Current mood:	excited
Current music:	Big Bottom - Spinal Tap
Entry tags:	class

My Baby Fits Me Like a Flesh Tuxedo
Classes have started! So far:

* Reading Hieroglyphs I with Daniel Selden proves to be more difficult than I'd originally anticipated...for some reason I have a little trouble with the idea that the signs can represent what they look like ("loaf of bread") or be completely unrelated when combined with other signs ("loaf of bread" plus "reed leaf" plus "horned viper" plus "man" equals "father"), while also having a specific sound in spoken language ("t"). I guess it's sort of like learning to be literate all over again, but also more complicated. Good thing we aren't going to have to write any essays in Middle Egyptian...or learn Hieratic, for that matter, since we are writing on paper instead of carving into stone. On the other hand, the handout on Proto-World involves the word "poontang" and its various relatives in other languages, so it's all good.

* Russian Modernism and the Avant-Garde with Bill Nickell is pretty much exactly what I expected. The classroom is tiny and inconvenient for all the multimedia stuff Bill wants to do, so hopefully we will be moving within the next week or two. Leonid Andreev sort of reminds me of a Russian Expressionist version of Chuck Palahniuk, with people getting raped and hit by trains and going mad; so that's fun. And Bill is as scatterbrained and nerdy-adorable as ever, if it's not creepy for me to say that. It's great having classes with professors who are just so crazy about their subjects, and who don't think twice about bringing an umbrella to class to prove a point.

* International Cyberpunk with Wlad Godzich is...I haven't quite gotten a grasp on it yet, probably because it's such a large class. However, Wlad is just as funny and charming as I had been promised he was, and who can say no to reading thirteen cyberpunk texts in 10 weeks? This seems like it will go along well with the Russian Modernist class, since both of the movements were/are so much about revolution and bucking the trend (well, I guess all movements are about bucking the trend of the movement before theirs, but you know what I mean).

It will probably be a lot of work, but I have high hopes for this quarter. I even made flashcards for Hiero! I don't know how I will ever get any writing done if it takes me 10 minutes to draw an owl for the letter "m", though.

Oh, it's the new year, isn't it? Hm. I don't have many resolutions to speak of, other than vowing to steal a certain ex-roommate's idea and try to read 50 novels over the course of 2009. This will include rereading, and if I complete that successfully, I will try 2010 with only counting the new novels that I read. And on the opposite side of the spectrum, I am going to make an effort to take my bike out more often and get some exercise, so long as I don't end up getting squashed by a typical overenthusiastic Santa Cruz motorist. I may even try biking to the library one of these days.

Guess it's time to actually, you know, get ready and go to work. She works hard for the money. So hard for it, honey. She works hard for the money and...the money works hard for her? I always forgot the last part of that. Oh well.