Winter courses (and another Edinburgh pic)

 

Another Edinburgh picture, taken from the very tippy-top of the Walter Scott Monument.  I love the lighting in this picture.  It looks like I did something really cool on purpose.  That big building with the clock tower is a schnazzy hotel, the street is Prince's St., and the green bit is Calton Hill.  Beyond that--yes, that is the ocean.

Figured I'd ramble a bit more in this post.  I'm going to try to actively begin to remember funny things that happen throughout the day, the way I did when I was living abroad.  Just because I'm home, so to speak, doesn't mean I should let that whole looking-on-the-bright-side thing I was doing last year slack off.  (Even if it was way too easy last year.)

Anyway.  I'm actually enjoying my classes this quarter, sort of.  We're reading a bunch of religious books in one of them, and half the time it's fascinating.  The other half the time it bores me to tears.  I think it's a mentality thing--it's definitely easier to understand and care about The Baghavad Gita when I'm not rushing or worried about other stuff.

In another class I've set an extra goal for myself (of churning out one short story per week), and that part is marvelously enjoyable.  The half where we have to read/critique other peoples' in-progress works isn't generally so much fun.  It takes a lot of time to line-edit forty pages of writing, and I try to be meticulous (because I hope that's what others will do for my story). My American art history course is kind of awful.  I keep getting flashbacks to 10th grade humanities  (Thanks, Ms. Tanaka.  Really.)  I'd be in so far over my head without that class, but at the same time--I mean, I don't know anything about art.  And half the lectures just piss me off because the idiot men are so goddamn sexist. (EDIT: Not the men in the class.  The artists.)

I'm also taking a William Carlos Williams class.  I don't know how I feel about it yet.  Some of his poetry just... doesn't make sense.  At all.  And there's an essay (that I haven't yet started) on his poetry due next week.  But his short stories--well, my copy of the book is late, but the prof read two of them out loud in class this week, and they were wonderful.  Absolutely brilliant.  Can you imagine a bona-fide legitimate writer in the twenties writing about lesbianism?  And it's not porn.  It's a good story.

So far this quarter

 

I look at pictures of Edinburgh when life in Santa Barbara starts to overwhelm.  As long as there aren't any people I know in the picture, it's very calming.  (If there are friends I haven't seen in months it's just sad.)  This picture was taken from about halfway up the Walter Scott Monument on Prince's St (that's what the brown/black spire is--part of the monument).  The first bridge with the buses is Waverly Bridge, and the odd coverings is actually the train station.  The other bridge, farther back in the picture, is North Bridge.  The first time I walked across it, the wind was so strong my scarf unwrapped itself and almost flew off my neck.  The hills in the background is Arthur's Seat.

Shorts weather in Santa Barbara today.  Dress weather, actually--it was too hot for even shorts.  It was pretty wonderful.  Somebody said it hit 83 degrees today (28 Celsius).  Even the wind was hot, like a Santa Ana.  I can't tell if I've got allergies in addition to my cold.  Blegh.  I love this weather, but blegh for runny noses and not enough cold medicine and pressure in the forehead that makes me want to either scream or curl up into a pathetic ball and groan in pain. (Thank god for Tylonal.)

I shouldn't complain.  One of my flatmates went to the hospital on Sunday for an awful stomach ache and ended up staying the night.  Horrifying.  Made me want to drive out there and give her a hug and some proper food.  (Except I don't have a car.)  For a while they thought it was appendicitis, and that she'd have to have surgery, but it turned out to be a lot less serious.  The day after she came home from the hospital, though, she ended up with both a cold and an ear infection in both ears.  Needless to say, she went home for the weekend to be babied.

My mother's coming up on Saturday with two of her girlfriends (both family friends) for a wine-tasting excursion.  Santa Barbara is wine country, I guess.  I get to come along, though if these allergies don't take a chill pill I don't know how much I'll actually be able to taste.

Whatever, though.  It'll still be nice to see my mother.

Sick Day

Cuddled up in bed in the middle of the afternoon with my jammies, a cuppa tea, and allll the work that's due tomorrow.

I dropped Latin, if there's anyone left in the universe that hasn't yet heard.  Oh frabjus day, calloo, callay, etc.  Except it sort of isn't.  I did enjoy Latin well enough (especially when it was going well), but it took so many hours to get everything straight in my head.  My other classes suffered, and forget about any extra reading or writing.

So my minor is a dream of the past now, but it's okay.  I've started writing again.  I've got a short story about Edinburgh I wouldn't mind posting an excerpt to sometime (after I've gone through another draft or two). I've also thrown myself into rewriting another short story, this one fantasy.  It's an odd mix of Rumplestiltskin and a Grimm tale and a Greek myth and I love it.  Finding the proper ending is painful, but it's a good kind of painful.

Fatty dogs and cobbled streets

 

Cluj-Napoca, Romania.

And a picture of the fattest dog in the world sitting in the gutter on the street outside my hostel to go along with it.

Cluj statue

 

Cluj-Napoca, Romania; the statue at the top of the fountain pictured below.  Another crooked picture. :)

Cluj fountain

Cluj-Napoca, Romania.  Also taken April of last year: a fountain at the base of a statue outside the church pictured below.


It's a crooked picture, but I still like it.  The whole day felt a bit crooked--I flew out of Cluj-Napoca to the Paris-Beauvais airport in the wee hours of the next morning, and I'd spent two or three weeks trying to figure out how to get from the Paris-Beauvais airport to Mont Saint Michel and back so I could see the inspiration for the Disney castle.  Then, that afternoon, I decided I was both a pinch travel-weary and incredibly homesick for Edinburgh.  So I scrapped all my France plans and bought a plane ticket to go home. 

It's kind of a nice feeling, to be homesick for somewhere that you've chosen to live.  It means you chose well. 

Cluj-Napoca

 

The front of a large church (by my standards, not the world's) in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, taken last April.  I spent a little under a day and a half in Cluj-Napoca, and it was very... different from the rest of Romania.  It was sunny and hot, for one thing.  It was a much bigger city than anywhere else I went (excepting Bucharest), with a lot more people, and a lot more stores (chains and otherwise).