Done! In many different ways, too
Jun. 6th, 2006 05:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
philenaFirst done is the long distance relationship! Not the relationship part, but the long-distance part. Daniel is here to stay, and we will never have to be separated by two thirds of a continent ever again!
I shall now add to the multiple entries I've been seeing springing up around my 4th-year friends who have finished college. My finishing was slightly retarded (in the literal sense of the word), because the professor for Medieval English lit* didn't feel like reading our stuff early, so he just said to turn in our papers with the rest of the crowd (Monday) and he would give us all Cs on the convocation grade sheet. Then, after he had read the papers, he would raise our grades from Cs to whatever they were actually going to be. So while reading weekend was less enjoyable due to the paper hanging over my head, at least I didn't have to be freaking out about it the same week I had a Russian exam, a historical linguistics paper, and a Daniel arriving! But now I'm done!
This weekend was the 57th St. art fair, which I've gone to three years in a row. It's always fun, but due to a weather front this year that has been sitting on Hyde Park and keeping the temperature from deviating from 75 degrees, it was even better than the last two years, when the equivalent front was about 15 degrees higher. Some of the art was certainly dreadful, but lots was lovely. There was a stall with some beautiful brown/red/orange toned paintings of women, the style of which seemed thoroughly medieval: all the colors were similar in tone, all the women had the very straight noses that you see in medieval paintings, and the lack of perspective was likewise not at all modern. They were really lovely, especially gathered together in one stall. Another stall had some lovely, lovely carpets, and when I looked at the amount of stitching that had gone into them I was astounded that the artist was prepared to sell them for as little as $3000. But by far the awsomest stall was just north of the food alley, and featured miniature gadgets that were the same as that fabulous machine in the lobby of the science museum in Boston. It has a bunch of balls that roll along on tracks and are pulled up by chains that go around cog wheels and then roll all the way down again, passing through little tunnels and all other sorts of Rube Goldberg-type gadgets that advance the balls along the tracks in amusing ways. This stall had similar machines, only much, much smaller, and it was great! There was even something added to the mix, which I didn't seen in the Boston version: hops! The paths would be carefully calibrated so that they would end on an upsweep when the balls were rolling down them at the right speed, and then the balls would hop off the tracks and land in a little receiving funnel that would funnel them back onto a lower portion of the track. It was fabulous! After Daniel and I had to tear ourselves away to see a concert** I would walk around the street and jump and say "hop!" I still do it every so often--those gadgets were the coolest!
*And I must say, although at first I blew off Daniel's comment that the class seems to be excessively focused on sex when I told him about the really cool erotic interpretations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, I now agree with him. That class was entirely focused way too much on sex! This is not necessarily a bad thing, and it certainly made the lectures a good deal more interesting, but that hip focus of the class disguised a number of problems that I wish I had mentioned in the course evaluation: Professor Miller curses a great deal, and far more than is appropriate, or even necessary for whatever emphasis he wants to place on a statement. He likes to raise issues and tensions in the text, but then completely ignore any possible interpretations that would resolve the conflicts in the text. And in the last class, he went so far to ignore any resolutions, that he essentially spent forty minutes mocking the stuff that "didn't make sense," because heaven forbid that he actually try to make sense of it!
**Both Saturday and Sunday we had to leave the fair because on Saturday we saw a concert with the University symphony orchestra and the university chorus: Brahms's 1st symphony and selections of Verdi choruses. Both were great, and now I know where that great scene in "A Night at the Opera" comes from! Sunday we saw Baremboim play the 1st book of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, which was, alas, less exciting; although we met Daniel's friend Ian there, and he was very nice and agreeable.
I shall now add to the multiple entries I've been seeing springing up around my 4th-year friends who have finished college. My finishing was slightly retarded (in the literal sense of the word), because the professor for Medieval English lit* didn't feel like reading our stuff early, so he just said to turn in our papers with the rest of the crowd (Monday) and he would give us all Cs on the convocation grade sheet. Then, after he had read the papers, he would raise our grades from Cs to whatever they were actually going to be. So while reading weekend was less enjoyable due to the paper hanging over my head, at least I didn't have to be freaking out about it the same week I had a Russian exam, a historical linguistics paper, and a Daniel arriving! But now I'm done!
This weekend was the 57th St. art fair, which I've gone to three years in a row. It's always fun, but due to a weather front this year that has been sitting on Hyde Park and keeping the temperature from deviating from 75 degrees, it was even better than the last two years, when the equivalent front was about 15 degrees higher. Some of the art was certainly dreadful, but lots was lovely. There was a stall with some beautiful brown/red/orange toned paintings of women, the style of which seemed thoroughly medieval: all the colors were similar in tone, all the women had the very straight noses that you see in medieval paintings, and the lack of perspective was likewise not at all modern. They were really lovely, especially gathered together in one stall. Another stall had some lovely, lovely carpets, and when I looked at the amount of stitching that had gone into them I was astounded that the artist was prepared to sell them for as little as $3000. But by far the awsomest stall was just north of the food alley, and featured miniature gadgets that were the same as that fabulous machine in the lobby of the science museum in Boston. It has a bunch of balls that roll along on tracks and are pulled up by chains that go around cog wheels and then roll all the way down again, passing through little tunnels and all other sorts of Rube Goldberg-type gadgets that advance the balls along the tracks in amusing ways. This stall had similar machines, only much, much smaller, and it was great! There was even something added to the mix, which I didn't seen in the Boston version: hops! The paths would be carefully calibrated so that they would end on an upsweep when the balls were rolling down them at the right speed, and then the balls would hop off the tracks and land in a little receiving funnel that would funnel them back onto a lower portion of the track. It was fabulous! After Daniel and I had to tear ourselves away to see a concert** I would walk around the street and jump and say "hop!" I still do it every so often--those gadgets were the coolest!
*And I must say, although at first I blew off Daniel's comment that the class seems to be excessively focused on sex when I told him about the really cool erotic interpretations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, I now agree with him. That class was entirely focused way too much on sex! This is not necessarily a bad thing, and it certainly made the lectures a good deal more interesting, but that hip focus of the class disguised a number of problems that I wish I had mentioned in the course evaluation: Professor Miller curses a great deal, and far more than is appropriate, or even necessary for whatever emphasis he wants to place on a statement. He likes to raise issues and tensions in the text, but then completely ignore any possible interpretations that would resolve the conflicts in the text. And in the last class, he went so far to ignore any resolutions, that he essentially spent forty minutes mocking the stuff that "didn't make sense," because heaven forbid that he actually try to make sense of it!
**Both Saturday and Sunday we had to leave the fair because on Saturday we saw a concert with the University symphony orchestra and the university chorus: Brahms's 1st symphony and selections of Verdi choruses. Both were great, and now I know where that great scene in "A Night at the Opera" comes from! Sunday we saw Baremboim play the 1st book of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, which was, alas, less exciting; although we met Daniel's friend Ian there, and he was very nice and agreeable.
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Date: 2006-06-09 06:36 am (UTC)