Safely ensconced in the back half of intersession break, I finally feel able to present you with Things I Have Learned This Semester, Fall 2008 Edition:

Gender Studies
-Don't tell anyone we ate cookies and gave feedback on the last day. This will merely reinforce stereotypes about baked goods and feelings-sharing in Women's Studies courses.
-Discussions with impossible-to-reach conclusions are the best.
-Constructionism > essentialism.
-Freud was sometimes full of crap, and sometimes a genius, and is is possible to celebrate his accomplishments while at the same time critiquing his nuttier views.
-Inclusion strengthens a movement.
-The headscarf brouhaha in France is indeed ridiculous.

French Film
-It's all about time passing.
-The tallest person in a theater will inevitably sit in front of the shortest person. This happened to Subcontinent throughout our childhood, and it happens to Prof. S's wife all the time as well.
-British guys with good French accents are doubly attractive.
-DO NOT WATCH JOURNAL D'UN CURE DE CAMPAGNE IF YOU VALUE YOUR REASON.

Elaine Pagels Worship Service
-Brilliant scholar + excellent lectures = TONS of reading
-It actually is possible for a section made up of twelve students believing in twelve different religions to not descend into sitcom territory.
-(so long as no one mentions S-E-X; then things get a little fraught.)
-The author of the Gospel of John disagreed with the author of the Gospel of Thomas on nearly every point. This is why Thomas isn't in the room when Jesus appears to the disciples. This is also why it's important to remember that people wrote the Bible.
-Waving frantically at the projector will not turn it off. Or on, for that matter.

Awesome English, Fin de siècle
-Sherlock Holmes is manly, believe it or not.
-Master Awesome can down a can of Diet Coke mid-lecture in under thirty seconds.
-Representation, penetration, emasculation, colonization, examination, frustration, creation, exploitation, desire.

Other English, How to Read Fiction and Watch Movies
-F. Scott Fitzgerald liked Heart of Darkness.
-Orson Wells liked Heart of Darkness.
-The Great Gatsby is often considered alongside Citizen Kane.
-Go figure.
-I was lying all those years when I said I hated Hemingway. I need some other author to ignorantly despise. The Sun Also Rises rocks my socks.
-The Road is kind of like grad school: you go and you go and you go and you make progress but what kind of life is that?
-Mulholland Drive makes no. sense.
-The Big Sleep gets better and better and better.
-It's troubling to see Jimmy Stewart as a villain.
-Harvardians, Princetonians, and Yalies do not have great lives ahead of them, if the characters in The Sound and the Fury, The Sun Also Rises, and The Great Gatsby are any indication.
-Jason Compson needs to sit down and shut up.

Every year that I was a teenager, we had a grammatically and geographically challenged fool in the White House.
Now I'm twenty, and I believe in change.
I am so happy: happy to feel even an ounce of patriotism, happy that I can be, at long last, cautiously optimistic about our place in the world, and happy that the day went off without a hitch. All day long, people have been grinning at each other in the street (strange in New Jersey), and when I went to give my tour this afternoon everyone was so pumped that the 25 degree weather didn't bother anyone. At the public library, they were showing CNN on all their monitors, so as I browsed for a book to read in the train I could listen to the dulcet tones of Wolf Blitzer doing post-game coverage, so to speak. So, huzzah!

In other news, I am almost done with finals/papers/take-homes-from-hell. Tomorrow I have my Gender Studies final, and then on Friday morning I get to join Dad in New York for what promises to be a weekend of awesomeness.

Winter break was wonderful and jam-packed (evidence of this: lack of blog entries). And now it is over, alas. Nonetheless, I got to meet up with HarvardGirl, StOlafBoy (erstwhile Roxanne to my Cyrano), BrandeisGirl, CornellBoy, UPSGirl, HaverfordBoy, and others. As well as, drum roll please, SUBCONTINENT!!!! We were finally reunited after six months and the giggles flowed freely. And we actually saw and liked (to varying degrees) Twilight, which of course means that my guilty pleasure quotient for 2009 has been used up just like that. From here on out it's Oscar nominees and Booker Prizewinners ONLY.
Yeah. Let's see how long that lasts.
In general, I have a pretty good (albeit eclectic) taste in movies and books. I did not expect to enjoy Twilight, though, and I confess that I did. Two movies that I also got to see in theaters while home and liked without shame were Slumdog Millionaire and Doubt. I had both read Doubt before, and seen it in Chicago starring Cherry Jones, so I was really, really excited to see the movie, but I was also a little trepidatious. After all, how could my second best theatrical evening (after seeing The History Boys in London) translate well into a movie?
I'm still not sure that it did, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. The average moviegoer may have found it slow-going at times, but it started on stage, and John Patrick Shanley, the playwright, both adapted it for the screen and directed it, so that was bound to happen.
As to the question of whether or not "he did it," I give you:
Three Things about Doubt:
1) I read the script in 2006: No, he didn't do it. Absolutely not.
2) I saw the play in 2007: YES. If he didn't do it, I'm a ninety year old African man.
3) I saw the movie in 2008: Yes, he did it, if, to allude to Bill Clinton, we are loose in our definition of "it." I e-mailed back and forth with Intern T about the movie, and he put it well when he said that it struck him that some line had been crossed, but whether or not it was physical molestation was unclear.
In short: Doubt. Read it, see it, whatever. But encounter it in some way.

The majority of my break was spent trying to convince myself to write two of my four papers (I ended up writing one), finishing The Wire (as you know), and starting Homicide. Homicide is like the nicotine gum you start chewing when trying to kick the cigarette habit that is The Wire.
And then you're addicted to gum.
At least in my case I know what's fueling my addiction. Detective Frank Pembleton.

He wants you to watch Homicide.
This is one of those characters I am IN LOVE WITH, and I can't decide whether I wish I were married to him or wish I had written him.
At any rate, intersession can't come too soon. We'll watch the next season then.

Until then, wish me luck on my three (remaining) papers, two RCA interviews, and two exams! À bientôt!