It's POURING outside. I got caught in the rain earlier and got soaked!! Long day of class today, and tomorrow is another field trip/luncheon extravaganza...
Breaking away from writing about the city for a bit, here's a few updates about me!
-- I'm getting very into Pilates. Random, right? I didn't know much about it a week ago, but I've done some research, and it's really cool. I could never get very interested in Yoga because of all the meditation and spiritual nonsense, but Pilates has none of that. It's a system of exercise developed during the 20th century which centers around flexibility and strengthening. I can't do any of the moves that require silly exercise bands and weights here, but I can do the mat exercises, which are the best ones anyway! The fun part is that I know so much already-- it turns out my favorite warmups that we used to do in Modern class with Ms. Strong were all taken directly from Pilates theory. So I even know some of the terminology! Anyway, I'm not using it for aerobic exercise-- we're getting a fair amount just walking around-- but I've missed the flexibility and strength that I used to have from dance, and I've accepted that I'm just not built right to be a dancer at the college level :-(... so I've been doing Pilates with the help of online videos whenever Isabelle goes out-- my abs are sore already! Maybe one day I can afford to take actual classes.
-- Having tracked down postcards two days ago, and stamps and envelopes yesterday, I finally found a post box today! So you'll be getting a postcard sometime within the next week I would guess.
-- I really like the course. I think it's because I love reading novels but I hate writing analytically about them. So it's great that, although we discuss the novels in depth, this isn't a literature course! We're using the novels as windows into the time period, as artifacts of social history. Which is awesome! So I get to read all these really cool books, and I have 14 people to talk about them with, and we're not competing to see who can b-s about them best in an essay, so we can actually have candid discussions. It's like a book club. I'm also looking forward to our final paper, even though I have no idea what I'll write about, because it's more of a history research paper than anything else.
-- A lot of people I've talked to strongly disliked the last book we read, the Vagabond, which was written by a woman in 190something. Although I, too, found the narrator annoying at times, I really related to her at other times. She is very introspective and has all these conflicting thoughts about being alone. She craves it, she is content with it, she despises it... The story was pretty interesting too. The woman, Renee, is in her thirties, divorced (which only became legal in the 1880s), and trying to make ends meet as a vaudeville singer. She thrives on her newfound independence but is emotionally scarred from the time she spent desperately in love with her abusive, philandering ex-husband, and is extremely guarded as a result. She is about to go off on tour with her vaudeville act when a rich man who lives off his mother's inheritance persistently begins courting her, offering her a life of marriage and luxury. Though she is at first taken in my his kindness and company, the cracks in their relationship begin to show. Ultimately, alarmed by his disinterest in her as a person and his fixation on "keeping" her, Renee refuses to throw away her hard-earned autonomy and chooses the independence and uncertainty of gypsy life over marriage-- which, to her, means subjugation.
-- European grocery stores are the best. I've been trying lots of different healthy French yogurts, and my favorite so far is a Mousse made with Fromage Blanc (kind of like Fromage Frais) with raspberries and blackberries at the bottom. Yum!
-- Chris's job at the GT is going well, but they've assigned him a terrible story. He's supposed to accost random people on the street and subject them to an extensive interview about how much money they make and what kind of lifestyle they lead. It's for a feature on the wealth disparity in Greenwich, but I can't imagine anyone's going to want to answer questions as personal as that. There are loads of questions too! No one's going to have the "time or inclination" to do that when they're grocery shopping! Poor Chris. It reminds me of some of my YDN stories. There's nothing in it for these people-- why would they agree to talk to you?? And asking people for interviews is so emotionally draining. Hopefully people are at least nice about it. Some of the college Deans at Yale were so rude that I burst into tears afterwards. I was lucky most of my stories at the Herald last summer were non-controversial/intrusive. Hopefully most of Chris's stories this summer will be lighter than this.
-- European grocery stores are the best. I've been trying lots of different healthy French yogurts, and my favorite so far is a Mousse made with Fromage Blanc (kind of like Fromage Frais) with raspberries and blackberries at the bottom. Yum!
-- Chris's job at the GT is going well, but they've assigned him a terrible story. He's supposed to accost random people on the street and subject them to an extensive interview about how much money they make and what kind of lifestyle they lead. It's for a feature on the wealth disparity in Greenwich, but I can't imagine anyone's going to want to answer questions as personal as that. There are loads of questions too! No one's going to have the "time or inclination" to do that when they're grocery shopping! Poor Chris. It reminds me of some of my YDN stories. There's nothing in it for these people-- why would they agree to talk to you?? And asking people for interviews is so emotionally draining. Hopefully people are at least nice about it. Some of the college Deans at Yale were so rude that I burst into tears afterwards. I was lucky most of my stories at the Herald last summer were non-controversial/intrusive. Hopefully most of Chris's stories this summer will be lighter than this.
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