sweet

I made the Dean's list! Yay me.

sleepless sleepover v.2.0

I went up north this weekend with Ian for a festival be put together at his high school for education about the queer community.  It was fantastic.  Every time I'm with Ian, I am reminded how amazing he is;  he has so much passion and talent, more than is fair to have in just one person at this age.  And he's wise.  I am honoured to be his friend.

Last night was the second sleepless sleepover of my dorm building.  It was lots of fun.  We watched Wristcutters: A Love Story, which, in spite of its somewhat sketchy title, is actually a hunourous, fantastic existentialistic exploration of suicide and existence on earth.  I highly recommend it.  

Tonight are the Oscar's, which I've never seen in my whole life, so I'm very excited to be seeing them with my wonderful friends.  

aspiring

I've been thinking a lot lately about trying.  Essentially, how much of our trying are we willing to factor into judgement?  I find it very heartening that most people I know are really willing to consider effort before evaluating.  Perhaps it is because of this that we are willing to forgive one another.  Intentions are crucial:  they have only a certain bearing on what the final results of our actions are, but they are terribly important in how we react in a subjective world. 

Also, the French have a different keyboard than Americans and you can change the functions of the keys on a Macbook to be like a French keyboard.  So, I did that last night, but I made it so that I can tell what I'm doing by putting tape over all the keys that are different.  It is not easy!  I am starting to get the hang of it, but all the punctuation is different (you have to hit the shift button to get a period...) and the letters to the far left and far right are different so I have re-learn the way my brain and fingers work around a keyboard.  It's good for my dendrites and neurons.  And also, when I study abroad in Senegal, it's going to be a French intensive, so I'll be all set for that.  I might even forget how to type in English.  

I went to a play last weekend and this was in the programme:

"When all is said and done, for me, the heart of the story is this: Our country was founded on profound and radical principles of liberty and equality, which we have not been willing or have not been ready to live by.  Perhaps this is because they have been too ambitious for our reach or too ahead of our evolution as a people or species.  We have achieved extraordinary power as a nation and made every sort of progress, but at the expense of those principles by exploiting and oppressing a large portion of the population.  At the same time, there is a relentless struggle and movement toward the alignment with the alignment with those founding principles if only by infinitesimal degrees." -- N.  Keystone

Food for thought.

middlenight

So I'm taking this electronic music class, right?  Right.  It's really awesome.  I have an hour on Thursdays and an hour on Mondays in which I'm supposed to do all my composing for the class.  We have one computer between all ten of us in the class, so we have specific slots for each of us.  Anyway, I usually end up spending a couple of hours there every time I go in.  I spent three hours there tonight and I wrote a piece called "Titanic Sinking" that is pretty wicked.  If I can ever figure out how to get them on here, I will post a few of the things I make.  Mostly the assignments are really meant to just get us to screw around with the software and check out all the things we can do, but with a little more structure than just messing around, but every time we have an assignment, I spend hours working so that at the end, I have a complete piece of music (albeit, a short one).  Last time, we were just supposed to make two rhythm patterns and then play some keyboard over top.  But I was so excited when I made some rad stuff on with the programme, so I stayed there for two hours and wrote a one minute piece with chord progressions, melodic progression and some cool beats.  I am so glad I have something creative to do this semester otherwise, I think I'd go crazy with no outlet for everything in my brain that isn't about International Affairs or Political Science or someone else's philosophy that I had to read and then regurgitate in between some thoughts that are supposed to be original, but not too original or the professor will mark the essay down.  

I left for a minute and, looking back and reading that last bit, I think it's important that I point out that I believe in the academic process, but I'm feeling a bit jaded about it right now because of my Pursuit of Happiness class.  My professor for this class is insane.  This class is a 100 level course that I am required to take as a freshman, and I was really excited before we started, but now I dread going there.  Most of the time, it's more work than my 300-level religious studies course.  I had a ten-page paper due today (it's only the fourth week of school!) that I stayed up almost all night last night for and skipped my morning classes to finish.  I did finish it, and I did think it was quite a solid essay, but I wish that it hadn't eaten my life quite like that.  Also, we have our midterm next Monday, which is the fifth week out of a 14-week term.  Ridiculous.  

In other news, I am working on making more time for myself to make poetry.  I use term "make time" very loosely here; I don't have much time to give to anything but school, and what I have is pretty well doled out where I need it.  Either way, I am going to squeeze it in.  My sense of form has changed a lot lately.  I am working on a poem much longer than anything I have ever written about the Holocaust.  I think that by the end of it, I will have been able to distill everything inside of me about it, turned it into a stationary collection of words that communicates something I've been needing to say and then, maybe, I will be able to let some of it go.  I don't know why I carry it around so much more than other people seem to.  

intense summer

I just got what I hope will be the first of several acceptance letters to summer Arabic intensives!  They have offered to cover half of my tuition with scholarships, which is absolutely fantastic.  The only downside is that the school is located in pretty much the middle of nowhere.  While this would cut down on my potential distractions and could actually be really great, it messes up my plans to be near friends for the summer.  There are worse things, though.  If I go here, I will be able to go to most of Lollapalooza, which would be FANTASTIC.  I will still apply to other schools, but this seems like maybe the place that I will go, unless I get into the one school that is my top choice.  Still, this is really good news, from an academic and social perspective.  The plans I am making are coming into a place that seems focused and fulfilling.  

dancing in the streets

I am reading this book called Dancing in the Streets by Barbara Ehrenreich.  Basically, of the part I've read so far, which is about a fifth of the book, the premise is that group rituals surrounding ecstasy or the creation of ecstasy are shaped by the experience of collective hunting.  This is framed in a very literal way.  But it got me thinking about group ecstatic rituals in the modern world and their relationship, and I arrived at the semi-stable idea that perhaps they are rituals of searching rather than hunting.  There's less urgency to survival now.