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I am so working on my essay for my Shakespearean lit class.
This is just a break, to stretch my legs and get a snack.
And that episode of Buffy I watched a bit ago, that was just a break, too. I needed to, uh, stretch my brain a little bit. And get a snack.
And earlier, when I was reading blogs and compulsively reloading my inbox (even though it automatically reloads itself) in hopes that I’d get a distracting email? Well, it’s important to stay fresh and alert. And get a snack.
The most productive part of my day: reading all those online essays by other students writing on the same play (though not the same subject, since plagiarism is bad, y’all and I didn’t dare run the risk of butting up against a similar line of argument). Not that I found a single thing to use, nor did I hope to. No! But reading some one else’s work, uh, recalibrated my standard a good deal lower. That’s a relief.
I’m getting right back to it now. Really! Just got to get a snack first.
Against the advice of all the voices in my seething brain squealing “NOOOOOOOOO!,” I just used Word Count and discovered to my astonishment: I’m halfway there. That’s a mercy, anyhow.
Just in time for the fall term and its heavy load of papers, here are some lesser-known proofreader’s marks. Like students of The Little Professor, from whom I cribbed the link, I could benefit from the “remove permanently from your lexicon” symbol. (It occurs to me that “lexicon” tops the list of overused words in my lexicon. Whoa — how meta.)
As children, we have so little concrete information about the world, and such a random collection of experience-based learning, that we construct oddly poetic worldviews and beliefs.
Some of these misconstructions of knowledge have their origin in semantic misunderstandings. Having been told repeatedly by our parents that we could be anything when we grew up, I decided at about age 4 that I would be the Pope. (We weren’t a Catholic family, and I had not the faintest idea of the Pope’s role; I just liked the hat.) Given the same sort of encouragement, my sister N. eagerly looked forward to becoming a circus bear.
Other childhood misconstructions are simple mechanisms for coping with common fears. Like many children, I believed a) that the night was filled with horrors, looming unseen in the dark, hungry for my innocent self; b) that keeping my head under the blankets protected me from these monsters. As an extension of this logic, and based on I-know-not what previous evidence, I further hypothesized that c) if I kept my head under the covers and held my breath for exactly sixty seconds, I was safe uncovered for the rest of the night. Although I cannot claim that my hypothesis was proven, it surely gained credibility as, night after night, no monsters attacked.
Ah, childhood beliefs. Some are just plain silly, some are quite touching, and some have the strangely comforting Lynchian quality that pervaded my own childhood.
I had a strange fear that if I closed my eyes in the bathtub, William Shakespeare would come up through the drain and kill me. I knew his name, but I had no idea who he was, so I just naturally assumed he was some sort of bathtub vampire. —– Dan
Naturally.
Spending my day-after-Christmas in quiet reflection (tipsy from champagne), thinking about the fact that I was at the University of Texas at the same time as Wes Anderson, Owen Wilson and Rene Zellweger, getting my degree in acting. (Who knows if our paths ever crossed because I had no future-star-power detection device.) However, after sitting in the “star chamber” (end of semester evaluations with the acting, voice and movement teachers all crammed into a tiny office) and being told I was a cross between Goldie Hawn and Elvira, but not as grounded, and never being cast in a main stage production in my department, one can understand why I gave up performing and returned to the arts visual.
I’ve seen only two people from my class in major motion films: one was in a photograph as the dead wife in x and another a nurse with a few lines in something else. (Oh, and another good friend once dated Robert Rodriguez who was in the film department with one of my best friends, in whose student films I always enlisted.)
It is I who upon graduation decided not to move out to Hollywood into a trailer with two good friends and a huge dog, and instead moved back to Houston to learn graphic design. It is I who after thirteen years finally feel like I’m learning something. And it is I who have only anise flavored cookies left over on the day after Christmas. Ick.
P.S. I just googled some other classmates and see one is married to a former soap opera actress.
P.P.S. The full moon on Christmas Eve.
In a shocking exposé, a Maine couple announces that schools are scheming to teach young people, actually going so far, in some cases, as to use books:
“They see it as, they say, ‘Hey, it’s a book, let’s expose the kids to it, and see what they learn from it,’ ” said Minnon, who with his wife operate [sic] a greenhouse on Route 202 in Lebanon.
The Minnons, parents of a first-year student at Noble High School, object to his class’s study of The Catcher in the Rye. Not satisfied with the school’s provision to allow their son to study another book, the Minnons are attempting to prevent the entire first-year literature class from studying Salinger’s classic.
(link thanks to Bookslut)
This term, I am taking my first class with Legendarily Scary Professor™. So far, she has handed back each of my papers littered with remarks like articulate and good clarity, very thorough. Phew!
Yesterday, we had the midterm, and at the end I walked out with absolutely no notion how I did.
I now find myself in a state of indeterminacy. The prof has not graded them yet, and her faith that I am still the same solid A student is touching. I, however, am breathlessly waiting for her to open the box and report the dead cat.
Out of nowhere, a prof asked, “So, who knows what kuru is?” Mind you, this has nothing to do with our classwork; he just likes to make conversation Jeopardy-style.
I happen to have read an article about kuru several years ago, so I was able to shoot back (or, more honestly, stutter back) “Um, the disease brain-eaters get, right? Human brains? With the, the, the prions?” (I am less than eloquent on the spot, but all the key points are there, my friends.)
But who, having read this once in her life, wouldn’t remember it? Brain-eating cannibals, people.
Today, my stack of books from interlibrary loan seemed a logical expression of all that early exposure to Goth. Now that I consider it, archaeology is a natural for Goths: the bones, the dust, the many opportunities to discuss the death gods of different cultures.
Elli
Elsa
