Roller Coaster...of Insanity

Oh, what a week. I've almost survived it, though. Just one Hum paper standing between me and...more work. But I'll have some fun tomorrow, though. First, there's the "liquid celebration." I finally arranged to get a bottle of good vodka. I ended up having to take two trips down to the other side of the floor to do so, and I'll have to go again tomorrow to actually give Darrow my money so he can go buy it for me. My first attempt at making this arrangement resulted instead in talking to Johnathan about Logic and getting my CD back from him.

The beginning of the week was pretty good. And I've already written about it, so all that I will say now is that I was pretty darn happy, if busy and not getting enough sleep. Things have changed a bit. Wednesday night I was going a bit crazy, because my brain shut down in the middle of Hum conference and I couldn't think for the rest of the day, but Thursday was worse in some ways. I did manage to get up and go to Bio lecture, and that was fine. But then I went to my String Quartet class, which actually sucked for the first time. And after such an awesome class on Tuesday... Anyway, we started out by talking about our final projects. For one thing, it sounds like it's going to be more involved than I had originally thought. I knew we'd have a paper and an oral presentation, but I thought we would all do our presentations on the same day. No. We each go on a different day. I don't know if this means that we spend the entire class time in charge. Not doing an oral presentation for the entire hour and twenty minutes, of course, but probably leading the discussion after that. Also, I nearly had all my ideas for my subject taken away. I'd already given up on Latin American composers, because Jenn had mentioned wanting to do Villa-Lobos, and I agreed to let her borrow my CD and quietly let go of the idea of doing such a project myself. But then in class Margo mentioned that she wanted to do Shostakovich, which I also wanted to do! So Leila suggested some other composers that bring extramusical things to their composing, or something like that, such as Bartok and Ives. And mentioned that sometimes it's good to pick something to write about that you hate. Well, that's all well and good, and I agree. In fact, I'm writing my Hum paper about something I hate - Seneca. But I don't hate Bartok or Ives, I'm just flat out not fucking interested. And I'm interested in Shostakovich not because of the political stuff, although that is interesting and worth studying, but because I absolutely love his music. I am, you could say, obsessed with his music, particularly the quartets. The symphonies that I've heard so far are good too, and I think that I will now listen to the seventh. But Margo ended up taking Bartok, so I get my Shostakovich. Had that not happened, I'd have told Leila I needed time to think about what I wanted to do so that I could then later go and see if there are any other Russian composers that wrote string quartets that I would be interested in studying. But that turned out not to be necessary. Oh, but then we talked about the twelve-tone system devised by Schoenberg, and Leila thought I didn't understand how it worked just becasue I don't know what the hell a fucking tritone is. See, in the twelve-tone system, you take the twelve different notes/tones and put them in some order without repeating any. Then you switch things around according to the intervals. Say you went up a perfect fifth between the first two notes (I do happen to know that a perfect fifth is, because the viola strings are tuned in perfect fifths). For the first variation on your original row, called an inversion, you would start in the same place but go down a perfect fifth. I understand the basic mechanisms of the twelve-tone system; excuse me if I haven't ever seriously taken music theory! I felt so crappy after that class that I scowled at everyone as I got my sandwich, ate it quickly in the MRC, and went home. Fuck Logic, I said. I'm already defeated by classes. My brain was working, though, so I got work done. Including my entire lab report. But damn it, something always has to happen such that I'm scrambling on Fridays before lab. The printer in my dorm is broken, so I blitzed (e-mailed) the stuff to Meg so she could print it out on her own printer, but she couldn't open the file. So I had to print it in the MRC during lunch.

We had prospies on Thursday. They joined us for our dorm dinner, then Meg and I showed them ODB, and then Nathaniel stole them. I walked with them to his room, accepted a hard lemonade from him, but then I split, because I wasn't exactly comfortable in that room after a while, and besides, I had to work on my lab report with Meg. So I went back to ODB to collect Meg, and we did the report. Just as she was leaving, Nathaniel returned the prospies, so I ended up talking with him in the hall a bit. He left briefly, so I took the opportunity to move to the social room. I knew he'd come back, and I didn't want to wait around in the hall outside my door like an idiot, nor did I want him in my room. So, social room. We talked for a while. It was okay, except for a couple things he said. Such as, "It's been a long time since I've sat and talked to you. I miss that." (I don't!) And there was the following exchange, which is slightly paraphrased (Naniel = Nathaniel. It's easier to type, and it's Kristina's nickname for him):

Naniel: So did you get anywhere with that guy at the Blue & Purple?
Me: Which guy?
Naniel: The one you were hanging on.
Me: Which guy?
(I then realized that Naniel hadn't been there long and so only saw me hanging out with Johnathan et. al.)
Me: Oh! No. He's just a friend.
Naniel: Just a "friend," eh?
Me: Yeah. And I ended up walking home with someone else.
Naniel: Did you get anywhere with him?
Me, after a long pause: No. (Thinking: I wish. And what makes you so sure I walked home with a guy?) And there were three of us.
(I then explained that I asked to walk home with them because I wasn't entirely sure how I got there in the first place because it was dark and I had been sober then. And he said, "Sure, rationalize it that way.")

So, was he being jealous, or accepting that I've definitely moved on from whatever crap that was back during fall break? I take the latter view, Meg takes the former. I'm taking a poll on this in my journal. Post a comment with your opinion. Oh, and if you have to do anonymous comments, would you be so kind as to identify yourself?

Today was actually pretty good. No reason to resent Friday bio lab, as it was cloudy most of the time, and we did a real lab. And by "real lab" I mean that we did stuff that involved micropipettors. (Yes, this is a rather narrow definition of "real lab." But that's okay because it's my personal definition that applies to biology stuff.) It took then entire freaking time, but Meg and I were something like the first people to actually get going, we worked until the end, weren't the very last to leave, and we have an extra data point. We rock. We don't need a third lab partner. Perhaps that's why we couldn't keep one. Oh, but the group we share a lab bench drives me batty. They often don't seem to know exactly what they're doing and occasionally bungle things. And one of them is a Bio major and another is a Biochem major. I mean really! Shouldn't you be paying attention in lab if this is what you're choosing to do for the rest of your Reed years, if not your career as well? Jeez.

In other news, I might be organizing an event for the MRC. There's a film called Rebels With a Cause which is about the Students for a Democratic Society (I'm pretty sure that's what the full name is), henceforth referred to as the SDS. It's not out on video yet, but it does tour to different places. It sounds like a really cool film, and the MRC has about $1900 that we don't know what to do with, so I'm hoping to get them to come to Reed in early April, and perhaps get the woman who made the film, and who was a member of the SDS, to come talk as well. I just have to e-mail them and get the information on it and such. I'm a little nervous about organizing, this, as it will be my first big project for MRC, but I don't have to do it alone. Geoff is very interested in the film as well and is willing to help out. I think it would be cool to work with him. He seems awesome, but I haven't really been able to find a way to really get to know him. But I seem to have stumbled upon something. He apparently spent his entire senior year of high school researching and writing about SDS and getting into all sorts of leftist ideas. And that leads me to fond memories of my junior year American Studies class...

And with that, I think I shall leave off writing for now and think about my last two years of high school and perhaps of what might have been had I not become a science major. (But hey, as a science major, I get a B.S. I think...) And of how I can bring back some of that and incorporate it into my Reed life. I've realized recently just how limited my brain seems to have become. I've been denying the philosophical/creative/poetic half of it to a large extent. Academia will do that to you, particularly when it's as intense as it is here. But I realize this now. And I'm realizing that there are things I used to care about that have fallen by the wayside. But now that I've realized these things, I can now go about returning them to my life. I have to in order to be able to function. I am not the type who can concentrate on only one thing. And speaking of not concentrating on only one thing, I need to practice viola soon. Oh, I'll do that tomorrow. Or Sunday. Probably Sunday.