participating in theatre quite as much as it did. Otherwise, I'd probably be doing it at university. Anyway, reading Socrates was fascinating as was reading Kant and I just finished on Wednesday an essay comparing the possible reactions of Kant and Socrates to the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001 (by the way, if you don't know, USA PATRIOT is actually an acronym for Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism. Scary, eh?). In order to write said essay, I had to read large portions of the aforementioned law, which was at times fascinating, but more frequently really painful. Sometimes it's helpful to be overachieving, other times it turns out to be more of a burden.

Fun facts about my dorm life:
our kitchen smells distinctly of old sponge and vomit and nobody can explain why
the heaters make good windowseats and incidentally keep one's behind nice and toasty for late night/early morning stretches of reading
my roommate cavalierly informed me that she screams in her sleep when she's stressed out. just in case I might have wanted to be forewarned about that. yeah.
dogs aren't allowed in dorm rooms.
noise travels through the floors and through doors but not through walls. eerie. actually, suffice it to say that the accoustics of the whole building are bizarre.
impromptu study sessions occur in very strange places. (e.g. the laundry room, the hallways at two in the morning, the non-smelly kitchen while making pancakes, the abandoned classroom in the basement...)
impromptu dance parties occur in the abandoned classroom every couple of weekends. I have yet to go, but I hear that they are epicly fun.
people say ungrammatical things like "I have hella homework" to mean that they have a lot of studying to do. bizarre.

Now it is time for me to do homework. Love to all.

no-sleep sleepover

Since my dorm floor is so tight-knit we like to plan events to have together as a floor. Sometimes we have "study breaks" where we all come out of our studious stupors and make playdoh dinosaurs together in the common room while eating chips and salsa and listening to music... Stuff like that. Last night, we all camped out in the common room and watched A Waking Life, which is a stunning movie; I highly recommend watching it. It's like what What the Bleep Do We Know could have been like if they'd actually addressed anything in that movie. It's beautiful. Then we all slept in there for our official floor slumber party. It was lovely. Lots of cuddling and talking and generally adoring each other. Today, my floor is going to see a performance of a Sophocles play in another part of the city. It promises to be exciting, even though the're not using the traditional masks. It's a great play and I'm really excited to go with this group of people whom I adore so very much.

ebb tide

On this day a month ago, I boarded an airplane in a city two hours from my home of 18 years and moved to a college new city in a new state where I knew almost no one and knew even less about the place. Pretty exciting for a little girl like me. Nervous doesn't even begin to describe my first few days here, but being in a world comprised of intellectuals and smart folks is easier than the world I inhabited back home. Imagine that.

I've made really great friends already. This weekend, my friend Melissa (who lives kitty corner to me and comes from the surrounding area and thusly has a car and knowledge of the area) drove me and Rachel and Danielle out to the beach for the day. It was stunning. Of all of my favourite things in the world (which is an extensive and inclusive list) cold beaches is one of the things that falls very close to the top. It was delightful to be off campus, out of the city and on the beach. Melissa and I went in all the way even though the water was freezing. We were numb when we came out and our clothes were all sticky and salty and awful... but it was worth it. The equinox was last night so that was our celebration of the changing seasons. It was the best equinox celebration imaginable.

Because I live in the Living and Learning building, I have a class with about half the people in the building. The building is small, though, so our class ends up being about 17 people. It makes us a really close-knit community. We all hang out in the common room and study together just about every night. We go into the city together, (go to the beach together), go to campus events together, help each other out, make food together. Its perfect and lovely. I'm so glad I applied for L2. There are possible plans for us to go camping together up in the mountais sometime before it gets too terribly cold.

I bought two house plants for my pretty little room (which has been deemed by many on the floor to be 'the best room they've ever seen' thanks to my roommate's and my careful planning of decorations.) Their names are Walter and Henrietta and I kiss them and talk to them to keep them happy in this somewhat depressing climate. In return, they keep me happy and upbeat in this aforementionedly chilly and grey tendencies of this town.

Tonight is the slam poetry festival on campus and Buddy Wakefield, who is my absolute favourite slammer is coming TO CAMPUS. Yes. I am so excited! In light of that, I should probably be proactive about my homework tonight...

In spite of the amazingness that I am experiencing up here, I sometimes still get a little homesick. I particularly miss the people that I am not yet used to not seeing regularly. And that's all she wrote. Fin.

the first mass email from the land of Academia from (9/7/08)

Good Sunday morning! Forgive me sending out another mass email, but it seemed the best way to fill everyone in and also finish the crushing load of homework I've acquired for the weekend.

Today, I cooked pancakes for about twenty people in my dorm. It was loads of fun. My friend John who lives next door bought ten pounds of just-add-water-pancake mix at the Fred Meyer (which is sort of like a wal-mart for those that don't know) and maple syrup and nutella and peanut butter. Then we all went to the Bone (the cafeteria which is officially known as the Bon Appetit) and filched bagels to store in our cupboards for midnight study snacks. My dormmates are all excellent people and it's fabulous having class with so many of them.

When I applied for campus housing, I applied to a new theme hall called Living and Learning, which is basically an experimental project in which we all have our Core Exploration and Discovery class together and we also live in the same dorm. It's a very exciting way to live. Almost every night, most of us hang out in the common room and discuss all kinds of fascinating things... Topics have ranged from Darwin's possible role as a spiritual guide, to the dangers of cloning, to the correlation between food and community... and much much more. Quite fascinating and frequently catalytic to long bouts of laughter.

This semester, I am taking:

the aforementioned Exploration and Discovery class

Intro to International Affairs

Origins of Islam

and French 201...

I spent the last hour reading the Koran, the Bible and my international affairs book... all very interesting though I'm not sure I entirely understand the Bible. Or the Koran (which is actually nothing like the Bible. I can kiss that assumption goodbye). Or some of the theories in my IA book (though it's not so much understanding the theories themselves as it is comprehending how someone could actually ascribe to said theories).

In spite of many warnings that the weather here would be terrible, it has thus far only rained twice in the two weeks that I've been around. Every non-rainy day has been sunny and warm and today actually feels a little bit like home. However, I am certain that the weather is crafty and is trying to lure me into thinking it will be survivable and any day now, it's going to become a solid block of cold, drizzly days which will pile up until late April.

Homesickness has as of yet remained at a manageable level, but we'll see what happens in the next few weeks. Any contact is appreciated (especially letters. I'll put my address at the bottom of this email) as is general good thinking in my direction. Now my homework calls with a shrill and unignorable (is that a word? I think not.) voice. Enormous love to all.