Know thyself.
Transliteration aside (for which I trust Apollo will forgive me; I'm not quite ready for the inside of a padded cell yet, and it would make my life very complicated if people thought I was) it's a very useful thing to keep in mind when you're hoping for ESP. There are people who, knowing what is to come, will arm themselves beforehand. There are people who won't. And then there are people (like me) who will convince themselves that nobody can really interpret what the Oracle says until after the event, so it doesn't matter in any case.
I hope the previous paragraph hasn't been taken as confirmation that some concerned person should start looking for a good psychiatrist. It's just the effect of a very crazy week. Gnothi se Auton.
The campus is going to be rather on the empty side next week, with half the students off on term break. That doesn't mean we won't have quizzes, though. If anything, since we've not been burdened with too many of them this week, next week is going to be an occasion for all the professors to revenge themselves for all the lack of preparation during T-Nite and after.
I think it's the "after" part that really bugs them. The trouble is that once you've got through T-Nite, devoting, at the very most, an hour a day to mugging, it's very difficult to get back into the pre-midterm routine. The profs look at it differently; they probably think that with T-Nite out of the way, you should attack your books with twice the enthusiasm. The policy of the Delphic Council doesn't quite work here.
Having said that, I suppose they knew it was coming. Some of them, at least, told us so in the first week. That makes me feel slightly better about myself and my present disinclination to spend hours with cases... That may change as endterms approach. I certainly hope it does.
But it's the Pierian spring I'm after as far as that's concerned.
Saturday, August 27, 2005
Sunday, August 21, 2005
The Brief Chronicles of Time
Drama seems to be everywhere right now. I don't mean drama as defined by Jacques sitting in the forest of Arden being wise; that's always there in any case. I mean drama in the more usual sense of the word.
The final show of Kamala was last night. Somehow people generally seem to perform best on the final night. I've never been able to figure out why it works that way. In any case, last night was good. I rather think Will would have enjoyed it if he had seen it, although he would probably have written a different ending.
One of my old classmates is doubling as Oberon and Theseus in Dream. You would have thought he'd be happy, with two leading ladies. But apparently he gets slapped by one and kicked by the other, so it isn't as pleasing a prospect as it seems. I can only feel sorry for him; to double in one of Will's plays and still have to count yourself lucky if you get so much as a smile from your counterparts...
This is my first relatively free weekend in a very long time. First it was midterms, then it was T-Nite... But I suppose a few weeks of not having time to think, leave alone eat and sleep, makes you far more appreciative of that time when you get it.
We predicted our quizzes with remarkable accuracy this week. That doesn't mean I studied for them very much; it just means I knew in the morning what iniquities were going to happen in the afternoon, and so the slip of paper behind the glass came as no major surprise.
While I'm on the subject, I have come to the conclusion, after much deliberation, that Hamlet was sane. That I'll probably change my mind in two days is immaterial; at the moment I am decided. He was just brilliant, and a far better actor than the abstracts he had in Mousetrap.
I've always wondered if Agatha Christie had Hamlet in mind when she wrote that play. Being Christie, she may have done, even if only as a decoy. And maybe not that much of a decoy, at that; if you stretch your imagination a bit, there's something in the concept of revenge and dead brothers that may have seemed familiar to the Elizabethan court.
And now, if I can keep my mind made up about Hamlet, and decide once and for all whether Macbeth would have killed Duncan even without the witches teaching him to know himself - both highly unlikely propositions - I will be somewhere.
The final show of Kamala was last night. Somehow people generally seem to perform best on the final night. I've never been able to figure out why it works that way. In any case, last night was good. I rather think Will would have enjoyed it if he had seen it, although he would probably have written a different ending.
One of my old classmates is doubling as Oberon and Theseus in Dream. You would have thought he'd be happy, with two leading ladies. But apparently he gets slapped by one and kicked by the other, so it isn't as pleasing a prospect as it seems. I can only feel sorry for him; to double in one of Will's plays and still have to count yourself lucky if you get so much as a smile from your counterparts...
This is my first relatively free weekend in a very long time. First it was midterms, then it was T-Nite... But I suppose a few weeks of not having time to think, leave alone eat and sleep, makes you far more appreciative of that time when you get it.
We predicted our quizzes with remarkable accuracy this week. That doesn't mean I studied for them very much; it just means I knew in the morning what iniquities were going to happen in the afternoon, and so the slip of paper behind the glass came as no major surprise.
While I'm on the subject, I have come to the conclusion, after much deliberation, that Hamlet was sane. That I'll probably change my mind in two days is immaterial; at the moment I am decided. He was just brilliant, and a far better actor than the abstracts he had in Mousetrap.
I've always wondered if Agatha Christie had Hamlet in mind when she wrote that play. Being Christie, she may have done, even if only as a decoy. And maybe not that much of a decoy, at that; if you stretch your imagination a bit, there's something in the concept of revenge and dead brothers that may have seemed familiar to the Elizabethan court.
And now, if I can keep my mind made up about Hamlet, and decide once and for all whether Macbeth would have killed Duncan even without the witches teaching him to know himself - both highly unlikely propositions - I will be somewhere.
Tuesday, August 16, 2005
Taste Not the Pierian Spring
The title doesn't mean anything. Really. It's just the effect of having functioned on three hours of sleep a night for a week, then having slept very nearly round the clock yesterday, and finally having topped it off by trying to make sense of Microsoft's accounting policy and decide whether stock options really motivate CEOs. All I have to say for myself is that I didn't get sozzled - not on alcohol, anyway.
T-Nite is over. In retrospect and with the benefit of twenty-twenty hindsight, it was fun, although going to bed at four in the morning is not something I would recommend as a lifelong policy. Some things are best left to Gally Threepwood.
So now it's back to business as usual. That's a rather depressing thought. During T-Nite I had enough to do that I didn't have time to worry about EA and QM backlog, or give more than a passing thought to midterm results. Now that I have the leisure to sit and work out what they're going to do to my grades for the term... But why think of that when I needn't?
One of my friends is playing Titania. They're putting up the show in the middle of September; I'll be very sorry to miss it - not least because I want to see her kiss Bottom with the ass's head. Still, maybe I'll have someone take photographs for me. I could do with some fun.
Less than a month now, until endterms. At this point I'm not too worried. When you're deluged in tests and quizzes as numerous as - well, as anything that anybody ever called numerous; I can't think of a simile right now - they all boil down, as one of my professors is wont to say, to punctuation marks in an essay being written by somebody with a warped sense of humour. (He just mentioned the punctuation marks; the rest is my own.)
It's raining again. So I'll just listen to the drizzle and let the Alps arise as they will.
T-Nite is over. In retrospect and with the benefit of twenty-twenty hindsight, it was fun, although going to bed at four in the morning is not something I would recommend as a lifelong policy. Some things are best left to Gally Threepwood.
So now it's back to business as usual. That's a rather depressing thought. During T-Nite I had enough to do that I didn't have time to worry about EA and QM backlog, or give more than a passing thought to midterm results. Now that I have the leisure to sit and work out what they're going to do to my grades for the term... But why think of that when I needn't?
One of my friends is playing Titania. They're putting up the show in the middle of September; I'll be very sorry to miss it - not least because I want to see her kiss Bottom with the ass's head. Still, maybe I'll have someone take photographs for me. I could do with some fun.
Less than a month now, until endterms. At this point I'm not too worried. When you're deluged in tests and quizzes as numerous as - well, as anything that anybody ever called numerous; I can't think of a simile right now - they all boil down, as one of my professors is wont to say, to punctuation marks in an essay being written by somebody with a warped sense of humour. (He just mentioned the punctuation marks; the rest is my own.)
It's raining again. So I'll just listen to the drizzle and let the Alps arise as they will.
Sunday, August 07, 2005
If Music be the Food of Love
Play on!
When you read the line by itself it sounds remarkably cheerful, as though whoever said it had drunk just enough to be in a benevolent, expansive mood. You can almost see him raising his wine cup to an imaginary orchestra.
Then you read the rest of the passage, and you wonder why Will insisted on hamartia for his comic heroes. Macbeth does not come across as manic depressive, nor does Othello, nor even Hamlet. But, traitorous though the thought may be, it is very difficult to read Merchant without wishing Antonio would stop being so noble, stop trying to save Shylock's soul, and get himself a life.
That has nothing to do with my life right now. I started with the quote because it's one of the happiest-sounding lines I know, as long as it's read by itself. The imaginary wine cup, the imaginary orchestra.
It's strange, how you discover that some things aren't as bad as they seem. While I would not make a habit of dressing like a prominent member of an underworld chain gang and going about shouting slogans, it is not without its attractions - on occasion. When I did it last night it was rather fun.
So was Welcome Night - or Nite; I don't know how they spell it. What I know about music, other than the spelling, pronunciation and etymology of the word, can be inscribed on a grain of rice with a blunt carving knife. It didn't make too much of a difference, though. I'm sure people who can tell C minor from C major had a nicer evening than I did, but I had, for lack of a better word, fun.
The week ahead is supposed to be the one where you learn how not to read an HR case and still avoid writing a 1000-word assignment in one evening. It seems a remarkably useful thing to learn, rather like the sixth sense some people develop that tells them whether or not there's going to be a quiz on any given day.
Aristotle would say that the expectation causes the quiz. But such accuracy would be a little too much to expect, even of Pythian Apollo.
In the name of Phoebus, then, play on.
When you read the line by itself it sounds remarkably cheerful, as though whoever said it had drunk just enough to be in a benevolent, expansive mood. You can almost see him raising his wine cup to an imaginary orchestra.
Then you read the rest of the passage, and you wonder why Will insisted on hamartia for his comic heroes. Macbeth does not come across as manic depressive, nor does Othello, nor even Hamlet. But, traitorous though the thought may be, it is very difficult to read Merchant without wishing Antonio would stop being so noble, stop trying to save Shylock's soul, and get himself a life.
That has nothing to do with my life right now. I started with the quote because it's one of the happiest-sounding lines I know, as long as it's read by itself. The imaginary wine cup, the imaginary orchestra.
It's strange, how you discover that some things aren't as bad as they seem. While I would not make a habit of dressing like a prominent member of an underworld chain gang and going about shouting slogans, it is not without its attractions - on occasion. When I did it last night it was rather fun.
So was Welcome Night - or Nite; I don't know how they spell it. What I know about music, other than the spelling, pronunciation and etymology of the word, can be inscribed on a grain of rice with a blunt carving knife. It didn't make too much of a difference, though. I'm sure people who can tell C minor from C major had a nicer evening than I did, but I had, for lack of a better word, fun.
The week ahead is supposed to be the one where you learn how not to read an HR case and still avoid writing a 1000-word assignment in one evening. It seems a remarkably useful thing to learn, rather like the sixth sense some people develop that tells them whether or not there's going to be a quiz on any given day.
Aristotle would say that the expectation causes the quiz. But such accuracy would be a little too much to expect, even of Pythian Apollo.
In the name of Phoebus, then, play on.
Wednesday, August 03, 2005
Elysium!
The servants of Hades may be stoking the fires of Tartarus, the Moirae may be sitting at their spinning wheel with identical sinister smiles, Zeus may be giving orders to the Cyclopes and gearing himself to say it with thunderbolts, but nothing can change the fact that midterms are over and that for the first time in six weeks there is not a monumental amount of reading material demanding immediate and undivided attention. The battles are over, and it will be a few days until we learn who has lost them, who has won them, and who has lost some and won others.
Around this time I should start feeling particularly aggrieved about the fact that we have classes this Saturday, and on every succeeding Saturday excepting the one that is listed in our timetable along with the dreaded letters W, A and C (followed by the dreaded word "Submission"). But I really can't feel aggrieved about anything right now; it's too much trouble, especially considering that sleep is going to be in short supply for the next two weeks.
Post-midterms... it's a little hard to believe that I've been here only six weeks, or that I've been here six weeks already. Six weeks of perpetual sleep deprivation, of deadlines to be met and no time to meet them, of trying to balance Assets and Liablilities and track down vast sums of money that have mysteriously vanished, rather al0ng the lines of Houdini... actually, it isn't as bad as it sounds. While I would not go so far as to say that being mistaken for one of Cleopatra's slaves is a pleasure that grows on you, it certainly becomes less painful with the passage of time. Dark may lower the tempest overhead, but I can console myself with the thought that whatever happens, I am unlikely to find myself hobnobbing with a hungry crocodile at the bottom of the Nile. Or even at the bottom of the Sabarmati.
It's drizzling. It's a very soothing sound, rain, when it doesn't interfere with fruitless trains of thought that you know will lead nowhere, but that you hope will provide you with a brilliant insight on how to solve all the problems of the Indian economy with one swift stroke. Until those thunderbolts start falling, life is, to quote the ninth earl, capital, capital, capital.
Around this time I should start feeling particularly aggrieved about the fact that we have classes this Saturday, and on every succeeding Saturday excepting the one that is listed in our timetable along with the dreaded letters W, A and C (followed by the dreaded word "Submission"). But I really can't feel aggrieved about anything right now; it's too much trouble, especially considering that sleep is going to be in short supply for the next two weeks.
Post-midterms... it's a little hard to believe that I've been here only six weeks, or that I've been here six weeks already. Six weeks of perpetual sleep deprivation, of deadlines to be met and no time to meet them, of trying to balance Assets and Liablilities and track down vast sums of money that have mysteriously vanished, rather al0ng the lines of Houdini... actually, it isn't as bad as it sounds. While I would not go so far as to say that being mistaken for one of Cleopatra's slaves is a pleasure that grows on you, it certainly becomes less painful with the passage of time. Dark may lower the tempest overhead, but I can console myself with the thought that whatever happens, I am unlikely to find myself hobnobbing with a hungry crocodile at the bottom of the Nile. Or even at the bottom of the Sabarmati.
It's drizzling. It's a very soothing sound, rain, when it doesn't interfere with fruitless trains of thought that you know will lead nowhere, but that you hope will provide you with a brilliant insight on how to solve all the problems of the Indian economy with one swift stroke. Until those thunderbolts start falling, life is, to quote the ninth earl, capital, capital, capital.
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