Auto-tuning is very popular in music nowadays, but it rarely adds anything to the music itself. Usually it just serves to make an otherwise terrible singer bearable to hear. On YouTube, however, there is an entertaining (and strangely beautiful) project called Symphony of Science that takes many famous popular scientists and creates auto-tuned songs that are really quite lovely, as well as bizarrely inspiring.
First up is "A Glorious Dawn," a remix of some Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking, taken mostly from clips of Cosmos and set to that strangely resonating piano/synthesizer background. "The cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths, of exquisite interrelationships, of the awesome machinery of nature..."
The other one that my friends and I at U of C have really enjoyed over the past month or so is "We Are All Connected," which is faster-paced and includes some drumming in the style of featured scientist Richard Feynman. This one has a wider selection of scientists, including Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Feynman, and even Bill Nye (yes, the science guy, a legitimate scientist in his own right). "The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it but the way those atoms are put together. The cosmos is also within us; we're made of star stuff..."
"We've traveled this way before, and there is much to be learned."
Thursday, December 23, 2010
Monday, December 20, 2010
A waltz for Bill
I was introduced to Bill Evans sometime during my sophomore year of high school or so, first as the extremely famous (although then a relative nobody) pianist on the majority of Kind of Blue and then as a separate entity from Miles Davis. From the KoB recordings, he is probably best showcased on "Blue in Green" (allegedly his own composition that Miles later claimed credit for, as he was wont to do throughout his career), which I thought was just the loveliest song that could ever be.
It's hard to separate jazz artists from the groups they perform in; different combinations of people seem to produce different ideas and sounds from the same artist. "Waltz for Debby" is an early and extremely famous Evans piece that predates his time with Miles but has the same sort of bizarrely clear, drifting, aching sound, like water, a tone I always associate with Evans despite the fact that it changed somewhat in his later life (he died of drug complications in 1980). I'm not sure where and when this particular recording is from, but I would guess sometimes either late 1950s or 1960s, after his fame had risen considerably. Anyone who has ever played the piano with any degree of seriousness at all understands exactly how difficult this sort of melodic fluency is to obtain.
It's hard to separate jazz artists from the groups they perform in; different combinations of people seem to produce different ideas and sounds from the same artist. "Waltz for Debby" is an early and extremely famous Evans piece that predates his time with Miles but has the same sort of bizarrely clear, drifting, aching sound, like water, a tone I always associate with Evans despite the fact that it changed somewhat in his later life (he died of drug complications in 1980). I'm not sure where and when this particular recording is from, but I would guess sometimes either late 1950s or 1960s, after his fame had risen considerably. Anyone who has ever played the piano with any degree of seriousness at all understands exactly how difficult this sort of melodic fluency is to obtain.
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Please ask, please tell
Today, as most anyone with a TV or an internet connection knows, the US Senate voted 65-31 to finally repeal the infamous Don't Ask, Don't Tell (DADT) legislation that prohibits servicemembers from being openly gay in the military, even as it (allegedly) protects them from being ferreted out and harassed by supervisors, etc. Supervisors don't ask about your latent homosexuality, you don't tell them, and everything jerks along in some semblance of normalcy. Of course, the simple fact that no one asks heterosexuals to keep their love-life on the down-low in the military, to hide their wives or girlfriends or boyfriends or husbands, makes this type of legislation at least moderately hypocritical, something that people remark often upon. What doesn't seem to get quite as much attention at times is the underlying attitude that so much of this legislation assumes, that gay or lesbian servicemembers need to be protected by denying who they are.
Bullying and harassment of homosexuals is as old as anything, as old as sexual harassment of all sorts and as old as ridiculously outdated race-related prejudice. It absolutely needs to be smacked down, whenever it appears, wherever it appears. The idea that having homosexuals hide who they really are to protect themselves, however, smacks of patronization. I'm willing to bet that many servicemembers know of several comrades who are more than likely gay, lesbian, and so much more, just as supervisors and military brass know. Bullying and harassment don't end by agreeing to pretend that there's "nothing to see here," by ignoring the qualities of those who are being harassed. Harassment ends when people realize that those whom they are harassing are human beings, just as they are; harassment ends with exposure, with people saying, "Yes, I'm gay" and letting others see just how "normal" (whatever that may mean) they are, letting others see that they're not monsters. To try to give non-heterosexuals some semblance of protection by asking them to pretend that they aren't gay, aren't lesbian, aren't bisexual is useless and counterproductive, not to mention extremely demeaning and insulting.
Repealing DADT is about letting servicemembers serve openly, without having to pretend that they're things and people that they aren't, yes, but in some way it's also about continuing to open dialogues and cultures. It's about opening up simple conversations about lives, simple encounters, that cannot exist when you try to pretend that everything's hunky-dory, that everything would be okay if people who deviate from the majority simply live their lives quietly and suppress those parts of them that are "deviant." It's about not merely tolerating homosexuality, turning a blind eye to it, "winking" at it, but celebrating it openly as the perfectly wonderful and beautiful thing it can be, the same way that heterosexual love can be perfectly wonderful and beautiful. The difference between tolerance and celebration can seem pretty semantic, but the joy and open-hearts-open-arms of celebration--the wild ride of shared life and shared humanity that it embraces--can make all the difference.
There are a lot of things still wrong with the way America, and the world in general, deals with homosexuality, with bisexuality, with, in short, anything different from straight-up monogamous (or serially monogamous) heterosexuality. There are a lot of things still wrong with the way we use, or attempt to use, our military to deal with the rest of the world, with the way that the military deals with minorities, with women, and, yes, with non-straights. For instance, the latest I've seen/read/heard about the DADT repeal that's been swept under the rug is the fact that the bill still explicitly bans these newly open gay soldiers from being able to extend military benefits to their domestic partners or potential legal spouses (for those who live in states where same-sex marriage has been legalized). DADT repeal also does absolutely nothing to address transgenderism, to whatever extent it exists in the military--and it probably exists to a much greater degree than people might be willing to admit, since transgender individuals are generally even less socially acceptable than homosexuals. They bend the common notions of gender even more--what do you call a male-to-female transgender who is sexually attracted to women? Straight male? Lesbian? What pronouns do you use and when and how? (When it's hard to label something, people tend to get a bit antsy.) The idea that gender and biological sex is a stew of hormones, chemicals, and social conditioning, among many other things, that don't always align in the same way doesn't fit well with the ages-old conception of "male" and "female."
That's another topic, for another day. For now DADT repeal is on its way to becoming reality; there's still Obama's signature, then certification and implementation by the Pentagon, which could take who-knows-how-long. This is a positive thing, however, a step in the right direction. These steps do not end with the military. They do not end with the end of harassment. They do not end with the legalization of same-sex marriage. They probably will never fully end. But everything that leads, even incrementally, to celebrating, openly rejoicing in, the wonderful myriad of forms that humanity can assume is something to be happy for--and a kick in the pants, a reminder to never stop loving, celebrating, and fighting for us all.
Bullying and harassment of homosexuals is as old as anything, as old as sexual harassment of all sorts and as old as ridiculously outdated race-related prejudice. It absolutely needs to be smacked down, whenever it appears, wherever it appears. The idea that having homosexuals hide who they really are to protect themselves, however, smacks of patronization. I'm willing to bet that many servicemembers know of several comrades who are more than likely gay, lesbian, and so much more, just as supervisors and military brass know. Bullying and harassment don't end by agreeing to pretend that there's "nothing to see here," by ignoring the qualities of those who are being harassed. Harassment ends when people realize that those whom they are harassing are human beings, just as they are; harassment ends with exposure, with people saying, "Yes, I'm gay" and letting others see just how "normal" (whatever that may mean) they are, letting others see that they're not monsters. To try to give non-heterosexuals some semblance of protection by asking them to pretend that they aren't gay, aren't lesbian, aren't bisexual is useless and counterproductive, not to mention extremely demeaning and insulting.
Repealing DADT is about letting servicemembers serve openly, without having to pretend that they're things and people that they aren't, yes, but in some way it's also about continuing to open dialogues and cultures. It's about opening up simple conversations about lives, simple encounters, that cannot exist when you try to pretend that everything's hunky-dory, that everything would be okay if people who deviate from the majority simply live their lives quietly and suppress those parts of them that are "deviant." It's about not merely tolerating homosexuality, turning a blind eye to it, "winking" at it, but celebrating it openly as the perfectly wonderful and beautiful thing it can be, the same way that heterosexual love can be perfectly wonderful and beautiful. The difference between tolerance and celebration can seem pretty semantic, but the joy and open-hearts-open-arms of celebration--the wild ride of shared life and shared humanity that it embraces--can make all the difference.
There are a lot of things still wrong with the way America, and the world in general, deals with homosexuality, with bisexuality, with, in short, anything different from straight-up monogamous (or serially monogamous) heterosexuality. There are a lot of things still wrong with the way we use, or attempt to use, our military to deal with the rest of the world, with the way that the military deals with minorities, with women, and, yes, with non-straights. For instance, the latest I've seen/read/heard about the DADT repeal that's been swept under the rug is the fact that the bill still explicitly bans these newly open gay soldiers from being able to extend military benefits to their domestic partners or potential legal spouses (for those who live in states where same-sex marriage has been legalized). DADT repeal also does absolutely nothing to address transgenderism, to whatever extent it exists in the military--and it probably exists to a much greater degree than people might be willing to admit, since transgender individuals are generally even less socially acceptable than homosexuals. They bend the common notions of gender even more--what do you call a male-to-female transgender who is sexually attracted to women? Straight male? Lesbian? What pronouns do you use and when and how? (When it's hard to label something, people tend to get a bit antsy.) The idea that gender and biological sex is a stew of hormones, chemicals, and social conditioning, among many other things, that don't always align in the same way doesn't fit well with the ages-old conception of "male" and "female."
That's another topic, for another day. For now DADT repeal is on its way to becoming reality; there's still Obama's signature, then certification and implementation by the Pentagon, which could take who-knows-how-long. This is a positive thing, however, a step in the right direction. These steps do not end with the military. They do not end with the end of harassment. They do not end with the legalization of same-sex marriage. They probably will never fully end. But everything that leads, even incrementally, to celebrating, openly rejoicing in, the wonderful myriad of forms that humanity can assume is something to be happy for--and a kick in the pants, a reminder to never stop loving, celebrating, and fighting for us all.
Friday, December 17, 2010
Thai expeditions
My hometown isn't the most diverse place in the world, but we do Asian-style foods okay; there are quite a few Chinese places (Americanized Chinese, but still) and two or three Thai places in town, and if we venture into the city, there's some Indian and a Brazilian steakhouse and whatever. Compared to Chicago, this is all laughable, but no one comes to New England looking for exotic food, unless someone considers seafood exotic.
Hyde Park is an extremely gentrified neighborhood for Chicago, but 55th Street is semi-famous for its three Thai restaurants (Siam, Thai 55, and Snail), and restaurants of other persuasions besides. 57th Street also has a pretty good Americanized noodle place called Noodles Etc, where a sort of pan-Asian (mostly Thai and Japanese) cuisine exists for dirt-cheap (aka student-friendly) prices. All this is to say that campus does not lack noodles of all sorts, in particular Thai food, and Chinatown (where the legitimate Chinese food resides) is only a 15- or 20-minute Red Line ride away. The dining halls are not open on Saturday nights, leaving us to the mercy of local restaurants and the like, and so U of C students tend to spend more time eating vaguely Asian food than eating any other type of cuisine, when it comes to going out for dinner.
Nonetheless my friend and I decided to hit up a local Thai place today, mostly because I found myself craving something noodle-y and peanut-y after having refrained from Thai food for the past several weeks. I had pad see ew (apologies for the bad transliteration; I've seen it Romanized in many different ways), which is similar to the ever-popular pad thai, only with much thicker noodles that are, in my opinion, probably better than pad thai noodles. I tend not to be very adventurous with cuisine (for several years I only ever ordered pad thai in Thai restaurants, and this isn't exactly anything far removed from that), but living in Chicago does seem to make people more embarrassed of culinary boredom and predictableness, so over the past year and a half I've been trying different things out, even if one of the listed ingredients makes me squirm. I've had "real" Chinese food, both dim sum and otherwise, Greek food, Indian/Pakistanti a few times, plenty of Thai, real Mexican food, and much more.
After lunch we found ourselves dealing with the usual small-town boredom that settles in when you live in a place where the only establishments under-21-year-olds are welcome to are restaurants and stores. Having dealt with the restaurant portion of that, we wandered around the Dollar Store for a while, ostensibly trying to find something tacky my friend's mom had requested for Christmas but in reality only finding cheap party supplies and state-themed shot glasses. (If you've ever wondered how long people can spend in a Dollar Store, today showed that it can be at least 45 minutes.) After that it was more small-town boredom at the library, a favorite after-school hangout for many middle schoolers and early high schoolers, much to the librarians' annoyance. When you live in white suburbia, you tend to spend a lot of time wandering around in stores, libraries, parks, and parking lots, even, just talking and joking around, wasting time, trying to enjoy other people's company.
At the risk of being redundant, boring, and awkward, we ended off the day by swinging by the high school as the students were dismissed. This at least was somewhat productive; we had an amusing conversation for 15 or 20 minutes with a senior (I still think of him as a sophomore) in the frigid high school parking lot, and by the time we went inside most anybody of interest had already left, fleeing hard and fast for the weekend. I can't say I blame them. A lot of days on break here in suburbia feel kind of like the weekend, but most other people have real life to attend to, still.
At school on a Friday night, I'd be going to dinner before the dining hall closed (at 7pm central, of course) and then hanging out in the lounge playing video games or watching trash TV or sometimes watching other people play deeply involving board games, like Settlers of Catan. If the homework load is low, people will try to figure out who is throwing a party, where, and who wants to go to it. The night would probably inevitably end in someone's room, watching YouTube videos and shooting the breeze until the middle of the night. Here nights are spent alternating the internet (YouTube videos, music, blogs, Facebook, IMing, Twitter, etc) and occasional TV shows with books, with lots of texting throughout. Occasionally there will be a dinner out with either family or friends, and at this time of year the party parade starts up (in another few days). Seeing friends is just harder, since at school your friends are all within spitting distance, for the most part, whereas here you have to drive for at least ten minutes to see anyone else.
Hyde Park is an extremely gentrified neighborhood for Chicago, but 55th Street is semi-famous for its three Thai restaurants (Siam, Thai 55, and Snail), and restaurants of other persuasions besides. 57th Street also has a pretty good Americanized noodle place called Noodles Etc, where a sort of pan-Asian (mostly Thai and Japanese) cuisine exists for dirt-cheap (aka student-friendly) prices. All this is to say that campus does not lack noodles of all sorts, in particular Thai food, and Chinatown (where the legitimate Chinese food resides) is only a 15- or 20-minute Red Line ride away. The dining halls are not open on Saturday nights, leaving us to the mercy of local restaurants and the like, and so U of C students tend to spend more time eating vaguely Asian food than eating any other type of cuisine, when it comes to going out for dinner.
Nonetheless my friend and I decided to hit up a local Thai place today, mostly because I found myself craving something noodle-y and peanut-y after having refrained from Thai food for the past several weeks. I had pad see ew (apologies for the bad transliteration; I've seen it Romanized in many different ways), which is similar to the ever-popular pad thai, only with much thicker noodles that are, in my opinion, probably better than pad thai noodles. I tend not to be very adventurous with cuisine (for several years I only ever ordered pad thai in Thai restaurants, and this isn't exactly anything far removed from that), but living in Chicago does seem to make people more embarrassed of culinary boredom and predictableness, so over the past year and a half I've been trying different things out, even if one of the listed ingredients makes me squirm. I've had "real" Chinese food, both dim sum and otherwise, Greek food, Indian/Pakistanti a few times, plenty of Thai, real Mexican food, and much more.
After lunch we found ourselves dealing with the usual small-town boredom that settles in when you live in a place where the only establishments under-21-year-olds are welcome to are restaurants and stores. Having dealt with the restaurant portion of that, we wandered around the Dollar Store for a while, ostensibly trying to find something tacky my friend's mom had requested for Christmas but in reality only finding cheap party supplies and state-themed shot glasses. (If you've ever wondered how long people can spend in a Dollar Store, today showed that it can be at least 45 minutes.) After that it was more small-town boredom at the library, a favorite after-school hangout for many middle schoolers and early high schoolers, much to the librarians' annoyance. When you live in white suburbia, you tend to spend a lot of time wandering around in stores, libraries, parks, and parking lots, even, just talking and joking around, wasting time, trying to enjoy other people's company.
At the risk of being redundant, boring, and awkward, we ended off the day by swinging by the high school as the students were dismissed. This at least was somewhat productive; we had an amusing conversation for 15 or 20 minutes with a senior (I still think of him as a sophomore) in the frigid high school parking lot, and by the time we went inside most anybody of interest had already left, fleeing hard and fast for the weekend. I can't say I blame them. A lot of days on break here in suburbia feel kind of like the weekend, but most other people have real life to attend to, still.
At school on a Friday night, I'd be going to dinner before the dining hall closed (at 7pm central, of course) and then hanging out in the lounge playing video games or watching trash TV or sometimes watching other people play deeply involving board games, like Settlers of Catan. If the homework load is low, people will try to figure out who is throwing a party, where, and who wants to go to it. The night would probably inevitably end in someone's room, watching YouTube videos and shooting the breeze until the middle of the night. Here nights are spent alternating the internet (YouTube videos, music, blogs, Facebook, IMing, Twitter, etc) and occasional TV shows with books, with lots of texting throughout. Occasionally there will be a dinner out with either family or friends, and at this time of year the party parade starts up (in another few days). Seeing friends is just harder, since at school your friends are all within spitting distance, for the most part, whereas here you have to drive for at least ten minutes to see anyone else.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Waltzing flowers
Such a great song, even if sometimes over-heard at this time of year. Always makes me want to learn to ballroom dance or something. Last year, in a fit of just-finished-a-paper-joy, I ran up and down my hallway once pretending to sashay to this song. I consider it a mark of U of C's relative weirdness that I got no odd looks for that stunt.
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
The home wavelength
My newsfeed on Facebook has become cluttered with a few common themes: "FINALLY DONE FINALS YAY!" (from friends at other schools), "Where are my grades?" or, alternately, "This quarter sucked" (from, of course, fellow Chicagoans), and then the curiously amusing "XYZ college class of 2015!" from current seniors at my old high school who have heard back from early action or early decision schools. Thanks to Facebook and another day of gossip at said high school today, I now know where several people are going, where one kid has been deferred, and where many of the rest are applying, to put their fates in the hands of the regular decision application pool.
Never mind the fact that "class of 2015" makes me feel extremely old, in a way that "class of 2014" (only one year off my own graduation year of 2013) couldn't quite manage. Why two years instead of one hits home isn't really clear, but I haven't thought about anything occurring in 2015, two full years after my own college graduation. I'm beginning to think, half in jest and half seriously, that I may be living in a cardboard box in 2015, but it's still far enough removed from the present that such an idea is more amusing than it is frightening. It's similar to how it's hard for those of us under the age of 22 or 23 to take any economic news seriously; we kind of delude ourselves that by the time we are facing the job market, things will have to be better, or maybe we'll just run away to Europe or Australia or something. Never mind, of course, the fact that you can hardly just run away to another country (immigration laws are strict everywhere, unless you marry a national of that country) or that other countries are in equally bad shape.
Thinking about how these kids who, last I knew, were awkward sophomores just emerging out of the pit of moodiness that is early adolescence are now applying, and in some cases even committing, to colleges is bizarre. When I last was home in September, they were still all mostly confused, annoyed, and not looking forward to the college application process at all, and now a few of them are already done. At this time two years ago, in December 2008, I myself was already done, really, sitting on a gorgeous early action acceptance letter from the University of Chicago and awaiting the financial aid decision that would seal the deal. It was so exciting. It wasn't until maybe March or April, as other people sealed their own college deals, that I realized just how much the past thirteen years of my life had been scripted by the rhythms of the public school system and how weird it would be to find an entirely new rhythm to serve me for the next four years. What do you do when you don't have school to dictate what you'll do with your waking hours? College's dictations are different than those of high school, but there is still the obligation of classes and homework and papers and exams.
Being home and lounging around with a bunch of sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds takes me back a bit to that old, high school rhythm, without really immersing me in it. Last year at this time it was almost literally breathtaking to return and remember life as it had been, barely six months previously. My heart would race when I approached the high school, both as a kind of post-traumatic stress syndrome thing (just remembering every bad test, every absolutely menial and joyless day) and as a strange kind of confused and resistant joy to being back home, in those hallways my feet still could traverse automatically.
Today and yesterday there was no emotion, positive or negative, no real awkwardness or fear of being called out for walking the halls I left behind in June 2009. Last year there was the fear of somehow falling back into high school, the fear of finding something there that would make me entirely unwilling to return to Chicago--the fear, in short, of remembering positive things about that experience we all vilified so heavily throughout. Being happy in Chicago was natural, but it depended in part on being able to vilify high school, my home town, everything that had come before. When the bloom came off the rose in February and the happy memories of time before June 2009 came swirling in, that defiant happiness of autumn quarter last year had to change and figure out how to incorporate all that had been happy in 8th grade, in 11th grade, in 12th grade, in Latin classes and with friends at lunch and after school. I had to finally put to rest the teenager, rebelling in part because actually enjoying anything or anyone was threatening to her oh-so-tenuous sense of independent self, and find the adult who finally understands that agreeing with other people and enjoying their company doesn't mean that she's lost herself in them.
The home wavelength even now feels at times like it's threatening to overwhelm me again, threatening to nullify all the things and people I've done and seen and met in the past year and a half since I left my parents' immediate control. Whenever that starts up again, however, I remind myself that my sophomores are now becoming members of the college class of 2015 at institutions all over the place, that my freshmen are starting college tours of their own, that a few of my favorite teachers from high school have left for greener pastures--in short, that everything changes, that clinging to life as it was is utterly pointless but so too is vilifying all that went before. My seniors, they are now, are different people from who they were when they were sophomores, just as my juniors are so different from their freshmen selves, just as my Latin teacher's smile is more worn and complicated than it was on the last day of my senior year. I loved them as they were and, if I really care about their lives and my own, as I want to, as I want to feel that depth of involvement and emotion, I love them as they are and as who they will be.
Never mind the fact that "class of 2015" makes me feel extremely old, in a way that "class of 2014" (only one year off my own graduation year of 2013) couldn't quite manage. Why two years instead of one hits home isn't really clear, but I haven't thought about anything occurring in 2015, two full years after my own college graduation. I'm beginning to think, half in jest and half seriously, that I may be living in a cardboard box in 2015, but it's still far enough removed from the present that such an idea is more amusing than it is frightening. It's similar to how it's hard for those of us under the age of 22 or 23 to take any economic news seriously; we kind of delude ourselves that by the time we are facing the job market, things will have to be better, or maybe we'll just run away to Europe or Australia or something. Never mind, of course, the fact that you can hardly just run away to another country (immigration laws are strict everywhere, unless you marry a national of that country) or that other countries are in equally bad shape.
Thinking about how these kids who, last I knew, were awkward sophomores just emerging out of the pit of moodiness that is early adolescence are now applying, and in some cases even committing, to colleges is bizarre. When I last was home in September, they were still all mostly confused, annoyed, and not looking forward to the college application process at all, and now a few of them are already done. At this time two years ago, in December 2008, I myself was already done, really, sitting on a gorgeous early action acceptance letter from the University of Chicago and awaiting the financial aid decision that would seal the deal. It was so exciting. It wasn't until maybe March or April, as other people sealed their own college deals, that I realized just how much the past thirteen years of my life had been scripted by the rhythms of the public school system and how weird it would be to find an entirely new rhythm to serve me for the next four years. What do you do when you don't have school to dictate what you'll do with your waking hours? College's dictations are different than those of high school, but there is still the obligation of classes and homework and papers and exams.
Being home and lounging around with a bunch of sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds takes me back a bit to that old, high school rhythm, without really immersing me in it. Last year at this time it was almost literally breathtaking to return and remember life as it had been, barely six months previously. My heart would race when I approached the high school, both as a kind of post-traumatic stress syndrome thing (just remembering every bad test, every absolutely menial and joyless day) and as a strange kind of confused and resistant joy to being back home, in those hallways my feet still could traverse automatically.
Today and yesterday there was no emotion, positive or negative, no real awkwardness or fear of being called out for walking the halls I left behind in June 2009. Last year there was the fear of somehow falling back into high school, the fear of finding something there that would make me entirely unwilling to return to Chicago--the fear, in short, of remembering positive things about that experience we all vilified so heavily throughout. Being happy in Chicago was natural, but it depended in part on being able to vilify high school, my home town, everything that had come before. When the bloom came off the rose in February and the happy memories of time before June 2009 came swirling in, that defiant happiness of autumn quarter last year had to change and figure out how to incorporate all that had been happy in 8th grade, in 11th grade, in 12th grade, in Latin classes and with friends at lunch and after school. I had to finally put to rest the teenager, rebelling in part because actually enjoying anything or anyone was threatening to her oh-so-tenuous sense of independent self, and find the adult who finally understands that agreeing with other people and enjoying their company doesn't mean that she's lost herself in them.
The home wavelength even now feels at times like it's threatening to overwhelm me again, threatening to nullify all the things and people I've done and seen and met in the past year and a half since I left my parents' immediate control. Whenever that starts up again, however, I remind myself that my sophomores are now becoming members of the college class of 2015 at institutions all over the place, that my freshmen are starting college tours of their own, that a few of my favorite teachers from high school have left for greener pastures--in short, that everything changes, that clinging to life as it was is utterly pointless but so too is vilifying all that went before. My seniors, they are now, are different people from who they were when they were sophomores, just as my juniors are so different from their freshmen selves, just as my Latin teacher's smile is more worn and complicated than it was on the last day of my senior year. I loved them as they were and, if I really care about their lives and my own, as I want to, as I want to feel that depth of involvement and emotion, I love them as they are and as who they will be.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Unfrozen pools
Today, amidst other errands and attempts at being productive, I stopped by my old high school for a couple hours to visit. Many people probably wonder how you can spend "a couple hours" visiting a bunch of fourteen- to eighteen-year-olds, but all the people I know who are still left in that building are at least sixteen, and it's weird to think of them even being that old; in my mind the juniors are still freshmen, from when I was a senior, and the seniors are still the same old sophomores I remember. In my mind, however, I was most decidedly not still a senior today.
A lot of things are still the same. There are the same old lockers, blue for freshmen and juniors and red for sophomores and seniors, the same random purple overflow lockers, even most of the same teachers. There are some new teachers, however, and now two full years of students I've never in my life met. These freshmen and sophomores, entirely foreign to me, sparked some vague memories of those years in my own life, years of thinking that an hour of homework a night was "so much work" and years where the future was only a vague and nebulous thing, where I couldn't tell you where I wanted to go to college because I'd never honestly never even thought about it. Now I'm a third of the way through college, still looking at the future with vague eyes, but no longer unable to imagine how things could go.
Yesterday, in a fit of boredom, I read the journals I kept in fits and starts from the middle of fifth grade through my freshman year of high school. In fifth grade I was consumed with my horrible teachers, and then the journal skips ahead to the end of sixth grade, where exactly the opposite had occurred and I had found myself in a deliriously happy state of actually enjoying a lot about school. In seventh grade the tone changed again, became brooding and uncertain and deeply insecure about what I considered weird, namely the fact that I actually enjoyed many things about school, which was not a cool thing to do in seventh grade. By eighth grade the brooding and self-instigated angst was gone, but the insecurity and confusion was back. Freshman year was just a long stream of disappointments with school and struggling to find my place in the chaos of high school, a new social and academic scene.
I would write pages in middle school detailing the funny things that had happened, the witty banter I had observed, how so-and-so had said such-and-such in this-or-that class and it had made everyone, including teachers, laugh. I also would note the times my middle school French teacher or my seventh grade math teacher had said something dumb, had tried to rat the class out without success, etc. Always my desire, as I wrote again and again, was to record these random anecdotes, which came in great bursts followed by weeks of no writing, so that I would "never, ever forget them." What's funny is that when I reread these journals yesterday, I remembered so many things so clearly, and many of the funny things recorded still made me laugh, remembering perhaps the sheer joy I had experienced laughing at them when they originally occurred.
For instance, one of the times I detailed during my eighth grade year (probably the year with the most journal pages devoted to it, the year when everything was the headiest and most palpably entertaining and frightening all at once) involved the first snowfall and a bizarre occurrence where the chairs in the classroom would make a godawful squelching noise every time anyone so much as shifted in them. I wrote the following, word for word:
It goes on for several more pages, detailing the troublemaking kid being forced to sit in the corner (an extremely common and entertaining occurrence in this class) and a highly entertaining episode from my science class the next period when a student teacher accidentally set off a model volcano, spraying baking soda and vinegar everywhere. Why I journaled such random things at that time in my life remains a mystery to me, but it does detail the depth to which I engaged with even mundane things then. It also shows the depth to which I was willing to subconsciously alter these events; I'm quite sure that I never ran into class and twirled around in a circle, as I wrote that I did, but my natural tendency to over-elaborate, to need to tell entertaining things, led me to include that (probably fictitious) detail. Similarly, I'm sure the dialogue had that flavor, maybe even most of those phrases, but probably not that exact wording (although my memory for things that entertain me was then, and is still now, very exact).
Nonetheless, when reading, I remembered all these anecdotes, as though from a good book I had once read and forgotten that I had done so. I laughed, a lot. They are good stories, even entertaining ones, genuinely funny and well-captured in places, and I'm glad I wrote them down. I also remember, however, rereading them in the depths of my freshman year, when nothing seemed that right, that natural, that funny anymore and wishing, so deeply, to relive that happiness, again and again. I have not journaled with that intensity, that verve and flair for capturing all the nuances of a scene, since my eighth grade year, and even in the happiest times of high school I never felt that simply happy, that entertained by the goings-on of classrooms, again. Many foolish things bothered my thirteen-year-old mind alongside these anecdotes of teachers and classmates, but I was always so glad to be alive, joyously involved in even the miserable parts of life.
When I was driving up to the high school today, I passed the skating rink that's situated sort of in the middle of the mass of buildings that is the high school, the athletic fields, the intermediate (grades 3-5) school, a playground, and the middle school. It's been in the 50s lately here, I guess, and the rink was full of water, waiting to freeze but at that moment still as liquid as the ocean. I remembered ice skating there many, many times throughout my youth, everything from skating lessons in 3rd or 4th grade to skating that one time right before midterms with my gym class my senior year of high school. And almost simultaneously, if such a thing is possible, I remembered ice skating on the Midway Plaisance at school, not even two weeks ago, with our house's four-year-old and her father, one of our resident heads (house parents, basically) and then ice-skating with the same bunch of people downtown a few days later at Millennium Park as the snow fell, light and easy, as pretty as a postcard. My New England hometown has not a drop of snow, but my industrialized adoptive city was as beautiful as anything I've ever seen that evening, swirling in the snow to swing music as city lights winked all around.
I remember these scenes, these Chicago scenes, clearly, remember the swoosh of skates and the laughter of my companions and the way I pictured myself, so suddenly, too easily, doing all that wrapped in long skirts or something, a silly antebellum Southern belle or maybe like some rich man's daughter in Little Women. Utterly unrelated to any other thought out there, of course, but a leap of associative imagination and happiness not felt in a long, long time, not felt since the days when I wanted to "never, ever forget" how happy my literature teacher's loving snark or my homeroom teacher's silly reminiscences made me. I'm not thirteen again, thankfully, but I think some of that lust for life, that joy just in the present moment, has come back to me in the past few months.
A lot of things are still the same. There are the same old lockers, blue for freshmen and juniors and red for sophomores and seniors, the same random purple overflow lockers, even most of the same teachers. There are some new teachers, however, and now two full years of students I've never in my life met. These freshmen and sophomores, entirely foreign to me, sparked some vague memories of those years in my own life, years of thinking that an hour of homework a night was "so much work" and years where the future was only a vague and nebulous thing, where I couldn't tell you where I wanted to go to college because I'd never honestly never even thought about it. Now I'm a third of the way through college, still looking at the future with vague eyes, but no longer unable to imagine how things could go.
Yesterday, in a fit of boredom, I read the journals I kept in fits and starts from the middle of fifth grade through my freshman year of high school. In fifth grade I was consumed with my horrible teachers, and then the journal skips ahead to the end of sixth grade, where exactly the opposite had occurred and I had found myself in a deliriously happy state of actually enjoying a lot about school. In seventh grade the tone changed again, became brooding and uncertain and deeply insecure about what I considered weird, namely the fact that I actually enjoyed many things about school, which was not a cool thing to do in seventh grade. By eighth grade the brooding and self-instigated angst was gone, but the insecurity and confusion was back. Freshman year was just a long stream of disappointments with school and struggling to find my place in the chaos of high school, a new social and academic scene.
I would write pages in middle school detailing the funny things that had happened, the witty banter I had observed, how so-and-so had said such-and-such in this-or-that class and it had made everyone, including teachers, laugh. I also would note the times my middle school French teacher or my seventh grade math teacher had said something dumb, had tried to rat the class out without success, etc. Always my desire, as I wrote again and again, was to record these random anecdotes, which came in great bursts followed by weeks of no writing, so that I would "never, ever forget them." What's funny is that when I reread these journals yesterday, I remembered so many things so clearly, and many of the funny things recorded still made me laugh, remembering perhaps the sheer joy I had experienced laughing at them when they originally occurred.
For instance, one of the times I detailed during my eighth grade year (probably the year with the most journal pages devoted to it, the year when everything was the headiest and most palpably entertaining and frightening all at once) involved the first snowfall and a bizarre occurrence where the chairs in the classroom would make a godawful squelching noise every time anyone so much as shifted in them. I wrote the following, word for word:
"Snow!" I cried gleefully when I entered literature. "It's SNOWING!" And I laughed and twirled in a circle. "Can we please go outside in it?"
"No," [my teacher] laughed. "Besides, you already were in it." People continued to beg and beg, and yet she remained as adamant as [my homeroom teacher].
We had to take spelling and vocab tests as well, and there was a slight problem with the chairs. Everytime anyone so much as shifted his/her weight in a chair, it would give a great squeaking sound. [Troublemaking kid] and that crew soon were moving on purpose, causing [teacher] to grumble that the next person to squeak in his or her chair would get a detention.
Moments later, I sighed and shifted my weight--causing my chair to squeak. "Oh my gosh!" I said frantically as [teacher] whirled around to glare at me. "That was accidental, I swear." She rolled her eyes at me, but thankfully did not fill out a detention slip.
It was very amusing, therefore, to watch [teacher] wince every time a chair squeaked "on accident." She was walking behind me when my own chair squeaked, and when I looked up at her to see her reaction, she just started laughing.
It goes on for several more pages, detailing the troublemaking kid being forced to sit in the corner (an extremely common and entertaining occurrence in this class) and a highly entertaining episode from my science class the next period when a student teacher accidentally set off a model volcano, spraying baking soda and vinegar everywhere. Why I journaled such random things at that time in my life remains a mystery to me, but it does detail the depth to which I engaged with even mundane things then. It also shows the depth to which I was willing to subconsciously alter these events; I'm quite sure that I never ran into class and twirled around in a circle, as I wrote that I did, but my natural tendency to over-elaborate, to need to tell entertaining things, led me to include that (probably fictitious) detail. Similarly, I'm sure the dialogue had that flavor, maybe even most of those phrases, but probably not that exact wording (although my memory for things that entertain me was then, and is still now, very exact).
Nonetheless, when reading, I remembered all these anecdotes, as though from a good book I had once read and forgotten that I had done so. I laughed, a lot. They are good stories, even entertaining ones, genuinely funny and well-captured in places, and I'm glad I wrote them down. I also remember, however, rereading them in the depths of my freshman year, when nothing seemed that right, that natural, that funny anymore and wishing, so deeply, to relive that happiness, again and again. I have not journaled with that intensity, that verve and flair for capturing all the nuances of a scene, since my eighth grade year, and even in the happiest times of high school I never felt that simply happy, that entertained by the goings-on of classrooms, again. Many foolish things bothered my thirteen-year-old mind alongside these anecdotes of teachers and classmates, but I was always so glad to be alive, joyously involved in even the miserable parts of life.
When I was driving up to the high school today, I passed the skating rink that's situated sort of in the middle of the mass of buildings that is the high school, the athletic fields, the intermediate (grades 3-5) school, a playground, and the middle school. It's been in the 50s lately here, I guess, and the rink was full of water, waiting to freeze but at that moment still as liquid as the ocean. I remembered ice skating there many, many times throughout my youth, everything from skating lessons in 3rd or 4th grade to skating that one time right before midterms with my gym class my senior year of high school. And almost simultaneously, if such a thing is possible, I remembered ice skating on the Midway Plaisance at school, not even two weeks ago, with our house's four-year-old and her father, one of our resident heads (house parents, basically) and then ice-skating with the same bunch of people downtown a few days later at Millennium Park as the snow fell, light and easy, as pretty as a postcard. My New England hometown has not a drop of snow, but my industrialized adoptive city was as beautiful as anything I've ever seen that evening, swirling in the snow to swing music as city lights winked all around.
I remember these scenes, these Chicago scenes, clearly, remember the swoosh of skates and the laughter of my companions and the way I pictured myself, so suddenly, too easily, doing all that wrapped in long skirts or something, a silly antebellum Southern belle or maybe like some rich man's daughter in Little Women. Utterly unrelated to any other thought out there, of course, but a leap of associative imagination and happiness not felt in a long, long time, not felt since the days when I wanted to "never, ever forget" how happy my literature teacher's loving snark or my homeroom teacher's silly reminiscences made me. I'm not thirteen again, thankfully, but I think some of that lust for life, that joy just in the present moment, has come back to me in the past few months.
Monday, December 13, 2010
Back on break
Home is quiet, very quiet, and dark in a way that an industrialized wonderland like Chicago can never be. I have my bedroom and a separate bathroom and rooms and rooms beyond--so many rooms, with so much furniture, and so much stuff, everywhere, books and photos and computers and lamps and the clutter of three lifetimes. There's my senile ginger-colored cat and my sweet, exasperating parrot and eighteen turkeys who hang around my backyard waiting for my mom to throw them scraps. There's 8 acres of land and the beehives and the brook, swollen with recent rain, and dead gardens and yellow-green stretches of grass. There's my double bed and the tv from the 1980s in my room that hasn't worked in years.
Living in a box for months, you forget that most other people's lives are lived in more space than that, at least in New England, at least where I'm from. You forget that people own whole houses and yards and pets and have numerous televisions; you forget that wild animals beyond gray squirrels and sparrows, omnipresent in Chicago, exist. It has rained almost nonstop since I got home Saturday night, down pouring, great buckets of water everywhere, whereas I left Chicago just before a snowstorm and subzero temperatures moved in. I will have all winter to freeze to death along the shores of Lake Michigan, but I do wish it were colder and snowier here now, instead of pouring, instead of miserable rain in the middle of December.
Being home is such a conflicting thing for any college student, I think. Being on break is wonderful; too much work has gone on the past eleven weeks, and I can fully relish the time off, although U of C's schedule makes it so that you don't quite know what to do with yourself when you don't have piles of work to do. At the same time, being home is bizarrely uncomfortable; everyone you run into, at least in a town this size, in New England, feels the need to point out your presence, remark on it, ask you how things are. College is anonymous, relatively speaking, where anything you do, no matter how crazy, isn't remarkable because someone else has no doubt done something crazier. In short, at home you stick out like a sore thumb, and you often find that the things you may have daydreamed of during your achier moments at school are not what you remembered.
So I'm glad to be home, glad to see some people (once I actually do; currently I have done little more than lie around and read all day), but am also already looking forward to going back to school. The workload ahead does not please me any more than the workload this past quarter pleased me, but the people, the places, the shared camaraderie of Karl Marx and awkward late adolescence are all terribly familiar to me in a way that home is no longer. Last year was a bewildering mixture of excitement and random spurts of horrific dread and stupefying loneliness at times, but now all has calmed down to the point where I begin to feel real love for Chicago, despite its oddities, where I can count on one hand the number of times that I've thought of high school or my life before Chicago in anything more than a very passing manner, as a "Oh yeah, I think someone I went to school with had done that/gone there/had that happen to them" sort of thing.
So tonight, curiously, I miss Chicago, miss laughing over nonsense with many other college-aged students and pretending to be an adult. Missing anything in life is stupid, I know; missing does nothing to bring anything back and detracts from the glory of whatever is in front of you at the moment (and there probably is something glorious about every moment, if you look for it). Sometimes just a dose of heartsickness, however, a dose of sorrow can be curiously cathartic, a wonderful reminder of how good times were in the past (even in the recent past of two weeks ago!) and how good you want to make them in the meantime.
Living in a box for months, you forget that most other people's lives are lived in more space than that, at least in New England, at least where I'm from. You forget that people own whole houses and yards and pets and have numerous televisions; you forget that wild animals beyond gray squirrels and sparrows, omnipresent in Chicago, exist. It has rained almost nonstop since I got home Saturday night, down pouring, great buckets of water everywhere, whereas I left Chicago just before a snowstorm and subzero temperatures moved in. I will have all winter to freeze to death along the shores of Lake Michigan, but I do wish it were colder and snowier here now, instead of pouring, instead of miserable rain in the middle of December.
Being home is such a conflicting thing for any college student, I think. Being on break is wonderful; too much work has gone on the past eleven weeks, and I can fully relish the time off, although U of C's schedule makes it so that you don't quite know what to do with yourself when you don't have piles of work to do. At the same time, being home is bizarrely uncomfortable; everyone you run into, at least in a town this size, in New England, feels the need to point out your presence, remark on it, ask you how things are. College is anonymous, relatively speaking, where anything you do, no matter how crazy, isn't remarkable because someone else has no doubt done something crazier. In short, at home you stick out like a sore thumb, and you often find that the things you may have daydreamed of during your achier moments at school are not what you remembered.
So I'm glad to be home, glad to see some people (once I actually do; currently I have done little more than lie around and read all day), but am also already looking forward to going back to school. The workload ahead does not please me any more than the workload this past quarter pleased me, but the people, the places, the shared camaraderie of Karl Marx and awkward late adolescence are all terribly familiar to me in a way that home is no longer. Last year was a bewildering mixture of excitement and random spurts of horrific dread and stupefying loneliness at times, but now all has calmed down to the point where I begin to feel real love for Chicago, despite its oddities, where I can count on one hand the number of times that I've thought of high school or my life before Chicago in anything more than a very passing manner, as a "Oh yeah, I think someone I went to school with had done that/gone there/had that happen to them" sort of thing.
So tonight, curiously, I miss Chicago, miss laughing over nonsense with many other college-aged students and pretending to be an adult. Missing anything in life is stupid, I know; missing does nothing to bring anything back and detracts from the glory of whatever is in front of you at the moment (and there probably is something glorious about every moment, if you look for it). Sometimes just a dose of heartsickness, however, a dose of sorrow can be curiously cathartic, a wonderful reminder of how good times were in the past (even in the recent past of two weeks ago!) and how good you want to make them in the meantime.
Monday, December 6, 2010
2:34 am
It's 2:34 a.m. here in Chicago on Monday morning, and I finished my paper draft. Entirely. Woot! It's pretty solid, for a draft, but what it needs is some good editing. That may not happen until Tuesday afternoon, though, since later today is going to be one big psych study party for my final in that on Tuesday morning.
Now I am quite tired and in need of bed and a book to read for a bit for pleasure before turning out the lights. Currently I'm reading A Clash of Kings, by George R.R. Martin, which is the second book in an ongoing saga called A Song of Ice and Fire. Each book seems longer than the one before it (this one is over 900 paperback pages), but they are weirdly intriguing, and I picked the first one up on a whim back in October at 57th Street Books here in Hyde Park. It's slow going, trying to read only really at night since there's no time otherwise, but it's a good way to transition from a day of hard reading and writing to something more mindless, something I can read without having to wonder all the while what my paper topic on it is going to be. :) Over winter break I think I'm going to be spending a lot of time reading this series.
Well, bed. Hopefully I will wake up by like 10 or 11 at the latest, especially considering that I'll have to wake up a little before 9 for my final on Tuesday. The past several days I've been completely ignoring usual sleep schedules and not actually getting out of bed until noon or so.
Sleep is so wonderful sometimes, really.
Now I am quite tired and in need of bed and a book to read for a bit for pleasure before turning out the lights. Currently I'm reading A Clash of Kings, by George R.R. Martin, which is the second book in an ongoing saga called A Song of Ice and Fire. Each book seems longer than the one before it (this one is over 900 paperback pages), but they are weirdly intriguing, and I picked the first one up on a whim back in October at 57th Street Books here in Hyde Park. It's slow going, trying to read only really at night since there's no time otherwise, but it's a good way to transition from a day of hard reading and writing to something more mindless, something I can read without having to wonder all the while what my paper topic on it is going to be. :) Over winter break I think I'm going to be spending a lot of time reading this series.
Well, bed. Hopefully I will wake up by like 10 or 11 at the latest, especially considering that I'll have to wake up a little before 9 for my final on Tuesday. The past several days I've been completely ignoring usual sleep schedules and not actually getting out of bed until noon or so.
Sleep is so wonderful sometimes, really.
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Composed chiefly of finals!
The University of Chicago runs on what's affectionately (?) called the quarter system, which is somewhat different from your usual semester system schedule. The year is divided up into four academic periods (autumn, winter, spring, and summer quarters), although summer quarter is not required and few people take classes then, so in reality it functions like a trimester system. (We still call the normal academic terms autumn quarter, winter quarter, and spring quarter however.) Each quarter is eleven weeks long, and weeks are identified by number; the first week of the quarter is 1st week and so on and so forth. Pretty logical so far.
U of C does one quarter before winter break and two after; again, pretty logical. However, in order to fit exactly 11 weeks (no more, no less) in before winter break, while still actually giving students some semblance of a winter break before winter quarter classes start up immediately after new year's, the school year must start approximately 11 weeks before mid-December, which means starting the last week of September. Thus autumn quarter is from late September to early-mid December, winter quarter is from early January to mid-March, and spring quarter (after a week break) is from late March to mid-June.
Well, today is Sunday the 5th and tomorrow, December 6th, is the first day of the 11th week of autumn quarter, aka finals week. Last week, 10th week, was, like every 10th week, composed of 3 days of classes and two days of reading period--no new material introduced, just review sessions, and a lot of studying for finals. Hence I've been pretty busy the past week studying, or at least pretending to study, and generally trying to avoid the fact that finals are rapidly descending upon us all. They are finally here, though, and there's not much any of us can do anymore besides hole up with books and computers and ride it out.
You might ask how classes work with the quarter system. Well, you can take either three or four classes a quarter, and a lot of classes, particular in the core/general education, are what we call sequences--you take two or three quarters of them in a row. The core at Chicago is infamously large and mix-and-matchy, but it consists of three broad groups: humanities/civilization studies/arts, mathematical and natural sciences, and social sciences. You have to do at least two quarters of humanities class, at least two quarters of civilization studies class, and at least one class in the dramatic/musical/visual arts, for a total of 6 classes from that group. You have to do at least one math class (two quarters of calculus, if you use calc for that), at least two classes in the biological sciences, and at least two classes in the physical sciences, for a total of 6 classes from that group. And everyone, without exception, has to do three quarters (a full academic year) of a social sciences core class, which is basically a giant mixture of classic social sciences texts, from the economic (Marx and Smith) to the philosophical to the psychological (Freud) to the anthropological. There's also a foreign language competency requirement (basically a year of a language if you can't test out of it) and even physical education and swimming requirements, if you don't test out of those.
Last year I took two quarters of humanities (basically a small Englishy seminar type class that all first-years take), two quarters of calculus, and two quarters of biological science, to get rid of hum (as we call it), bio, and math. This year I'm taking the full gamut of sosc (as we call the social sciences core sequence), two quarters of physical science (I'm taking an astronomy/astrophyiscs for nonmajors sequence), and an art history class next quarter to finish that. I already have full PE and swim credits and language competency, and I'll be doing civ (as we call the civilizations studies core requirement) next year. So I'm sort of, almost done with the core.
What else do I take? Last year and this year I've taken Italian for the fun of it. Last year I also took a Shakespeare class, an English theory class, and a basic intro to linguistics class. This quarter I'm taking a social psychology class in addition to sosc, Italian, and my astro class. Next quarter I'll be taking sosc, Italian, the second part of my astro sequence, and an art history class on Islamic art and architecture from 650 to 1100 CE to complete my requirement in the arts. In spring quarter I'll finish up sosc and Italian and probably take some sort of English class and possibly developmental psychology. After this year the only core I will have left is civ (basically equivalent to the history of a particular world region); I'm considering doing civ as a study abroad thing (which is very popular) in Rome or Athens, where you go abroad for a quarter and get three quarters' worth of civ, but otherwise I will do my three quarters of civ, a glorious full academic year, on campus next year.
This is all a very long-winded way of saying that it's finals week for autumn quarter 2010 and I'm not crazy-happy about it. My finals week is back-loaded; I have nothing tomorrow but then something every day Tuesday through Friday, and I'm not going back to New England until Saturday. On Tuesday I have my social psych final from 10:30am to 12:30pm. On Wednesday I have a five-page paper about Max Weber for my sosc class due at 5pm. On Thursday I have my Italian final from 8-10am, and on Friday I have my astro final from 10:30a-12:30p. So far I've organized tons of notes about psych and planned out my Weber paper, quotes and all (although I haven't actually begun writing it yet). After I finish this blog entry, I'm going to study psych until dinner and then maybe start actually doing some legitimate paper-writing, although I have a secret santa party-type thing to go to at 8, as well as some other random social obligations, and that all won't be done until probably 11pm. At which point it's back to the grindstone for a few hours before bed. Tomorrow is going to be finishing a draft of the paper and hardcore psych cramming for Tuesday.
There's a vague sort of schedule in there, somewhere. It's hard this close to winter break to care about a lot of this stuff, but this is the most important part, when my focus is supposed to be the strongest of all. With that, I'll leave everyone to their own schedules and start in on some social psychology for a few hours. Hurray!
U of C does one quarter before winter break and two after; again, pretty logical. However, in order to fit exactly 11 weeks (no more, no less) in before winter break, while still actually giving students some semblance of a winter break before winter quarter classes start up immediately after new year's, the school year must start approximately 11 weeks before mid-December, which means starting the last week of September. Thus autumn quarter is from late September to early-mid December, winter quarter is from early January to mid-March, and spring quarter (after a week break) is from late March to mid-June.
Well, today is Sunday the 5th and tomorrow, December 6th, is the first day of the 11th week of autumn quarter, aka finals week. Last week, 10th week, was, like every 10th week, composed of 3 days of classes and two days of reading period--no new material introduced, just review sessions, and a lot of studying for finals. Hence I've been pretty busy the past week studying, or at least pretending to study, and generally trying to avoid the fact that finals are rapidly descending upon us all. They are finally here, though, and there's not much any of us can do anymore besides hole up with books and computers and ride it out.
You might ask how classes work with the quarter system. Well, you can take either three or four classes a quarter, and a lot of classes, particular in the core/general education, are what we call sequences--you take two or three quarters of them in a row. The core at Chicago is infamously large and mix-and-matchy, but it consists of three broad groups: humanities/civilization studies/arts, mathematical and natural sciences, and social sciences. You have to do at least two quarters of humanities class, at least two quarters of civilization studies class, and at least one class in the dramatic/musical/visual arts, for a total of 6 classes from that group. You have to do at least one math class (two quarters of calculus, if you use calc for that), at least two classes in the biological sciences, and at least two classes in the physical sciences, for a total of 6 classes from that group. And everyone, without exception, has to do three quarters (a full academic year) of a social sciences core class, which is basically a giant mixture of classic social sciences texts, from the economic (Marx and Smith) to the philosophical to the psychological (Freud) to the anthropological. There's also a foreign language competency requirement (basically a year of a language if you can't test out of it) and even physical education and swimming requirements, if you don't test out of those.
Last year I took two quarters of humanities (basically a small Englishy seminar type class that all first-years take), two quarters of calculus, and two quarters of biological science, to get rid of hum (as we call it), bio, and math. This year I'm taking the full gamut of sosc (as we call the social sciences core sequence), two quarters of physical science (I'm taking an astronomy/astrophyiscs for nonmajors sequence), and an art history class next quarter to finish that. I already have full PE and swim credits and language competency, and I'll be doing civ (as we call the civilizations studies core requirement) next year. So I'm sort of, almost done with the core.
What else do I take? Last year and this year I've taken Italian for the fun of it. Last year I also took a Shakespeare class, an English theory class, and a basic intro to linguistics class. This quarter I'm taking a social psychology class in addition to sosc, Italian, and my astro class. Next quarter I'll be taking sosc, Italian, the second part of my astro sequence, and an art history class on Islamic art and architecture from 650 to 1100 CE to complete my requirement in the arts. In spring quarter I'll finish up sosc and Italian and probably take some sort of English class and possibly developmental psychology. After this year the only core I will have left is civ (basically equivalent to the history of a particular world region); I'm considering doing civ as a study abroad thing (which is very popular) in Rome or Athens, where you go abroad for a quarter and get three quarters' worth of civ, but otherwise I will do my three quarters of civ, a glorious full academic year, on campus next year.
This is all a very long-winded way of saying that it's finals week for autumn quarter 2010 and I'm not crazy-happy about it. My finals week is back-loaded; I have nothing tomorrow but then something every day Tuesday through Friday, and I'm not going back to New England until Saturday. On Tuesday I have my social psych final from 10:30am to 12:30pm. On Wednesday I have a five-page paper about Max Weber for my sosc class due at 5pm. On Thursday I have my Italian final from 8-10am, and on Friday I have my astro final from 10:30a-12:30p. So far I've organized tons of notes about psych and planned out my Weber paper, quotes and all (although I haven't actually begun writing it yet). After I finish this blog entry, I'm going to study psych until dinner and then maybe start actually doing some legitimate paper-writing, although I have a secret santa party-type thing to go to at 8, as well as some other random social obligations, and that all won't be done until probably 11pm. At which point it's back to the grindstone for a few hours before bed. Tomorrow is going to be finishing a draft of the paper and hardcore psych cramming for Tuesday.
There's a vague sort of schedule in there, somewhere. It's hard this close to winter break to care about a lot of this stuff, but this is the most important part, when my focus is supposed to be the strongest of all. With that, I'll leave everyone to their own schedules and start in on some social psychology for a few hours. Hurray!
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