Galore

Music = Fiona Apple, "A Mistake".
New game = Kung Fu Remix, on newgrounds. Don't give it any time. I'm only putting it here as a warning.
New classes =

• Advanced creative writing: Poetry with Robert Fitterman (To work on comics + writing, although my CW minor is already done.
• Topics in Genre Study: American/Asian war literature (Vietnam War narratives are really interesting.)
• Two classes to help me complete an education minor, the specifics of which I have note yet determined (will I be considering staying the summer to complete that? I don't know.)
• Another internship in education?

News!

This weekend is not going as well as I thought it would, in some ways. I am going to the hospital on monday to get a blood test, as a doctor's appointment suggested I may have anemia...really, it's probably not that, but I'm going anyway because I want a nutritional analysis, and I feel dizzy a lot when I stand up quickly...which doesn't seem right. I do feel better about my paper, although I haven't done nearly as much work as I'd hoped, yet. There's still tomorrow and monday...

I finished The Mayor of Casterbridge tonight. Interesting book, full of lying detestable individuals and beautiful/interesting scenery. Probably going to include it in my paper for class that I've been worried about...I'm pretty sure at this point that my paper is going to be about children being portrayed as adults by Victorian-era narrators, particularly during education. I don't know what the "so what" of my thesis is yet, though.

Volunteering at the school on thursday, called St. Alouscious, was fun and interesting. Really mentally exhausting. Afterwards I felt incredibly tired, kind of dusty, mentally. The hymn-saying turned out to be pretty cool, just a lot of normal kids' songs like "The Wheels On The Bus" and "He's got the whole world in his hands". One thing that really interested me was the way the kids I was staying with were learning the alphabet, with accompanying hand signals. "S" was a snakey movement (biblical?), "T" was making the cross of a "t" with your right hand, and so on. I had never thought of that before. In any case, at this point it feels like working with older kids, like high school level, might be better. We'll see!

Pictures!

• The futuristic stage at the Barbican theatre, at the Barbican complex. That place has everything--residences, theatres, a college, stores, inside it. I think England is preparing to restart civilization there should anything go wrong. I went there to see a dance production called "O", which wasn't that hot by my count.
• The building that strikes me as strange on the way to school. I think it's because of the stairs without the walls. I've been trying to put it in a comic, but like the first line "Let's talk about vegetables" in a poem, it just refuses to be written about.
• Corinne sent me a letter (Thanks Corinne!), and inside it was a tattoo! Chill. Check out this puppy. No, I'm totally not flexing.
• St. Bert, the patron saint of pigeons.
• The soup kitchen where I've been volunteering. Unpeopled.

ROME TRIP, PART 3: Venezia!

Day 7: Arrived from Florence!

• We get in to the hotel! Here's Joseph chilling out in the room. We stayed near Mestre, which was a city about 20 minutes by bus from Venice. It was actually a really good thing, because we got a different experience than actually staying there, which would have been expensive and touristy in a bad way. We got to see a little more of what suburban Italian life was like, I think.

Day 8: Venice tour. (Foggy+Rainy -> Sunny in afternoon.)

• Venice is pretty. Even when foggy.
• Breakfast at the supermarket = yummy. I don't remember what Joseph got, but I got a fresh warm baguette, brie, a little yogurt, grapes, and an apple for later. Yay!
• I discover the joys of pocket coffee, the philosopher's stone of candy. Basically, they are hollow peices of chocolate with a shot of expresso inside...five in a pack, 1 euro per pack...yeah, I got the jibblies.
• In case you didn't know, the public transportation in Venice are the Vaparettos, which take you down the larger canals and from island to island. Joseph and I totally got 3 day passes.
• Piazza de San Marco, the only piazza/square place of significant size in Venice! The birds were insane. People try to slip birdseed into your pocket in order to sell it to you. Yes, I went into the building in the background of the first picture there.
• After touring, we spent a while just kind of wandering and ended up in a rather large park, near where we read for the rest of the afternoon. I got Joseph to smile, for real. I think he looks happy.
• Big boat, no?

Day 9: Venice tour. (Foggy + Rainy -> Foggy)

• Breakfast at the supermarket + Pocket coffee = still yummy.
• I dropped a poetry notebook in the Grande Canale! How's that for a memory? Luckily, all of the stuff in this notebook was unimportant/on my computer. It happened as I was going through my bag to get my camera. The picture wasn't worth it :).
• Aside from Vaparettos, public transportation in Italy is interesting. Did I mention that? The bus driver, after picking us up, parked on the side of the road near a park and went out to have a cigarette, wandering in a soccer field and watching us watching him on the bus for 10 minutes. It was chill, I read a tiny bit of book, struck a pose, and so did Joseph...but I probably would have been annoyed if I was actually on the way to somewhere. I can just picture this:

SIMON: Sorry that I am late, Signore, but the bus driver decided to have a few extra cloves this morning. Takes a drag on five cigarettes at once and finishes them all in one breath, throwing them on the ground in the Italian style.

SIMON'S LAX ITALIAN EMPLOYER: No problem, dude! You're just in time for the first break of the morning. Have some cake.

• We wandered, and did a bit of island hopping, going all the way to the island farthest East, called Riga (I think, I'm too lazy to check right now).
• Venice was still pretty. And full of boats. And casinos.

Day 10: Left that morning, for Milan, my second favorite city (Florence was my favorite.)! No comment, yet.

Toodles. Time to read like the dickens. No, that is not a pun, I didn't finish the 1000 page Dickens book we were supposed to read. Yes, I am embarassed. No, I do not like him particularly. Though clever and laughy, he's kind of a kitschy writer for serious reading, in my opinion. Although I haven't read that much of him.

Googled: "Like the dickens"

Meaning: A lot; as in 'hurts like the dickens'.
Origin: Nothing to do with Charles Dickens. Dickens is a euphemism for the word devil, possibly via devilkins. Shakespeare used it in 'the Merry Wives of Windsor: 'I cannot tell what the dickens his name is my husband had him of.'