On being taught, and why I'm at uni in the first place

I always end up trying to do too much. It's happened this semester - I'm taking five papers (three is full time; four is the normal maximum) and working part time. It's nuts. I knew it would be nuts, of course. I shrugged and resolved myself - all-nighters, bleary eyes and coffee overdoses here I come! And I came, and I was, and the coffee was good.

Only, my marks slipped. Not much: they're average now, or a little below. I don't like that, not one bit, but I'm living with it. I'm trying to remember why I did this to myself, and usually it isn't hard. I love learning, love it to pieces: love it in pieces, in the smallest, cloudiest, most obscure little factoids to be dredged from page 382 of that book with the very ugly cover. But perhaps even more than I love learning, I love being taught. I love listening. I love lecturers who go off on tangents, and lecturers who qualify what they tell us, going into much more detail than we need because they just can't help themselves (it's especially good when they know they're doing it and get all bashful). I love to experience that passion for knowledge.

I love, what I love most, is to forget the 'I'. When you're caught up in someone else's story, you see the world through different eyes. You see different colours, different shadows; the sky is a different blue, the birds sing a different song. This is amazing to me. It's a richer world, a world multiplied, magnified.
'
This way, you see, five papers are five more worlds. They're the worlds of my lecturers, who I will now describe in the barest of pen portraits: the charismatic French professor, lover of badgers, strawberries and sword-sticks; the grey-haired, grey-suited archaeologist with a passion for kumara pits and red cod; the gregarious and charming C.S. Lewis expert who goes to such great lengths to entertain us; the soft-spoken PhD with his purple cardigans and plaid; and the anthropologist, studiously warm and sincerely interested, with an oddly unnerving ability to categorise us all. They're all quite wonderful, really. Despite the inevitable boredom (and here I'll ponderously type out 'archaeological statistics', in the full knowledge that no matter how multi-syllabic, these words simply cannot convey the horror) - despite that (and 'depauperate'! Depauperate! WHY???*) it's incredibly good to be living this life.

Gotta go define 'society' - wish me luck. :-)

* With footnote, for to better communicate mine disdain: 'depauperate' only ever comes up in studies of Pacific archaeology (not even in the dictionary, I tell you!). It only has one context: decreasing biodiversity with increasing distance from the Asian continent. It is constantly used in this context, despite its complete redundancy, despite that fact that 'increasingly depauperate' is just a fancy way of saying 'decreasingly varied', or even just the good old 'less and less'. Depauperate. Hmmph.

Otago!

Couldn't resist. Our uni is just so gorgeous.

Our beautiful flat

You know how Blogger inverts the order of uploaded pictures? Well, this is the view from our kitchen window - formerly last in the list. But hey! Pretty, green cityscape!

Our kitchen a month ago: since then, we've brightened it up just a bit and been given a new, much more reliable oven.

The lounge! Very big, and still a wee bit bare.

The gorgeous fireplace what did teach me so much about ashes and soot, and the door to the kitchen.

My room! This is taken from about the middle of the floor: it's rather big.

View from that there window in the pic-i-ture above.

The other side. Me have pwetty fireplace aussi.

... and my fingers are dead from composing and typing up 'une petite histoire amusante' due tomorrow afternoon, so that's all for now. Love you, Dad. :-)

Well, hello there

First off, three songs I've just discovered, and loved:

- Ludovico Einaudi's In Un'altra Vita (classical piano)
- Everybody Knows by Ryan Adams (alt-country)
- and Ah Mon Amour by Rachid Taha (world/arabic)

Then, a random note: how Western-centric is a 'world' tag, really? I mean, 'world' isn't descriptive of the music in any way that counts - Bruce Springsteen, Elton John or U2 are just as Earth-based as Rachid Taha. Still, perhaps fear of cultural bias was what spurred that silly tag in the first place. They're all doomed experiments in stereotyping, anyway!

Second random note: why do I want to write 'a euphemism' instead of 'an euphemism'? Because it's right, that's why (duh :-P) - but why? Why? Oh, that's why. And even though you don't want me to, I'll explain - just skip ahead. The 'eu' in 'euphemism' is pronounced 'you', so it has a consonant sound. *wondering headshake* Learning, new, always, etc.

Tis the eve of the English exam.