The outside of my apartment.
So technically, it’s been finals week since Monday, but my first and only exam begins at 3:30 today. I feel like I’ve studied to the point that my brain can’t really hold any new information. At this point anything I try to put in through studying seems to bounce back out. This is why I’ve pretty much stopped studying at this point and am blogging. If I were going to do badly on this exam (Linguistics), I’d know it; my friend Sarah, who’s in the class with me, figured out that even if we (at this point we have the same grade) get a B- on the final, we’ll still have an A- for the class. So I feel okay about it.
My roommate Marcella and I in our apartment.
I’m actually really sad about school ending. This year was very new for me; I was living with one of my best friends, I have an awesome boyfriend who goes here (at least he did first semester), I joined an a cappella group and met a ton of new people, and I genuinely enjoyed all of my classes. I’ll be more sad about moving out of my apartment than anything else. Suffice it to say I had the most fun this year at school than I ever have before. I even have grown to love Linguistics, something I never even considered studying. If I had more time at UConn I might have considered minoring in it; but unfortunately, I won’t be able to.
My only complaint is with Residence Life. They have been completely unhelpful in sorting out housing matters for me and my future roommates next year. Because of their shortcomings we are going to have a random roommate and my friend who was meant to live with us first semester has nowhere to stay. It’s frustrating, but I’m guessing lots of students have experienced the same problems with them.
Today I’m particularly sad, because it’s a lovely day and campus looks particularly nice right now. All the trees are green and budding and there are only some puffy clouds in the sky. It’s sunny and warm and so beautiful I could almost cry, I don’t want to pack up my things and say goodbye to my friends and be four hours away from Jan, I don’t want to sit around every day at home looking for something to do. I wish I could take a class up here or just lengthen the semester so my friends could stay here too. So many of my close friends are graduating; I can’t really imagine how they feel right now. I don’t know what I’d do out in the great expanse of the future. Driving through Newport this past weekend I felt like I haven’t really accomplished much, partially because I know the people there are richer than I’ll ever be, and also because it reminded me of my favorite book, The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut. The book opens in Newport, with a crowd around a mansion’s concrete wall, desperate to see the spectacle within. I want to be inspired by something like Kurt, my favorite author, was inspired by the tall gates and marble homes of Newport. I want to see everything.
One of the mansions in Newport.
This summer, as cruel as I make it sound, may actually be one of the best. I’m going to Block Island for two weeks as per usual, staying in the house my family has been renting for years. Right after my 22nd birthday my family and I are going to Provence, in the south of France, for two weeks, to stay in an old farmhouse on 40 acres of lavender farms. It’s the type of thing most people only dream about, and I do too, I just don’t want to know how I’ll feel after I get back and the whole of August stretches before me unkindly and I have nothing to fill it with.
I want to make art this summer and run and do all the things I think about but never go through with. This means I’ll have to motivate myself somehow. If Jan gets his job in Newport then I’ll be up there fairly often, I’m hoping, with plenty of time to just wander. I plan on doing the entire cliff walk, a 3 mile hike around the cliffs on the edge of town. I want to sneak into mansions and find the haunted rooms and do cartwheels on their finely manicured lawns. I’ll get there, I’m sure, it might just take a while.
For now, though, I’m just sad to leave this place. I’m sure I’ll feel the same warmth and safety of being back on campus in September, but I am still adjusting to letting go of the time I’ve had here recently and saying goodbye to good friends and places. It was a very good year.
Robin
I’ve tried to keep out of the whole swine flu (now H1N1) hysteria, but this morning I heard something that made me extremely nervous. Bear in mind that I’m a serious hypochondriac, and am terrified of weird diseases and getting sick and dying. It scares me to no end to hear people panicking on the news and all around me, but I’ve been fairly level-headed so far. I even kept my cool when a kid next to me in the dining hall was talking about how he got back from Mexico two days ago. And I didn’t start wearing a mask when people were talking about swine flu in Vernon (30 minutes from UConn).
"Ok, if you live here, here, here, here or here, you're going to die. Probably."
But this morning my roommate Ari called me to tell me that there was a confirmed case in Stratford, the hometown of my roommate Marcella, who is there right now. I called Marcella to tell her the horrifying news, but to my surprise she had already known and wasn’t afraid. “Can you wear a mask, just to make me feel better,” I pleaded. She laughed and told me it was fine.
THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT.
And on a certain level, I know it’s fine. But I can’t get the idea out of my head that if I get this flu, I’m going to die. I know many people feel the same way, which is why there’s such a panic. But out of the hundreds of people who have the flu now, I don’t think the percentage of death is terribly high; it’s a killer virus in the sense that pneumonia can kill you, though mostly the elderly and young children die from it, or those with weakened immune systems.
Still, I’m afraid. I keep having dreams of quarantines, zombies wandering the streets and pigs running around biting people. I’ve been drinking Emergen-C exclusively and trying to avoid public places. Even now I have a headache and I’m starting to worry it could be the harbinger of illness.
The near future.
Should I be worrying this much? Of course not. But I blame the media for my overreaction. If you’re going to constantly report on a story about a virus spreading across the United States, you have to be prepared for stirring up some chaos. I’m guessing in the coming weeks the news will be reporting that swine flu isn’t as deadly as first thought, and things will go back to normal. People will forget, as they did with avian flu, SARS, malaria, yellow fever. It will become a thing of the past, though it will still exist as a threat. For now, though, I reserve the right to worry. It’s just in my blood.
Robin
Filed under: Food, Movies, People | Tags: darjeeling limited, india, restaurant, slumdog millionaire
Last night I went to a restaurant in Providence called India, which was beautiful and luxurious, and didn’t really remind me a lot of the country. That’s only because I don’t really know what to think of the actual place, India, because of what I’ve seen from movies. In the past year I’ve seen 2 movies that give completely contradictory impressions of India, and I hope that I can someday go there and find out for myself what it’s like. But in the meantime I’ll try to reconcile the two views by way of finding a median.
Jason Schwartzmann, Owen Wilson, and Adrien Brody in The Darjeeling Limited.
The first movie is Darjeeling Limited, which I loved. As a die-hard Wes Anderson (the director) fan, I knew going into the theater that I was going to have a great time. Anderson’s movies are fantastical and he seems to view everything through the lens of a story-teller. His scenes are like drawings from a children’s book, with bright colors and patterns dominating the sets. Everything is filmed very simply, with straight-on shots and continuous scenes contributing to the sense that one may be reading a picture book instead of watching a movie. Darjeeling was beautiful because of the use of colors within scenes, but didn’t really give me an accurate idea of the place it explored. In the movie, India is a magical place where all the women wear jewel tones, all the children are friendly and innocent, and the country can be explored from the safety of a train car without actual exposure to the people. But Darjeeling, although it’s meant to do so, overly-romanticizes the place. I feel a connection for the characters, but not for the land.
The children from Slumdog Millionaire.
Conversely, Slumdog Millionaire, the famed Oscar winner, paints a much darker picture. The majority of Indian people live in the slums, with shacks for homes and dirt floors. Most of the characters are devastatingly poor or disadvantaged, and the only people who have risen above the poverty level are drug dealers. Children in this movie are drug mules, prostitutes, and their lives are nothing like a children’s book. Slumdog is beautiful but sad, and although the movie managed to garner a little bit of attention to the slums of India, the people living within them are still existing in a realm of squalor and oppression.
So the restaurant India didn’t really help me in my hopes to discern what the real India is like. The restaurant is very pretty inside, with silk archways and long cotton curtains separating the tables; Bollywood movies play on a large television next to the bar and belly dancers float around the aisles. It’s an India that doesn’t really exist except in the minds of Americans. There were two girls giving free henna tattoos, and I got one on my palm of a peacock. But even they didn’t really know anything about India. “Before Indian women get married, they get henna drawn on their hands, right?” They shook their heads and said they didn’t know.
The henna drawing I got last night.
I’m not sure how realistic the idea of taking a train across India is (as in Darjeeling), but maybe I’ll be able to experience it for myself someday. For now, I guess I can only appreciate what I know of India from movies, television, and of course, delicious Indian food.
Robin
internet interest 