Something New

Montserrat has taken over my brain. I hate to say it, but it’s true. Almost every time I walk around campus, I keep wondering how I can apply what I see to that class. It’s so weird. My Montserrat seminar is called ‘Truth and Abstraction’ and this semester is basically talking about self portraits and what it really means to capture yourself in a photograph, or in a painting, or what have you. I’m finding it a bit frustrating because it’s not really straightforward. It requires a lot of introspection, and quite frankly, I don’t always have the time to ‘journal creatively’ everyday. On the other hand, because I am so keen on scenery, I have now walked around most of campus, and have seen some pretty cool sights.

I never really realized how pretty campus was until recently, when I was walking around and seeing how all the buildings popped out of the scenery.

In other news, we’re having a burst of warm weather! It’s so weird, considering that it’s the middle of February, but yesterday I walked outside without a coat on! Admittedly, it was only fifty degrees at most. Still, in comparison to the usual winter days here on the Hill, yesterday and today have been quite balmy.

Oh, well, until next time…Happy Early Valentine’s Day!

p.s.- Why yes, I did sketchily stand in front of buildings to take pictures for possible self portrait backgrounds…

Sorry for the lack of updates over the past few days; I know you’ve all been suffering from withdrawal symptoms, right? *hears crickets chirping* Anyways, the reason I haven’t been updating is because it’s been so busy the past week! Since we have a four day Columbus Day weekend, the professors are trying to finish everything up before we all go. Yesterday, I had my biology midterm, the day before that, I had my biology lab practical, and a bunch of other homework. I’ve never felt so overworked right now as I have in the past week. Even now, I should probably be working on my chemistry lab notebook, but that will have to wait…

Another thing that kept me busy was reading and preparing questions for The Known World, a novel by Edward P. Jones. He came to visit my Montserrat cluster last night in the common room, and my Montserrat professor is a wee bit, teeny tiny, itsy bitsy bit competitive with the other classes in the cluster.

She needn’t have worried; our class is obviously the best.

To prepare for Mr. Jones’ coming, we each had to make up our own assignments for the novel. As it turns out, we were on the right track, but we didn’t do the assignments as per my professor’s specific instructions. So we did it again. And when Mr. Jones came in to speak to us last night, we were super prepared. He seemed like a nice man, and I liked the way he spoke. He had a slow, descriptive way of talking in real life, which matches the tone of his novel a lot. He was a Holy Cross graduate from the class of ’72, so it was cool to think that a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist was one of us a really long time ago!

At first, I thought the discussion was going to be boring, and that I’d rather do chemistry homework instead…but it turned out to be alright. He made a few jokes, especially about not always being sure what he was writing the whole time. Not to mention that the cookies served afterwards were good…