Meet Me

Hello all! I am alive and DONE with the semester! It was a fun semester, and I had lots of fun in two of my classes (Writer's Workshop and 'the Fairy Tale Class'). I could do without math and astronomy, but they weren't bad.

So now I'll get back to a promised entry...

I went to St. Louis!

My hotel (Hyatt) was right next to the Arch.



And the hotel was pretty sweet too.



And had a sweet view of the city.



The beds were so comfortable and there was this lounge that we got access to (for like $40 a night or something?) that had food out all day. MMMM. It was like free food basically (since the school funded the trip). The only thing more delicioso than good food is good FREE food!

Here's the obligatory photo of me with the Arch.



In case you forgot, I was in St. Louis to present a scholarly paper I wrote about The Bluest Eye. That went well. I was only asked a few questions from the audience and they were all easy to answer.



Here are some of the fun things I experiences in St. Louis:

The City Park
Just a few blocks from the hotel was this park filled with sculptures and interactive stuff, like a set of panels that played different notes when you stepped on them. Here's some of the cool stuff found there.





Hooters
I went to Hooters for the first time! And it was pretty delicious.



St. Louis Zoo
YAY! I love the zoo! Here are some pics from the zoo.

City Museum
This was one of the coolest places I went to in St. Louis, and ever in my life. It was basically this huge building that was filled with games and tunnels and stuff for adults. It was amazing!!








Unfortunately, I forgot to bring my own camera (got those pics from friends) but trust me, there was A LOT to explore and I spent like a half hour just running through a set of tunnels on the first floor that seemed to never end. It was amazing and if you go to St. Louis, you must go.

I also went to the actual museum.


And to the Museum of Westward Expansion, which is located beneath the Arch.


Of course I rode up the Arch too! You have to ride up in this tight little pod. Here I am with my friend Todd as we rode up.


And the view from the arch:

I also took a nap in a very strange position:


And I played Scrabble. And yes, Todd and I won (duh!)


Here's a group shot of the juniors who went on the trip.


While I knew everybody from seeing them at school, I had fun getting to know them better.
But since I'm not that social, I mostly hung out with my good friends Rebecca and Todd.


Aww!

Here we are on the final night, eating at the banquet.


Our school won like 7 (thousand?) awards that night so we were very proud. GO TCNJ!!!

So in summary, I had a wonderful time there, loved the city, and would definitely go back.

Get A Bit Classy

I’m alive! I know I haven’t posted in almost a week, but the Spring 2010 semester has officially begun, and so has my new internship (yay!). So being a full-time student with two jobs will undoubtedly result in less frequent posting.

So since my classes will be taking up most of my time, I figured I’d talk about my classes a little so that y’all know what I’m spending my time doing and can then behave with an appropriate amount of jealousy or something.

M/Th at 8:30am – Astronomy

All I know about this class is that it involves studying stars. So this will probably be my favorite class! And on Mondays from 10-12, we get to do a lab. I’m assuming this will involve Botox, lipo, lectures from Mariah’s retouchers, etc.

M/Th at 2pm – Writer’s Workshop

At the end of my freshman year, I decided to add a creative writing minor. Writer’s Workshop is the final course in the minor. This course is geared toward creating one long piece rather than many short ones (like the other creative writing courses). Students are encouraged to write either a novel or novella, or a cohesive book of poems or short stories. I started a story in my Fiction Workshop class last spring and think that I will be working mostly on expanding that story. I have twenty pages of it so far, but the page requirement for fiction is 75-100, so I have a lot more to add. I wish I was brave enough to try to write a cohesive book of poetry, but my poems usually aren’t related thematically or even stylistically at times.

This is the FOURTH class I’ve taken with the same professor. I think that’s cool because he saw the work I submitted in Intro to Creative Writing and Fiction Workshop, so he’s seen the progress I hope I’ve been making.

T/F at 2pm – From the Renaissance to the Postmodern: The Fairy Tale Tradition

Often referred to as “my fairy tale” class, this course is the capstone to my major. (Yay! Two capstones in one semester!) I actually signed up to take a different capstone but that one was canceled and my class was dropped into this one. When I found out, I shed a flood of hot tears, but now that I’ve had a few homework assignments from this class, I am so glad I got switched into it.

In this class, we read and analyze fairy tales, starting with the Father of the Fairy Tale (Straparola, 1550s) and ending with contemporary retellings of the tales. On the first day of class, my professor told us to ignore what we thought we knew about fairy tales—they are not for children, do not need to have a moral (that’s a fable), do not always have happy endings, and are not primarily an oral tradition but a literary one. She then called Disney, “the D word” and encouraged us to use it only sparingly in class.

So I’ve started reading the fairy tales and they are HILARIOUS. I love:
- the extremely dramatic way characters deal with grief (“[The nurses] found them both lying dead. Immediately they began to scream and to shed a flood of tears. They tore their hair and their garments and laid their breasts bare.”)
- the terrible displays of ‘pity’ or ‘compassion,’ (“But when they saw how lovely and gracious she was, they were moved to pity and decided not to murder her. But they cut off both her hands from her body and tore her eyes out of her head.”)
- the scolding of angry mothers (“Stop it, and get out of my sight! Go break your neck somewhere! Take off. You’ve ripped apart my guts, and I can’t stand you anymore. My hernia swells up, and my goiter grows each time you appear. Stop coming here. From now on this house is like fire for you. I wash my hands of you and consider that I never spewed you forth into this world.”)
- the general funny descriptions (“He rubbed his eyes with his hands and stretched his arms for half an hour with sixty yawns and farts in the form of a dialogue.”)

Never has my homework made me LOL like these fairy tales do. I am definitely reading these stories to my kids! [Oh, and btw, my BFFL Josh took this class when he was in school!)

T/F at 4pm – Applied Liberal Arts Mathematics

Ugh, sick! This class is called “Applied Liberal Arts Math” which means “Math for Dummies.” It’s required that I take one math course, so I chose this easy one. So far, we’ve learned two methods of splitting your assets when you get divorced or separated (unlike Brangelina, who are staying together! LIARS!) or want to fight over inheritance. ZzZzZzZz….

So what classes are y’all taking this semester?!?!

Grades

Yesterday I finished getting all of my grades for the Fall 08 semester.

I got my first three grades all in one day! And I looked like this

I got:
an A in The Witch in Literature
an A in Creative Writing
an A in Intro to Sociology

So my semester GPA was a 4.0 so far and my overall GPA was 3.86.

But then I got my final grade and looked more like this

Heartbroken, lonely, and dirty.

I got my first B in college!!!

: (

Now my GPA dropped! Grr...

Kansas

For my often talked about Witch in Literature class, I was assigned to do a presentation of Gregory Maguire's book Wicked.

We all know from L. Frank Baum's book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz with Judy Garland that the Wicked Witch is truly wicked.

The book (which turned into the musical of the same name) is about how the Wicked Witch of the West became wicked. Maguire offers an explanation as to why a green-skinned girl becomes a witch who is angry with the world. I loved the book and was excited to do a presentation on it.

I decided I should do a musical with a similar theme.

I wanted to write about someone who is seemingly innocent at first and through their circumstances are suddenly known as evil, much like Elphaba. And I wanted to tie this in to the actual witch-hunts, where you only needed one accusation against you to be hanged as a witch.

So I thought of these characteristics of witches during the witch-hunts:

-Having a familiar (a pet that is in league with the devil)
-Following the instructions of a powerful man
-Killing others
-Having 'strange dreams' that involved much dancing and merriment as well as horrors

And I realized that if this one girl were really alive during the times of the witch-hunts, she'd DEFINITELY be called a witch:

Yes, beloved Dorothy Gale.

So I wrote the musical (the script and the songs) about how Dorothy 'comes home' from Oz and is accused of being a witch and eventually is hanged for her experiences in Oz. After all, Toto is her familiar, she took orders from the wizard (all-powerful man), killed TWO people (Wicked Witch of the East and West), and had a dream where she was dancing (with a talking animal and a heartless man I might add)!

I put all the info in a cool Playbill for the class. The cover:
And the back cover was an ad, much like in real Playbills:

And then it happened!
My class really liked it and I think my teacher was impressed! So I'm very pleased with the outcome. In the play, I was Uncle Henry, who is the one who accuses Dorothy and Em of being witches. Here I am with Toto!

And because people probably are curious as to how it went, here's a video of me singing (awfully) the final song of the play.

Please note that I DO NOT like acting. I like singing (when I'm by myself), but acting is not my forte. So you'll have to forgive the way I'm just standing around while I accuse my wife and niece of being witches.

And yes, I did warn my class that none of us in the musical are actually singers. haha.

: )





Oh, the things I'll do for an A...