LSAT, GRE, MCAT, and other tales of woe May 13, 2007

Yesterday our program took an excursion to Stonehenge, Stourhead, and Avebury. The largest portion of the day was spent at Stourhead, exploring house, gardens, and the pub. The Spread Eagle, in fact. Perhaps the most inappropriate extant name for a pub. Anyway, while at lunch, Adam, Paul, and I discussed the future. Not surprising, because all three of us are greek, and have found that rush and greek life are what we most have in common.

Once all of the ins and outs of fall rush were hashed out, we moved onto other things that will be occupying our time come August/September. The GRE, for example. Well, really I’m the only one who’ll be taking it, but it brought up standardized testing and how we (okay, I) thought we were finished with that once we were accepted to a college. Not so! Adam will be taking a year off to prepare for the MCAT, and Paul is doing his study abroad semester during his sophomore year, so that he can focus on prepping for the LSAT his junior year. My housemate Phil will be in London in less than a month to take the LSAT for the first time, and is devoting quite a bit of time to books and computer programs that will hopefully improve his score. He has this whole schedule, and took the books with him yesterday.

I admire that kind of dedication, but at the same time, wonder if it’s really for the best. For me, at least. I’ve been trying to come up with a post-graduation plan, or at least the barest outlines of a plan. I’ve never wanted to be locked into anything, but free floating makes me anxious. I need a plan. So I’ve spent the past few nights looking into graduate linguistics programs. “Linguistics”- the word is like adrenaline for my brain. More than once when I’ve heard someone else use it my reaction is a little squeak. I don’t even have to be involved in the conversation, it gets my blood flowing and I want to know what they’re talking about! Say it, out loud: lĭng-gwĭs’tĭks. It’s fun to say, right? Now think about everything it entails… the study of the nature, structure, and variation of language, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, sociolinguistics, and pragmatics. (from the American Heritage Dictionary). I mean, that’s awesome.

When I graduated high school I thought philosophy and psychology were the fields for me. I was going to minor in French, and laid out a four year plan of how that could be accomplished. Double major and a minor can take some finagling, especially when you throw Great Books on top of that. Hours were spent absorbing the course catalog, totally freaking out about how many wonderful classes Mercer had to offer, and trying to figure out how I could take them all. I don’t get quite that excited anymore, but I still enjoy registration. Even if it means sitting at a computer in Paris at 11 pm on my 21st birthday. I’m excited about possibility (even though I haven’t always maintained the same level of excitement when it’s time to actually learn the material).

The four year plan didn’t last long. My Intro to Psych class showed me that I really wasn’t interested in psychology. It’s absurd how much I allow the teacher to control how positive my class experience is, but I decided that if I had to take that psych. professor again, I wouldn’t major in psych. Looking at the class schedule for sophomore fall semester, it was either take that professor, or no psychology class until sophomore year. I haven’t looked back. During that second semester I had met teachers in the French department, and decided to major in philosophy and French. Since I’m double majoring, I don’t need a minor, and at the beginning of sophomore year I declared my majors and thought I was set. (It was actually a difficult thing to do, since declaring majors meant new advisers, and my freshman year adviser had been phenomenal.)

I should have been set. But since learning and interests aren’t static, I found other things. I met people who majored in economics (Economics? Really?) and found out through conversations that I might have enjoyed economics as well. One might think that since my favorite news publication was/is The Economist, I would have figured it out. Hell, it was my favorite even in high school! Alas, I’m not so big on the obvious. As for philosophy… well, I enjoy it, I really do. But it isn’t what I want to do with the rest of my life. At least, not exclusively. I don’t remember when I first… wait, yes I do. Sophomore year I took a French class titled “Les Femmes Ecrivains”. Our textbook grouped them by theme, but also by era. Marie de France was born in the late 12th century. Simone de Beauvoir, the early 20th. That’s a lot of time, and a lot of women in between. But I was interested in the changes that took place in the French language between the two. Some of the oldest stuff we read in translation. Not to English, of course- to modern French! Yeah, that’s what sparked my interest in diachronic (historical) linguistics. Now that I’m thinking about it, I can see how the fuse might have been laid out even earlier, in my high school French class, but that’s really a story for another time.

I picked up the art minor studying in Paris. Having not expressed any natural talent when I was younger, I hadn’t really given art a thought when it came time to collegiate education. At least not a serious one. In high school, if you did music and foreign language there wasn’t time to explore other subjects. C’est la vie. But in Paris, taking the time to really look, and focusing on getting the image on the paper… well, art minor it is.

This isn’t even what I had intended to write about.

Feminisation April 30, 2007

Articles like this one are why BBC News isn’t my homepage anymore– at least for the next few weeks. It’s terribly difficult to read about the killings at Virginia Tech, and the formulations like those presented by Sarah Baxter (to be fair, she’s writing for The Times) leave me speechless. I don’t want to think about how much coverage this must be getting back in the States. Not that it isn’t news, or should be ignored… but how often do you hear the same soundbites, watch the interviews with experts, and see clips of his video? All of the second guessing of the school administration’s actions should of course take place, but the time and place that is appropriate, I’m not as sure about. Information overload, that’s really all I’m saying.

But that wasn’t the point. The ‘news’ article and the comments made in it by Camille Paglia are discussed in a few different blogs: here, here, and here. I’m sure there are others as well, but that’s what I’ve come across. Is she aware how much it sounds like she’s trying to blame Cho’s actions on the women who wouldn’t sleep with him? Obviously, she doesn’t state that explicitly, she’s talking about larger social trends and their general effects. And yet…

Here is my reaction–much more eloquent than I could phrase it.

Continental Drift Theory March 28, 2007

Perhaps it isn’t strange that just a few days before my mom is to fly in, with less than a week left until I’m to see Jay and Emily again, I feel more distant than ever before. But maybe it is.

I need to give up this nocturnal crap.

on and off March 2, 2007

i live in oxford now, and that’s pretty amazing. i’ve lost a lot of time to being worried about what i will do when i don’t anymore, but i’m getting better about that. more constructive. more positive. more accountable to myself and my goals and the things which have to happen–the things i must do– in order to achieve them.

this week: tackling post-colonial feminism, post-modernism, and the same old vulgar latin, all at the same time. working too much. and getting a hug!

i realized earlier, and this is something i’d recognized before- that a significant part of the isolation of studying abroad, or really being in a new place with new people (almost regardless of circumstances) is going weeks, months without touching or being touched in an affectionate way. there are pros and cons to this phenomenon, of course. i’m not one to seek physical attention, and sometimes get in moods where i don’t want to be touched at all, by anyone. a hug isn’t my default greeting, i’d say. i’ve also come to appreciate the privacy and solitude that living with near strangers provides- i can go days without meaningful conversation, or argument, or having to listen to “drama” that i don’t much care about. in this vein, the negatives outweigh the positives: days without laughter. but with touch, it’s a more subtle, compounding process. i can’t remember the last time i hugged someone, and that’s scary– in part because the physical isolation is representative of something similar happening emotionally. i talk to my family about as often as i would if i were in macon, and talk or email everyone else significantly less. i’ve met new people, but always under the condition that in 3, 6, or maybe 9 months we’ll be living in different states or countries.

beyond this blogpost, i’m recently preoccupied with this emotional/physical isolation, and it has manifest itself in a few ways- uploading more pictures, sending postcards, trying to get the most i can out of having ‘intellectual development’ as my focus, and daydreaming. i wasn’t self-aware enough before to say precisely from what i’ve changed, but most emotional stimuli now, in the form of memories or projections, are accompanied by visualising interaction- what it’s going to look like when my mom steps off the plane a month from now, how matt, brian, north and i were sitting when we hung out over christmas break, and what possibilities for seeing friends will be like come june (given the restrictions of being a pi chi, working on my thesis, and geography).

anyway,  that’s what i’ve been thinking about. friday night i’ll be attending my first concert at the sheldonian! my friend bronwen plays in the oxford millenium orchestra, and they will be performing benjamin’s “concerto for trumpet and orchestra” (a world premiere!) as well as tchaikovsky’s symphony no. 4. awesome.

“write”. as though it were that simple. February 20, 2007

found this saved on my computer- i’ve no idea how long ago it was written. 

for some reason, i think of writing- journaling- as a means by which to discover hidden facets of myself. certainly, a way to order thoughts and keep track of a line of reasoning, which is absolutely necessary when one has a tendency to contradict what was said two minutes before, as i do. i enjoy reading other people’s journals, but i don’t think that it is because we have similar goals for our literary endeavors. and if i really consider keeping a journal, or writing a blog, a useful tool, then i would probably invest more time in its application. clearly, i do not often turn to the blank pages or expectant keyboard when i’m trying to work out a problem. what i see in other people’s blogs… it’s the picture that their words, reasoning (and lack thereof), and worries paint. not to say that i think one’s whole self, or even a considerable portion of

A month later September 4, 2006

and so little has changed. I’ve finished a bit of my summer class work, but not all of it. I spent the last hour or so searching for my passport, slowly accepting that I won’t be able to go to Oxford, it will be too late to take classes at Mercer, and I will just have to take another semester off.

Don’t worry though. I found it.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about what my newly discovered “artistic ability” means for both the present and the future. Already I’ve decided to attempt to add an Art minor before I graduate. It adds 12 hours, but with so little time left it won’t be easy. I’m sure that I have managed to look quite conceited and arrogant about my drawings, and perhaps I am. I tried to be humble about it, but humility was accompanied by a crisis of confidence. I don’t think that drawing is all that different from writing. If I think that I can’t, I won’t be able to. When I write a paper I have to believe that what I’m putting on the paper has some value to it. I imagine that is probably the case for most creative processes: one has to commit to the idea that there is some good that will come out of the act. Maybe that is true for all action.

This time next week I will be preparing to land at Gatwick. Certainly there is a ton to do between now and then: another trip to Macon, maybe up to Athens, finalize classes, turn in philosophy papers, pack, and spend as much time as possible with my family. Guess I should start stressing out (my mom is!). I’d rather take this last week at a leisurely pace; there will be plenty of sprinting required once I start classes. Not relaxing exactly, but steady and purposeful. I think that I’m nearly ready.

Ready? Begin. August 2, 2006

I haven’t been able to sleep well since I got back from Europe. As that was nearly a month ago, I think I ought not blame jet-lag. So it’s 4:30 in the morning and my dad is waking up to go to work, but I haven’t slept yet this evening. Insomnia is a bitch, and I really have to get rid of it before I leave for Oxford. Life over there will be hard enough without adding sleep deprivation to the mix.

I’m still not sure how I will say goodbye to my friends and family. On some level I just want to make a clean break: goodbye guys, I will call you on December 6th, when I’m back in the country. Deactivate facebook, uninstall AIM. That approach surely isn’t the best, and I doubt I have the guts to follow through with it anyhow.

Hanging out with the younger sis makes me so glad I’m not in high school anymore. But then I listen to myself talk about college, and I realize that things aren’t really all that different. There’s just more alcohol, sex, and studying (surprising, no?). Tonight, for example. I have crush on boy, boy tells me (damn you, AIM!) that he has crush on girl (not me). So now what? I bite my tongue and try to go on as though nothing momentous has happened. At least college can provide a little perspective: relationships aren’t just about who is cutest in the class, and there are obstacles bigger than whether or not he has already dated your friend, and if your class schedules match up.

I think that I want to succeed. Maybe I just don’t want it enough. Desire–volition– seems more important than opportunity (at least in my case). I’ve had plenty of opportunities, but no real drive to follow through with what I think I want. Is that something I can change?