I think I might love writing. Not poetry, because half the time it doesn't make sense. But prose. It goes all the way across the page. It is a complete thought. You can talk and describe and write like you would speak.
I think I might love writing.
I love getting books from the library to read just for fun. As a college student in general, and an English major specifically, reading for fun isn't something I get to do very often. At about this time every year, I get tired of being told what to read, and I make a rebellious trip to the stacks on the fifth floor of Strozier Library and pick something. When I'm feeling extra rebellious, I hide in the Goldstein Library (Children's Literature) and forget that I'm a college student at all.
So the reading for fun bug hit me this year and I picked up Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak. I'm really enjoying it. I loved the movie when I saw it again last year, and I wanted to read it, because as anyone can tell you, the book is always better. I love his words and images. In the first eighty or so pages, there have been at least five times when I've stopped and thought, "Wow, that was a really amazing line." I'm only about a fifth of the way through it, but so far, it's delicious.
I was flipping through the pages idly the other night when I noticed writing. Faint pencil marks crammed into the margins expressing the thought of someone long ago. The book has been in the library for more than 25 years, and I can't help but wonder what the other people that read it were thinking. Someone scribbled a poem in the back of the book. I don't know who wrote it. Maybe it's another Pasternak poem that the editors neglected to include, or maybe it's an original that the poet wanted read by someone else, whether it was published or not. Maybe it's a pastiche of Pasternak poem. But I can't help wondering.
That's why I love library books. They are shared. They've touched someone else's hands and been dropped as the reader drifted off to sleep, shoved in a backpack next to a textbook that has seen far less wear, chosen over assigned reading. I like books. I think they all have their own story.
I got the results from my Folklore midterm back, and I did just fine. Yay. I'm no longer worried about that class too much. I know that with a fair amount of studying, I can do well on the tests. Plus I have an idea of how he grades things in general.
Current source of panic/anxiety: Advanced Shakespeare.
An Update Concerning the Previous
Well, it's been a week since my midterm, and I think I've gotten far enough away to talk about it now. I sat down and looked at the paper, and thought, "I'm gonna be okay."
I was right, until I hit the essay. I had no idea how to answer either of the options. I didn't realized that we were supposed to study a few people in depth (neither did anyone else), so I basically made something up. It was basically incoherent. Perhaps the worst bit of writing I've done since my Freshman year of high school. I think I did get some extra credit, though, so I'm hoping for at least a B. We'll see.
On a totally different note, we had our 2nd Annual Thanksgiving in October on Monday. I spent most of Sunday and half of Monday cooking and I've come to a couple of conclusions:
1. I'm never cooking a Thanksgiving dinner alone again.
2. Cooking a turkey isn't any easier the second time around.
3. Rolls -1 cup of water do not rise.
4. Southerners don't stuff their turkey, or use apples, or have mashed potatoes.
That is all.
I'm Going to Fail, That's All There Is To It
I'm sitting in Panera right now studying for my first exam in many years in which most of the content must be memorized. I'm an English major, see, and we don't memorize things. We analyze. We remember details about books, plot points, images, motifs, etc. We don't memorize things. Ever. But that's what this professor wants. Rote memorization. I really don't remember how to do this stuff. I need to know who wrote what in what year (for example, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm wrote Kinder und Hausmarchen in 1812 (1st Vol) & 1815(2nd Vol)). How am I supposed to remember that? I think it's time to bust out the flash cards.
Zoomed Out and Blurry
When we were in Virginia a few years ago, I took my dad's Canon A-1 with me. It's beautiful where I grew up, and I wanted to capture it. The front yard. The view of the house from the front gate. I especially wanted pictures of Draper's Valley Presbyterian Church. We didn't go there when I was a little, but every once in a while we'd find ourselves going up through a gap in the hills and into Draper's Valley. You turn a corner and hit the crest of a hill and spread out before you is a green valley, with a church steeple nestled among trees at the bottom of the hill. It's one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. So I took the camera with me to try and capture it on film. I stood out next to the family van snapping picture after picture. When we finally got them developed, I was disappointed. They were zoomed out too far and a little fuzzy. I ignored one of the main rules from Photography class my freshman or sophomore year of high school: always have a focal point. Don't just take some random picture, there needs to be something to look at. Apparently green rolling hills weren't enough.
I don't know what made me think of that picture, but whatever the case, I couldn't help but draw an analogy between that photograph and my life (here's where it becomes apparent why I'm an English major). The picture is my life. You can tell that the subject has the potential to be beautiful. There's some pretty cool stuff in it. There's that church, and some farm houses in the distance. There's cows and sheep and rocks and a cemetery. It would all make for a really nice picture if I got close enough to really look at it, to focus on it. I tend to bounce around, I'm never focused on one thing long enough to make it something in which I excel. I play piano and guitar, but only just well enough to know that I'm not really that good. I'm mediocre at sports (better than the girliest of girls, but so hopelessly out of shape that I could never be really good). I write fairly well, but the odds of making it as a writer are lower than the odds of getting a speaking part in a feature film. There are all these things that are there in front of me, but I can't focus on any of them and make them a subject for this picture. Instead it's way too zoomed out and a little bit blurry.
Walrulopes and Tiger Chicken
More Photoshop Assignments posted for your enjoyment.
The greatly feared, but rarely seen Tiger Chicken. I'm really not quite satisfied with it, but I got tired of messing with it. I'll probably end up going in again and working on it some more. The stripes are particularly frustrating, since they are not actually black, and I can't get the eyedropper tool to pick up the correct color, as it is in fact several colors.
The docile Walrulope. It has difficulty eating, since it's tusks tend to get in the way when it tries to graze, which is why they are all but extinct. Again, not quite satisfied with it. The tusks and whiskers of the walrus head look a bit digital, but they are significantly better than they were before. I do like the ears and the horns. I had to move the one on the right and cover the natural horn, which is why that area might look a little dodgy.
