Cement Girl

I had my first bass lesson today. Things went well and he said i did pretty well on my sight reading for not having really played all summer. That was reassuring. It feels really good to play bass again under some tutelage (?), and at the very least- just play his bass... it's so nice and has nice tone and is just altogether wonderful. It's a much better size for me than the school's bass.

I had my first meeting with my primary reader for 410 yesterday. I'll be talking about 410 on here a lot, I'm sure, over the next few months so i better go ahead and explain what 410 is. The term "four-ten" is mostly just the word around here that is short for Humanities 410 (also referred to as Hum410), a course that ends our humanities core here at my school. As a liberal arts institution we have to go through these humanities courses that... are part good and part bad.

There was no Hum110 (freshman) course when I was freshman, but I think they've added it since. So you do that, and then Hum210 your sophomore year. There are actually choices your sophomore year and you can take Hum210-Science and Technology, Hum211-War and Peace, or Hum212-which has something to do with environment. Everyone uses the same basic text "The Theory of Human Nature" which includes selections from philosophers such as Plato and Socrates, Augustine and Kierkegaard (i believe). I had Hum210 and hated it. The end.

The Hum310 is called "Faith, living, and learning" and is a much better course (in my estimation). Each professor teaches it a different way and has some different texts, but I think everyone reads "circle of quiet" by L'engle, and "the chosen" by potok. We start discussing those three elements and paradoxes, etc. etc. My class consisted of about 13 other people and an awesome (one of my favorites) professor. It was a feely-good-ask-tough-questions time and i wanted to cry when it was over.

So hum410 is supposed to bring all of your education together, basically. I will still have two semesters of school left after this, but i'm a senior and am just going to get it out of my way. 410 is basically just one paper you write over the course of the semester. However, it is a paper that is based on one paradox of your choosing. This paradox must be a universal human condition and must be illustrated in an example from your major. Then you must also tie it to two totally different disciplines-one from arts and one from sciences. I am a human development major and i think I am going to tie mine to some sort of art like visual art, music, or film, and sociology.

So i met with my primary reader yesterday and i meet with my secondary reader (that awesome professor mentioned above) in a few minutes. My primary reader, Gary, had already met with a number of his paper-writers, and had not signed off on a single proposal. My paradox i want to use is "we (as humans) seek after what we already have". Gary said that while he struggled with that thought, and couldn't write a paper like that himself, and was a little confused by it (and made me confused in the process of talking about it), he signed off on it! So now i meet with Dennis and see what he comes up with.

My assignment between now and the next time I meet with Gary is try to find an art that i can see this expressed in, and somehow outline my paper or write a short essay without doing research (just stuff from my head). We'll see.

The two cds I cannot stop listening to are: mewithoutYou's "a-->b life" (in the car), and "ben folds-"rockin' the suburbs" (in the house, with my roommates).