Blogging

I ran into my adviser as I left Fairhaven today. I feel like we sometimes have awkward interactions, despite the fact that he's my favorite professor.

"So, you're a blogger now," he said.

"I guess," I answered.

It's good to know that someone is reading this thing.

But seriously, thanks Niall.

Concentrated studies

School has begun to take over. It's not so much that I'm ridiculously busy, because I'm not. It's more just that I look at the work I have for next day of school and it's just so intimidating. Eventually I psych myself up for it and get it done in a reasonable amount of time, but until I do that I'm stuck thinking about how I have to do it - and that is certainly the worst part.

In any case, lately I've been spending time thinking about what I want to concentrate in. Over the past few months I have come to a conclusion, and so this quarter I am taking the Writing Portfolio and Transition conference, which is basicially Fairhaven's equivalent of writing proficiency. It also signifies moving out of exploratory studies and into concentrated studies. My studies have always been pretty concentrated though, as I came into college with a pretty good general idea of what I was interested in.

It's crazy to think that after less than two years of school I already have nearly 100 credits, when you only need 180 to graduate. Over the past week I have declared my majors (Political Science, and a Fairhaven Concentration). Next quarter I plan to take the concentration seminar, and design my concentration and I hardly feel like I've been in college that long.

I guess that's the sign of a good college experience - you hardly realize it's going by. That's easy for me to say right now though, as I sit at home. Hit me up in the middle of a lecture class and I might be telling a different story.

Poetry in the bathroom...

Sleeping nine hours on a school night is luxurious.

And probably not the smartest course of action for studying. Yet, after a point you learn that it’s less detrimental to go to bed at a decent hour and cram in an hour before class than to nod off over those inverted 7 chords. So that’s what I did—slept from 9:30 pm ‘til 6:30 am. But that’s not normal. This, rather, is my normality:

12:00 am-1:00 am (depends on the amount of torture my profs decided to allocate): bed
6:30 am: haul body from bed, eat (all in a groggy haze). If raining, don the clown suit (rain pants, reflective strips and a slightly-shredded-brilliant-orange-reflective-vest to go over my conveniently black rain jacket) and ride bike to school.
8:00 am- 5:00 pm: class/studying/grueling hours in the practice room/pretending I have important stuff to do on the internet (like blogging!) when I really should be doing the aforementioned things…

All my classes have proven themselves worthy of the exponentially diminishing amounts of sleep I'm currently getting. Intriguing discussions about menstruation and the clitoris in my Pregnancy and Childbirth class, instruction on the mind-boggling 7th chord (mind-boggling to me, the percussionist, who’s shamefully been able to avoid those collections of notes that create—I know, this is going to be stunning—melody!) in music theory.
Anything else? Ah, yes, two interesting conversations. One was with my poetry professor. We discussed the intricacies of nursery rhymes while washing our hands in the restroom facilities. The other was during Elements of Style, about how the simple placement of a comma can create two types of panda: benign or nearly-homicidal. Only in Fairhaven, dear readers, only in Fairhaven…


Feedback feeds me, so...don't let me starve?

(and in case anyone's wondering...the inability to make indentations to my paragraphs is really quite a nuisance...anyone have a solution, O computer savvy folk?)

The usefullness of Fairhaven's stairwells

Read poetry in one of Fairhaven’s many stairwells yesterday:

By flat tink
or tin, or thin
copper tong
brass clang
bronze bong*

...........

Where else but in Fairhaven could you sit in a dim and drafty stairwell and recite poetry? Put like that, it sounds dismal, but I honestly love those stairwells; the shadow of rain falling through window , the resonance and echoing acoustics …perfectly atmospheric for reciting poetry focused on sound. Every alliteration and assonance was amplified and accentuated by the stairwell’s hollow depths.

…so maybe I’m dramatizing the atmosphere of Fairhaven’s stairwells, but they served their purpose: a place to read, listen and feel the poetry.

Class began with a cookie. Let me explain—it’s not uncommon for Mary Cornish (an especially excellent poet, person and professor at Fairhaven College) to begin the first day of class by reading about the sweetness of learning. Of course, for any of us especially intelligent college-goers, such things need validation. Thus the cookie.

And with cookie in hand, we embarked upon the study—no, the experience—of Poetry and Sound (the title of the course). Started off with a video by Evelyn Glennie (an amazing solo percussionist) about the importance of listening. Later, we broke into small groups to read poems and discuss their play with sound.

And ever since class finished, I’ve been splashing in puddles, listening to the way my hair-in-the-wind sounds like the rustle of thin metal filaments and so on…after I made it to the house I share with five other girls, about 3.5 miles from campus, I practiced my drum set for two and a half-ish hours, listening to how the vibrations and the sound of the drums spoke, just playing them in weird ways.

It’s this that I love about Fairhaven. I’m not simply going to class, studying, sleeping eatingbreathingexisting during every insipid moment of the day. No. I’m living—my passions intersect with my academics and not in an overburdened, suffocated way. It’s more of a harmony.

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*Bell, by Valerie Worth

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...feedback is always a good way to get me to write more. Of course, if you don't want me to write more, you should still comment and tell me that...

Fairhaven classes build community

Finished up my first day of classes today. Well, class to be more accurate. As a Fairhaven student with interests in politics, I have taken a number of classes in the Political Science Department, and it’s always interesting to me how the dynamic shifts when I’m not in a Fairhaven class.

Instead of walking into a main campus class and maybe recognizing a face from another class, I consistently find myself in classes with people I have begun to get to know (and people I know very well) through the tighter knit Fairhaven community. Instead of eventually learning the name of the person who sits next to me, Fairhaven classes provide instant introductions and many teachers provide some kind of group activity or discussion that instantly gives you a sense of your fellow classmates. Instead of feeling like a number, I feel like a person.

That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy my classes on main campus, but most of them lack a sense of community. Even the seminar classes I have taken don’t really compare in terms of community to the “Fairhaven circles” I have become so accustomed to. The good classes come close, but I always end them with the sense that something is missing.

PS: This is the Fairhaven blog. I hope you enjoy and would love any comments.