Wednesday, October 18, 2006
puhneen
midterms are in a week's time. pre-draft for our fiendishly long essay for writing seminar is due tomorrow, the draft next monday and right now i don't even have a thesis. there're definitely times when i feel that i've had just about enough of nabokov and his obscure pnin which close to no one has read (frankly i don't know anyone who read anything by nabokov other than lolita and pale fire for pleasure) and reading and rereading every chapter, every paragraph, every sentence and every word because nabokov writes so carefully, deliberately and subtly that you have to mull over every word to figure out his intentions. needlessly to say i'm no read-closely, pay-attention-to-every-detail, see-connections-between-disjoint-paragraph, draw-conclusions-from-the-most-incomprehensible-detail lit prodigy. ughhhh. i whine too much. but my writing seminar is definitely my prevalent source of stress. at least maths is mechanical (even though the textbook is poorly written and mathematical equations don't seem to make sense a lot of the time) and economics is common-sense made complicated (the textbook is poorly written as well, but since the lecturer wrote it you can't suggest a change so i'm going to secretly and treacherously read sloman instead) and classical chinese is easy! thank goodness i have one manageable class to keep me sane, though it's nothing to be proud of when you as a native own a class populated with people who started learning chinese in college.anyway, i have fall break after the midterms! yay one break for me to take a brief respite from work. and my dad is coming so yay again! this calls for touring the campus and nyc and washington, even though i still have tons of work, so technically this is not a holiday. sigh i'm happy to just survive in princeton, and everyone agrees with me. everyone feels miserable on mondays and tuesdays, wednesdays are better because we're halfway through the week, thursdays are the go-out-and-get-wasted (i don't!) days because everyone avoids friday classes like the plague. and of course friday is great and friday nights are silly watch random movies nights and everyone sleeps at 3am and gets up past noon on saturdays which are still decent days. then it dawns upon everyone that a new week is starting and sundays are the mad catch-up with work and feel disgusted at self days. then we repeat the cycle! ain't it great? i thought that i was going to expand my horizons at princeton. turns out that i'm becoming so myopic that i can't see past the next week. (if you do attempt to plan weeks ahead, you'll asphyxiate from picturing the sheer amount of work.)
okay i've just wasted twenty minutes writing this so i'm going to return to my pile of readings on nabokov and pnin and memory and exile. i want to be exiled from this place sometimes. but it's not going to happen so tata! -daintily waves goodbye-
p.s. and i've a two page reading by nabokov on how his name and pnin are pronounced. how thrilling.
ray at 4:54 PM
2 Comments
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at 10:23 AM
Diego Ryo said... hey ray what happened to your tagboard? haha i just love the way you describe college life. it's definitely so dynamic and packed that you cant plan ur week ahead.
looking forward to our Xmas trip!-
at 4:37 AM
Edwin Tan said...
wow what an apt description of college life! so unbelievably succulent... mmm.
