I'm going to post today!

The post has finally arrived!  There's still the cute doggie pic though.

Because this is the one hundred and first post.

It’s another late Friday night and I am tired, again, and should’ve written this earlier again.  But that won’t stop this from being an epic post.

Considering that I haven’t watched an inspirational movie tonight, this will be a more traditional post outlining my week.  However, I had a pretty interesting week, so prepare to be enthralled.

Last Sunday was the initiation of some new pledges to our fraternity.  That wasn’t that interesting, so I won’t talk about it much more than that.  However, each of our pledge classes has a name (name of alumnus + Greek letter).  This pledge class has the cute name of Willard Gamma.  My pledge class got the lovely name of Zlatkovich Beta.  Lovely.  I kind of like the quirkiness of it though.  Shocking, right?

Difficult color exercise.

On Monday in art I finished my color exercise, with the wheels and this “tints and shades” exercise that doesn’t look very impressive but was super difficult.  To give an example, we created a scale between blue and orange.  So first mix red and yellow (to make orange), then combine blue and orange in differing ratios to create a “gray scale” sort of idea.  Then from three of those middle colors, create tints (add white) and shades (add black).  Only in my case, I never mix enough of the colors, so I run out of the “middle color”, then have to mix red, yellow, blue, and white/black all over again.  Rawr.

On Tuesday, I watched a heavily pro-charter school documentary in Education for International Development.  It was pretty good, but sad when some of the Harlem kids they focused on didn’t get in.  But there was a girl with a single, deaf mom and I felt good about it when she got in.

This is a picture of AU's "sakura".

Wednesday I overslept, and decided not to go to my one short class of the day, and instead went to the gym.  It felt good.  I also went running outside, in 38 degree weather and a t-shirt and shorts.  Do you do that, Derek?  Or are you smart and don warmer clothing?  It felt good to run, but the cold air made it harder to breathe (it was cold for me. I know that makes me lame.) and I’m really out of shape so I only ran around for like 10 minutes, then went in the gym to lift weights and worked out pretty intensely on the spin bike.  My point in talking about this is that it felt good to go out on a run this week and wanted to relate to Derek for a moment.  Only you’re in shape.

Me inside "my" building

Thursday, I started my newest art project, in which I have to paint an “architectural landscape”.  If you guys know anything about me, you know I love my SIS (School of Internat’l Service) building.  It is brand new, Gold LEED standard, special super-duper and Obama spoke at its opening.  So that’s what I’m painting.  Here’s a pic of what I’ve done so far.  Bear in mind I had to mix all of these colors by hand, except for the small dabs of white in the flowers, and that it’s not done.  I’m pretty happy so far.  This is our first work on canvas, our first work in color (besides the wheels), and so yeah.

My painting.

The real building.

At 8PM I made a rare “into the city” excursion, to see a play called Ana in the Tropics.  It was in Spanish, and one of the professors here was the one to translate it into Spanish from English, so the students from AU were encouraged to go.  I saw my prof and her family there and talked to them in Spanish a little (I was nervous and initially forgot everything, but they were nice so I managed to get out that I want to go to Spain to travel abroad and some other stuff.).  Then it was bed time.

Then today was today.  In Education for International Development, we read this Langston Hughes poem you’ve likely read, or maybe heard of the play “A Raisin in the Sun”, which as you’ll note, is an obvious allusion to this poem.  But yeah so we talked about it and I made this (what I thought to be) interesting point about Hughes’s decision to use the word “deferred” instead of “denied”.  I won’t elaborate too much.  

 Langston Hughes's "A Dream Deferred":

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

A week from tomorrow, Devin is coming to visit over CdM's ski week.  I'm really excited about it (I think about it all the time), and I think he is too.  He last minute applied here, so hopefully he likes it.  It's expensive, but I got some money to go here and I'm sure he will too.  I made a spreadsheet outlining everything we're going to do.  I'm that excited.  So next next week my post will be in conjunction with him and will have lots of cool pics of us exploring the city.  Yay us. :)  I will give you an overview of our itinerary next week, because I know you're all interested.  It will be heavy on the art side, because of his 100% in art history and general love for Mr. Gunnin.


Well, that's it for tonight...

Good night!

-Rachael