Slipping back into the merry school-year insanity.

[tenlittlebullets]

On Sunday I took the bus out to Boston and met up with misatheredpanda for a last hurrah before she goes off to school across the pond. We went to the Gardner Museum and the Garment District and generally made huge nerds out of ourselves, and it was much fun.

Also, I got a study carrel at the library! No more trying to do my homework in my room and failing due to the zillion distractions and procrastination options. Now I just need to come up with some clever method to secure all the stuff I'm going to leave there, because it would suck to have a ninety-dollar textbook stolen. (Also, it's on the same floor as the French history section, in an adjacent wing. Nothing on the level of UMD's motherfucking huge French history collection, but it will probably yield some shinies.)

As predicted, my French course on literary representations of Paris is goddamn awesome but it's kicking my ass. There is a lot of pure, shining joy in being able to write and think in a foreign language--not just assemble sentences, but express myself in something approaching a natural flow. The work is a bitch though. I mean, I probably have the most 'natural' command of French of anyone in the class, and I'm regularly staying up late or getting up early to finish my homework. (Fluency might be what's shooting me in the butt though, because I'm treating it like an English class and writing five lines of analysis for questions that are probably just there to ascertain that I understood what was going on in the reading.) But that class is so shiny. We spent half a class period last week looking at old maps of Paris for crying out loud, looking at how the city expanded and where the walls used to be. The teacher read bits of Notre-Dame de Paris aloud. I might be doing a project on Haussmanization later in the semester. It's just--so shiny.

Comments

[followthatcab.livejournal.com]

Je suis jalouse ardemment de tu maîtrise du français. That's my best crack at it.

Get a picquet guard around that study carrel ASAP! Does Smith have Regular Carrel Desks or is it a MONKEY CARREL?

[10littlebullets.livejournal.com]

I am unfamiliar with the ins and outs of carrel politics at school libraries and thus have no idea what you're talking about. :D It's mine, though, all miiiiine. I was standing outside the library half an hour before opening so I could be the first underclassman to reserve one.

I'm not sure who would steal calculus textbooks, let alone steal them from a carrel tucked into an alcove at the far end of the north wing of the second sub-basement, but I would rather not find out. So all my books are going into a locked bag bike-locked to the desk leg, at least until I find some more ingenious and MIT-worthy way to protect them.

[srevans.livejournal.com]

Settling in well, then? How's the people-things?

That does sound pretty much like they planned that French course just for you though. :)

[josiana.livejournal.com]

That sounds like a very shiny class indeed. O_O I hope all the work doesn't kill you.