Sunday, March 2, 2008

The Cool-o-meter

COOL
- Eating at Orient Express for the first time since Winter Break
- At work today, talking to Ray, the 60-/70-year old CMITES employee in charge of publicity, newsletters and website, about History. About how we hated it in middle school and in high school and how later in life (oh-so-much later in my case!!) we appreciated it much more and, dare we say, even loved it. About how it's taught in school when it's a requirement (wrong), about how we had no idea about context until later (his examples, what was happening politically when Bach composed such-and-such, what music did people listen to during the French Revolution?), and about how wonderful Antonia Fraser's narrative style is (his read, my read)
- Starting my lab report!

French phrase of the day for Saturday, March 1: C'était un être à part! "He had a style all his own!"

NOT COOL
- Trying to put up CMITES signs at 7:50 in the morning - signs that were put on stakes so that they wouldn't have to be taped to, and subsequently torn off, the sidewalk (ingenious! cost-efficient!). I.e., trying to drive stakes into the ground (frozen) at way-too-early o'clock.
- Lab report! Too much to do!
- Only three All Abouts Girl Scouts cookies left in the box of 21 that I bought . . . Thursday night.

Shamefaced.

(One to add to the reading list: Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription: Notes and Asides from National Review by William F. Buckley)

1 comment:

alice said...

Paula and Lisa apparently never told you about that one time I ate (an entire box of butter cookies minus two = just so i could say that i DIDN'T EAT THE WHOLE THING) in one sitting.
haha, i still don't like middle school, and i still think that it was mostly a waste of time, especially with the way my classes were taught (maybe with the exception of math. not that they were taught well, since my teachers weren't much good at all, but because it's the only subject that has any continuity and was necessary for high school level math in the future). i learned more during middle school from my time outside of class, if anything. whatevs.
i do appreciate high school more now, though. but i can't say that i hated it while i was there, either. hmm.