May 27, 2008

Long overdue update!

Well, I've successfully handed in papers, moved out of my apartment, flown home to Wisconsin, enrolled at the University of Minnesota and returned to the Twin Cities for the summer... all in the past week.

It was my great grandma's 90th birthday party this past weekend, so I was able to see my extended family for the first time since Christmas, plus we all congregated at a bar with pictures of the pope. Not too shabby, if you ask me.

I wish I could have spent more time in Green Bay, but my summer class started today so I needed to be back. My mom got a cold this weekend, so I could have stayed at home with her to cook her soup and take care of her! We went to downtown DePere for the Memorial Day parade, which was fun. Kari says she wants to be a Civil War re-enactor after seeing them in the parade. I got sunburned.

Today was my first French class since high school. It was pretty good... A lot of stuff I remembered quickly and some I didn't. I looked up my instructor in the U directory and apparently she's not even a PhD student but a Masters candidate. I don't have any problems with her teaching the course or anything, it's just a little depressing that we're at the same education level and she's teaching a class. True, it's Beginning French, but still. She's getting paid to be there and I'm the one paying her. When do I get to start teaching classes? I think I'm going to put together a syllabus on Jesus movies for a teaching opportunity through the residential colleges at Yale. Non-professors apply to teach self-made seminars at the residential colleges, so I'm going to apply for that at the beginning of the year. I'm going to work on my syllabus over the summer and get feedback from the various advisors/professors I've worked with over the years. Take that, French instructor! Just kidding. She seems cool.

I told Kari that after one day of class, I can already tell the difference between MY schools and a public state-school education. hah, it's fun pretending to be elitist. This is the third university I've been enrolled at... lots of fun.

Andrew comes home on Saturday! yay! I'm excited. I miss him.

I've passed the halfway mark for my 50 book goal. I finished Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love before I left New Haven and The Dracula Dossier (soon-to-be-published) the other night. Now I'm 30 or so pages into Shakespeare's Wife by Germaine Greer, a book I've been wanting to read and one that Tessa highly recommended. Exciting. Now that I'm a U of M student, I'm going to get an ID card tomorrow so I can check books out of the library. When I told Kari, she said I was like the guy in Breakfast Club who gets a fake ID so he can vote. At least I'm not committing voter fraud.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I saw your comment about Jesus movies and thought you might be interested in the book Richard Walsh and I (Jeffrey Staley) had published this past fall, entitled "Jesus, the Gospels, and Cinematic Imagination" (Westminster John Knox). A description can be found at my Seattle University webpage. Google my name.

Yours, Jeff

Anonymous said...

I stopped reading. I am distracted by all the netflix.