In other news, all the students on campus received this email earlier in the week:
Which doesn't apply to me — not only would it be cruel to keep a pet cooped up in my messy little apartment, I also don't have the time or energy required to take care of anything other than my buckets of homework — but means that this has apparently been enough of a problem that they had to send out an email about it.
Which means that there are puppies and kittens on campus. There may even be puppies and kittens in my building. Or maybe, you know, gerbils or something.
[Under the cut: Small fluffy animals; a last summary of pre-reg; and your one and only chance to get a glimpse into the writing that's been occupying all of my time this week!]
I understand why the university prohibits pets, or at least I think I do — most of the on-campus housing can't be comfortable for most pets (except maybe hamsters or something); they could escape or leave a mess; some students are undoubtedly allergic; they shouldn't take the chance that a finals-crazed student will forget to feed his or her pet; etc. At the same time, though, PUPPIES:
ALSO KITTENS:
ALSO ALSO HEDGEHOGS:
...Um. I really have no excuse for the hedgehog-spamming which just occurred, except that hedgehogs are adorable. (I like hedgehogs and llamas, okay? Don't judge. Also, today there was a guy dressed as Santa outside one of the churches nearby, and he had two llamas with reindeer-antler-headbands on, and I almost flailed myself right out of the car. LLAMAS.)
What was I talking about again? Right, my week. Well, pre-reg finished up, and it actually worked out pretty well for me despite last week's grumpiness. I'm going to be finishing up the requirements for both of my majors, which is nice — in the summer, I was a little worried that I was going to have to drop one of my majors, but I seem to be on track as far as that goes. Of course, all of my classes are going to be on Tuesday and Thursday, including a whopping four classes on Thursday (6 hours and 50 minutes of class, if I'm calculating correctly), which ought to be interesting.
And by "interesting," of course, I mean that you'll probably be able to play a game called, "Watch the progression of Sasha's blog posts as she goes progressively more and more insane." Fun times!
Other than that, my week has involved zucchini-sesame-cheese muffins and a lot of homework — I had a 3 page essay due Friday, and a 5-8 page story and a 12-15 page paper due on Tuesday. And to spice things up a little today, I've decided to give you guys a look into my process/what I'm working on.
First things first: my paper for Theory One: Beyond Me, Me Me: Reflexive Anthropology. We've been working on this for the entire semester: we take a moment from our lives/experience that we think has anthropological interest, and we've gradually been layering it with more and more details and social theory.
“I know we’re all being really annoying right now,” Rafi continued, seeming patently nonchalant about the way he was upending all my expectations of Metro-normality, “and if anyone wants to punch me in the face right now, then I really want you to do it.”
The Metro is too noisy for any single statement to elicit silence, but at the very least, there was no greater increase in noise than there had been. I suppose the other passengers might have been feeling anything from disdain to bemusement, but I was stunned, at least. It was something so far away from anything I had ever experienced on the Metro, or possibly ever—something I could never have imagined doing, or having anyone around me do. I didn’t think anyone was going to take him up on it. I felt pretty freaking sure nobody was going to take him up on it, as a matter of fact; [...] who, on a train full of grim-faced adults in suits, is going to walk up and punch a seventeen-year-old in the face?
Second, my story for Techniques of Fiction, which basically came about through a combination of A) my professor (Deb Olin Unferth) saying that [a.1] we should try writing in first-person plural just as an experiment, and [a.2] that most stories written in the second person command form weren't particularly specific about who they're speaking to; and B) my having watched a friend of mine play Portal 2 recently. And then, well. Sometimes I can't resist a challenge like that.
Actually, I was going to post an excerpt from this, but I think I might wait until after I hand it in and we discuss it in class. There are still a few tweaks that I need to make to the structure. For the moment, though, all you need to know is that it involves robot-type-things of questionable morality. (I don't even know, okay. Other people in my class are writing these desolate stories about roadtrips and failing friendships with beautiful imagery and feelings, and I'm writing bizarrely-structured stories about psychotic robots. I don't know how I got to this point, okay.)
Third! The essay I turned in on Friday forCommodity Consumption and the Formation of Consumer Culture, which I inevitably refer to as "Commodity Culture" for the sake of brevity, and also because I honestly can never remember the full title.
The question I answered was this: "On the one hand, forms of consumer culture are open to all and profit by drawing in as many potential consumers as possible. On the other hand, they have all tended in some way to limit their address, welcoming members of certain social groups, while ignoring or actively discouraging others. With reference to particular shopping spaces (such as department stores, malls, supermarkets) or to advertiser-supported media (such as magazines or commercial television), critically discuss the inclusionary and exclusionary tendencies in the design of their markets."
Which I did, in what I like to think was a rational and well-thought out way. However, before writing the paper, I used a structuring technique which I've been relying on recently whenever I'm having a hard time focusing my thoughts. I wrote an informal sketch of how I wanted the paper to go, and then went back and rewrote it far more formally, thoroughly, and articulately.
My teachers get to read the formal version. This is the informal version:
I don't actually usually color-code these outline things, but the colors correspond with the way I color-code my notes from specific sources according to theme.
I hope you've enjoyed this ridiculously long look into my classes and my brain. Tune in next week for my tips for making social theory more interesting, the REAL reason why I feel like it's probably better for the universe if I don't become an academic, and anything else that happens to pop into my mind at the moment.
[Original tags for this post: CHALLENGE ACCEPTED,Classes, cute fluffy things, emails from The Powers That Be,HEDGEHOGS, it’s okay even I don’t understand what goes on in my brain,llamas, Pets, pre-reg,things that I do, what is my life what are my choices?]
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