Tumbling through the internets

Good news: I have a Tumblr now. Bad news: my hipsterdom has just increased. Tumblr will be pretty much random bits of lulz, and in a way I'm hoping to eventually consolidate a lot of ASOIAF stuff over there since, well, that makes sense and all. (There is a large and vibrant ASOIAF Tumblr community, from what I can tell.) I'm andnowitbegins there, after the famous Tower of Joy scene in AGoT. Check things out here.

Also bad news: final at 3pm, technically today I guess. Yup, a final during 10th week. Rather cruel, I agree, but c'est la vie.

So very exhausted right now, and hot, and in need of a shower, and in need of sleep.

UDaR on meeting deux

More substantiative posts coming soon, I swear, but for now all the info is on Una Donna a Roma, my Rome-focused blog, where info about the academics of my time in Rome this fall have gone up.

A presto!

Then whence cometh evil?

“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?”
--Epicurus

 

I don't know Greek, this comes from the internet, and I don't know how accurate the translation is. It's all over the place in about this form, however. I think some sort of modernization must have happened, as the Greeks were (nominally) polytheist, although I know by some point the strict polytheism did kind of give way into an idea of one overarching and all-powerful deity. Nonetheless, this to me, as it stands, however accurate a translation it may be, definitely stands out as a fairly accurate (if simplistic) account of the pop understanding of a God (or Gods, I suppose) today (and probably for many millennia) in the anthropomorphized, personal-God-who-pays-attention-to-human-concerns-directly sense.

Osama bin Laden, 1957-2011

Rest in peace is not at all the thing to say upon the death of the world's most notorious terrorist. I know of no one in the Western world or, for that matter, most of the rest of the world who will mourn Osama bin Laden, a man who killed at least as many fellow Muslims as he killed non-Muslims, a man who divided the Muslim world, who caused undue hate and pain and stigma for members of his own religion who lived as minorities in Western countries. Osama bin Laden has never struck me as a man who cares all that much for subleties, and yet his masterminding of so many terrorist attacks indicates that he was not at all an unintelligent man. He knew how to plan, how to feel religious fervor and incite it in others, how to drive wedges between social and religious groups. He knew how to make himself heard, how to capture a news cycle--exactly the sort of behavior that will continue to fuel terrorism (a form of violence that takes its very power from being shocking, distressing, and widely reported) of all stripes long after we have stopped talking about his death.

His death will not bring back 3000 American citizens, or the thousands of other people around the world, Muslim and not, "Western" and not, who have died. It will not bring back the thousands of American men and women who have died running around the Mideast looking for him, trying to stop terrorist attacks, trying to democratize Afghanistan and Iraq and now, lately, other countries in the region. It most certainly will not bring back the millions upon millions of average-Joe civilians caught in the crossfire in thousands of various locales around the world, in the power struggles between religions and societies that get reproduced every day, it seems, in the Mideast in particular. Killing one terrorist, even a massive figurehead, even an Osama bin Laden, is not going to make this all go away. It's not going to stop al-Qaeda or other similar groups from continuing their fights. Democracy is going to continue to go toe to toe with Islamic theocracies all over. The success of various democratic movements will depend on the citizens themselves, not on how heavily we throw ourselves into directly fighting on their behalfs; in too many cases we're at least partially responsible for Islamic theocracies (which we preferred to socialist/communist ones in the 1950s and 60s) to begin with.

It's hard, therefore, to say what I'm feeling knowing that Osama bin Laden is dead. If truth may be told, I long ago forgot, in many ways, about him--his elusiveness simply became par for the course. He was dead to my conscious mind years ago, after we bogged ourselves down doing mysteriously uncertain things originally allegedly pertaining to him in Iraq. Right at this moment I am watching hordes of people on TV thronging around the White House, waving American flags, screaming with a combination of righteous anger and joy, climbing into trees, doing cheerleading stunts on the backs of strangers. A few minutes ago there were others here, and my RA spoke what I think so many of us were thinking: "Osama bin Laden was an absolutely despicable person, but I just can't cheer about his death."

Cheering about anyone's death does seem to accomplish exactly nothing. It's just pure energy, in a way, energy that might just as equally be turned to tears when we think about all the horrific crap Osama bin Laden has done in the past decade or two and all the horrific crap we've done trying to stop him. Right now this energy has turned into patriotism for many of these people I'm watching on my TV screen; death and carnage and rage and sorrow become symbolized by waving American flags and chanting USA USA USA. In a way I am indeed feeling some sense of joy and satisfaction knowing that Osama bin Laden's specific plans for destruction cannot hurt any more people, but I know equally well that terrorist attacks will continue and we'll continue thinking of the Muslim world as a block, as if there weren't a million subtleties in each Mideastern country and a million reasons why nothing ever has, does, or will come easily in this world. The part of me that remembers the build-up to the war in Iraq and the rapid disillusionment when it turned out that we were in a quagmire sees waving flags with a touch of fear in this context; flags and joy and overdue and pent-up rage seem to send off alarm bells in my head. Little good seems to come from bravado and trying to simplify emotions, these days. There's also the amazement that Osama bin Laden only died now. What on earth have we been doing spending so much money (billions upon billions of dollars) that could have been spent researching cures for cancer or something to kill one man (and a few million spares) after ten plus years of trying? In a way it feels like the US military has finally done its ridiculously expensive job, and it's hard to give it a hearty congratulations for doing its job.

Osama bin Laden is dead; we won that battle, in that we were the ones who directly killed him. (After all, tempus fugit--time flees, and everyone dies of something or other.) This is indeed a blow to Islamic terrorism. It is indeed a kind of long-overdue justice for the families of people killed on 9/11 and for the families of all the other people around the world dead because of Islamic terrorism. It does not mean the automatic dispersal of al-Qaeda, however. It does not mean that terrorist attacks will stop any time particularly soon. Osama bin Laden was a wealthy, powerful, and well-connected man, and thousands of similarly-minded, similarly-powerful, and similarly-wealthy men just like him are still alive and well across the Mideast, killing their fellow Muslims almost as indiscriminately as they want to kill Americans and other Westerners. He is a bright and shiny link in a heavy and complex chain of power relations, religion, society, education, charisma, and so much more, a chain many many people are trying to destroy, and a chain for which we have killed just as many people as the chain has killed.

Osama bin Laden is dead; we "won" that one, but at a horrific price. I would hope and try my damnedest to ensure that the price does not stay as high in the future, but I know, as surely as I know that the sun will rise tomorrow, that when the next push comes to shove it is going to be like stabbing water trying to fight emotions and flag-waving to remind people of the explicit atrocities and all the nuances of fact and emotion that somehow went ignored in the past and are likely to be ignored in the future.

Things learned from the royal wedding

No, I was not up at 4am central time to witness the beginning of someone's married life. I was up at 6:30 am, however, to go teach about drugs to a bunch of unruly high school freshmen. When I got back to my room at 10, I still had an hour and a half before my first class, so of course I watched choice selections from the wedding on TheRoyalChannel on YouTube (it exists, really.) They had 2-6 minute clips of "highlights" from the wedding and also an hour-long video of the ceremony itself. I watched a bunch of the clips and then skipped around in the ceremony video. Between these videos and some Googling, I feel like I basically got all the royal wedding stuff needed and also some sleep. Win.

I had a lot of thoughts on the royal wedding. Some are encapsulated below:

• Westminster Abbey looks a lot like UChicago--or, should, I say, it's the other way around
• Our Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, however, doesn't have trees (?!?) in it
• Anglican wedding ceremonies are remarkably boring
• That was a very nice-looking dress, but the train was a bit much
• The maid of honor almost looked better than Kate did
• William is not that attractive. Neither is his brother.
• Charles was, is, and will always be old. Just old. (I remember when I was young I used to think that Charles was married to Elizabeth, instead of being her son....)
• Elizabeth also seems eternally old. Professional dress-suits for the win?
• Okay, British, you win when it comes to hats.
• Walking all the way to the altar in Westminster Abbey is probably good exercise
• That music was pretty good, especially the fanfare troop
• Little kid attendants at a royal wedding, lulz
• Royals seriously need shorter names. William Arthur Philip Louis. And then Catherine Elizabeth. Haha name disparity.
• Again, yeah, this Anglican business is kind of boring
• Ring almost didn't go on finger oooooooh almost drama. (According to my male RH: "If you get married, put the finger through the ring, not the ring on the finger." We'll keep that in mind, thanks.)
• Carriage rides and car rides lololololol
• Apparently Today had a "countdown to the kiss" clock onscreen for a few minutes? Crazy.
• Speaking of kisses, that one was kind of lame. Come on, William, give us something to look at!
• Speaking further of kisses--greatest picture ever:

Catherine and Prince William in 2011.

 Perhaps unsurprisingly, many pictures of the kiss from around the web crop out the damsel in distress in the lower left hand corner. I think the human factor of the entire spectacle is drastically improved by having her in the shot, however. But yeah, not such a fan of that kiss. It's not bad at all, just kind of a let down from whatever expectations I think people had. Then again, William's parents had a far more interesting time of it.

Diana Spencer and Prince Charles in 1981

Thirty years ago Charles wasn't old; who'da thunk it? I think Charles looks better than his son does in their respective wedding day photos. But then again, Charles and Diana weren't exactly a paragon of wedded bliss, now, were they? Interesting side note: my only memory of the existence of Diana is the day she died. I was playing with my brand new beanie baby knockoff toy (an orange fish) when I heard that a princess, of sorts, had died. Cheers to being born in 1991?

Congrats to William and Kate--may their marriage be far happier and more successful than his parents' was.

Maundy, maundy, can't trust that day

Note: This is a pretty long post about my personal history with religion, one of the random spurts of introspection I am occasionally prone to.

 Today is, in the Christian world, Maundy Thursday, a commemoration of the Last Supper--or, as one of my very Catholic Facebook friends put this morning as his status, "And so it is that Thursday that changed the world." That makes tomorrow Good Friday (the commemoration of the crucifixion of Jesus), Saturday Easter Vigil, and Sunday itself Easter Sunday, the resurrection.

As my "about me" states, I was raised in a barely-observant mixed Catholic-Protestant (UCC) household. I saw my father in church of any kind but rarely. My mother I guess gets more out of religion than either my father or I, and growing up she was still tied somewhat to Catholicism, even though I know the constant shenanigans that go on with the Catholic Church truly wore her out. Thus I spent about once a week from the age of five or six until the age of eleven in some sort of religious affair, be it religious ed classes at the local Catholic church, actually going to mass, or something similar. Although my mother's connection to Catholicism was rarely overbearing on me as a child, my mother's parents were quite strong Catholics, and so I guess there was some generational pressure to raise the latest kid to grow up in God. Interestingly, my father actually comes from the overtly religious family (his father is a UCC minister), and yet I rarely if ever discussed religion with my paternal grandparents (or my father myself, for that matter) growing up.

Maybe it's just because I'm still quite relatively young, but I do remember my very early thoughts about church and God and whatnot well. I went along with it as a very young kid, the same way any kid in a culturally Christian area goes along with Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and similar. Religious ed and my mother made sure that I knew that Christmas and Easter were supposed to be about more than just the presents and the general surprise/excitement (which I truly loved, even more than the presents), but I never read much of the Bible at all in any context, be it religiously, for a literature class, or otherwise. I remember being four or five (maybe a bit older) and asking my mom if God really was an old man who sat in the clouds and looked down at everyone, and if so, how he did it. My mother tried to explain that that wasn't it, that God was more like a force, but I think that only slightly enraged and confused me--I have never liked being lied to, and even the realization that the common childhood conception of God wasn't accurate was upsetting and off-putting. (Besides, the budding storyteller in me kind of liked the idea of there really being a bearded guy up in the sky.)

After that I continued to go along with the God = force idea, although my mental conception could never quite change (all the Father, God, Son, Children language in Christianity does not help). I did first communion and first confession and all that when I was in second grade with the rest of the Catholic kids in town; although I was a tomboy and hated wearing dresses, I really did enjoy the pageantry of communion and the pageantry of church in general. It thrilled with the part of me that did then, and does still now, love world-building and cultures and stories. I had nothing to say for my first confession and, I believe, actively made up some lie about pulling my cat's tail. I learned the prayers for the rosary (which I can still recite) and the Nicene Creed (of which I cannot remember a thing now) and all the rest. My mother would go through spurts of trying to make me say Hail Marys or similar before bed, and when I stayed with her parents, my grandmother led me through the classic "Now I lay me down to sleep" prayers. I suppose they must have made some impression on me at the time, but as I grew older, I began to wonder what it actually felt like to be touched by a god and began to doubt that I had ever actually truly felt my forefathers' religion in my own bones.

I guess it was trying to figure this out, trying to feel this religion, that led me to allow my mother to make me an altar girl, starting when I was 9 or so. This, uncoincidentally, coincided quite closely with the death of my maternal grandmother from lung cancer in 1999, when I was 8, so I went at religion in the new millennium with gusto. In retrospect, it was a juvenile form of fake-it-till-you-make-it; if I wore the white overrobes, and learned the sections of the mass well, and touched holy water and oil and collections baskets and all the rest, the wonderful pageantry was alive and crackling in me, and I did believe then that this was Godly and spiritual and moving and all the rest. At some point in those early 2000s years, at the same time that I finally gave up Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, I tried Catholicism for real, as best as a Biblically-ignorant young girl could do, giving up things for Lent and not eating meat on Fridays during Lent and trying to feel extreme sorrow over Jesus dying by watching the Stations of the Cross and going to Good Friday mass one year. (My mother's hatred of crowds meant that we usually never went to church on actual holidays, but this was an exception.) I vividly remember doodling INRI and crosses in my sixth grade planner at Eastertime, as though the writing out of it could prove to myself that I deeply loved God and Jesus and all the rest.


I have not thought about the depth with which I went at Catholicism in my middle school years for quite some time now, but I think I understand why it has all come rushing back so clearly this past week. Several of my closest friends here in Chicago are actually very religious Catholics, something I did not realize until I already knew and liked them well. It's one thing to go to Catholic school (I know many people who have done this), but the realization that these were people who had gone to Catholic school and actually liked it and actually been made religious because of it was mindblowing to me; all the stories I knew of Catholic school from people my age came from people who had been entirely turned off of religion because of it. Here are people who go to mass every Sunday (something I had never done even as an altar girl), who feel bad if they miss mass, who go to confession fairly regularly, who give up things for Lent with real serious and abstain from meat on Fridays during Lent, who have rosaries and Bibles in their rooms, and all the rest. Here are people who seem to have managed to really take to the spirit of Catholicism far better than I, who loved the pageantry but could never get beyond it, did. At home, in high school, most of my friends were at the very least apathetic to religion, and several were pretty openly agnostic/atheist and scornful of religion. Even those who did go to church with some regularity never really spoke of religion outside of church. Maybe it's just because I never really lived with friends in high school the way I live with friends now in college, maybe it's just because Chicago is a far cry from the hinterlands of New England, but here in college I've met far more openly, seriously religious people than I ever knew even when I went to religious ed with the rest of the Catholic kiddie goobers in elementary school.


Hanging around people who read the Bible and have rosaries and go to mass and confession thus brings back all my own pre-teen attempts at Catholicism with great clarity. I remember Good Friday mass--the interminable length, the veneration of the cross, the prostration before the cross, and all the rest. I remember trying to eat fish instead of meat on Fridays for a few years; I remember spending one Good Friday off from school doing a walk for Habitat for Humanity--learning to be good and charitable. I remember even earlier events, the yearning to try communion and then the inevitable disillusion I had when it turned out that communion wafers tasted bland. Really, that disillusionment with communion is a fairly apt summary of Catholicism and I in general, of childhood in general for so many people--growing up and realizing that the body of Christ tastes a lot like a subpar cracker, realizing that there never was or could be a fat man in a red and white suit who brings presents, realizing that there never was or could be a bearded man in the clouds.


Trying to trace what led to my rejection of Catholicism is difficult. In some ways, I think coming out as a nonbeliever, even to people who are not very religious or who describe themselves as "spiritual" rather than religious, is the religious world's analogy to coming out sexually as something besides ramrod-straight. I did not know anybody, growing up, who did not believe in some sort of God or something out there, just as I knew very few openly gay people. It was not until I myself realized that I was not religious and started telling people this that I realized that some people I had always known were actually in a similar position, faking religiosity while their hearts firmly disbelieved in all the trappings of faith. When you're a young teen in white suburbia telling people that you don't believe in a conception of God that matches Christianity's, no one really believes you; every teen is rebellious, and it's really easy to dismiss it as just another teenage phase, like too-tight jeans or all-black clothes or something. Telling yourself that you don't believe in the Christian God, when you know literally no one else with similar beliefs, is just as hard; maybe it is just a phase, you think, or maybe there's something seriously wrong with you. And yet in many ways the lack of true attraction to church, the lack of emotional connection, has been there for a long time, possibly forever. Does everyone feel that way and simply fake it until they make it? Is all religion, are all religious people just going with the flow in the same way that you've always been? Are you normal, or are you weird, or are you something else?


With all these questions whirling around, it's no great surprise that, like any questioning teen, I turned to experimentation of sorts. If a God in the sky was complete crap, at least the earth was solid and real, and beautiful to boot. Paganism had been around for millennia before Christianity; I felt bad for it for being run over by Christians; there was a certain romance and exhilaration to polytheism for me, thanks to my over-reading of fantasy and Greco-Roman-era books during this period. I think the only remotely-pagan thing I ever actually did was to try to call Halloween "Samhain" and May Day "Beltane" and the like and put out food for the dead on Halloween night since the veil between the worlds is supposed to be at its thinnest then. It was still kind of fulfilling in a pageantry way, and emotionally the vague connection it gave me to the earth and other living things was inspiring in a way that Catholicism had never ever been. It wasn't real religion, however; it ultimately didn't work the way I had always been told that religion should work.


So where do you turn from neo-paganism and rebellious polytheism to active and mature agnosticism and atheism? For me it began with the religious conservative's ultimate conspiracy-theory dream (or second, in any case, only to Harry Potter): Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, which I read as an eighth grader. Like with many books, there was a shiver down my spine throughout my reading of The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass. It was quite well-written. The mental imagery was gorgeous. The idea of my soul in animal form as my greatest lifelong companion was the realization of a dream I'd never realized I'd ever had. And there in its pages was a real person, a real human being, a writer, a published author who did not believe in the Christian God, who called the idea of it and the bureaucracy that fueled it destructive and foul and an antithesis to love itself. The world of Philip Pullman believed in the goodness and beauty of this life, not a future life, believed in actions and love and living every day to the fullest. It believed in stories as synonymous with life. I had never read or heard any philosophy like this before in my life, and this was what made my heart sing, made me feel both profoundly sad for death and yet so happy to be alive, made me feel (ironically) like I had been touched by something eternal and godlike and yet better than godlike because it was human, it was actually within my power to be and do and love.


I have never given up my love of pageantry, of details of dress and hair and rituals and songs and chants; I have never given up my idealistic love of love for everyone, even though I am in many ways the ultimate never-been-kissed, never-loved late teenage nerd girl. Not believing in a personal God, or a power above humans that actually cares at all about what humans do, or an existence beyond our existence now--believing, in essence, in the wonderful primacy and importance of this life, this here and now, this presence--has matured me, and matured in me, since I was the gawky and angsty thirteen-year-old reading His Dark Materials. To me the idea that now is as good as it gets is vestigially frightening, certainly, in the same way that I scream when I bump into someone in the dark; it's automatic to fear the end of self, of ego, of consciousness, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that. The endless, lurking sense of death that haunted me last summer when I flirted with depression made me cry like I have not cried in years and froze me, mind and body, like nothing else I have ever experienced. The idea that now is as good as it gets has also, however, forced me to grow and love others with as much strength and confidence as any other human ever has, with no God standing over my shoulder to ensure that I do it. My love of pageantry has left the idea that "It is that Thursday that changed the world," however, behind. In the depths of time and the vast expanse of the universe, there does not seem to be any one day that has changed the world any more than any other day has, even without looking at the logical absurdity of men rising from the dead and using that as proof of a God who loves us and cares about what happens to us. It's the Easter season, but it's also a very lovely day in April in the northern hemisphere, a day in which I and many others are alive and healthy, a day in which the earth continues to tolerate humans, and that matters to me and to many others far more than any Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter Vigil, or Easter Sunday ever could.

GAME OF THRONES premiere

To my great surprise, I was able to find episode one ("Winter is Coming") of Game of Thrones online last night only a few hours after the premiere time--kudos to whoever did that. No obnoxious and virus-y surveys attached, either. For those of you using the internet, you should be able to find it on any of the usual sites; if you need a recommendation for a site to watch, let me know in the comments and I will find a way to send you the info. I will not list sites here, as I would like to keep specific sites on the down-low.

A word on watching TV online: yes, it is illegal, even if you just watch it streaming and don't download (which is rife with virus problems in any case). It is not my preferred method of watching. If I had a TV, I would be willing to subscribe to HBO for the duration of the run of Game of Thrones in order to watch it legally. I do not have a TV, however, and HBO as yet does not have a way to watch its TV shows online legally/in a sanctioned manner. I found copies of the first episode, only a few hours after the premiere, in no fewer than 5 different places online. I would be willing to bet that in the next few days and weeks, hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people, most of them my age or similar, will watch Game of Thrones online in such a manner. Watching TV or even feature films on compilation websites is an exceedingly common thing for college students and young professionals, just as listening to music uploaded to YouTube is very common, whether it is sanctioned by record companies or not. The most interesting thing of all is that my watching and listening to media for free, online, does not actually preclude my buying said programming later. If I really enjoy Game of Thrones, I will probably buy the DVDs. Similarly, I have bought several albums on iTunes after listening to different tracks, and really getting to know them, on YouTube. The trend nowadays is simply to only buy things you already know you like--by getting to know them first for free, online.

Now onto my impressions of the premiere. The rest of this post is spoilers--if you do not want to know the plot of either the book or the TV series, do not read any further.

This episode covers the events from, roughly, the prologue to "The things I do for love." I quite liked it, overall. Production value really is gorgeous, and the cast is very talented. There are many added or modified scenes as compared to the book, but I fully understand that television is a different medium from books and that changes in this way are often necessary. Very few of these changes bothered me--the only one that does with any regularity is the change of Cat from book to screen, which seems in many ways more of a whimsical character change than some of the other changes. In the book, Ned is the one who does not want to become Hand, guessing (correctly) that it is a dirty job with no thanks and believing (correctly) that he belongs in the wild north, not playing court games. Cat pushes him to accept, wanting (as always) to raise the position of her family in the eyes of the kingdom and to do her duty; her birth house's motto is "Family, Duty, Honor," and Cat fits that, in many ways, to a tee. It's only after Bran "falls" (read: is hurled from a window after discovering the twincest) that she suddenly understands the danger that the Lannisters pose and tries to convince Ned to stay. In the TV series Cat is, from the first five minutes, dead-set against Bran witnessing the execution and ferociously against Ned traveling south to become Hand.

Most other things were fine. I disliked Peter Dinklage's accent as Tyrion; he's American, and it shows. Just when you get used to it, it comes jarring back, straining the suspension of disbelief a bit. Otherwise, however, Dinklage makes a wonderfully Impish Tyrion, and from what I've read, he only gets better as Tyrion's role expands in later episodes. I do wonder how well newbies can keep up with characters and whatnot; it's quite a lot, in many instances, and I feel like some relationships are not quite fully explained in any sense, or are a bit clumsily explained by Arya in the king-meeting-Starks scene, which does not feel quite natural. These are all relatively small nit-picks, however, and now that some of the messy exposition has gotten out of the way, I will be interested in seeing how the series progresses in relation to the book and if it can remain as gripping and intense as the book is.

Dunes

Where were we camping, you might ask? Why, Chesterton, Indiana. Obviously.

Indiana Dunes State Park is quite a lovely place, about an hour and fifteen minutes from Chicago by train. The entire thing was beyond crazy, however, so let's see how well I can narrate it. To begin with, we were supposed to be taking a bus to the train stop at 57th Street at 3:40 on Friday to catch a 4:16 south/east bound train to Indiana. I had Italian until 3:20. I ran home, literally, threw all my school stuff out of my bag, and then threw the camping stuff (which I had stacked up the night before) in the bag. It didn't all fit, so I put my towel, an extra jacket, and my quilt in a huge Borders bag. Of course, I was still one of the first people done and, to make a long story very short, we missed the 3:40 bus and caught the 3:50 bus instead....which died about two blocks from the train station. Just when we thought we would have to get out and schlep all our stuff, the bus was resurrected and we got off, ran up the stairs to the train platform, and caught the NICTD South Shore line, which was so crowded with commuters that we couldn't sit near one another.

Fast forward to getting off the train. As it turns out, the campsite is about a mile from the train station, so we had to walk through random parts of Indiana. For about an hour because we got lost. With a heavy bag on my back, my overflow bag in one hand, and my sleeping bag in the other. When we finally got to the overnight part of the campground, we found that my male RH, who had driven a car down with the one-year-old and all our food, had chosen a spot very far away from the entrance to the campground. We eventually got there, pitched three tents, started a fire, ate dinner by dark or so, which consisted of (for me) two burnt hot dogs and s'mores. Most everyone else had fish tacos, since it's a Friday in Lent and apparently real Catholics (aka not my mother's side of the family) actually don't eat meat on Fridays in Lent, but frozen whiting (yeah that's apparently a type of lake fish) is just not particularly edible to me, someone who grew up with fresh haddock as a conception of what "fish" is. It was raining on and off, it was pretty cold, the one-year-old was cranky, I was cranky, etc.

When we eventually went to bed, I was so tired that I collapsed into my sleeping bag and basically fell asleep right then and there. The next day was more fun, with card games and much better food and hiking to the lakeshore, which was so windy that the waves were enormous and the wind blew us all off our feet. It did look a lot like the ocean, which was cool, only without that key ocean-y feel and smell, where your hair gets matted and tangly and salty even without getting it wet. The sand from the dunes was blowing around everywhere, so that I sort of felt like I was walking on Mars or something, and afterwards when we reached the beach house, out of the wind, it felt a bit like we were survivors of an apocalypse. Once we got back, I went to take a shower in the bathhouse, which turned out to be an excellent life decision because it enabled me to dry off nearly every article of clothing I had under the hand dryers. I spent about an hour in there drying off clothes and watching my female RH, the five-year-old, and my RA take equally long and hot showers.

Things went downhill after that, however. It turned out that 4pm was a great time to take a shower, as that was when it was snowing--yes, snowing--outside. By the time I returned to the fireside the snow was replaced by consistent 40 mph wind and bitter cold, so cold that even after I put on three pairs of pants and four layers of shirts and sweatshirts I was still unbearably cold. The food was slow to cook, we were all frozen, the wind was blowing acrid fire-smoke into our eyes and nostrils and mouths no matter where we stood near the fire (and it was too cold to not stand near the fire), the one-year-old screamed for probably half-an-hour without stopping; we finally just admitted, out loud, that things were "sucky" and "pretty awful" (in far more colorful language), and of course after that the food started to finish, so that the first bites of biscuit-dumplings we passed around the fire were pretty much the best bites of food I have ever had in my life.

After that the wind went down to only about 20 mph, which was bearable, and the food and hot chocolate was all really warm and nice. We considered sleeping all seven of us students in one tent but eventually just divided it up into two tents instead of three, with the 4 girls in one and the 3 boys in the other. Before bed we all huddled together in the impromptu girls' tent talking, lying on one another, and trying to keep warm, until the boys eventually left. I thought the tent was going to come down on us several times, as the gusts were back up in probably the 30-40mph range at night, but at least it was fairly warm in the tent with four bodies in it. (In the morning our female RH informed us that the previous night had seen a record low for the northern Indiana area.) In the morning it was cool but not so cold, and the sun was finally out, just in time for us to strike camp after breakfast and come back to the city, where I am now only wearing the usual one pair of pants, long-sleeved shirt, and sweatshirt and am not bone-achingly cold and covered in campfire smoke.

Despite all that, it really was a fun trip, just sleeping and shivering with one another and eating campfire foods and reveling in simple things like showers. You get to know even people you already know well just that much better when you are stinky, cold, tired, and yet somehow still happy at the same time and sharing the same cramped living spaces. Now I get to sleep in a real bed again and take a real shower (which I should get on, after I put away my all-too-real disgusting laundry from this past weekend), and do quite a bit of real homework.

Sounds like real fun.

Drowning in things

This week (since Sunday night), I have done the following things:
--read 500 pages of a Victorian novel (well, 500 minus the 90 pages I still have left to read)
--interviewed 8 candidates for our house RA next year (our current RA is graduating)
--wrestled with the housing office
--ordered and picked up prescriptions
--played IM inner tube water polo for my house
--gone to the gym three times
--read a couple hundred pages of Freud
--taught a health workshop on the far southwest side with someone I don't know and without the necessary materials
--taken notes on three of the densest psych studies I've seen in a while
--done various busywork for Italian

Tonight we have 5 more RA candidates to interview, which will take approximately four hours (no joke: 7 to 11 pm). Tomorrow I am teaching again, this time closer to home, at 8:45 in the morning (hopefully with materials?), then going to three hours of class, and then running back home, packing a bag, and going camping in Indiana until Sunday afternoon. When I return I will probably have several hundred pages of reading and an Italian writing assignment to do. Oh yeah, and Game of Thrones premieres Sunday night, but my hopes of finding it online before Monday or Tuesday are not great. I guess it's not like I really have time anyway. I'm kind of just still just surprised at how quickly this supposed-to-still-be-innocuous 3rd week of the quarter turned into an angry blur of too much homework and not enough time.

Rolling the dice

It had to come eventually: making decisions.

The day I was accepted into the Rome study abroad program, I knew two things immediately. The first was that I had to go and would be a fool to refuse, and so I didn't. The second was that I was very likely going to have to pull myself away from my house, since UChicago can't get its head on straight regarding undergraduate housing and study abroad. On the one hand, the college loves you to go abroad and tell everyone how great it was when you get back. On the other hand, the college loves to try to keep third- and fourth-years in the housing system, since the vast majority move off campus, since there IS no housing for everyone, try as UChicago might to say otherwise. So you would think that the college would jump at the chance to make it easy for students to both go abroad and stay comfortably in the housing system, regardless of when students choose to go abroad.

No, no, and no again.

When you return from abroad, the college guarantees you housing the same way that it guarantees housing for all who want it--but it does not let you choose. They can't let rooms sit empty for a quarter waiting for you, so you go where there is a space. As far as I can see now (unless someone drops out of school after autumn quarter next year), there will be no space for me in my house beginning winter quarter 2012. In my dorm, maybe, although that's a bit of a stretch. But more than likely not in my house.

It's conflicting because I really do love my house, in many ways. It's not just a dorm or a room to live; it's also many of my friends, two of my elder-sibling-I-never-had substitutes in my resident heads (house heads), my job for the past year in working for our resident masters (dorm heads), and a lot of happiness a thousand miles away from home. This means quite a bit to someone who grew up painfully shy and oftentimes (comfortably) alone, as only children so frequently are. It's basically my family out here, in many ways, and while relationships aren't strictly dependent on where you are, physically, in the world, there's a reason why the people you are closest with are often those who also live near you. Ease of access and frequency of contact give you both the impetus and the need to make relationships work.

It is entirely one thing to move out of housing because you're ready to move on, because you want to pay rent and cook meals for yourself and start pretending to be a real person. I could do that eventually, and I probably will by the time I'm a fourth-year. It's another thing, however, to realize that you don't really have a choice, that your choice is either a) go live and learn for seventy-some-odd days on another continent, or b) stay where you are and keep living with the people you love. How can anyone ever possibly pass up the opportunity to live for a bit in another country? And yet it is so hard, harder than I want it to be, to think of letting go of this vibrant community I've helped make for the past two years, to know that when I come back it won't be waiting for me. The price I pay for international studying is the community I've been a part of back here, domestically.

Of course I can and will visit this old home regardless of where I live next winter quarter and of course I can and will be changed, emotionally and socially, by spending seventy-some-odd days living in an apartment in Rome. In so many ways my house is changing anyway; our resident heads are finally leaving to go, beautifully and yet a bit painfully, be real people who own a house, and our RA is graduating and going to New Mexico to work. But many of the students, my compadres, the meat and bones of the housing community, from this year are staying, and it's just that much harder to swing by the lounge and play Mario Kart or watch stupid TV or bemoan homework when I live somewhere else, blocks away, instead of simply four floors above.

Tonight the randomized seniority list for room pick came out, and I got a great position. One I can't take, of course, because I am barred from participating in the spring lottery due to my not being physically on campus in the fall. (The sweet, sweet laughability of it all.) The first-years and my own yearmates besides are, as I type this, beginning the long process of scheming and trying to figure out what rooms they want to set their sights on. This is a month-long diplomatic (and sometimes just dramatic) affair that is both amusing and yet highly annoying, in that wearying way that over-eager and over-emotional drama can become. It's especially bitter this year because I feel forced out of it. At least three of my yearmates are also studying abroad and staying in housing. But because they are not going abroad fall quarter (because it didn't please them to go to Rome, for instance, or other fall programs), they will have no problems whatsoever living where they want to in the house. The one girl who is also going abroad fall will be okay because she has an arrangement with a girl going abroad winter and a girl going abroad spring, to rotate in and out of a double as each goes abroad.

It's an arrangement I would gladly have participated in, and yet it was not offered to me, something that does make me feel awful in a vague and impersonal way. I know it was simply chance, really, an instance of the other girl probably being around when this bright idea first occurred to the other two, while I simply wasn't in the room. And yet it does make me feel rather left out, not least because although I love my other fall-study-abroader in many ways, I simply feel like, in many ways, I would make a better roommate than she would; I'm far neater and quieter than she is, and the other two girls are also quite quiet and relatively neat. Mostly the entire proceeding just took me by surprise, caught me in a painful presumption that I had something with these other two girls that turned out not to be and left me to fend for myself. I'm not angry at any of them, particularly, just upset in general at being left out by what I can only hope and presume (although look at what presumption brought me!) was simply chance. If I had been in that room when that decision was made, if I had somehow seen it and made my own case, if only if only if only--well, life would be a bit easier for next year, that's all.

And yet right now, when everyone else has some sense of security and I do not (not yet, anyway), it's hard to see this as simply a complication; it feels a lot more like a serious blow, one that I keep coming back to with every end-of-the-year ritual, which will only come more and more frequently as the year rolls on towards its end. It feels personal, even though I know it likely isn't, and it puts me at the mercy of chance, moreso than other people, something inevitable in life that I still have to figure out how to take in stride. I guess that makes this all a somber and rather bitter lesson, at the moment--but a lesson nonetheless.

Poison

"Jon Arryn was a man of peace. Why kill him?"
"He started asking questions."



"I know the truth Jon Arryn died for."

And so will we, beginning next Sunday at 9/8 central. Some great shots here: Dany coated in blood, Varys, Littlefinger, Lysa Tully Arryn, Dothraki orgies, and more. 8 days until the premiere!

UDaR on meeting numero uno

Una Donna a Roma has been updated with details, most notably pertaining to visas and plans for other Europe excursions, from the first pre-departure program meeting yesterday afternoon. Enjoy!

Schedules 'n things

Many people who read this blog actually care very little about A Song of Ice and Fire or HBO's Game of Thrones, shockingly. So as to keep this from simply becoming a repository of fan-girling over the latest and greatest in Westeros, here's some news that has everything to do with the real world and nothing to do with George R.R. Martin or HBO, namely: what I'm doing this quarter.

A week in, it's safe to say this is the solidified version of my schedule from now through June. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays I have Modern Love in Victorian Poetry and Prose from 11:30-12:20 and then Italian from 1:30-2:20. On Wednesdays I also have my lector (conversation) session for Italian from 10:30-11:20, and on Fridays I have another hour of Italian right after the normal hour, from 2:30-3:20. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I have the third quarter of sosc from 1:30-2:50 and The Social Brain and Empathy, a psych class with the renowned empathy pioneer Jean Decety, from 3:00-4:20. (All times central, of course.) All that time on TTh mornings is usually spent getting ready for the gym, from which I actually just returned, while I'm at the gym from 3:15ish to 4:15ish on MW and later than that on Fridays.

The English class is pretty good, although there are actually quite a lot of people in it for a discussion-based class, probably about 25 or so. I'm not crazy about the Victorians, but it fulfills a period requirement for the English major and is kind of hilarious, in both ironic and non-ironic ways, so it's overall good.  Italian is, well, Italian, although it is really quite awkward this quarter since only two people (another girl and I) are in the class; the rest are in the 11:30 section that I used to be in but had to switch out of so that I could take this English class. Our teacher is also kind of awkward, although it's gotten less awkward as time has gone by, so it's okay now. Sosc is sosc, basically the same as ever, although so far it's been a little more interesting this quarter than the last two quarters; we're currently reading Freud, and then we're reading Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Memmi, and some other Freud. Empathy (or, should I say, ze ehm-pat-EE) is pretty entertaining; Decety has probably the thickest French accent I've ever heard, which makes lecture that much more interesting. He's also really nice, which I guess is sort of surprising considering what a bigwig in the field he is, but it's definitely appreciated.

Besides classes, not too much interesting is going on yet. Went to Chinatown on Saturday and had some really delicious food with some housemates. Our house is doing a camping trip at the Indiana Dunes in a week and a half, assuming all the planning comes out okay, which is really exciting. It's spring and the prospies are out everywhere; there's an admitted students overnight this Thursday and next Thursday, so we'll be swamped with eager and awkward high school seniors. The weather's been pretty okay; it was legitimately hot on Sunday, and although it's still very sunny, the temperatures are back down into the 40s and 50s. I think it's supposed to stay there for the next few days, but I guess we'll just end up seeing what happens.

UDaR: in which I can't smile

A new Una Donna a Roma post about the bizarre process of having six pictures of me taken for mysterious study-abroad purposes is up and rockin'.

Jace of Televisionary gets in on the action

One of the better-known internet-based TV/film critics is Jace Lacob of The Daily Beast, Televisionary, etc. His review of what he's seen of Game of Thrones so far (the first 6 episodes that HBO sent to critics) is officially up and viewable here. He has read the books but watched the screeners with his wife, who has never read a word of Martin and was allegedly "entranced" by the visual ride HBO takes us on.

He summarizes the show thusly:

Based on the novel series "A Song of Ice and Fire" by George R.R. Martin, Game of Thrones arrives with its brutality and vision very much intact. Adapted by executive producers David Benioff and Dan Weiss, this is a staggering adaptation of a monumental literary achievement, a densely-plotted fusion of fantasy and potboiler political thriller with a deeply cinematic scope. 

Jace is clearly a super-fan, not only of the books but of the show. His language to describe the adaptation includes the words "insanely fantastic":

The first six episodes of Game of Thrones, provided to press in advance, are insanely fantastic, a groundbreaking work of television that's both visually engaging and thematically insightful. This is high fantasy done right, offering a wild and unrelenting plot about the games people play, the thirst for power, the ends men (and women) are willing to go in fulfillment of their own desires, and the things that we do for love. These six installments represent a crowning achievement for serialized television, its taut narrative the launchpad for dynamic conflict, copious bloodshed, and, yes, even a reflection of the mercenary times we live in.

He finishes it off with a sentence that will probably make every A Song of Ice and Fire fan's heart beat just that much more quickly:

This is the type of series that comes around but once in a lifetime, a groundbreaking and absorbing drama that is utterly unlike anything else on television today.

Gore, sex, love, lust, ambition, pride, children, adults, humor, "monsters," dwarves, booze, family, honor, duty, tomfoolery, and, yes, even heart-rending sorrow. Sounds about like the series we all know and love.

14:03 of GAME OF THRONES

It's here. The "exclusive sneak peek" of Game of Thrones premiered about two hours ago on HBO, and it's online for your viewing pleasure. This covers the very beginning, from the wilds beyond the Wall to Winterfell, roughly the prologue and Bran I from the book (minus the direwolves, fellow ASoIaF fans, sorry--that scene is probably right after the cut off).

Warning: This, and all of Game of Thrones, includes direct depiction of intense violence and bloodshed. HBO rates it as Mature Adult, and for quite good reason.





The production value is breathtaking. Looks so much more like film than TV. Also, the bits and pieces of the Stark children are wonderful; the added in bit with Arya (Maisie Williams) is the most impressive and true-to-the-spirit not-from-source-material-but-well-placed bit I've seen in an adaptation in a while. Starting off with a bang and following through; definitely addicting.

Two weeks until the premiere. April 17th, 9pm ET/8pm CT, HBO.

First real mainstream GoT review up

A few bloggers have been giving their impressions of Game of Thrones, but most of them are fantasy-niche and/or fans of the book series already. The Hollywood Reporter is neither niche nor previously familiar with the books, so far as I can tell, but their review (found here) is very positive and makes it sounds like GoT has definitely found the ability to attract the general public. Their remarks on how the immense complexity of ASoIaF translates to a miniseries are especially interesting:

...That kind of start to the 10-part series was essential because Game of Thrones is a complicated story with numerous characters and a dense, interwoven back-story. Though it demands attention, Thrones never once bogs down. It’s the kind of drama where, when the first episode ends, you wish the nine others were immediately available. And that validates HBO’s notion that television is the perfect medium for a fantasy series done right. Getting Martin’s Thrones, the gold-standard, could end up landing HBO its next franchise...What that means, essentially, is that there’s a tight grip on the storytelling and a real understanding of who each person is – traits that make the complexity easier to bear....What we have here is the successful pairing of an acclaimed collection of fantasy books with a television series that illuminates and expands what’s on the page. Worth the wait? Absolutely. And even if you have no idea what all the fuss is about, you should get in from the start absorb Martin’s fantastical tale.

Sounds like this is going to be good. Whether or not you're familiar with the books, definitely give this one a chance, and if you like to read and haven't checked out the books yet, what are you waiting for? Get your hands on the first book, A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin, and start reading now--it's a long journey, but one that rewards its readers a thousandfold for the initial investment you make. The other three published books in the series, in order, are A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, and A Feast for Crows, and book five (of a predicted seven), called A Dance with Dragons, hits stores July 12th--now is the best time in ages to get involved.

GoT reminder: Sneak peak tomorrow

Just a reminder on the Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire front that tomorrow, Sunday 4/3, is the date that HBO shows the first 15 minutes of the first episode, directly before the continuation of their current miniseries Mildred Pierce. This sneak peak airs at 9pm eastern/8pm central, and according to HBO it will be made available online "immediately afterward" for those of us who are sans HBO/sans TV in general, presumably to try to get those who can to sign onto HBO. If you're a big ASoIaF fan or just a fantasy/medieval fan in general, I'd recommend getting HBO if you can, just for the next few months (the first season should end sometime in June) to watch the show, as all early reviews from critics (both those familiar and unfamiliar with the books) indicate that it will be splendid watching, and tell HBO why you're subscribing. Those of us who cannot subscribe to HBO (hey, fellow college kids/people sans TV!) can't monetarily support the show, and although we will find ways of watching, some explicit support is always helpful from those of you who can in order to keep HBO invested in continuing to produce the show.

UDaR on dates and paperwork

The latest Rome news is in, and it's official paperwork, meeting dates, and program dates! Check it out at Una Donna a Roma, where anything and everything Rome-related goes in the six months left until my departure for Europe.

%&&%!--Thus, Chopin

Spring quarter has gone pretty well so far, at least up until about an hour ago when I had to start printing things off for classes. In a slim attempt to save trees, I decided to double-side the printing the old-school way (odds, put back in to print evens), since my printer does not do that in the hip modern duplex way. I eventually got it down--after many poor pieces of paper wasted messing up in various ways along the path to double-sided glory and many obscenities yelled at my printer for needing two ink cartridge changes (black and then, 20 minutes later, tricolor) and a paper-jam fix along the way.

Thus, although there are stories to tell and a UDaR update to put up at some point this week, for now I will leave the blogging world with something more peaceful and blood-pressure-reducing than wraslin' with my printer: Chopin.

Additionally: UDaR update on family + Rome

Earlier this week I updated Una Donna a Roma, my Rome-focused blog, with some of the history of my family and Rome (my mother's side of the family is Irish and Italian). This was mostly to keep the blog from dying with lack of greater program specifics by trying to post once a week or so with things at least partially relevant to the eventually upcoming trans-continental experience. :) If you haven't seen it yet, check it out!

Wonderfully creepy, my lord

Lots more Game of Thrones-related stuff has been announced in the past few days, but the highlight of what's been posted lately is this featurette of Petyr Baelish, also known as "Littlefinger," one of the courtiers in King's Landing. The master of treasury, Littlefinger is about as shrewd as they come, and he also harbors a long-smoldering obsession with Catelyn Tully Stark, the wife of Eddard Stark, who thinks of Littlefinger only as a little brother. In Catelyn's absence he sort of gloms onto her children, especially the older Stark daughter, Sansa, in his shrewd, awkward, and creepy way.

Littlefinger (Aiden Gillen) and Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner) turning on the creepy factor. Screenshot courtesy of Westeros.org

Littlefinger is definitely a love-to-hate type of character with a bizarre and slightly pathetic history, and that screenshot really captures the awkwardness and creepiness he seems to bring to just about every interaction he has with anyone, particularly anyone connected to his infatuation with Catelyn, doomed from the start due to his position as a relatively lowly lord and Catelyn's position as both a Tully (first lords of the Riverlands) and a Stark (the wardens of the north).

Vacation blahblahblah

Not dead, just on spring break. Which is of course delightfully un-full of things to do but which thus makes blogging about things less necessary. Blogging is often a procrastination tool for me, a way to settle my mind before moving onto something else, but there's nothing really to settle here or procrastinate doing. Except sleeping. Which I'm doing, for some reason.

I have A Game of Thrones back from my housemate, so I've been re-reading that. There are a lot of sneaky little details I missed the first time through--unsurprising, in a way, considering how quickly I usually read things. It just takes such a long time with ASoIaF since every book is at least 800 pages in mass-market paperback form, and at school I only read before going to sleep, which only allows for a chapter or maybe two a night (the chapters get really long as the series goes on, it seems). 20 pages or so a night, 50 if I really chug on through (but then I usually have trouble going to sleep afterward, so yeah). That means it would take 2-3 weeks a book to re-read at that pace.

I also have been reading Amy Tan's The Bonesetter's Daughter over the past week or so. It was pretty good. Totally, totally different from what I've been reading the past few months (fairly generic modern realistic fiction as opposed to epic fantasy and then trashy fantasy), but that's probably a good thing. Oh yeah, and all that reading I do for class, which for some reason I never really think about when I get to thinking about books I've read. Next quarter I'll have fiction to read for class; I don't think I've had that since last spring quarter, when I took a class on Shakespeare. Kind of looking forward to being able to write English-y style papers in addition to obnoxious sosc papers next quarter.

Being home is extremely, extremely boring in the sense that, well, there's not much to do. Almost none of my high school friends are also on break, so it's mostly just me and my family rattling around small-town New England, fiercely missing friends from school. It's also so transient--just over a week, just 10 days, three of which are now done--that it's hard to really bother settling into any sort of routine. I'm not sure where my suitcase is (I assume my mother took it and hid it from me), but my clothes are all in a laundry basket. No real point in putting them away, it seems, when a week from right now they'll be packed up and ready to read back to the central time zone.

Some more interesting stuff should be happening starting tomorrow, which I guess is good. Lazing around driving my mother crazy and being driven crazy by her is only entertaining up to a certain point, after all. :)

UDaR update on program specifics

A new post is up at Una Donna a Roma regarding the conversation I had today with a friend who did the Rome civ program this past fall; I learned quite a lot about the program, some of which I reproduced there.

Total bonanza

First, and foremost: DONE WITH WINTER QUARTER. That's all, really, on that front. Back to New England tomorrow.

On the Game of Thrones front, there are so many videos out as to make your head spin. House features for Houses Baratheon, Lannister, and Targaryen, PLUS character features for many of the Starks and the key Lannisters and Targaryens. The character features are exclusively for Comcast subscribers, but they have already started leaking onto YouTube. Not all videos are yet on YouTube, but many are.

First and foremost, the feature of House Baratheon, the royal house of Westeros since Robert's Rebellion about 15 years previous to the start of the story. This features King Robert, a tiny bit of Cersei (she's featured in the Lannister video, of course), Joffrey/Tommen/Myrcella (the royal children), and Renly, Robert's younger brother. This is not yet on YouTube, but you can find it here courtesy of TV.com.

Now the YouTube videos, embedded below, beginning with House Lannister. Cersei, Jaime, and Tyrion are featured here, with new shots and interviews with the actors. There is also a brief shot of Tywin Lannister, the infamous house patriarch, in his glorious lion-themed armor, which is something fans have been clamoring about for a while now.



House Targaryen is the former royal house, overthrown in Robert's Rebellion. The two remaining heirs, Viserys and Daenerys, were rescued and taken to the far east, where they've lived with the wealthy merchant prince Illyrio Mopatis. As the series begins, Viserys and Illyrio are marrying Daenerys off to Khal Drogo, a khal, or warlord, of the nomadic Dothraki people, in exchange for Drogo's help in taking back Westeros for the Targaryens.



Now onto the character featurettes done in collaboration with Comcast, beginning with the Starks. First up is the patriarch Eddard (Ned) Stark, beloved friend of King Robert, father of five legitimate children and one bastard. Serious and probably the most rigidly honorable character in the series, he nonetheless has a great soft spot for his children, including his bastard, Jon, whom he has, unusually for a lord, raised alongside his legitimate children.



Next is Catelyn Stark, Ned's wife, originally from House Tully of the Riverlands region. She is devoted to her family and yearns to see them rise in the eyes of the king and would do anything for her children, but she also can be fiercely stubborn and determined when need be.



First up among the Stark children is Jon Snow, the bastard child of Ned Stark, who decides to escape the shadow of his bastardy and his famous family by joining the Night's Watch, an order that protects the Seven Kingdoms from the wildling invaders from the north.



After Jon is Sansa Stark, the eldest Stark daughter and second-oldest legitimate Stark child (the Stark heir, Robb, does not have a featurette). Naive and drawn to stories of knights and chivalry, she dreams of escaping the wilds of the northlands and joining the royal family after she is promised to the crown prince Joffrey Baratheon.



Next is Arya Stark, the second Stark daughter and third legitimate child overall. Much more tomboyish and wild than her sister, she yearns for adventure and has a deep bond with Jon, as both are rather different from their siblings.



Last is Bran, the second-oldest legitimate Stark boy and second-youngest child overall (there is a younger son, Rickon, who is not featured in these featurettes). Too young to be much of a player in the political arena, he mostly lives a good life running about the castle but worries Catelyn intensively with the hijinks he gets up to.



The Lannisters have three featurettes, beginning with King Robert Baratheon, who is not technically a Lannister but is married into the family. A great warrior in his day, Robert has a soft spot now for wine, food, and women and was a much better throne-winner than he is a throne-sitter.



Cersei Lannister is Robert's queen and the twin to Jaime Lannister (who, strangely, does not have a featurette). Stunningly beautiful, Cersei has great ambition and an unusually strong lust for power for women in the medieval period and is good at playing the game of thrones.



Tyrion Lannister is the younger brother of Cersei and Jaime. Born a dwarf, his mother died birthing him, and his father has never forgiven him for it. Although his relationship with his siblings and father can be very tense, he acts a lot like the other Lannisters: he is extremely clever and witty.



Last are the Targaryens and associates. Viserys is the older Targaryen child and the heir to the ruined Targaryen fortune, and he has never stopped obsessing over his lost kingdoms and plotting to win them back, even to the point of (quite literally) driving himself mad. He is extremely possessive of his sister, Daenerys, whom he likely would have married were the Targaryens still in power (the Targaryen custom is to keep their blood pure by marrying brother to sister).



Daenerys is Viserys's younger sister. She has no memories at all of Westeros, unlike Viserys, and is dependent on him to learn about their family and their right to rule the Seven Kingdoms. As the series begins, she is to be married to Khal Drogo so that Drogo will provide Viserys with an army to take back Westeros. She begins to learn the art of ruling at Drogo's side.



Khal Drogo is the vicious khal, or warlord, of a horde of the nomadic Dothraki people. Huge, strong, and intimidating, he claims to have never lost a battle and accepts Daenerys as his gift-wife from Viserys and Illyrio Mopatis but slowly begins to fall in love with the much younger, and much more fragile, Daenerys and helps to teach her how to rule.



And that's it for now--so many videos, but they're all so good! Great shots in each.

The Maester's Path: Link 3

The third link for The Maester's Path is up and rolling; I apologize for not getting info up earlier, but it did not get released until this afternoon when I was actually already in my astro final. C'est la vie. The theme this time is "sight," and in this link you take the black, metaphorically speaking, and try your hand at being a member of the Night's Watch keeping an eye out for wildling invaders. It's got a first-person perspective and is extremely graphics-heavy, as it does a beautiful 3D video-game-esque conception of the Wall and the land beyond, so close out other windows and applications running before trying. Maneuvering is done by mouse only, so if you're on a laptop with just a trackpad it can be a little precarious, but it's doable. For how-tos and general help, check out the comments on this page at fan site Winter Is Coming. It took me a good 15 minutes to get with my trackpad being annoying, but it's very interesting.

The reward this time seemed a little bit shorter than the others, to me, and not quite as intensely interesting, but all clips are good clips so far, at least as far as this series goes. The scene is not particularly momentous but features a character we've already seen, as well as some first glimpses of a few others, and gives us a glimpse at a locale we haven't seen too much of yet. Highlight or copy-paste into a word document to read a summary: Tyrion is at the wall, discussing the growing threat of the coming winter, with what appears to be Maester Aemon and Commander Mormont.

In other news, astro is indeed done, and it went as well as expected. 25% completion of finals! Tomorrow is the take-home art history final, and Wednesday is Italian and turning in my Foucault paper. The worst is basically over, however.

Finals update & GoT trailer bonanza

Just finished 5 pages of Foucault draft-ness, so I'm feeling pretty good. It's good to have a whole draft down and the next two nights to do rewrites (on top of the 3 other classes I also have stuff for between now and Wednesday morning). I was on a productive kick again last night, spending about 3 hours at Harper (the general 24-hour reading room with gorgeous Gothic architecture) plus four hours at Harper today to plan out the Foucault paper, make my study sheet for astro tomorrow (smallest handwriting ever on that one), and actually draft out Foucault. I've never spent this much time in libraries, and yet it really is not a lot compared to what most people do during finals week. I'm already tired of studying astro, but the exam is tomorrow at 1:30, so I'll probably wake up my usual weekday time at 9:30ish and study until it's time for lunch/class, and then that will be done. Forever.

My just-finished-5-pages good mood has only been enhanced by the wonders the internet has shown me as regards Game of Thrones; apparently two different trailer-esque videos were shown on HBO tonight, and both are now online. The first, called "Fear and Blood," is a generic dramatic 2:20 trailer, focusing on the legend of the Others (which HBO are calling "White Walkers"), some new shots of the far north/Castle Black, and some great Jamie/Cersei Lannister dialogue. It's not yet on YouTube, so I cannot embed it, but it can be found at the official HBO production blog Making Game of Thrones--check it out here.

The second video, embedded below, is a "Meet the Starks" feature, and it is easily my favorite video posted so far about Game of Thrones. It begins with some basic "this is Westeros" explanation by George R.R. Martin, seen before, but then it goes into some brief clips of Ned, Catelyn, Robb, Sansa, Arya, Bran, Rickon, Jon Snow, Benjen Stark, and the north in general, including some more Castle Back stuff. Clips from interviews with the actors, glimpses of Winterfell and more, our first times really seeing Rickon and Sansa, and so much more--a really awesome intro to the Starks. I hope they do similar videos in the next weeks for the Lannisters, the Baratheons, and the like; it's really very well done.



Tomorrow's Monday, so it's almost time for the third link for The Maester's Path, which I will also hopefully post about sometime in between waking up tomorrow and taking my astro final at 1:30. I'll also be getting my copy of A Game of Thrones back from the housemate I lent it to sometime this week before we all leave for break, so I can finish a reread of it before the show premieres on 4/17 and start my reread of ASoIaF in general so I'll be done by July, when A Dance with Dragons comes out. Things are going pretty well, all things considered, for finals.

Fulfilling stereotypes + classes, at last

I'm not a big study-in-library person, in part because I'm lazy and, since I have a single on a quiet floor in the house, I usually see no need to study elsewhere. Last night--a Friday night, mind you--I went to Crerar, however, the moderately-creepy science library on campus, since a few friends were going. We nabbed a study room so that we'd be able to talk once in a while, and we left at about 11pm, 5 hours after we arrived. My friends mostly worked on papers due on Monday and Tuesday, and I worked on studying astronomy (four hours to go over notes and check solutions to homework, apparently) and started consolidating information to study later this week for Italian.

Now today, a Saturday, I've spent about three hours studying in one of the general dorm-wide lounges with another friend. Again, "studying" here means finishing writing out all my Italian stuff and consolidating info for my art history final, which really doesn't require much if any actual studying since it's a take-home final that's posted online at noon on Tuesday and due back by noon on Wednesday. It's open notes, it's three short compare and contrast essays for different artworks/monuments, and it really isn't much of anything to worry about, since after my initial B+ on my first writing assignment for this class, I've gotten As and A-s on the other graded assignments we've had, including the midterm. It's better to push papers around and take notes, however, than it is to work on my Foucault paper, the thing I am dreading most about finals week. It's now not due until Wednesday, but I have to spend Tuesday doing my art history final and studying for Italian on Wednesday morning, and I have to spend most of tomorrow making my cheat-sheet for astronomy on Monday (all of the class condensed onto one piece of paper is really fun to make). So really, I need to plot out Foucault pretty rigorously tonight, write it tomorrow/Monday, and do some sort of editing on Tuesday.

I really need to be thinking about Foucault, but I absolutely hate sosc papers (they are so joyless, compared to other types of papers, not that any paper is really that fun), and I know that no matter how much I try, I'm likely going to get a B+ on it (like I've gotten on all my sosc papers) and a B+ in the class for the quarter. I'm completely down with B+s, but I just do not want to write something that likely isn't going to be top-notch work anyway, since sosc papers require such agonizing succinctness and dry accuracy, a far cry from the "brimming-full-of-random-stuff, close-read-to-pieces" English-y papers I prefer to write.

Fortunately, the quarter is indeed almost done. Unfortunately, however, the most important (and most agonizing) part of the quarter is just beginning. As if determined to make it that much harder to care about these classes anymore, classes for spring quarter finally came out yesterday. I'm taking Italian 203, the third quarter of sosc, an English class called Modern Love in Victorian Poetry and Prose, and a psych class called The Social Brain and Empathy, which is taught by world cognitive-neuro-empathy expert Jean Decety. No astro, no art history, just stuff I actually could conceivably care more about (besides sosc) and/or enjoy doing work for (again, besides sosc).

After this quarter, I'm done with physical sciences for the core. After this year, I'll also be done with sosc. After this year, the only core I will have left is civ (civilization studies), which will be happening fall quarter. In Rome. Then, after I get back from Europe, I'll have to take classes that will eventually give me a degree and a future. Chyeah?

New UDaR post on the deposit + end of classes

(End of classes for real this time. Except for the class I have to teach high schoolers tomorrow afternoon.)

There's a new post about the paying-the-deposit, officially-accepting-my-position process up at Una Donna a Roma.

In North American news, classes are finally done, in that I sat through the travesty of a sosc class this afternoon. It wasn't really a travesty, just kind of boring. But useful when it comes to our papers on Foucault due next week, especially since my professor changed the due date of the paper to Wednesday instead of Monday. I have enough stuff going on Tuesday and Wednesday, so I'll probably just be doing the paper this weekend anyway as originally planned, but it's nice to have a few extra days to look it over and pretend to edit it.

Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me is tonight. In an hour and ten minutes, actually, which means I need to shower (I just got back from the gym), grab some dinner quickly, and get ready to head out; I'm leading this trip, so I'm in charge of 9 other undergrads plus my own fine self and making sure that we get to the Metra station on time to catch the train north. It should be fun, all things considered (NPR pun? I swear it was unintentional).

Done, or so I thought

Tomorrow is the embarkation (yeah, I don't think that's a word either) of the grand social/academic experiment known as reading period. For two blessed days before finals, we are supposed to be free of classes and homework; our eyes are now on that prize known as finals week, known as two-hour-long exams and multiple pages of essay-ing. We have tomorrow, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday to prepare ourselves for the impending doom.

I also have a class tomorrow, during reading period, on Foucault. Thanks, sosc professor. I appreciate that. Granted, it's technically "optional," but he said he would not hold it unless everyone showed up, and for some reason a lot of the people in my class want to talk about Foucault yet again, so there we go. An hour and twenty minutes of Foucault tomorrow to brighten my reading period. Our paper (5 pages) on Foucault is due Monday, and we're supposed to bring in tentative outlines and stuff tomorrow, so I guess this could actually be a productive and helpful class period, but I'm rather attached at times to the idea of a lazy reading period, kind of a proto-weekend before I have to spend the actual weekend studying, reading, and writing for hours on end.

This reading period kind of looks like it will be anything but lazy, what with sosc and Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me tomorrow, teaching Friday, finding time to submit my Rome deposit and talk to the study abroad office, and probably other sundry things I'm not aware of yet but which will pop up out of the woodwork. Finals week itself will be moderately insane; my astro final is Monday at 1:30, my Foucault paper is due Monday by 5pm, my take-home final (three comparative essays of different artworks) for art history is posted on noon on Tuesday and due by 11:59 am Wednesday, and my Italian final is at 8am on Wednesday. And then I have to get ready to trek to the airport on Thursday to fly home for ten days for spring break. During which I have to secure employment for the summer if at all possible.

!!

Additionally, new sub-blog

To keep things focused a bit, I've started up a new blog specifically for Rome content; it can be found at Una Donna a Roma. I will continue to blog here throughout the process of getting ready for Rome, and even while I am in Rome, but UDaR will have the nitty-gritty details of the process, and when I am in Rome it will contain descriptions of trips, sights seen, cultural experiences had, and the like. This blog will remain a general depository for thoughts on the internet, college life in general, ASoIaF, and all that it usually is. UDaR will probably be slow for a bit until preparations really start gearing up next quarter, but I'll let you guys know here when a new post regarding the Rome process is up. Until then, enjoy yourselves. :)

Roma

Today I received word that I have officially been admitted to a study abroad program in Rome for fall quarter next year, meaning that I will be living in Rome for 10 weeks this fall with about 20 other current UofC college students. It's not really real until I pay my deposit ($550 woooo), start the visa process (thankfully the college handles that for us), and whatnot, but I'm sure it will hit me eventually that I'm going to one of the cradles of Western civilization for an extended visit. :)

I am really, really happy to go to Rome, even though it will require some changes in my usual living routine (besides the obvious change of being in a foreign country on another continent). I'm not sure that I know anyone who is also going with this particular trip, which isn't particularly frightening for me. It is weird in that we are living in apartments in Monteverdi, however, and I've never 1) lived in an apartment, and 2) shared living spaces with other people. I know, I know--a college student who doesn't share living space? I share bathrooms and common areas, but my room this year (and last year) has always been a single. I'm pretty sure the apartments in Rome are four-person with two double bedrooms, but I'm not entirely sure. Trusty earplugs will get me through just about everything, but it is kind of weird to think about sharing a sleeping room with someone (in a foreign country, on another continent) for ten weeks. It's also weird to think about taking care of my own meals all the time (food is not part of the deal, although housing is) and doing other domestic-ish adult-y things. I guess it's a bit like a crash course for real life.

The greater problem for me remains housing after I get back from Rome. The way UofC housing works, you sign on for a whole academic year at a time, but if you're going abroad for a quarter, things get messed up in that you aren't allowed to reserve a room ahead of time. You're guaranteed a space somewhere in housing if you want it, but since people going abroad fall do not reserve rooms in the spring lotteries, we're basically left up to the whims of chance when it comes to coming back to housing for winter quarter; wherever there's space, we go, and it's pretty hard to get back into your same house again, unless someone else leaves. Lots of people in my house are studying abroad next year, and two of my friends are actually studying abroad in winter and spring quarters, respectively. The tentative plan was basically to get a double, which the three of us would rotate in and out of as necessary, and which I would love, as it would let us all stay in our house next year. However, this never really came to fruition, and then the next thing I knew my two friends had indeed set up this plan--with another housemate who is going to India in the fall.

Obviously it was a little bizarre and kind of upsetting to be locked out of this rotating double plan, for another random housemate also going abroad fall, and obviously the fact that my housemate is also going abroad fall and also wants to stay in our house when she comes back (and actually has a working plan for doing it, something that I don't have) makes it that much less likely that I will be able to get back in next year unless someone from our house drops out of the college or something. I won't be homeless or anything of the sort no matter what happens, but I do love my house and housemates dearly and would be sad to be in a different house. Hopefully I can at least remain in the same dorm, even if in a different house.

There's nothing that can be done about that now, though. Eyes just have to stay on Rome. :)

The Maester's Path: Link 2

Link 2 for The Maester's Path, the promo website for Game of Thrones, is active, and it's much more intricate than the first link was. This time the focus is on "sound," specifically conversations at the Inn of the Crossroads that tell something about several of the great houses of Westeros. The conversations are pretty interesting but also sort of hard to hear, and the houses from them are mentioned indirectly. After listening to all 5 or 6 conversations, you go to a board where there are many sigils of bannermen houses; you're supposed to mix and match the sigils in the smaller red circles to create the great house sigils mentioned in the conversations. (One of the great house sigils you can make is a red herring and isn't actually mentioned in the conversations.)

The best source of help I've seen so far has been the comments of this post talking about it at fansite WinterIsComing. There's also a really cool heraldry section over at Westeros.org, but if you don't already know at least something about the great houses, it's hard to figure out where to start looking to find what sigil is what. The reward for this one is another 30-second clip from the series, featuring a character very well loved by the fandom (highlight or copy/paste into a word document to see what scene: Catelyn Stark is at the Inn of the Crossroads, being pestered by the singer Marillion, when Tyrion Lannister and company enter the inn end spoiler). Not quite as cool as the scene from last week but still interesting to get our first real sense of how these characters will work.

Overall The Maester's Path is very involving and intricate, and obviously the work HBO and their subcontractor Campfire Media have put into the site is impressive. Curious as to what will come in the next few weeks and of course very curious to see how the series looks and what the viewership numbers will be for the premiere on April 17th. Fans of the books are amped up, of course, but I'm interested in seeing what people who have never read the books think.

Again, if you'd like to join me as an acolyte, use the following link: http://itsh.bo/edmQfU. If you sign up after following this link to the website, I gain an acolyte; I'm currently 1/5, or 20%.

A programming note: on April 3rd at 9 PM eastern/pacific, HBO will air the first 15 minutes of the first episode of Game of Thrones as a sneak peak of the series, and it will make this 15-minute long clip available on HBO.com afterward.

This week should be relatively chaotic for me, with the end of classes, some events, prepping for finals for this quarter, and probably news on whether or not I was accepted into a study abroad program for next year, which then will prompt housing questions and all sorts of other complicated almost-real-life things. I'll keep posting whenever possible, however.

Sunday procrastination + GoT trailer

First off is the first full trailer for Game of Thrones, released last week and originally EW-exclusive, which is now on YouTube and thus can be embedded. Tomorrow a new "link" in The Maester's Path should be activated, which will bring more ASoIaF fun and hopefully a new awesome clip from the series as a reward for completion.



Besides that, there's no real news for anything going on; it's just another gray winter's day here in Chitown, spent writing a lab report about the cosmic microwave background and getting ready to start reading some Benjamin and Adorno for sosc on Tuesday. About 7 hours of class left this quarter and Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me on Thursday would make this a pretty good week, and it's certainly going to be better than next week, when finals doom is finally here, but the run-up to finals is almost worse than the papers and exams themselves.

I've been reading one of my Belmont used books now that I finished the first one, A Wizard of Earthsea. This one is called Mage Heart and seems like a bizarre little cheesy romantic fantasy; so far there's been illicit hallucinogen use, mentions of demons, slightly bizarre magic, and hints of good ole female homosexuality, along with lots of talk of breasts. It's interesting enough to make it worth reading, at least for now, but I don't see anything truly original or shocking or otherwise coming out of this one.

Post-apocalyptic Borders

So the Borders here on 53rd Street is closing Monday, and last night a bunch of friends came back from a ransacking trip with plastic bags bulging with every book that had ever caught their eyes and quite a few they never in a million years would normally buy. Apparently every single book, poster, or otherwise in this closing Borders store was on sale for $1, whether it was originally a $7.99 trashy romnov or a newly-released $25 hardcover.

This morning, therefore, a few of us went out to see what remained of the heavily-picked-over spoils. We found surprisingly a lot--not much of it good, of course, since anything of inherent value had long ago been bought up, but it's a lot easier to justify buying crap romnovs and the like when doing so will only set you back a dollar each, instead of eight bucks each. I did find a very few actual legitimate purchases; one was Diana Gabaldon's Outlander, which is supposed to be pretty legitimately good even if it is a historical time-traveling Scottish highlander romance, and another was Madeleine L'Engel's A Wrinkle in Time, which I have never read but which is, of course, supposed to be a classic. Most of the rest was just barely above crap level, including some Jeff Shaara American Revolution dramatizations and the requisite "we suck compared to Europeans"-type book, this one from 2010, so that it's actually fairly recent. The worst was some fantasy I picked up almost solely for its glitzy cover and the promise of griffins, my favorite mythological creatures besides phoenixes, but apparently these griffins tend to eat humans, and in the foreward the author thanks members of an internet messaging board, with their screen names, so you know this is just the epitome of internet-age derivative fantasy.  There were lots of copies of Glenn Beck's The Overton Window, but I couldn't justify paying even a dollar for that, and apparently not many other Hyde Parkers could. 

It's really strange, and slightly sad, to be in a closing Borders, with all these empty shelves, some of which have already been dismantled. The shelves themselves were for sale in many cases, and it was mildly tempting to buy a Borders bookshelf, but without plans to move into an apartment in the next year, it really was a pointless idea. Also, even though the genre titles still hung above, most of the remaining books and just been thrown onto any old shelf, regardless of classification, meaning that the cooking shelves were full of romnovs and some inspirational pet stories were cheek-to-cheek with the remaining manga selections. I particularly enjoyed noticing that part of the romnovs-in-the-cooking-section situation was the subtitle "crockery" below some of the worst romnovs I can imagine being published; I laughed at that. The people swarming Borders with us were also slightly scary; it really was, in many ways, like we were all the survivors of some terrible apocalyptic event, desperate for the few remaining books in the world, and tons of people had their arms full of random books, clinging to them as if they were the only books left to read. I tried to limit myself only to books that I had some hope of actually reading at some point, but my companions were not all so self-restrained; one of my housemates bought 15 books, and doesn't even really know where some of them came from or why, exactly, she picked them up. Apparently a few other housemates had gone earlier in the day, and one of them bought 30 books and a poster. I haven't seen her stash yet, but I'm curious as to whether she was able to pick up any higher quality stuff than what we, going only about an hour later, found.

I love bookstores, and lately I've been going hog-wild with books; last weekend we went to Belmont/Lakeview to a used bookstore, where I picked up four other books, of marginally better readability levels, but also for more money each. The world truly is a bit bizarre when it's cheaper to buy new books at Borders than it is to buy used books at a jank-tastic used bookstore on the northside. Also, they were still taking gift cards at Borders, so I didn't even have to spend my own cash- or debit-card-money at Borders, so really, it was almost like free, in a way. It does feel kind of silly to use people's gift money to buy crappy books; knowing the people who gave me those gift cards, they probably would have better appreciated me buying two or three actually good books rather than 9 relatively stupid books. I still have $15 left on the card, however, so maybe at some point in a few months I can buy real books with that. (Or, realistically, one real book.)

Books bought last weekend at Bookman's Corner (Clark and Wellington, Belmont/Lakeview area)

Books bought at the closing Borders at 53rd and Lake Park

I saved $105.88? Best/saddest book sale ever.

Really, it's been a pretty good weekend so far--heartening, really, considering that there are only 3 class days (and all the agony of prepping for finals next weekend) left in the quarter.