Sorry for the rather ridiculous delay between posts. I am in Santa Cruz now, visiting my [grand]mother, and so, of course, school has ended. What to say?

Well, my courses for next quarter are in place, and should all be great. Math, humanities and social sciences core all carry over with new professors. The profs for the first two have good reputations, and for the third I changed sections (along with a friend) to the class of a likely terrific anthropologist Prof. Mazzarella. I added drama for art core, which sounds promising, and to fulfill a somewhat less exciting requirement, added a social dance class, about which I know nothing.

Finals were manageable: two papers – one long and book-reportish, the other less so – and two exams. I was satisfied with all of them, but can’t really predict grades at this point.
One dandilly ambiguous personal situation, a few friends’ birthdays, some new bands, countless teacups and a quiet last day later, I made it home. I am intensely tired, and not for lack of sleep, and most of my friends are gone or in finals, but it is nice to be back and have a chance to reconnect and eat some real produce.

I took a trip to the Reg’s special collections research center to kill some post-finals down time, and with the help of Bryce Lanham, I found out a few interesting things about the dorm. I apologize in advance, you probably don’t care.

Anyway, some trivia:

Snell and Hitchcock were both built as men’s dormitories, and both were used for that purpose at least through the fifties. Despite this, Snell holds the record of oldest women’s dormitory in a co-ed college. The University’s first women’s dorm complex – Foster/Kelley/Green/Beecher – was not ready in time, so for the spring quarter of 1893 Snell was assigned to women before becoming the next fall “a center of university life for the men of the colleges” (Goodspeed, A History of the University of Chicago 1891-1916).

Hitchcock (as well as B-J) allowed graduate students until the sixties.

Snell and Hitchcock, as well as most of the older buildings on campus, are held up by their stone walls, which is why they are so thick.

Both dorms were renovated in 1972-3, this renovation included:

• Replacing the section I and V stairways, and moving the section I stairway south, to meet fire code.
• Renovating the bathrooms.
• Rearranging some walls in the upper two floors of sections I and V to create access to the fire escapes.
• Replacing most of the dorm’s plumbing and wiring.
• Closing the chimneys for the inner-section fireplaces.
• Adding those annoying door-closing pistons to the inner section rooms.

This was supposed to draw “20 more years of useful life out of the aging dorms.” By comparison, Woodward courts (now the GSB) barely lasted 50 years, and rumor has it Max P. is not intended to last more than half that.

There were several more major changes intended that were never funded, including:

• Creating horizontal links between sections and buildings by cutting hallways through the inner sections (thus turning most of the doubles into singles) and connecting Hitchcock to Snell on each floor.
• Building a loading dock and bike entrance where the Hitchcock kitchen now is.
• Building a common mailroom and front desk for the two buildings at the base of section I, and giving Snell a second floor porch in the process.
• Giving Snell a third-floor study lounge (directly above the tea room).

There was even talk in the early seventies, which never made it to blueprints, of dividing section III in half, connecting the rest of the sections, and turning Hitchcock into two sections, each of which would be a separate house.

A few points

The last 36 hours have been complicated: a roommate's medical emergency (on the mend), and a rattling murder in the university. I am doing fine, but this is just an odd place to be.

In better news, the great debate is tomorrow, Plato’s “Symposium” is amusingly strange, among other things, and coffee, tea, chocolate and curries abound gloriously. I have too much to read outside of classes, and this is the ideal state of things.

one more thing...

the people I’ve met here, by in large, have some single thing above all that they can do. Not to the detriment of anything else about them, I just found out that of the friends I’ve made, one has published scientific research more than once, another wrote a novella, or something along those lines, and reviews professionally, and another is on the search committee for Chicago’s next archbishop. Some take better pictures than I do, or make better tea, not that either of those is a feat of greatness. Most of them play an instrument well, and a sport.

I can’t think of anything like that for myself.
But I think that, at least for today, and at least for this year or these few years, that this is something that I can get used to.

I am doing well here, and I am genuinely content. And right now, that is enough.

[By the way, I realized ofter writing this that I read something last week by a friend saying something phrased similarly. This has been bouncing around in my head for a while, though, and isn't an intentional response.]

Apologies to all for the slow posts lately. Things have not been unusually busy, I just haven't been setting aside time for the blog.

I had a cold over the weekend, which largely passed. The weather has been strange as usual, although today was the first day that a scarf seemed like a good idea.

I started a weekly open-café in my room on Sundays, which was fun the first time, and should be likewise this.

Classes for next quarter are already coming into view. My math teacher is, as feared, not teaching calculus, but our replacement is also from the upper echelons of the department. I hear good things about my next humanities teacher, and will be sticking with my SOSC teacher unless I go out of my way to switch - witch I well might. The class is leaning a bit heavily on Hegelian philosophy, even to the detriment of the actual material (Marx, Weber) we are reading.

Biology is a one quarter class, with a required one-quarter biology elective to follow. Different options are open each quarter, which leaves my fourth class slot up in the air. My (teriffic) professor's elective runs in the spring, and covers the natural history of the American Southwest. It concludes with a two week road trip and independent research project during summer break. If I can convince him and myself that I can cut it and would enjoy it soon, I'll do it. That would leave winter quarter open for an arts class, probably drama/production, as it has gotten very good reviews. There is also an intro-keyboard coarse that sounds interesting, but it meets no requirements, so is probably better saved until later.

Well, my printer just arrived. Later, all. Flickr posts to come.

anatomy of the hallway & more photos of campus

Walking to Class I
Originally uploaded by kodama (home)

More photos are online. I am too busy to post anything all that in-depth, but here are some little updates:

-I accidentally walked in on (through the back door, thank god) an a press conference by someone who had won a Nobel that morning.

-I helped out with another prospective student open house this morning... putting enthusiasm to good use, I think.

-Midterm in math Friday - supposedly only a grade boost, I am optimistic.

-My first paper, on Socrates's Apology just came back. Good feedback and an A-. Yay.

-Hegel is much, much more dense than Smith or Marx. Sadly, my SOSC teacher is not a terrific lecturer, and loves Hegel.

-Opera tomorrow.

-Lee, dad and Jan will be here on Friday.

-"Achilles is not as much of a Douche as..." (kid in hum class)

More

Florence without glory
Originally uploaded by kodama (home)

I posted the bulk of my Florence photos just now, though not the pretty ones. See the flickr caption for this photo.

Classes continue to go well, and I spoke enthusiastically to some prospective students. Fefferman (calc prof) left a mathematical cliffhanger: are all horses white? I teach go tonight.

Packed Days

Yesterday and today:

Four classes
Go
A quiz
The drinking of tea
An experimental wind instrument concert
A paper
A bestselling author
Homemade cinnamon rolls
An antique telescope on the roof of my math classroom, and the ISS
Someone's travel photos from Iran
Plotting for Scav
Proofs and a class on proofs
Zany house meeting
Reading on the grass

thoughts on walking to Crerar

the rain
the grey woolen blanket of air
and the trees and the stones
quietly worn away,
slowly
as they were meant to
drop
by
drop.

it feels like the best days at Ishibashi or Awara.

and the beauty of the sad silence
the silence that gracefully accepts any sound trying to pierce it
and lets it pass through
as if it were nothing.
the joy, the complete overflowing contentment of the silence
of the stones
and of the rain
and of the blanket of air
all makes me want to cry
and embrace every inch
and let it pass through
as if it were everything.

Crerar

Crerar
Originally uploaded by kodama (home)

There are more good ol' ivy photos behind this one, have a look.

The weekend has been all that it should be; public debates, a play, reading Smith on the Armadillo swing, math on Fermi's chalkboard, go, and some quiet but good parties.

...like a fox

“[Socrates] is crazy… like a fox.”
The conclusion to a long back and fourth discussion in my Human Being and Citizen class, on Socrates’s Apology.
Classes are going well. I like all four-and-a-half of my professors, and the workload, while not yet in full swing, is entirely manageable. As well as studying and spending a fair bit of time with random other folk, I watched The Seven Samourai at the impressive student cinema (Doc Film) and did a fair bit of Japanese tutoring today.
Math involved an incredibly simple and novel proof about infinity that I had seen before in Gödel, Escher, Bach, and that made me happy. The one café on campus that uses intelligentsia coffee beans (some of the best) has notoriously bad baristas, though, and that does not make me so happy.