That title sounds like directions. And in that context, the directions would be something like two down, four rights and two lefts. Or maybe it's some combination of rights and lefts. Anyway, the title refers to weeks left in the second half of junior year. (My lack-of-internal-spatial-compass is well-documented here and here. And this seems like it should count, too...)
Swamped under with homework this weekend, three time-intensive projects all due Monday. So there's been a lot of playing Garth Brooks and Kenny Chesney CDs to work by. Keeping up with the Thunder as I can.
Went home for a bit last weekend; the best part was when I looked into the family room at the furniture rearrangement, Rags spotted me, meowed hello and ran up the stairs to greet me. With the water pipes busting during the cold spell a few weeks ago, the carpet in the GBC auditorium had to be replaced. So it was missing during Sunday's service; which felt familiar and welcoming. Though I never could decide whether it felt like meeting at the warehouse during the 2008 remodel, like the family room after a flood but before we stained the concrete, or like the SGYC tabernacle.
About six months until everybody heads that way again...I hope I can be there, but it's too early to know.
Haven't really had much of a chance to play guitar much, and what time I have had has sounded uncertain and nervous, which doesn't work that well as motivation. Maybe I should learn some new songs, or try writing some.
Something I've been trying to figure out: Is it worse to read a book that's been written at instead of to the reader, or is it worse reading a book by someone who can't write? Being written or spoken at feels very demeaning as a person. (Most textbooks are flagrantly written in this style.) I suffered through Kate Chopin's book The Awakening since it's the book we'll be discussing for one of my classes next week. She was a deeply unhappy, very angry and frustrated New Age feminist with a meager amount of talent, who occasionally wrote a nice phrase or sentence almost by accident, only to realize what she'd just done and erase it with two atrocious sentences to end the paragraph. (My opinion.) She was a single mother in the 1890's, though; and writing mostly short stories was about her only way to stay afloat. (That's a fact.) But her writing is just so....vulgar. And I mean that in the original Latin sense of commonness. There was nothing extraordinary about it, except maybe the incomprehensibility of the (frequent) abstract tangents she goes off on. And I really don't care much about a married woman having an affair and committing suicide when the man she wants won't run away with her. And it's set in Louisiana; and I don't know French. So that was another downside.
And a lot of this distaste is probably intensified by having just finished Jane Austen's Sense and Sensiblility for the third(?) time right before it. The books share some character types in common, which will probably be the topic of a future essay, but Austen was intelligent and snarky, with a moral compass, and while she didn't care much for all of society's conventions, she accepted that they were there for a reason. Chopin just wanted to smash everything that could be worthwhile because of her wretchedness, like Oscar Wilde and H.G. Wells. G.K. Chesterton speaks much of her kind of people in his Orthodoxy.
Managed to turn watching Space Jam into research for a homework project in Creative Writing, that was kinda neat. (I like exploiting those loopholes."Said in Calvin voice") And also some reruns of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Agent Carter. Planning on trying to go through the Mighty Ducks trilogy soonish. And really need to watch Pixar movies for inspiration and admiration purposes. (Which I don't have on DVD, and they aren't on Netflix. But that's what you rent them on Amazon for.)
No comments:
Post a Comment