We shall see the Shire again.

Some of us sooner than others. Apparently, by the time Rachael reads this she will already be in the Shire. Hopefully the movie got it right; I'd hate for the book's version of seeing the Shire again to come true. Well, I still have a couple of weeks before I find myself looking upon a familiar sight. I'll be failing to remember the taste of strawberries until May 22, which is, I believe, later than Rachael, Jason, and Rich get home, but before Nicole gets home. So this week I have classes and next week I have exams. Disirregardless of when you guys stop posting, I will post next Monday and very likely the Monday after that. If ruining the weekly symmetry of the blog is something you can't deal with, go ahead and leave, because I'm not going to.

So what has been filling my head this last week?
In Bib Lit, we've been reading the letters of Paul, which include Romans, Corinthians, and a few others. They might constitute the least exciting part of the Bible. This week we're reading Revelation, so I expect the interestingness to pick up considerably. Our professor keeps making these lame but funny jokes about our upcoming exam being the Final Judgement and the fact that it is coming up meaning that The End Is Nigh. He's still awesome.

My British History professor wrapped up the wars of the American Revolution last week, which is certainly an interesting thing to think about from the perspective of British history. This is the class that I think I'm going to get the lowest grade in, but I don't regret taking it.

I'm a little Uncertain about putting this in here.

Now that we've wrapped up relativity, we've moved on to quantum physics in my . . . physics class. The stuff we did last week (particle-wave duality of light, Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle) was pretty much a review of what I already knew, though. Fortunately, today's lecture was a lot better. We talked about some really, really weird stuff. 'Cause, you know, particle-wave duality is weird enough when you're talking about light, but when you're talking about matter . . . whoa.

World Lit has been the most interesting class for the past week, which is not its usual place in my course preference hierarchy. We read Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, which started a little slow, sped up in the middle, and maintained pace through the end. It was one of those gems of a book that is valuable not only for the entertaining nature of the plot but also for the quality of the writing, and not only for the entertaining nature of the plot and the quality of the writing, but also for making you think. The fact that I am currently taking Bib Lit allowed me to get even more out of the book than I would have otherwise, seeing as a survey of Morrison's characters reveals not just the well-known Biblical names like Pilate and Solomon and First Corinthians, but also lesser known names like Ruth and Reba and Hagar. I think Rachael would really, really, really like this book. I think Nicole and Rich would enjoy it. I think Jason would think it was okay but a little boring. And Sim would hate it, but that's okay. Even though one of its biggest themes is stories, which is, of course, one of the biggest themes of Sim's favorite book ever.
But Song of Solomon is actually my second favorite work that I read for that class in the last seven days. I will now introduce a work that I will demand you all to read, at least in part, this summer: Jorge Luis Borges' Ficciones. The reason I can confidently assert that I will demand you read part of it is that Ficciones is a compilation of short stories, most of which are less than ten pages long. I have only read five of the seventeen stories in the book, and indeed I don't really need to read any more before the end of the semester, but I intend to finish them up on the plane ride back, so by the time you see me in the flesh I'll have a more complete review. For now, I'll talk a little bit about the little bit that I have read so far.
Borges plays with your mind. He doesn't tell you a straightforward story in the way you'd expect from an author of a short story collection. You can't tie his stories, if we can call them that, to a ninth-grade plot diagram. Some of them start off like a normal story would, but evolve into something utterly unlike anything you've ever read. Some of them start off utterly unlike anything you've ever read and evolve into something utterly unlike anything that is utterly unlike anything you've ever read.
"The Form of the Sword" is a perfect example of the first category; it ends much in the same way that the original "Planet of the Apes" ends, i.e. with the same type of twist, though more cleverly concealed throughout.

Damned dirty apes.

"The Library of Babel", on the other hand, fits neatly into the second category. While reading it, I was reminded of two things I have seen in the past, one of them last year in Mr. Gunnin's class and the other much longer ago, both of which are pictured below.

Piranesi's Carceri, c. 1750.

If you don't immediately recognize this and feel an overwhelming flood of nostalgia, you probably aren't a real person.

Just to clear up any misconceptions, Borges' story bears no similarity to that of the worst level of the greatest first-person shooter campaign of all time; the reason that former reminded me of the latter is simply that the physical structure of its library seemed a little bit like that of the library of Installation 004.
Anyway. You should all read some Ficciones. Especially Rich. These things are right up your alley.

At some point in the last seven days, I went on a brief walk and snapped some pictures of Middlebury in spring. And since I went to the trouble, you're going to look at them.

So what else happened to me this week. Hmmm. Let us think. Oh yes, SYT.
SYT stands for Screw Your Teammate. It's the theme of last Saturday's track party. You're assigned a teammate whom you are obligated to set up with a date, but your teammate cannot know who this date is, and (s)he must do something awkward to find out. This is best understood via example.
Do you guys know what coning is?

. . .

Well, since nobody answered me, I'll assume you don't know and I'll go ahead and tell you. Coning is when somebody is holding an ice cream cone in the customary fashion and you grab it out of his hand from the top, as in the actual ice cream part. The end result is that the person who has been coned ends up without an ice cream cone and the person who did the coning ends up holding an ice cream cone upside down, palming the ice cream.
So this is what I made Charlie do. He had to stand near the ice cream bin at Proctor (the 3rd best dining hall on campus) and cone people right after they put their ice cream in a cone. His date was to wordlessly get some ice cream, and when Charlie coned her she would say, "I'm your date tonight." And that is exactly what happened when Charlie coned Tori (Tory?). However, it should be noted that she wasn't the first girl he coned. Yup, that was pretty funny when he palmed a random girl's ice cream.
And that is example No. 1. Example No. 2 is what I had to do, which was to follow the following instructions:
1. Put on a wizard hat.
2. Acquire a staff-like branch.
3. Stand in the doorway people use to get into Proctor to eat.
4. Prevent them from passing.
Yep, that happened, and it happened to me.

I leave you with one more thought.