hermionesviolin | Oct. 8th, 2003

1)

Sunday night, when i left the house a little before 7, when i took my first real inhale, my first thought was that it smelled like snow.

Fall seems to have been cancelled, importing California’s rainy season instead. I have very few long-sleeved shirts that i like wearing, but i have something of a fondness for the chill season, so it will be okay; i will just live in my grey Smith sweatshirt as always. (Emily M. said that it’s because of all the rain we’ve been having that the trees haven’t changed color much.)

Walking from Spanish class to my Bodywise meeting today i passed Chapin lawn and lots of people were standing around looking at one of the trees. There was a hawk, and three squirrels (appeared to be two parents and a youngster). At first no one was moving much, but then the youngster would move around on the tree near where the hawk was. The hawk was on a branch only about a foot out from the trunk, and a couple of times the young squirrel would go out so it was mere inches away from the hawk and then scurry away, but the hawk did no more than turn its head. Sometimes leaves would fall and many of us bystanders as well as the hawk would turn our heads to look. Mostly the hawk was just there, sometimes looking around. After 10 minutes my neck started to hurt and i decided i really should go to my meeting. Passing that way again 45 minutes later the hawk was on a lampost, one of those classic black candy-cane-shaped ones. It was in the middle of the curve, backdrop a near cloudless blue sky. Would have been great to have had a camera.

At Bodywise we had yet another new person and Connie was telling her about why Bodywise no longer does eating disorder stuff (once i finally get copies of the research from her, i’d really love to talk to you about it, btw) and i said “I’ve heard this like 9 times” and got up and threw out my trash and when i returned to my seat, i pulled off the sweatshirt i had draped on the back of the chair and put it on as i was a bit cold. Lanie thought i was leaving. Oops, i wasn’t actually trying to be dramatic.

I really dislike the GroupWise desktop client, but i finally downloaded it Sunday night because while usually i take an inability to access it via WebAccess to be a sign that i should really be doing my homework instead of obsessively checking my e-mail, sometimes i really want to be able to access my e-mail. (And it is nice to be able to constantly have the window open, so i can obsessively check my e-mail without wasting time logging in -- though that was part of the appeal, that it took time and you felt like you were actually doing something even though you knew you really weren’t.)

I always find it interesting which (portions of) posts generate comments and which don’t.

( in which i talk politics and a little bit of sports )

I feel like i do more close-reading in my Spanish classes than in my English classes. The one Spanish Lit class i’d taken before this one made me feel like i hadn’t necessarily improved my Spanish skills any but did make me feel much more prepared to be an English major. We talked about the historical context including literary movements such as Romanticism and biographical information about the author and Freudian analysis and Biblical allusions and yeah, it was hardcore, but looking back on it it seems like a typical 200-level lit class only in Spanish. (And it was a 200-level Spanish lit class, my first semester in college, so of course it felt hardcore.) In our Lorca class, Estela is all about “palabras claves” and the like, pointing to important words or phrases or images or scenes, both in Lorca’s work and in the Recuerdos Mios of his sister. We spend so much time going over every single word, phrase, line, of the poetry, examining it, and i started thinking about how i feel like i do more close-reading (closer reading) in that class than in my English lit classes and i tried to remember what i actually do in English lit classes. I think the only lit class i took last semester was Michael’s American 1865-1914, and despite being cross-listed, the Harlem Renaissance is not really a literature class. We focus more on what the work is saying, examining historical and author-biographical information to help us figure that out. This got me wondering whether it’s a symptom of Lorca’s work that we dissect it so much that way, because it’s very imagery driven, not like Yeats or Auden say, where you can read the poem and come up with “The author was making statement X about society/life.” Our Spanish midterm paper is a 5-page paper on a poem, or on two poems. Our final paper is the same thing only 8 pages and it can be about a dramatic work or a poem. I am both terrified and excited.

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burning like matchsticks in the face of the darkness

when faced with my demons I clothe them and feed them

Oct. 8th, 2003

Oct. 8th, 2003

this is what i mean when i talk about writing long entries

and posting about classes

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