gravycopter

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    What I had for dinner:

    Roast beef, mashed potatoes and gravy, salad, apple juice, chocolate ice cream with chocolate syrup on top.

    Words that Professor Mine Enemy used in Greek class today:

    "κόσμος."
    My name, three times.
    "Megatron."
  

      What was in the sky when I took a walk after dinner, when the air was warm and humid after a hot day and a hot rain:

    A helicopter. Clouds.

sophomore on saturday

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    AWW YEEUH

    SCHOOL TIME

    It is good to be back. Being back is a good thing.

So this is most of the student body, all dressed up for convocation. When I say it is a tiny college I mean that.

    I'm so happy to be with all my friends again (including Best Friend, who is a brand-new freshman), things are going really well with my two new roommates so far, my best bro Jim finally got here today (Saturday) although move-in day was Wednesday, I've got all my books, I just got back from a quick trip to the store with bestie Laura for the supplies for our traditional shared meal of sourdough bread and potato soup (to feed ourselves tomorrow because the cafeteria isn't open on Sundays), I've got a bag of Pepperidge Farm Geneva cookies, and I have now memorized the Greek alphabet. Things is peachy.

tough luck, mr. grayson

    Dear Harriet Walter,

"Following Haly's clues, he finds a mysterious Book of Names in the circus that holds his on the last page^[14] .[He's forced to fight a rhyming demon named Acheron when his clown Jimmy Clark is attacked by an ex-fiancee using black magic^[15] .]"

 from a plot summary on the wiki page of Dick Grayson.


    Oh my gosh comics are dumb.

oh golly i can't write anymore yay yay hurray

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    hurngh blurhghkl rarr

    rarrrrrr

    ararararr

    what am I doing with my life

pretty sure Rigby isn't actually supposed to be on the couch

    what i am doing is totally failing in the attempt to become a young adult

    and also watching a lot of batman movies

    (while eating unhealthy children's breakfast cereal)

    (in my pajamas)

    Back to college in two weeks. Sophomore time! (pronounced sop-ho-mor-ay)
    'Til then, I'm still housesitting - I had a week off but came back yesterday - and misusing the ability to access the internet at all hours (which I didn't have for most of the summer) by reading through Tumblr all the time. And by watching Batman movies.

     I can't really concentrate on anything right now or I might be able to explain why Tumblr is destroying my attention span and making me (with my super mimcky writer-voice) struggle with expressing myself and articulating actual ideas (especially without images and communal reactions)

    bewaaaaaaare

master of the beasts

Dear Harriet Walter,

    Well! Apparently it has been a while, she says as she sits on top of the back of a couch, kicking away at a dog's stuffed toy because the dog wants her to play fetch but she wants to write. (Dog toy is too gross to touch with my hands without washing said hands before returning them to the laptop.)

    Today is my fourth day of housesitting. The murder mastiff isn't here, as the people I'm working for actually found a really cool boarding place that specializes in working with large, aggressive dogs who have behavioral problems and since his owners were having several kinds of trouble with him anyway, they decided that that was a happier option and might do some long-term good.

    However, I still have to take care of one largeish, energetic, nervous, and easily bored young dog named Rigby, who is some kind of short-haired, lean, coyote-like thing. She needs lots of attention.

    And I also have to take care of five cats (two downstairs and three inside or adjacent to the barnish thing, one of whom is a Persian and needs his fur brushed and his eyes cleaned often), four chickens, and the young potbellied pig.

    The pig is, of course, the pig that I previously saw in a pet shop and wanted so badly to own. This is the family and home that he went to. (You might wonder how I can be sure. The pet shop does not often have pigs, the family bought him around the time I know he was there, I recognized him when I first saw him, and I have pictures on my phone from when I saw him for sale to compare to the pig I take care of.) Yep. I get to live with and take care of the pig I yearned for, for three weeks. His name is Papa. He takes blueberries from my fingers quite delicately.




    Housesitting is a very strange job. It requires very little of what we think of as work, instead calling for one to step into a person's or a family's shoes, inhabiting a broken-off piece of their life while they're gone. Taking care of their pets, sleeping in one of their beds, raiding their pantry, washing with their soap and so on, but with none of the family interaction of their lives, very little of the driving away to go places and buy things and work, no knowledge or history of their habits and hobbies in the lives they lead at home. I feel like another person's ghost, in a functional way.

    Sometimes I feel like I'm being paid to haul the pig's large rubber water bowl to and from the house to dump, rinse, and refill it, and clean out the cat litter, and groom the cat, and feed creatures several times a day, and take the dog out to potty, and walk the dog down the gravel roads, and be lonely and isolated from other humans all day (as I'm way out in the country)...and sometimes I feel like I'm being paid to sit on my butt and watch Batman TV shows.

    Speaking of whom, life lesson learned today:

    when tasked with brushing a floofy white cat, first make sure that you are not wearing a black Batman t-shirt.

books books sugar DEATH

    Dear Harriet Walter,

•     I have literally never in my life watched as much television as regularly and extensively as I have been doing these past few days because of the USA Olympics trials. Auntlet says that this is because I'm discovering something very new to me (I've never watched any Olympic things or athletic things before) and I'm having to figure it out. This is especially true for gymnastics, I think. Limbs, Harriet Walter. Limbs everywhere.

•      I read Dracula recently. Bram Stoker and such. I was hoping it would surprise me and be way cooler and more interesting than I expected, like Frankenstein was (you'll remember that Dr. Mac made us read that this spring as an illustration of the themes and cultural reactions of Romanticism).

            Nup.

•     If you have ever lain in bed at night, sleepless and haunted by the question, "I wonder what was up with the commerce, warfare, and intercultural relations between early Dutch settlers and Munsee Native Americans in the early colonial period of America's history," suffer no more. I can highly recommend The Dutch-Munsee Encounter in America: The Struggle for Sovereignty in the Hudson Valley by Dr. Paul Otto, mainly because the dude himself gave me a copy earlier this summer and I read it because hey why not. It is actually a pretty interesting account! 

•  Speaking of history books, look at this book Dr. Mac has assigned for Comparative World History next fall (one of the four he's assigned so far). It is about sugar and history! Two of my favorite things! Oh my lands, I almost want to order it early and read it before the semester begins.

I hope I don't look back on this in the fall and be like "olawks can't believe i was excited to read that what a wretched heap of poo."

• I have gotten a job housesitting in late July and the first half of August for a couple living out in the country. This is a slightly unusual housesitting job, as the couple has to prep me for it for several weeks before I actually begin the job, and by "prep me" I mean "have me over to their house every few days so that their Tibetan Mastiff puppy can get used to having me around and stop being an antisocial guard dog about it all." And by "antisocial" I mean that my private name for him is "the murder mastiff."

This is an example of a full-grown Tibetan Mastiff. Yeppers.

boring academic update

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    We found out a few weeks ago that Tiny College is, indeed, going to keep existing, even though it hasn't quite met its fundraising goals yet. Just a few more hundred thousand dollars to go. (snortsnorthaw I just really wanted to write that last sentence ok)

    (I should mention that they're also restructuring the academic program so that instead of different majors, all the students will be Liberal Studies majors and we'll each choose two concentrations, which will be based on our former majors with a couple of additions. Sort of like a split-screen major, or a traditional double-major with a more reasonable workload. Liberal liberal arts. Eight concentrations to choose from. I was an undeclared major last year, so now I'm having to choose two concentrations instead of a major. I actually really like this setup.)

    Yesterday I registered for classes for next semester.

    Here is what they are, provided I don't freak out in the first two weeks and drop one of them and do something easy but solely elective like American Lit to 1865 or whatever.

• American Civilization I: Early Encounters to 1865
• Man what is up with 1865. Something significant probably happened then. (This is why I need an American history course.) Anyway this is more history, like the (worldwide) civilization 'n culture survey classes I took last year except American. I will be taking the continuation of this class in the spring, as well.

• Comparative World History
•  This is HIS 331-1, my first upper division history class. (Other history class is part of the core.) I'm taking it to help me decide if I for sure want to be a History major - no, not major, what do we call this instead? A history concentrator? That sounds dumb. 

• New Testament Studies I:  Gospels and Acts
• Did I mention that it's actually really unusual that my college requires as part of the core curriculum a full year of Old Testament and a full year of New? Because it is. Most Christian colleges require one semester per testament, which is like super lame.

• American Government and Politics
• I'm taking this to fulfill my Social Science requirement. It's a three-hour once-a-week class. It is going to be difficult.

•  Beginning Greek I
• Yeah. Yeah. Um. Greek. I have to take two semesters of foreign language in college because I didn't fulfill the requirement in high school. It was either Greek or Hebrew, Tiny College is tiny. And it's not modern Greek, by the way, it's would-have-been-modern-two-thousand-years-ago Greek.

    So that's that.

    And I'll be working a job in the academic support center.

    I know it's only fifteen credits but they will be hard won.

    Best part is that I have only two professors for these five classes. I had four last fall and three in the spring. NT and Greek will be with Professor Mine Enemy because he's kind of the only faculty we have right now for both the Biblical and Theological Studies concentration (our one BTS adjunct is moving away from Cali) and the Biblical Languages concentration (the man is unreal, he's teaching six classes this fall). The rest will be with history/humanities super-fab-man Dr. Mac. This is quite all right. These are two of my favorite dudes on the planet.

from commencement last month, photo by someone who wasn't me. Dr. Mac (on right) is actually much taller than PME (who is not a tall man), but he was standing on a slope.