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.