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| I'm leaving TOMORROW!!! Yikes!! I had such good intentions of updating this thing several times over break. Urbana, for example -- I could have written so much about Urbana, it was amazing! if I know you at all (and if I don't know you at all, please stop reading my xanga), I can pretty much guarantee that at some point during that week I wished you were there (unless you were, in fact, there). Or I could have written about Christmas, or our Fairy Tale costume party (we're not weird, we're just different), or the fun of reading familiar books, or learning Swahili, or something but I didn't write about anything. I'm a bum. Sorry. If I know you've subscribed to this thing, I will try to add you to the list of whatever emails I manage to send off this semester. If you don't want me to, or if you want to be sure I do add you, just let me know. I'm afraid I can't guarantee that I'll send any off at all (my batting average is pretty horrible on xanga at least), but I will try to, and I'll try to keep them shortish and/or semi-interesting. I am not entirely sure that I'm ready to go, mentally-speaking. Literally speaking, I know I'm not ready to go yet. So I'm off to pack things up. | | |
| Okay, I have a theory, which I'll set down here so that all may benefit from it: C.S. Lewis totally based the Dufflepuds on the plebeian citizens in Coriolanus (which is a play, by Shakespeare, that you should read or see). That's all my wisdom for tonight. But it was definitely rather amusing to notice. I just can't imagine that he wasn't thinking of that when he wrote The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Anyway. Get more sleep than I do, friends! Goodnight. | | |
| I definitely like going off on Saturday mornings to help tutor a recently-immigrated family in English... not least because of the purely selfish refreshment I get out of just being around lovely non-America-raised people, even if I don't understand what they're saying and might be misunderstanding them altogether (for all I know). It's brought back some vivid memories of being a newly-arrived foreigner myself, in a country where I knew practically nothing of the language, and I've found myself automatically trying to remember the things I wished someone had done for me then, so that I might have a chance to help someone else now. And, of course, getting to interact with different people means more opportunites to make cultural faux pas (did I spell that right, and how do I make it plural?), which I definitely did! This family is Muslim, and the mother (yes, she has a name, but no, I'm not writing it on xanga, yes, I am paranoid) and I were looking at little pictures of animals that had the name of the animal written underneath it. So she would look at the picture of the dog and read "Dog," and I would say "yes! dog!" and then she looked at the cow, and we got into a bit more of a conversation -- "cow -- eat!" "yes! you can eat a cow!" And the same with chicken -- "yes, chicken -- we can eat it!" It was pretty exciting, we were getting into a great routine, and when we got to "Pig" I was like "yes! pig! we can eat the pig!" But no, we definitely can not eat the pig!! Oops. She was a very kind person, though, and just sort of gave me an amused look, and then we kept going. And yes, between spending the morning with this family, and the host family dinner, and the international market, and Dara's post which makes me feel nostalgic for Nigeria even though I've never been there, and talking with Hannuta, I am officially homesick as well. Anyone have an extra thousand dollars or so that they'd like to contribute for me to buy a plane ticket? PS-- I would just like to clarify that by "lovely non-America-raised people" I don't mean anything at all against the many lovely America-raised people I know (I'm American too, after all). It's just that somehow these sorts of people remind me a bit of the people back home. | | |
| A Robert Frost poem, in honor of three of my classes -- Astronomy, Reason and Religious Belief, and Shakespeare: Accidentally on PurposeThe Universe is but the Thing of things,
The things but balls all going round in rings.
Some mighty huge, some mighty tiny,
All of them radiant and mighty shiny. They mean to tell us all was rolling blind
Till accidentally it hit on mind
In an albino monkey in the jungle,
And even then it had to grope and bungle, Till Darwin came to earth upon a year
To show the evolution how to steer.
They mean to tell us, though, the Omnibus
Had no real purpose until it got to us. Never believe it. At the very worst
It must have had the purpose from the first
To produce purpose as the fitter bred:
We were just purpose coming to a head. Whose purpose was it, His or Hers or Its?
Let's leave that to the scientific wits.
Grant me intention, purpose and design -
That's near enough for me to the divine. And yet with all this help of head and brain,
How happily instinctive we remain.
Our best guide upward farther to the light:
Passionate preference such as love at sight. So, this is how you know if you are really good -- can you figure out which things in the poem would apply to which class, without having taken the classes? In other news, my Astronomy textbook used the word "sleuth," which was pretty exciting. It brought back many wonderful memories of Hardly Boys readings at team retreats and at the beach. And today was a beautiful day for such things as sleeping in, and creekwalking, and soccer. It's so nice to see all of you again! And tonight, I'm sure I'm going to get a massive amount of reading done to make up for the fun day. I'm just sure of it... | | |
| As of yesterday, I have...
....drumroll...
...my driver's license! Hurray!! 
Sometimes I take the card out and look at it just to be sure it's still there... Now I'm finally a full-fledged person in America, land of zero public transportation.
Thank you, Lord, for giving me a kindly, non-evil tester-lady. | | |
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