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.

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.

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).

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.