I had a little minor non-drama with getting my German major all set up.

There are essentially three classes that one simply *must* take to get the German major or minor. I am taking one as we speak, signed up for another for next semester, and I thought, a few months ago, that the third would also be offered next semester. This would have put me in the odd situation of making me take five classes again next semester, instead of the usual four, but I would have been able to deal with that, I think.

However, that third German class? Not actually being offered next semester. I didn't realize this until I was figuring out the classes I would have to take for next year, and I had a little unhappy moment in my brain. It was not a good feeling, to say the least.

The scenarios running through my head were roughly along the lines of offering to take a 250 (an independent study course) to make up for that last class. Or that I would eventually just give up on the German double major with Religion and accept a whole lot of German classes that would have to speak for themselves. Which I would think is fair, since there was another version of that class offered this semester which I could have taken had it not conflicted with my Religion seminar. But it would really suck overall, because I had planned on double-majoring in German and Religion from essentially my first year at Swelles. (I am one of the few people I know to enter and leave college with the same major in my head and on my diploma.)

But! Instead, in a very brief meeting with my hastily selected German major advisor, I was told that I could use one of my extra classes from the Uni Vienna to fill that spot for the missing class. Which means, I can get my major ohne Probleme, and I actually have to take fewer classes for it than I originally thought I would have to. Well, rather, one of the extra classes that I took just for the hell of it in Vienna actually ended up not being wasted as just a class that fulfills my graduation requirements, but also will count towards my major.

Leben ist gut. Was mehr könnte ich sagen?

Essentially, in my last semester of college, I will probably only be taking one class that is actually being counted towards either of my majors, the German seminar. The rest are looking like Latin, Greek, and possibly another class in the Classics department on Greek and Roman Religion, which I may or may not attempt to count towards my Religion major. It certainly looks really cool overall, but I cannot place my hopes too much on it, because it might conflict with that last critical German class that needs to get done.

My Greek professor is actually a nice person, but seems rather deeply awkward. The whole class had kind of a hard class today (SO MANY VERB FORMS >_< ), but she made a point of telling us that we (all four of us) were actually a very quick class and that we should not have problems. Then we brainstormed about how we can figure out how to learn all the stupid verb forms- see, however much I whine about Swelles, they still do awesome things like this in class. I cannot stress how much I had missed that while I was abroad.

Latin seems to be going apace. I need to review more, this is clear, but I'm doing fine. Augustus rocks my socks.

I find myself singing as I wander around the halls, and doing dance steps. I joke with strangers about how the cafeterias run out of coffee. (Me. Joking about lack of coffee!)

I like my classes, I like my job, I like all the people on my floor- I am honestly really happy with this, and I think that's more because of the work and the high stress level that I am used to at this place. You do the work, things work out.

In other news, an acquaintance of mine from my first year came up to me last weekend and told me how flattered she was that I had hit on her about three years ago- this was before she was really out/even all that sure she was into girls, and apparently she got a real kick out of me flirting with her at a dance (in my own incredibly awkward way.)

The words "incredibly hot" were used.

*hisssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss*

Oh, just ignore that sound- it's only my ego inflating. :D

Yo, people

So, the first week of classes went fine, and some issues have been addressed

1. My greek professor- not actually as evil as previously thought. Just seems to get bored teaching the basics, now that we are starting to read sentences, we should be okay.

2. My hall is a happy happy place to be. The Austrian exchange student is named Romana Klinger, and she is snarky and wonderful and about 23. We went out on Friday night with a small herd of the other language tutors, drank a beer, and basically futzed about for a while. They are all slightly overwhelmed by Wellesley, and think the amount of work is ridiculous. Romana is impressed by my German, and despairs of actually teaching people German in Wellesley- she is a poli-sci major herself, and her German grammar is about as good as my English grammar.

3. I finally have a white board! Life is good.

4. I did not go to church last week because I had left my phone in the room when my mom called. This was probably for the best...

5. I had my very first day of working in the conservation lab of the library, and it was relaxing and fun. I made custom-fit cardboard boxes to protect delicate older books- I will work there tomorrow as well. It was very soothing and bright and repetitive.

6. There is no number 6.

7. My German class is remarkably easy when compared to the literature classes I took at the University of Vienna. We are currently reading something about "The Life of the Swedish Countess of G***", which is full of people being swept away by their emotions and dramatically vvirtuous acts. .

8. I have had only one religion seminar so far. The professor seems nice (slightly overly friendly, but nice) , but I was without coffee at the time and therefore my brain was dead, and my judgement impaired. Her voice, however, ranges from "Tolerable" to "Nails on Chalkboard" in pitch. I weep for my grades.

9. My Latin professor is uniformly delightful, and deserves cookies. We talked about the organization of roman Triumphs today, and the sheer size of the damned things was driven home by the fact that Pompei Magnus once carted wagons full of cash that he had won in his wars down the streets Rome: the amount was larger than the entire tax income of the Roman state for a year.

10. There was a little drama for me today before lunch, when it was discovered that a book reserved for my religion seminar was lost. I had read part of it on Friday, but there is a paper due on it this week, so I needed it. Fortunately, tho the bookstore was out, another student had a spare copy that I bought from her at the bookstore price.

I am holding off on learning Greek grammar tonight... though I must do it, and am already behind. I feel like this is not going to be a fun course, but hopefully, I will slog on through it.

So, for those of you out there in the flist who speak Greek, any easy-reader style books to help motivate my little buns?

(There is a part of me that deeply enjoys the look on peoples' faces when I say I am taking Latin, Greek, and German. Little do they know, German is so far the easiest by far.)

Odd midnight-and-peach-tea-inspired thought:


Harvey Dent's romantic mix tape would clearly have to include Abba's "Take a Chance on Me".



I feel like I just kicked a puppy and liked it. See icon.

Another slightly earthy-crunchy town in Vermont.

The Mothership has landed at her quilting retreat, so my sister and I have the day up here free. Because of my sadness, my sister has agreed to go and see THE DARK KNIGHT with me later today. (JOY!)

The WATCHMEN trailer I've seen recently looks awesome, HELLBOY II is till in theaters and I will probably see it upon my return home.... All in all, for pure greatness this summer seems to be shaping up well.

I still feel like I should make a point of checking out all the superhero movies I can get my mitts on and doing a review/retrospective bit on each of them, maybe something for a paper like that would be great....

Days 19 and 20: Floating.

Sidney snuck back past the decrepit fencing into the vacant lot. In the half-light of the fading day, the shapes of his collection loomed like the skeletons of clockwork dinosaurs. He rushed by them with only a few exception- a strange apparatus there received a loving pat, another a cursory examination that yielded a few specks of dust. For the most part they went ignored, like shoes he had long ago outgrown.

An observer would note that he clutched something to his chest as he ran, that he was flushed and out of breath long after he had stopped running, and that his grin stretched out wide past the point appropriate for polite company. A careful observer would perhaps have noted the convulsions of his fingers and belly where his burden touched his body, as if it caused spasms. A very careful observer who looked in exactly the right place would have seen the blue glass eye around Sidney’s gleam far more brightly than the ambient light should allow. But Sidney was unobserved in the place he had constructed for himself, and no one could have seen from his actions whether those convulsions were a sign of delight or revulsion.

He slipped into the last inner circle of his carefully artless maze, which directed both the casual and the determined walker on paths tangential to the heart of the field. Only Sidney even noticed where the debris formed a pointedly solid barrier around the center, and of course only Sidney new where to press, push, shove and wriggle his way around them.

Sidney reached his goal and carefully lowered his burden to the table in the center of the labyrinth. His hands rested heavily for the space of a heartbeat on this, the altar to his mind’s inner workings realized, and he took a breath slowly. In. Out. In. Out.

He’d come so far and there was so much work to be done still.


***
Anyone could build an airplane or a hang glider in his spare time. Sidney had set his sights a little higher.

***
Sidney’s first breakthrough was, oddly enough, the night that he was attacked by a werewolf.

His various attempts to recount the story after the fact remained confused well past the point that terror and youth would excuse his inability to remember. Werewolves have however an inherent terror and confusion attached to them, and Sidney had so few chances to recite his tale to a believing audience that it hardly mattered.

The facts, as recounted by his mother to the priestess to whom she took Sidney to clean him of the taint of evil, were as follows: Sidney at age nine wandered out into a wooded section of a neighboring park on a night of a full moon. His mother was not a woman convinced of the truth of the things her grandmother had whispered to her in the dark of the night many years before, and it had been many years since she had tied holly above her door to keep out evil. She stocked her cupboards with Advil and cough syrup, not potions, and her garden grew only vegetables, not herbs. When Sidney protested against the need to wear the blue glass eye his great grandmother had passed along to all her descendants, Sidney’s mother did not insist.

Nevertheless when Sidney ran screaming from the woods with blood on his T-shirt, she recognized the creature that chased her son to the edge of the woods. She grabbed her son in a rush that belied her cold terror and carried him screaming into the house. She hid him in a closet and returned to the door of her porch. There she waited, clutching her grandmother’s silver carving knife in her good left hand and a flaming brand made hastily from gin and turpentine in her right.

The beast came. They fought. It was a hungry monster in search its rightful prey. She was a mother. She won, but it cost her an eye and her home. She fled that night before the firemen came to pull from the ashes her house the only corpse that they would find that evening: a mostly human figure with shattered teeth. When the blackened fragments of the canines were reconstructed, they measured half the coroner’s index finger. He quietly ruled the death an accident, and put a fresh bow of holly over the door of his own home that evening.

Sidney knew very little of the battle, but recalled the next night with great clarity: he had spent it strapped to a bed while a mixture of wolfsbane and rosemary was rubbed into the open bite wounds on his arms, over and over until the dawn brought him back to himself.

Sidney learned several things very quickly after that: always wear your glass eye and see that that you keep it clean and brightly shining, so that it can see evil far away. Keep holly fresh and green in your home, especially over the doors and windows. Never use your real name when a false one will do. There are monsters in the world and they will get you if you are not careful.

***
Sidney did think that merely flying was enough. Winds would eventually fade down. Planes would run out of fuel. Essentially, to keep absolutely sure of not touching the ground, one had to find something that would perpetually and eternally remain off the ground of its own accord.

One had to defy gravity, really.

day 17
“What do you mean I cannot pass?”
“You cannot pass. There is just no getting around it, your grades are completely in the toilet. There is not a thing on earth you can do to save your grade at this late stage in the game. You quite simply cannot pass this class.”
“But that’s impossible. I got a B+ on the last in class quiz!”
“Those don’t count for anything towards your final grade. The only grades that count towards the final are the homework grades.”
“That is the exact opposite of what you said on the first day of class.”
“If you recall, this year the first day of this class fell on Opposite Day.”
“What? That was Opposite Day? Since when can you observe religious holidays in school?”
“This is not a public high school, this is a private university, and the dean of academic relations recognizes my right to practice my religion in the manner of my choosing as an Orthodox Literalist.”
“Well, yes, of course. I just mean, don’t you still have to declare that sort of thing beforehand?”
“I declared it oppositely by not declaring it.”*
“That’s insane.”
“Well! I have to say that I find your attitude towards my faith to be very offensive.”
“What? Look, I have nothing against your religion, but you can’t fail me just because I didn’t understand the practices of a religion that I don’t belong to! That infringes on my religious freedom.”
“And to just what religion do you belong?
“That’s just my point- it shouldn’t matter! I went into class expecting that I would be able to learn, and because I’m not a follower of Literalism, I didn’t know that I should feed everything you said through a reverse polarity filter. The facts of the issue were only clear to the Literalist members of the class!”
“If you’ll recall, the syllabus did say that students should check the dates on syllabus very carefully, because some of the class times had to be moved for religious holidays. You could have just checked the calendar.”
“My calendar does not have the Literalist religious holidays marked on it- it has the cycles of the moon! and the high tides! But you notice that I don’t tell people that I’m a sailor and then expect them to know that I will not be in classes on days where outgoing tide coincides with their lectures- I would still have to tell them for them to know!”
“Look, I am sorry for the miscommunication, I tried to be as clear on the subject as I could be within the confines of my religion, but I cannot change the fact that your grade is too low for you to pull it up. Even if you aced every homework, quiz and the final, your final grade would still only be in the forties. There is nothing I can do.”
“Fine. Fine! Then what am I supposed to do about this?”
“I would strongly suggest that you drop the class, and talk to any other professors who had their first day of class on that date and see if any of them were issuing instructions in compliance with Opposite Day restrictions.”

*As stolen from Bill Waterson's Calvin and Hobbes Rules for Calvinball, as collected from historical documents (AKA comic strips) here: http://www.simplych.com/cb_rules.htm. See Rule 1.5

day 16
“Is it okay to use normal hand lotion on the scars?”
“Huh?” I was startled out of my reverie. “Oh, yeah, it’s fine, the scars are all healed up nicely.”
“I was about to say- they look very clean and small for scars from a car accident. I have some uncles in a machine shop in a machine shop, when they lose a finger it heals up way worse than this.” She draws a fingertip gently down the pale line at the end of my knuckles.
“My fingers didn’t actually get cut off in the accident itself. They pinched between the door of my car and the car that crashed into us. The actual amputation happened at the hospital the next day, when they figured they couldn’t pin the bones together enough to fix them.”
“Oh, I see.” And she did seem to pick my hand up and look at it a bit more closely. “That would explain it. It’s really not a bad scar at all.” She seemed earnest enough about it. I don’t really want to think about what a machine shop could do to someone’s hands after a lifetime of working there.
“No, it’s not bad. It just rubs funny when I write.”
“You still write with your right hand?” She asked, and I resisted the obvious pun with some difficulty. She was starting to seem
“Yeah. You only really need your thumb and first two fingers for that.” My left hand was starting to feel soggy in its little bath thing, but she’s painting some sort of liquid on a tiny brush across the base of my nails.
“What is that?”
“Oh. It’s cuticle oil- that and the bath helps loosen the cuticle that’s attached to the nail. You need to push it back for the polish to stick on right.”
“Okay then.”
“It’s aaall part of the service,” she says with a smile. Her front teeth are a little crooked. She finished my right hand and stick it in the tub while she fished out my left.
“Alright, now I’m going to take this little stick,” she holds up a tiny lance, “and push back your cuticles. It might pinch a little.” She takes the pointy stick and starts rubbing in sharply in circles over my thumb. It’s rather strange and more than a little fascinating. It reminded me of a dentist scraping off plaque. It did pinch a little.
She moved on to my fingers, and when she was done on the left she moved to the right. Again she seemed to make a point of being delicate, but even going slower she was done more quickly. After, only three nails to deal with.

Day 15 Abbreviated

She did grab my hand, eventually. She started rubbing much more slowly, and much more gently than on the other hand. It was appreciated, actually.
“This okay?”
“Yeah, it’s fine.” It was more than fine, actually. It was rather lovely. I’ve stopped shaking hands with my right hand for practical reasons since my accident. At first my hand was swathed in bandages, and any attempts were just too painful. After the bandages came off, I switched back to right hand shaking, but there were some… incidents.

Whether someone actually recoiled, or didn’t notice until they were already holding my hand and felt something was missing, it made for an awkward first impression. I am fairly certain it cost me at least one job interview when an incredibly inelegant young woman grabbed my hand, noticed the missing fingers, and knocked coffee over her laptop with her elbow on the withdrawal. A lefthanded shake was unusual, but it gave the other person a hint that there was something wrong. They tended to pick up on it a bit more quickly on their own after that.