This morning I had English again for the first time in a bit. We're meeting in the library on Friday, and hopefully I remember that when the time comes.
I went home between that class and Psychology as a Career. It's difficult to take notes for that class, because so far everything is either a get-to-know-you or common sense information (I don't think I'll be tested on why my classmates decided to come to college or how it's different from what they expected).
I stayed on campus after that, ducking into the eating area at the end of the TSC's lower floor, and scribbled out some story notes on a napkin. I need to do a project for interior design due next week, I believe. The theme is "harmony and contrast" and I need to "refurbish or recycle" something (and there was one more word that I forgot and that's not listed on Canvas). Hmm.
My first thought was that I could do a neat display by taking sheets of old first drafts and other early writings, doing that trick Demetria did with the papers we took to the Halloween party to make them look yellow and old, and crumpling them up at the bottom of the display. I could make some sort of stack. At the top of the mound could be a character or something rising from the discarded drafts. Recycling, see? But that's more of an art project, and probably not what our teacher had in mind. It would be a good idea to make a timelapse video to show him and the classmates who are supposed to comment things they liked or disliked all the steps, though.
Apparently our teacher had in mind ideas more like "refurbish a chair". He said that since he didn't make us buy the two recommended texts for this class, we could put that money into our projects throughout the year. So if I want to buy a broken chair, I can.
I had a little time before my Institute class, since it was Wednesday. I went back to Blue Square to drop off my stuff and get something light to eat (I wasn't hungry enough to eat anything on campus with one of my meal swipes). We had an interesting class, although I think our teacher forgot about some of the things he told us last week, and told them again. We talked about Mary being pregnant and visiting Elisabeth, and Elisabeth knowing she was pregnant without Mary having to tell her, which probably came as a huge relief to Mary. We discussed Joseph too.
And we talked about how some religious scholars out there try to deny the fact that Mary was a virgin by saying the scripture was mistranslated. "In Greek the word means 'virgin'", they say, "but they translated it from Hebrew, where it just means young girl, and the Greeks mistranslated it because of reasons". Which my teacher said sounds like a convincing argument, unless you know the Greek culture of young girls being temple prostitutes. In the Hebrew culture, it was a given that a girl of marrying age would be a virgin. But in Greece, where apparently girls had to serve their time as a temple prostitute before they were married, you needed to specify that Mary was a virgin, and they did. The scholars would know this detail, but don't bring it up, I guess.
Finally, my teacher used to work with the back-door neighbor of Boyd K. Packer. He asked him what that was like one time, and the neighbor said, "Well, he just seems regular to me". When prompted to share a story, he said that (at that time), the last time he'd seen Boyd K. Packer, they were talking over the fence and there was a squeal. One of the piglets in Packer's yard had tripped into the mud and gotten the mud all over its face. Packer walked over, scooped up the piglet, and gently used his thumb to smear the mud out of its eyes. The neighbor said that it made him realize how gentle he was, and that Jesus probably treated animals a similar way while on the earth. I just thought it was a neat story.
My teacher asked if we could pray in a foreign language for the opening prayer, and asked if a redhead could pray for the closing prayer. And I can't remember what source he cited, but it was from the presidency in one of the older Ensigns or something that "a two-minute prayer is sufficient to open any meeting, and thirty seconds is sufficient to close it".
He's pretty cool, my teacher. Except, I chose the wrong day to stay after class to ask a quick question, because he ended up talking to one of the students about life in India for fifteen minutes while his roommate and I waited there. That was Not Cool (TM). I rocked back and forth, bounced on my heels, and drummed my fingers on my notebook while trying to look like I wasn't. Clearly, I was too subtle. After fifteen minutes, I finally interrupted them and asked the teacher if he could remind me next week that I wanted to ask him a question, because I needed to go. The roommate shot me a grateful glance and said that I could probably ask him now, because "I think we're about to head out too".
All I wanted to ask my teacher was why he kept saying "This is [like] the Hill Cumorah pageant" every time one of the songs in the scriptures came up (I can't remember if last Wednesday I mentioned this, but in Greek - I think Greek - there are a lot of poetic songs in these scenes with Gabriel, Mary, Elisabeth, and Zacharias). He was doing this last week too. I didn't understand why he didn't say "Christmas pageant" since this was the Christmas story that a lot of us have probably put on, or if it was a metaphor for people singing and putting on a pageant show and he didn't want to use Christmas pageant as his example, why he didn't say "Nauvoo pageant", which more people would have been familiar with.
He said it was because the Hill Cumorah pageant, a pageant once put on at the Hill Cumorah, used to be the more popular one, and admitted more people probably would have known about the Nauvoo one. I just thought it was a very weird thing for him to be saying, because he said "This is the Hill Cumorah pageant again" at least seven times between today and last week, and I wanted it cleared up. A dumb thing to wait fifteen minutes after for, sure, but I wasn't expecting him to go on talking to that guy for that long. Well, I got to hear interesting things about dowries and schooling and culture.
Regardless, it was a frustrating end to my day, since I'd been first in line to ask him a question after class, but he'd jumped up to grab free parking passes for the kids who drove, and the line got all muddled by the time he came back. I have a right to grump about it for a blog post.
I went out to wait for the evening bus, and finally made it back to Blue Square a little over half an hour after my Institute class had ended. The flaw in having Institute once a week on Wednesdays is the fact that all the new "Fairly OddParents" are airing then. It was supposed to air at nine, but the time zones weren't clear, so I didn't know if that meant 7:00 here, or 8:00. I flipped on the TV just as one of the old (like Season 3) episodes was coming on as a rerun, and since I'd watched it during the marathon, I took it to mean that 7:00 was not the correct time. Kind of a relief.
My artsy friend was doing a stream again (she does a lot of those in the evenings, you see). I wasn't in the mood to join her (especially since I knew I'd want to see the new episode), so I distracted myself for a bit until it was 8:00. Then I turned on the TV again. It seemed like the new episode wasn't airing, so I reluctantly withdrew to see what my friend was doing. The other day she was drawing a Danny Phantom picture for someone who didn't get a gift during a Christmas art exchange some people were doing. It was coming along well. Only, apparently she didn't save or the file got corrupted or something happened, because she had to start over today. She wrote this info next to the stream link, so I thought I should check up on her.
It turned out to be good I did. Apparently, there was a lot of confusion about the episode, because they played the wrong theme song or something so one of my friends turned it off only to realize later they played the new episode... Something along those lines. Anyone, one of our pals had recorded it, so after taking half an hour to get it set up, she uploaded it.
I told our drawing friend, "I'm totally ditching you to watch the episode. I'm not even going to make up an excuse for it". She said she wasn't even mad. She ended up pausing her stream but leaving the chat open, so we all watched it together and talked about things as they went on (Anti-Cosmo and Anti-Wanda apparently MOVED from their castle while Foop was away at school, without telling him, so he's been living by himself in the giant castle for who knows how long and this is why his parents haven't appeared since Season 7. Holy heart-shattering plot twist, I was not ready). So it turned out to be really fun!
It was an okay episode, and there were things we didn't like about it, but we all agreed that Foop and Chloe hugging was great. Completely coincidentally I've always ended up drawing Foop and Chloe on the same layer, so I was amused by this friendship, and my friends were all over it too.
Though if I were smarter, I would have checked the TV again at 9:00 to see if the episode was airing, for future reference. But, it's okay. The last time I was in the stream, another pal sent me the link to where I could watch all the episodes that were supposed to air in America, but that never did for reasons that were unclear. I felt no shame in watching an episode that was supposed to air last April and is not scheduled to air during this "mini-marathon" now. I have friends in high places, apparently.
So I'll be okay in the future if I can't catch new episodes on Wednesday. The other reason why I didn't feel bad about watching the nine or ten episodes that have aired in other countries online is because apparently, they won't be airing here in America in chronological order. That was not okay with me. Sure, it's MOSTLY a cartoon where it doesn't matter what order you watch them in, but at the same time, it does matter, because Timmy and Chloe's friendship was so absolutely rocky at the start, and Timmy is slowly warming up to her. I wanted to see this happen in order so I could notice the turning points and future continuity.
That's what I did on Tuesday, watch episodes, so I'm caught up with my friends and they don't have to keep spoilers from me anymore. "Dimmsdale Daze" was very, very good. And it's hilarious because it's becoming more and more obvious as time goes on that Chloe isn't a Mary Sue (she lies to get out of trouble, turns in an alien who's been hiding on earth for six seasons and trusted her with his secret to get a good grade on her extra credit project, and has absolutely no problems stealing a doll she wanted from Timmy's dad, even when she knew it was ultra-rare and he'd been looking for it for years, etc.), so everyone out there who was insisting that she was is in for a storm. I've been defending her since the beginning, so it's pretty awesome to me.
It's also really cool that after just watching her for a few episodes last year, back when there were only like seven of them out, that I made predictions about her personality - she denies everything that goes wrong or that she doesn't agree with, her parents pressure her to be a perfectionist, her parents are often absent and left her to raise herself on a Care Bear-like cartoon meant for three-year-olds that she's loved for the last fifty-five years - and then all of these things are being confirmed as canon in the episodes as they come out (she DOES deny everything, and her parents are "extreme veterinarians" who are often gone. It broke my heart that time Timmy pointed out that they were wearing their pants backwards, and Chloe scoffed that "her parents don't have time to pay attention to the little, unimportant things in life" when they do things like leave for the Amazon one night while she's asleep without wishing her good-bye).
It's wonderful. The writing has been tipping downhill now that Butch and some of my other favorite writers don't write the episodes, but I'm glad my friends and I can all find things we agree we like, and we can talk about continuity jokes like Punchie the Kangaroo too. It's a good show for me.
