Buckets of fun

Today I got an idea of just how stressful the next few weeks were going to be. I would break it down for you, but it is scary just thinking about it. I'm on a day-to-day basis at the mo. 

My friend Marga and I are studying in one of the bubble rooms in the science building. This building is brand new, they just built it in 2004, and it has been resupplied with all the latest science equipment. They have these rooms with glass walls on the corners of each floor that stick out a little into the atrium, and are glassed in and furnished with couches, chairs, and a table as well as a white board and a window to the outside world. It pretty much looks like a bubble. Anywho, I love them. They are pretty, and very conducive to studying. 

At the moment, I am watching The Bicycle Thieves. It is an old, Italian movie for my film class. I'm not sure if I like it, it's kind of sad. Last week we watched Hitchcock's Rear Window. As far as old movies go, Hitchcock is a really interesting director. Sometimes, though, I find his style a little tiresome. He's a fan of jumping back and forth to create the drama rather than letting it play out in the scene. In a lot of ways, this compensates for bad acting, but sometimes it's nice to just watch the acting. I guess it really depends. We also watched an old Japanese movie called Ugetsu that I really liked. It was a sort of fairytale-type story. I liked it a lot. 

Today in my Rome seminar class, we talked about Attila the Hun. It's kind of funny because it he is also coming up in discussions and Illuminated Manuscripts in my Art History class, even though there is a good 500 years between the time period he died and the first illuminated manuscripts were created. Did you know he had a stroke while doing the dirty with one of his new wives? Yeah, she was German, and she had to watch him have the stroke and then bleed internally til he died. That's a beautiful wedding present, how romantic. And then all his children got to fight over who got to rule his empire. By the way, everytime I am in that class and we are having discussions, everything get's played out in my head using the characters from Asterix comic books. I'm not even joking. All visigoths look like this:

All roman legionaries look like this:

And all the Brits look like this:

There are also villages, and gauls who look like Asterix and Obelix, as well as emperors who pretty much all look like Julius Ceasar, even though technically Ceasar was never an emperor. 

Anyway. So that is how I deal with being in that class for 3 hours straight. I also use Asterix characters while I am doing my readings for that class. It just helps when trying to digest information. 

In my Cultural Anthro class, we are watching a movie called Tough Guise which is a documentary on the normalization of masculinity and femininity with a focus on the socialization of the association of violence with men. It was actually quite interesting, this guy, Jackson Katz, was very informative. He talks about how boys learn how to be tough by watching other boys and men portrayed in movies and the news, but that being violent isn't even necessarily something that is attributed to testosterone. Anyway. It's interesting. 

Oh my goodness the little boy in this movie is so cute. 

I really want to see Milk, but I hate movies that end with people dying, especially if they are killed. 

I also really want to see Slumdog Millionaire, but I heard it was sad and I hate sad movies. 

Wow, life is hard.