Sunday, January 24, 2010

Sunday night blues

I've made my morning coffee instead of buying it on the way to class every day this week, which is good for two reasons: one, it means I'm not shelling out the money, and two (and perhaps more importantly), it means I've been waking up early enough to do so. This may or may not have more to do with my relative lack of work than it does with my willpower, but I'll pat myself on the back anyway.

My professor only succeeded in scaring away one student, but another one added the class late so our roster still tallies nine, to his chagrin. The 125 pages of reading I had to do was from Alfred Russell Wallace's The Malay Archipelago, this book that documents the author's journey through the titular region in the 1850s. He stomped around islands shooting anything that moved, collecting pelts and skeletons for various museums back in Europe. A lot of Wallace's "classification" of the different ethnic groups he encounters there is totally offensive and ridiculous, but other than that it wasn't as painful to read as I thought it'd be.

Things that are painful at the moment: trying to write a poem for class tomorrow, and the likelihood that the Vikings are going to the Super Bowl. Egh.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Harrowing mistakes and lost eyeballs

Today, I sent an email to the members of English Club about tonight's meeting. After logging out of the EC account and back into my own, I realized that the bold-face subject in my inbox read "First meeting of the semseter!!"

It really shouldn't cause me this much distress, but I've been fighting the urge to send a follow-up email that acknowledges the lapse in my usually excellent spelling for about an hour. The online community is doubtlessly judging my incompetence at this very moment. I HATE TYPOS.

In other news, classes began yesterday and already I have 125 pages of reading due tomorrow for a class on the ethnography of Southeast Asia. I think the professor is trying to scare the modest class of nine away--he mentioned at least ten times in the 40 minute introduction to the class yesterday that "probably none of you will want to come back, I'll be shocked if there are half of you here on Thursday." I've already bought the twelve books ("You will read until your eyes fall out this semester," he told us), though, so perhaps to his dismay there will be at least one student in class tomorrow.

Maybe if my eyes do, indeed, fall out, I'll have an excuse for future spelling mistakes in the emails I send.