Hippy me on Infant Development, Cobblestone streets, and well...

My Child and Adolescent Development class is soooooooooo boring. And today I have 30 pages of textbook reading and copious note taking for the quiz tomorrow. It's tasks like these that makes me revert to my hippy-daydreaming-self. When reading about whether or not to breast feed, share the bed with your baby or do baby's dream does nothing to excite me. My initial hippy answer for all these questions is a basic one size fits all: babies were born, feed, and cognitively developing long before Gerber had developed formula, epidurals were possible (question, am I the only one that thinks shoving a HUGE needle in someones spine as being a bad idea?)and websites available for interpreting dreams. Hippy me just wants to embrace the fact that nature has provided and "progress" doesn't always lead to a better solution than what nature has already presented, usually it's just a more sophisticated problem. That's my hippy rant.

As a way to try and escape my textbook I have been daydreaming. Lately I've been in France a lot, Avignon, where lavender fields, crepes, biased waiters, and exotic toilets were found. But my favorite part was the cobblestone streets wet with fresh rain. The world is a more romantic, beautiful place with cobblestone streets (unless it's the Versailles cobblestone, that's just dangerous).

I know that every European town/city has cobblestone streets (except for the ones that were annihilated during the WW's), but there is something so classy about them, unless you're in highheels--I've tried it and given my natural grace it's a miracle that 1) I'm here today, 2) someone didn't die as I tripped many times--my body is an awkward, yet capable weapon. 

Moving on...

Cobblestone streets, it's almost as though they promise summer romance, hot men, chocolate to die for, and your first kiss in the rain. Or Johnny Depp from Chocolat:

 

Then you also expect to look like this: 

 Oh well, I suppose we all have our little fantasies...Which reminds me I'm hoping the Groundhog was wrong and VA will experience an early spring! Wouldn't that be wonderful?! Then I'd find a colonial town with cobblestone where I can lazily walk hoping I look suave while the hippy in me continues to grow out her leg hairs, protest textbooks, GMO's, liver dumplings, and personality tests.

PROFESSORS UNITE!

I don't know when I'll learn not to go to my dad for comfort over college drama's. He's answer is a timeless classic when I go down the self-pity road and cry: "why me?"

Dad will reply: "TRADITION!"

(Now play this movie clip:

                                                                                                                               )
I used to think that dad was just on a cynical, unforgiving tangent rooted from a long history of college abuse, until a professor admitted to it. My professor lightly touched on the idea of, "the tradition of the mysterious professor...the man that you can never figure out and his standards are unexplained." But the way that Professor D. referred to it made it sound like there's some higher, secret order of professors out there, kind of like the Masons, meeting together for the purpose of destroying their students peace.

Dad and Professor D. have got to be right! I'm totally convinced!!!!! I can picture it now.

"Faculty Meetings" 

 

The perfect cover--"transparent", out in the open, unsuspected, lethal. Students fund with hard work and loans the rich, luxurious office they meet in. It drips with rich mahogany, maroon, wing-backed chairs, smells of wax and fresh ink staining the pages of an essay on the desk. They nonchalantly saunter in, and settle them selves in chairs arranged in a circle. The last one to enter comes fashionably late. With a heavy limp he enters, trailing behind a blood trail of red ink with an essay clenched in his hand. It's wrinkled, torn, stained with more red than black ink. He looks like a mix of a vampire and Quasimodo and Mr. Addams. He is the self-sacrificing, dedicated professor that stays up late every night feeding off of innocent essays.

The provost of the college probably stands and leads them all in reciting their pledge (Standing at attention they recite these verses, and then they finish by taking their red-inked pens and drawing an F in the air before being seated):

Professors unite! 

Now is the time to ruin the peace

of the future--one student at at time

no student left behind!  

They then open the floor for discussion. The topic? New and creative ways to support the holy tradition of ruining the peace of the student

Ideas rush forth like girls at an One Direction concert. 

• Suprise essay assigned before spring break
• Dispensing with fall break
• Alluding to cancelling class the day of an exam and then don't
• Rearrange the seating chart
• Pop quiz

Then the half-human half-who-knows-what professor that was late raises his hand:

"I support the order of the mysterious professor. The one that cannot be charted, defined, predicted. The powerful one that has only one true constant: the forever changing mind. The one who captivates his students peace by keeping them subjective to his ever-changing whims. This professor is one that does not bow to the technological era of transparency, outlining the grade scale, or addressing the material that will be on the exam. This professor is the true consummate of our trade. But if any of you still lack the clarity of this vision I have rewritten William Ernest Henley's Invictus for you:

Out of the night that covers them,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable approval.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
The students will winced and cry aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of premeditated enigma
Their heads will be bloody, and bowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the exam,
And yet the peril of the grade
Finds, and shall find, them panic-stricken.

It matters not how difficult the syllabus,
How charged with absences the scroll.
I am the master of their fate:
I am the captain of their soul."

Silence, they all stand and give him the honorary air F. They feel too much respect to clap or say another word. But after being taught by the master, they silently depart and head to the psychology department to receive advise on how to be more enigmatic.

*End of meeting*

Only one remains in the room, an English professor that is deeply disturbed that the rewritten poem didn't rhyme as the original did. Then a maniacal smile spreads across his face--it must be a devise used to prove how unpredictable he must learn to be. Happy at this new interpretation he returns to write up a secret syllabus full of his expectations for the class, then the syllabi antagonist. "This antagonist is what I will give my students." He mediates evilly.

And that is how the tradition continues.

Hamlet, Essay, Exam, Valentines Day

College. Snow day. Paper due tomorrow. Exam tomorrow. Valentines day tomorrow. But here I sit trying to pound out a paper on Hamlet's theme of action vs. indecision with the movie comparison of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. I have sat here for too long trying to be productive, but all I come up with is horrible! My head is too far into this essay that I hoped would stand as a David among my portfolio. And then all the negative self-talk starts about my writing aspirations. But in the depths of my mind a flash of pink and red was seen that helped me feel better about life! VALENTINES DAY.

By definition I am a single woman, in college, and I have no one to spend Valentines day with and I should be miserable, but instead a smile spreads across my face. Valentines day is a better excuse for a crappy day than Friday the 13th.  No matter what you're complaining about if you add, "and it's Valentines day..." to the end of your complaint suddenly your problems are validly much worse than anyone could have supposed. Let's test this out:

Which sounds like a worse day:

• 'Ugh! My alarm didn't go off and my hair looks horrible!' 

 Or

• 'Ugh! My alarm didn't go off and my hair looks horrible...and it's Valentines day...'

• 'I have an essay that is ruining my life!'

 Or 

• 'I have an essay that is ruining my life and it's due on Valentines day!'

• 'This essay is putting me through the meat grinder and it's making me all self-conscious about writing and stupid that I want to go into creative writing. I AM A FAILURE!'

Or

• 'This essay is putting me through the meat grinder and it's making me all self-conscious about writing and stupid that I want to go into creative writing. I AM A FAILURE! AND IT'S VALENTINES DAY!'

• 'This chick flick stinks!'

Or

• 'This chick flick stinks and it's Valentines day!'

 See what I mean? By merely adding four words to the end of your sentence suddenly you're just pleading for validation and anyone who doesn't give it is then insensitive. 

Red Herring:

In Paris I was walking around with a group of friends when a bunch of drunk guys felt like some of my friends were incredibly pretty and they wanted to get up in their business. We ran onto a bus, but our new suitors wouldn't be deterred. Here's a photo of them blowing kisses to me. They were probably drunk and that's why they got confused and decided to blow kisses to me instead of the girls they were originally hunting for. 

 Oh the men of Europe, sometimes it wouldn't hurt if an American guy wanted to be a little more forward and said I was pretty...I got that all the time in Europe, but maybe those guys were just scamps.

Back on track:
 Life hurts today. I hope I'm a writer of any kind (except the average or horrible kind). I love writing. I know it's a powerful thing, but it's a competitive field and I kind of feel like an average or horrible writer. Well, I've got things to do, and it's Valentines day, so I better make it look good.

Shebz