Aleksandra the Great’s Exploits

Maybe I do live on the wrong side of Clifton Heights

Monday morning I was heading for the trolley and noticed that the back right window of kuruma-kun (Car) was broken. It looked as if someone had hit it with a bat or some such tool, shattering the glass and leaving a little hole. I naturally worried that I had caused it. As it turns out, however, 13 cars in the area had been shot at with a beebee gun. Apparently, some vandals were riding around Clifton destroying property. Hmmm.

And again!

It shouldn’t be too hard to recall my post-colonial lit. professor (since I wrote about him in the last post). We were reading Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, which is a companion novel to Jane Eyre that deals with the [spoiler warning] supposedly crazy woman in the attic. It’s a background, essentially. Anyway, she ends up burning down the guy’s mansion in JE, and there’s one critic who suggests that Jean Rhys is encouraging the metaphorical burning of all books like Jane Eyre (that exploit colonial stereotypes). So, my professor picks his copy of JE and sets fire to the edges.
Canon?

In the post-colonial lit. course we read three novels by women, and the rest were written by men. As an end-of-term activity, we all voted on the books we liked most and least, what we would eliminate if we had to, etc. The women writers were spread out, and Salmon Rushdie won the most-liked. Then the professor explained that the real canon is determined by how many articles are written about particular authors or works. So we voted on what authors we had written about or were planning to write about. As it turns out, the three woman authors were at the top of that list.

My professor said that he knew of only one study done between the critics and their opinions on a work. There was some conference in which a person presented a study on critics of Ulysses. Apparently (I haven’t read it), the woman in it has an affair. So the presenter researched the critics who thought the woman was a whore versus those who thought she was liberated and found an overwhelming correlation between critics who thought she was a whore who had also been involved in affairs and divorces. What does this mean for criticism?

And finally

Ten-to-twelve-page papers are significantly harder to write than five-to-seven-page papers. At least there’s only one more to write.

I really haven’t forgotten about this blog. Every now and then I feel bad for not updating in so long. The only problem is that there is absolutely nothing worth mentioning on a blog. (While the fact that Carli has abandoned us for the summer is important, I would imagine that anyone who would really care already knows.) What I’ve been doing since I got home, then, includes:

1. Sleeping either far too much or too little, depending on the night, just to keep my sleep-wake schedule on its toes.
2. Seeing people on occasion.
3. Not getting a job yet because I haven’t heard about financial information from Bryn Mawr and I have no experience.
4. Reading Naruto manga/awaiting the release and translation of chapter 310.
5. Getting my green belt, which is pretty exciting. Now I get to learn kata with kicks in them. On the other hand, though, I probably have to spar.
6. Attempting to learn the kanji taught to Japanese school children.
7. Playing FFVII with my little brother.

On the productive side, my room is almost clean. Also, I have been applying to jobs; I’d just much rather work at a bookstore, for example, than at a bank.

¡Adios, Nueva York!
I checked out of my dorm late Wednesday evening, meaning I can no longer call myself a New Yorker. I have two finals on the 9th of May, and then my first year of college is finished, and I hopefully won’t have to go back to New York (except to use my two free passes to MoMA—is anyone interested in going with me?). But there are still 32 days until I’ll have heard from all of my transfer colleges (meaning I’m anxiously awaiting the mail every day).

Finals
On Thursday morning I had my World Cultures: Chinese and Japanese Traditions final with Ricky and my Lit Interp final. They decided to make the WC final on the last day of class rather than on Reading Day, something about which I was very pleased, since I don’t have enough train tickets to travel to and from New York one more day than I thought I had to and because you’re not allowed to have finals on Reading Day; they let us arrive at 7:30 rather than at 8 so we could have extra time. Anyway, the amazing thing is that I filled a Blue Book! During the midterm in my AmFic class last semester, for which we only had an hour and fifteen minutes, some of the students requested second Blue Books. I think I filled half of my first book during that exam. After about an hour and a half of writing in WC, though, I went up and got my second book. I’m pretty pleased. [Edit: I know that’s the same thing I said about those boys and their grammatical correction. Sorry.

One more thing: The final did not prove to be very difficult. We read five works and had to answer one of two essay questions for each one. They were all pretty reasonable—comparing some of the plays of one collection, examining characters’ actions, ect. One of the books we had to read was Soseki’s And then, a novel that deals with this guy Daisuke and his friend Hiraoka and Hiraoka’s wife, Michiyo. One of the essay topics for that book was “Write the main narrative as seen from Michiyo’s perspective.” What kind of essay is that?! It didn’t even require that we think about the book, only that we know the plot. And telling it from her point of view made it even easier than simply summarizing since she didn’t know all of the side stories with Daisuke’s family. Needless to say, I chose that one.]

Where’s Tabby?
This morning around 6:30 my mother came in my room to say that we left the back door open last night and the cat (Tabby) was missing. My mother said she’d looked around outside and couldn’t find her and didn’t hear her meowing, so she really believed my cat was dead. My step-father heard, and he and I got ready quickly and went to help look for the cat. By the time I got to the basement, however, they had found Tabby. She had hidden under my neighbor’s car and very luckily was neither run-over nor stolen. Tabby enjoyed a very early breakfast and lots of attention this morning.

I’ve been cut off from the world for a few days since my internet’s been out, but today as I was taking a nap the cable fairy came and fixed it. You would think after several days of not being able to check my email, and with our leaving for Canada on Sunday, the ski club people from NYU would have sent something, but sadly the most important emails I received were from Facebook. So, break:

I was beginning to think I’d lost my ability to watch movies in the theater when both Brokeback Mountain and The Producers bored me. I think now that they were both just too long and drawn out for the stories they were telling. Memoirs of a Geisha was, I am happy to say, much better, although there were some deviations from the novel. And of course it’s completely implausible. I read that book and Flowers for Algernon over break. I went to Borders Monday night and spent an hour and a half combing the Fiction/Literature section looking for something pleasant. There are very few really nice, pretty books that don’t make you feel worse after reading them (like Matilda, but that’s for kids, or The Princess Bride). I was shocked to see that there is an overwhelming quantity of “fiction” (terrible-seeming books written for single middle-aged women about, for example, Sex with the Ex) taking up shelves where real literature is supposed to be.

Tuesday we went skiing. Oh, wait, we didn’t go skiing, even though the weather in the Poconos was perfect and snowy and it didn’t rain at all back home. So instead I went to a bunch of stores with my mother, including an anime shop that opened on Baltimore Pike that’s just like a video store.

Christmas was pleasant. I’ve got an MP3 player and a PSP, so now I don’t have to talk to anyone if I don’t want to. Those will be especially nice on the subways going to and from work and New York. I also split the cost for new ski boots with my mother, and we got my skis tuned. This is what I’ve been up to (besides the group parties about which everyone knows) over break. I’m going back to school Saturday to leave on the ski trip Sunday.

I know I haven’t written anything lately. It’s probably because I’d feel silly writing too much just about me, but I’ll update soon. For now, though, a bit of shameless bragging about my little brother. Unfortuantely, he did not make seminar during this round of testing. He only missed by three points because his “cognitive efficiency” wasn’t high enough above average. Oh, well. So they tested his IQ, and naturally it’s above average (but not high enough overall to satisfy the district). He’s in the top 98% for reading and the top 99% for math, but what’s even more exciting is that his math reasoning IQ is above genius level. Yay, Stevie! Heh, and his teacher had thought to keep him in the middle level math class with her to make sure that he could hear everything properly (he’s in the upper level math now, though). I completely forgot to mention here that he passed the test for his orange belt a few weeks ago. He goes to karate four times a week now. I’m so proud of him.

I don’t see Amanda nearly as often. She was in her first horse show last weekend and got second place in one event and fifth in two others. This is her in her equestrian uniform on a horse:

And I suppose Nate is surviving. The last time I talked to him was right after he downloaded Advent Children, which I still have yet to do. Anyway, that’s it. There should be an update soon.

Christina and I went home this past weekend to visit family and teachers. We decided to text Z to find out the best time to visit him since we were undecided as to when we should come in anyway. He said fifth block was best, and we planned to come in earlier to see other teachers (specifically Wuetig and Connelly, and I wanted to see Ms. D) during fourth block. We approached the main entrance security guy around 1pm and told him we were back for a visit. He asked if Mr. Z knew we were coming in because we weren’t allowed to interrupt his teaching and he hadn’t put our name down on a list of expected visitors. We assured him that we had contacted Z and that everything was set. Doubtfully, he instructed us to go right down the hall and into that door (as if we didn’t know where the English office is. We didsay we were former students), and he said that we couldn’t go wandering about the halls.

So Christina and I set off down the hall and wondered whether he would notice if we went somewhere else. We got to the intersection in front of the English office and walked past the door to see if Z was in there. Since he was not, we thought we’d try going to his (old) classroom to let him know we were here. Just then, the bathroom monitor asked us what we were doing, and he said that he had no idea where Mr. Z would be right now. We told him we’d check Z’s classroom, and he almost let us go, but then a female security guard came hurrying down the hall and stopped us, saying “We got them” into her walkie-talkie. She asked if we checked in the English office, and we said that we hadn’t because we saw that he wasn’t there. So she sent us back to the main entrance to wait until fifth block.

When we got back there, the first security guard told us that he’d kept his eye on us, that he’d seen us turn to the left (which we did to talk to another security guard) and then to the right (to go to Z’s classroom). He made us sit on the bench and wait for fifth block to begin. As we were waiting, Ms. D walked by, and she stopped and talked to us for a while. She left, and soon after the bell rang. We told the security guard that the bell had rung, so now we’d be off to see Mr. Z, and he said something like, “Go ahead” as if he wouldn’t have had us chased down if we had just left.

We made it safely to the English office. Z met us there. He said that a security guard had told him that two girls were looking for him, and that he had told him he was expecting us. Mr. Connelly was in the English office, and Z snuck us up to see Mrs. Wuetig, so we ultimately had a successful visit. We left before 3pm with no problems except the fine I got for breaking a one hour(!) parking limit.

A friend on the inside suggested that we leave the school saying, “All right, we’ll visit teachers another time,” and then sneak around and enter through the gym doors. The friend also suggested that we just walk in from one of the other entrances. It would be risky, sure, but perhaps if Christina and I had been in dress code and not wearing jeans, we might have tried it.

The policy may be different on the days when mass visitations occur (e.g. the Wednesday before Thanksgiving), or after the school year has progressed a bit. Just in case, though, be careful visiting.