My particular class schedule has left me in an odd position today.
I had midterms in my three serious classes last Friday, yesterday, and today. Because that is completely ridiculous, I essentially put off every obligation I could conceivably put off and spent the past week doing nothing but freaking out about (respectively) early hominids, food aversions, and the shamanism hypothesis. Now that I've emerged from the last of these, I have to revisit the other things people expect me to do. I have workshifts to do, I have a game of Yinsh to play with Jacob, I have a paper proposal and bibliography due Monday, and yes, I have reading to do for my Discworld class. I'm trying to figure out if I can reconcile these things with the invitation I've been extended to join some of my housemates at a cabin somewhere far away for the weekend. It sounds like fun. It's an opportunity for a ride in Whiskey, the run-down but utterly pimped-out conversion van recently purchased for $100 cash by two house members. That alone would probably be worth rearranging my weekend and spending two more days frantically working.
That's why I was in the Anthropology library immediately after my test today, looking up articles on Acheulean stone tools from Ethiopia. Contrary to what you all think, it's a completely engrossing subject. I was there for an hour until the library closed and hardly got to look at half of what I wanted to. When the circulation personnel announced they were closing the desk, I looked at my watch and was seized with a sudden guilt. Here I was sitting in the library when I should have been at home reading Guards! Guards! It's true, though. I have a reading response on it due tomorrow at noon and what with all the midterm studying, I've barely started. I really ought to work on my slacking and procrastinating -- lithics are no substitute for the serious study of literature.
Posted by dianna at October 19, 2006 06:33 PMthere's a class on discworld? man, i would so ace that class.
Posted by: michele at October 19, 2006 10:05 PMObserve, Lord Burley. I am married... to England! BUM BUM BA BUM BA BUM BUM
Posted by: The Queen at October 20, 2006 03:34 PMWait, what the hell? I posted that because every comment I tried to post with my actual name got denied for questionable content. What the hell? Why am I banned from commenting on my own page?
Posted by: Dianna at October 20, 2006 03:36 PMI'm not sure why you're being denied, but the comment as Queen Elizabeth has got to be the funniest comment I've read all week.
Posted by: Jacob at October 20, 2006 11:58 PMYou missed the fake email address, wearenot@mused.com.
Posted by: The Queen again at October 21, 2006 12:05 AMYou're welcome.
Incidentally, I was wrong about one critical piece of information. Whiskey was not purchased for one hundred dollars, Whiskey was purchased for eleven hundred dollars. This is probably the reason that we made it up to Ukiah, out to the woods on windy dirt roads, and back, all in the same number of pieces as when we left.
Posted by: The Queen at October 23, 2006 09:41 AMGlad to hear you made it back in one piece. Did Whiskey also make it back in one piece? Do you have any harrowing stories of backwoods terror, or was it just another fun camping trip?
Posted by: Jacob at October 24, 2006 10:08 PMNo backwoods terror at all, actually. Just the feeling that that much cliched happy hippy college-student-road-trip camaraderie and spontaneous childishness belongs in a movie and not in real life. Honestly. At one point on the way up to Ukiah we pulled Whiskey over to the side of the road, got out and ran through someone's pear orchard eating pears, found a branch of the Russian River, climbed down to it, and took off our pants and went wading. It was ridiculous. Real people do not drive out to the woods with a pile of blankets and a dog and make apple pie and drink red wine and hop fences to look at the stars and come back and fall asleep in a heap on a sea of mattresses. Real people burn the pumpkin curry and argue about where to go and worry about whether the van is reliable enough to make it back to Berkeley.
Real people are suckers.
Posted by: Dianna at October 25, 2006 11:28 AMYou're forgetting -- we're hippies. We pick up the pears off the ground that are half-mushy and eat the unmushy parts because we don't like to waste food. We're like the Little Ecologically Responsible Rascals. So you probably don't have to worry too much about your pears. Anyway, man, you can't own the land, it belongs to the Earth.
Posted by: Dianna at October 25, 2006 12:07 PMand the earth hasn't paid property taxes in, like, forever. the tricksy wench.
Posted by: didofoot at October 25, 2006 12:30 PMShe pays us in the air and the trees and the flowers in our unwashed dreadlocked hair, Kristen. If you'd just tune in you'd know this already.
Posted by: Starsong Fairyfeet at October 25, 2006 03:20 PMlisten, if the government needed more air, they'd quit doing business with the big pollution companies. clearly, we don't need those things. we need the earth's cash. and that is why we have diamond mines. you might care about boring issues "the bad influence of marketing" or "human rights," but the rest of us have to eat, all right? we have to eat diamonds.
Posted by: didofoot at October 25, 2006 03:31 PM