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fireworks!
Apr. 16th, 2011 05:35 pmI have my second real analysis midterm now, but weirdly it's the homework rewrite due Tuesday that was frustrating me this morning--I have an idea of how to do all but one of the problems on the exam. I also figured out what I'm writing my second-to-last short essay for CST on! For some reason, "look at all your homework and figure out how to do it" counts as plenty of productivity for me on a Saturday.
Admittedly, this is enhanced by the fact that I cut off all my hair again today (yay--it had been getting long). Oh, and I spent a few minutes making the Scrivener scene files for this one sequence I re-organized on paper recently, though I haven't started modifying the text to fit what I need. Revising is an odd thing to get used to; it doesn't have an easy metric like "I wrote this number of words".
Yesterday I went to the theater department's production of Skin of Our Teeth. It is an odd play; I think it must have made more sense in 1942 or they wouldn't have given it the Pulitzer. Maybe not the whole hours thing in the last act, but the gender roles, maybe. And the sense that the world always gets destroyed and then we have to build it again--these days it seems like everyone thinks we're getting tiny apocalypses while slowly sliding into the abyss, and eventually we'll all just fall over the edge. (And the rest is silence.)
But the production was very well done--great costumes, great set (made out of cardboard apparently--the first time one of the actors picked up what looked like a flat and carried it off I was very startled), very good performances all around. Cute dinosaur. In the last act almost all the characters had half-size puppets of themselves with which they acted out the scenes, which was fascinating. They must have gotten a puppeteer in to teach them technique; they had clearly gotten trained in how to use puppets onstage, and it added a layer to all of the meta. What that layer means I'm still not sure, but it was really neat.
It's Spring Weekend or some such, which means vaguely obnoxious music drifting from the campus center last night and today--and a foam pit no one wants to play in when it's forty degrees out--but which also means that they had a fireworks display last night. Before the play Kate and I were eating dinner outside and saw them setting up. During the intermission I realized that the dull booms I had been hearing weren't sound effects for the play but fireworks, and promptly dragged her outdoors to look at them.
I love fireworks. The way they thump in your chest and the way that the new ones illuminate the drifting smoke-corpses of the last. It's vicarious, unreasoning enjoyment, and I adore it. Seen in the middle of Skin of Our Teeth it gave a sharp contrast to the affectations, the sometimes painfully self-aware meta... Just generally, too, I like the intellectualism on campus, but once in a while I need some fireworks to shake me out of my brain, send me running for the doors to watch them glitter and die.
I think I will be okay the rest of this semester. I've been having weird moments of doubt (mostly Do I want to be a physics major after all?), and--well, I have not really enjoyed real analysis this semester, which is Minnesotan Understatement for please get me out of this course it is breaking my brain. But all I have to remember is that no, that isn't all of life, not even my life, not even right now. I have fireworks and I have Kate and I have a ticket for the Janelle Monae concert in a couple of weeks, and I have some Scrivener files waiting for me to fill them with words. And I will get through the real analysis and the rest of quantum and all the rest of everything, and I will be okay.
Admittedly, this is enhanced by the fact that I cut off all my hair again today (yay--it had been getting long). Oh, and I spent a few minutes making the Scrivener scene files for this one sequence I re-organized on paper recently, though I haven't started modifying the text to fit what I need. Revising is an odd thing to get used to; it doesn't have an easy metric like "I wrote this number of words".
Yesterday I went to the theater department's production of Skin of Our Teeth. It is an odd play; I think it must have made more sense in 1942 or they wouldn't have given it the Pulitzer. Maybe not the whole hours thing in the last act, but the gender roles, maybe. And the sense that the world always gets destroyed and then we have to build it again--these days it seems like everyone thinks we're getting tiny apocalypses while slowly sliding into the abyss, and eventually we'll all just fall over the edge. (And the rest is silence.)
But the production was very well done--great costumes, great set (made out of cardboard apparently--the first time one of the actors picked up what looked like a flat and carried it off I was very startled), very good performances all around. Cute dinosaur. In the last act almost all the characters had half-size puppets of themselves with which they acted out the scenes, which was fascinating. They must have gotten a puppeteer in to teach them technique; they had clearly gotten trained in how to use puppets onstage, and it added a layer to all of the meta. What that layer means I'm still not sure, but it was really neat.
It's Spring Weekend or some such, which means vaguely obnoxious music drifting from the campus center last night and today--and a foam pit no one wants to play in when it's forty degrees out--but which also means that they had a fireworks display last night. Before the play Kate and I were eating dinner outside and saw them setting up. During the intermission I realized that the dull booms I had been hearing weren't sound effects for the play but fireworks, and promptly dragged her outdoors to look at them.
I love fireworks. The way they thump in your chest and the way that the new ones illuminate the drifting smoke-corpses of the last. It's vicarious, unreasoning enjoyment, and I adore it. Seen in the middle of Skin of Our Teeth it gave a sharp contrast to the affectations, the sometimes painfully self-aware meta... Just generally, too, I like the intellectualism on campus, but once in a while I need some fireworks to shake me out of my brain, send me running for the doors to watch them glitter and die.
I think I will be okay the rest of this semester. I've been having weird moments of doubt (mostly Do I want to be a physics major after all?), and--well, I have not really enjoyed real analysis this semester, which is Minnesotan Understatement for please get me out of this course it is breaking my brain. But all I have to remember is that no, that isn't all of life, not even my life, not even right now. I have fireworks and I have Kate and I have a ticket for the Janelle Monae concert in a couple of weeks, and I have some Scrivener files waiting for me to fill them with words. And I will get through the real analysis and the rest of quantum and all the rest of everything, and I will be okay.