To <3 or Not to <3

Despite that message at the end of the last post, I still haven't touched math. Procrastination is a way of life.

During math class today, I half-listened to Noeth while cramming Chinese music for Acadec. I know a little of both subjects and not enough of either. Alas, the period afterwards, I sojourned all the way to the red wing to seek out Crick for the music test. He was chatting with former students (yet again), and I got plaintively waved off to somewhere "quiet," which suited me perfectly fine.

I skimmed through the music test while skimming through my daily internet perusals: email and Slate in the computer lab. (Evidently, Chinese music is too boring to occupy my entire brain.) Steff walks in and starts doodling differentials onto my test. As we assess the aesthetic appeal of various terrorists and actresses, I remember I have to turn in the test to Crick next period and get back to work on it. There, I see Steff has scrawled, "I <3 CRICK."

Sigh. I <3 Steff.

Paris. Berlin. Mexico City.

Hunkered down with Youtube and DVD for some lovely and romanticized traveling this weekend.

First destination was Paris via Youtube. Upon learning that the long-anticipated portmanteau film Paris je t'aime was bootlegged on youtube, my hot little criminal hands sought then out immediately. So yes, watching a 5 in screen surrounded by white space and ads is not the optimal viewing experience, but shame on US distributors for not putting it out in theaters or DVD. (Especially when this French movie has so many American directors and stars.) I haven't gotten around to watching them all -- it seems 6 years of French study has been for naught -- though I have been so far duly amused and touched.
Maybe it's just my short attention span, but I adore short films and short stories. It is a difficult art to capture something momentous in only a few minutes or a few pages. Brevity is the soul of wit, no? When done well, a short film is the perfect capsule of a sentiment. When done badly, it just seems very pedestrian. From the segments I've seen so far, Paris je t'aime is a mix of both. My favorite are by Tom Twyker and Alexander Payne (not, interestingly, my favorites directors at all): Fauborg Saint-Denis and 14e arrondissement. Least favorites are by Christopher Doyle and Wes Craven, the former tries unsuccessfully for Chinese-French punnage and the latter is just unsuccessful despite invoking the spirit of Oscar Wilde.

Sunday night, I turned my gaze eastward and backwards in time to 1980s Berlin. Wings of Desire was recommended to me by my UChicago interviewer, and since I recently received a nice email from her, I decided I needed to watch it now. But Wings of Desire is not an urgent movie. It languishes, it longs, it lingers. From its soaring aerial views to the cool black and white , it's a poetic meditation. I actually liked it quite a lot, but I need to rewatch it in a less detached frame of mind. I love the title Wings of Desire because it's haunting, and the same can be said about the film, but I need to let it "haunt" me more. The ending however, just totally lost me; I thought it was terrible and stopped listening.
By the way, on top of sharpening my French, I need to learn German too. The angels in Wings of Desire hear snippets of thoughts that are never translated in the subtitles--how infuriating! The opening lines of the film are echoing in my mind right now. Whoever said German was an angry language never heard enough German.

After a hemisphere change, I found myself in a rambunctious Mexico City. Sólo con tu parejga is a exuberant sex farce that manages to take on a rather serious topic: AIDs. Tomas (Daniel Gimenez Cacho -- creepy priest of Bad Education!) is a serial womanizer who gets a bitter pill when one of his conquests decides to take revenge. I adore the cover art - inventive, loopy, and rife with phallic symbols - sums up the film perfectly.

Now I am off to the utterly unlovely and unromantic Mathland.

Drunken Nerds

Four successive posts UChicago-related. Hmm, I begin to sense a pattern. Anyways, bits and pieces from fellow Chicago applicants assembled from around the Internet.

On why Chicago students drink so much:
The smarter you get, the more depressing you realize the world is. The more depressed you get, the more you drink. (paraphrased)

So, bar jokes:


Rene Descartes walks into a bar. The bartender asks "Something for you, sir?" Descartes replies "I think not," and vanishes.

A neutron walks into a bar and asks for a beer, which the bartender gives him, and then walks away.
The neutron calls after him, "Hey, how much does this beer cost." The bartender replies, "For you, no charge!"

C, E flat, and G walked into a bar. "I'm sorry," the bartender said, "We don't serve to minors." So E flat left and C and G split a fifth between them.

Essay 1: Claustrophilia

In his book Having Everything Right: Essays of Place, Kim Stafford describes the Kwakiutl tribe of British Columbia assigning place-names based on the natural characteristics of a location, the events that took place there, or the feelings that the site instilled. "Where Salmon Gather," "Sound of Dripping Water," and "Where Dzo'noq!wa Cried Out Oh," were among the names the Kwakiutl people assigned to their surroundings. He'lade, translating to "Place Having Everything Right," was of particular meaning, as it was the name universally given to exceptional locations. What is your he'lade?

I’ve never understood claustrophobia because I have the opposite condition: claustrophilia. Small spaces are my he’lades. The walls encircle me like hugs, and I curl up in my own warmth. It is comfortable and comforting. There is no room for a big scary monster to hide behind my back, and I can inspect every inch of the floor for creepy crawlies. As I press my chin into the groove between my folded knees, I feel good. It’s as simple as that.

Small spaces are common, but they are not created equally. You can find them anywhere: under a table, behind a door, between shelves. But the conditions that create small spaces also make them uninhabitable: too dark, too inaccessible, or even too small. The perfect space is hard to come by, but I happen to have one in my bedroom.

Between my bed and the wall, there is a strip of land that is the exact width of my hips. Holiday feasting usually makes the squeeze snugger, but fat is fortunately squishable so I still manage to fit in. On one side, I have the white blankness of a wall—a potential canvas if inspiration strikes. On the opposite side is the narrow ledge between the mattress and bed frame, where I’ve improvised a shelf perfect for hiding pencils, socks, and midnight snacks. A nightstand makes up the third side, and a clock and lamp sit atop as reminders of the outside world. The groove of my neck fits perfectly on the top of the nightstand, but the handles of its shelves dig into my spine. I’ve gotten used to it, though future spine problems may be blamed on those handles.

Usually, a book or magazine rests on my knees when I sit there. If it’s a school assignment, my left hand splays the book open and my right wields a pencil ready to discern its meaning. More often, I am peering at the glossy pages of a magazine, either reading about Baghdad or the latest misadventures of Sienna Miller. Its floppy pages stay put on my knees, so both of my hands are instead devoted to stuffing food into my mouth. Compressed in that little space between the bed and wall, I have learned two hundred years of European history as well as the intimate details of Miller’s relationships. As thus, I have enjoyed the company of both John Law of pre-French Revolution infamy and Jude Law of Nannygate infamy in that inter-furniture space.

In three dimensions, this place is tiny, but other dimensions exist too, and they can be boundless.

An Immodest Proposal

Apathy and indolence are an especially passive combo. When these two traits are found together in a single person, especially one who is suffering from a severe case of senioritis, it can defeat even the most well-intentioned motivations. Basically, I don't feel like doing anything.

In a lot of ways, senior year has been kick ass awesome. I have great teachers, great classes, and a group of friends I am very lucky to have. But in many, many ways, senior year has been shitty like hell. I don't mean personally...but there has been a lot of anger and tragedy flying around me that I can't ignore. Hopefully, the latter half will pick up.

So before this post totally devolves into emo ranting, here is the real purpose this post: to somehow motivate myself out of wasting time online. During one of those time-sucking periods of internet surfing today, I found a thread of archived U Chicago essay prompts. (This has nothing to do with college, I swear.) The prompts were, as promised, uncommon. Uncommon in that the writing they inspire are not college-essay like at all. It struck me that these prompts were great for expository writing.

So in a typically masochistic decision, I have assigned myself to write one essay a week. Maybe essay is the wrong word; it'll really just a passage inspired by a prompt or answering the prompt. Partly, I feel guilty shirking the responsibility of writing a really U Chicago essay, which I must remedy to ever consider myself a legit Chicago student. Also, I need to start updating again, in less ranty and hopefully more interesting fashion. First course of action: resuscitating that Frankenstein essay...