Festoons and Snow Flurries - oh, and Finals, Too

                Festoon - what a fun word, right? Anyway...

                Three more days. I should really be more excited, but right now I’m just focused on the task at hand. Facebook is full of finals woes. However, no one could ignore the trees, wreaths, and ribbons appearing all over town, or the snow flurries and sub-freezing weather. December has come.

                I’ve finished my ROTC commitments for the semester, and I’ve finished practically everything for Arabic. We still have class tomorrow, since language classes still meet during Reading Period, but they’re combining our class with the one before it in order to show a movie. I’m not quite sure why they expect people to show up an hour earlier than usual on the last day before finals in order to watch a movie, but there it is.

                My Hebrew paper is written but needs to be edited for grammar and overall content, but that’s not due until Friday night. I have a philosophy exam Thursday morning (the very first slot of exam period) which isn’t supposed to be that hard, and then Friday afternoon my group presents our physics project. And then it’s over.

                Until then, though, it’s a marathon – one appointment after another. The main problem is actually paperwork; I went to a study abroad meeting last week and found out that I have another whole round of forms to get signed before I head off, which means making a lot of last-minute appointments with various administrators around campus and then hopping around to fifteen-minute meetings all day, but it will all get done.

                Actually, the weekend was fairly refreshing. I was able to take a full Sabbath on Saturday, which was very nice, and to catch up on sleep, the only problem being that when I finally got up at 11:30, there were only a few hours of daylight left. On Sunday my Hebrew professor invited both her classes to her house for lunch, where I had pita and hummus for the first time since I came back from Jordan. It was like Thanksgiving dinner; we were in an actual house, everyone sat around the living room and chatted (in Hebrew), and the food just kept coming! I went home stuffed and didn’t eat anything until Monday morning.

                Because the Hebrew classes are so small and focus so much on speaking, and because people generally take it for a couple of years, the community is very good. Although I have to admit, listening to people discuss the differences between Arabic and Hebrew grammar, in Hebrew, with a little English and French thrown in for good measure, is interesting – especially when you consider that native languages included British, Irish, and American English.

                I also had time to start work on a short story (in English) this weekend that I intend to finish over the break. I haven’t written flat-out English fiction, just for the fun of it, in a long time, and it’s a good way to take a break from studying without forgetting completely about thinking. I also dropped in on  Christmas Tree decorating party in my dorm last night for some hot chocolate and cookies (well, they didn’t call it a Christmas tree; it’s just a tree we happen to decorate while singing “seasonal holiday tunes”, but the spirit’s the same).

                Okay, it’s been a while since I’ve thrown in a random Harvard fact, so here’s one: we love signs. We have signs to tell you where to put your dishes and signs to thank you for doing so (which also randomly appear next to stairwells). We have signs on the doors to tell you whether to push or pull (for those of us who are both book-smart and blonde). We have signs telling you if a door is an emergency exit and if a door is not an emergency exit (the main entrance to Lamont Library is clearly marked as an emergency exit; no one’s sure why). We have the creepy-out-of-context helpline signs on the inside of the bathroom stall doors that tell you you’re not alone. And last but not least, we have the lovely sign in my dorm telling us where not to leave the dishes (under which everyone always leaves their dishes).

                I’m going to miss Harvard next semester. Having exams after classes end is a nice system, but it means that there are people whom I realize too late I won’t see again until next fall or, in the case of the seniors, indefinitely. I’ve definitely made a lot more friends around campus and in ROTC this semester, and grown closer to the friends I already had. However I’m excited for Jerusalem next semester, and for the yet-undiscovered adventures the summer might hold.

                For now, though, I’m just going to concentrate on finals. And then concentrate on Christmas. When I write my next post, I’ll be on my way home! 

Tales of Thanksgiving

            Well, the weather suddenly realized that it was December. It’s been an incredibly warm winter, for the most part; it’s only snowed twice, very briefly, and the weather has been in the fifties for the last couple of weeks. Today, though, the temperature dropped into the twenties, and I walked home in the snow.

            I was walking home from a ceremony where Harvard presented its Humanitarian of the Year award to His Excellency Ban Ki-moon, the UN Secretary-General. I just heard about it yesterday, and I decided to see if I could get in. All you had to do was show up early - it was one of those things that only happens at Harvard. I was fairly close to the front of the line, where I met a couple of people while waiting to go in, and we ended up getting front-row seats (not counting the rows of reserved seats in front of us). The Secretary-General did, I think, manage to infuse us with some of his “sense of possibility”; however, I think he really won everyone over though his use of the word ‘helter-skelter’ and his well-wishes for our finals.

            It’s the second-to-last day of classes before reading period and finals start. Everything has gone by really, really fast. There’s only one more blog post, and then I’ll be done for the semester – although I’ll write an extra one with end-of-the-year reflections, so stay tuned for another couple of weeks! In about two weeks, I’ll be leaving Harvard, and I won’t be back until next fall, since I’ll be studying abroad all next semester. I’m still not sure how I feel about abandoning one of my few precious semesters at Harvard, but I know I’m looking forward to spending that time in Jerusalem.

            Thanksgiving break was wonderful. Wednesday morning I got up, packed the little I needed in my backpack, and headed out. My parents met me at the airport to drive me home, and we talked and watched Back to the Future (I’d never seen it) before going to bed. I didn’t have much time over the summer to see my parents at home; there was a lot to get done. It was a good summer, but I will enjoy having winter break to spend time with them.

            We had a pretty traditional Thanksgiving with my family; we met all the cousins and aunts and their families at my dad’s mother’s house, and we spent the day eating and catching up. There was an abundance of home-cooked food, especially in the dessert department – four pies, two cakes, and two half-gallons of ice cream!

            On Friday we went out to eat with my mom’s parents, and we had a good time talking. I pulled everyone into a good twenty minutes of trying to remember all the state capitals, which I’m sure everyone enjoyed, and afterwards my grandfather took our Christmas card photo. I won’t attach the actual photo here, since many of you will get it in the mail later, but I’ll give you a behind-the-scenes pick of our annual Christmas card photo session.

            Saturday we drove up to Houston and spent the night so that I could catch a direct flight to Boston on Sunday morning. The hotel didn’t have Wifi, which was surprisingly relaxing, and despite the briefness of the break, when I got back to Harvard I felt rested, and ready to get to work on the remainder of the semester’s assignments.

            There are a lot of assignment. At the moment we’re in that strange time when you need to work on projects and essays for the end of the year, but you still have regular homework assignments to worry about as well. Harvard has a full week of reading period before finals, though, so there will be time to work on projects – although my Arabic class extends into that time.

            In addition to my normal classes, ROTC finishes up this week, so after tomorrow I can wake up at a normal time every day. Under Construction is a lot busier than we were at this time last year, singing at various events and performing at a church next Sunday. I’ll let you know how that goes.

            I am still sick, but getting more sleep should help, and I’m feeling better than I was last week, so hopefully this will only last a few more days. In the meantime, I’m continuing my college trend of getting sick at the end of every semester. I took my Physical Readiness Test (PRT) for the Navy yesterday, and as usual, when I finished the run I started coughing and sneezing and sniffling uncontrollably. I got several strange looks on the T; it probably appeared I was dying. However, I had enough time to take a nap afterwards, and when I woke up, I was back to my original recovery level.

            It’s getting to be that time of year where I can make a list of all the assignments I have to get done. Besides assorted other tasks, I have three essays, two big projects, one presentation, one test, and one final to look forward to. The projects are group efforts, and two of the essays are done, as of yesterday, so things are moving along nicely. Hopefully I’ll have enough time and energy left to get everything done well before the next two weeks are over.

            Now that I’m about to leave, I’m realizing once again how lucky I am to be here, and how much I’m going to miss this campus and the people in it. But end-of-year musings are for another time. We still have two weeks left – time to take the world by storm!

'Twas the Tuesday before Thanksgiving...

And all through the class

Everyone’s eyes were glazed over like glass,

As they counted the hours ‘till they would awake

And find that they’d started the holiday break.

            Well, that’s not entirely true. I still pay attention in class. But I can’t say I’m not excited about the fact that, by the time most of you read this, I’ll be on a plane on my way back to Texas. Until then, though, it was a very busy weekend, so there’s a lot to write about.

            First of all, Harvard-Yale. We won! As we have for the past 13 years, barring one game. However, unlike last year, this game was very close and pretty exciting. I left at half-time to do work, and I’m sorry I missed it, but I’m glad we won, and it was nice to be able to go to a football game again, even if it was a far cry from Texas football. The halftime show was especially telling – on the Yale side, the about thirty people who made up the band (and one twirler) pretty much walked out, made a peace sign, made a triangle, played a song, and then walked off the field again. Harvard was a little better, but I have to say, SHS (and pretty much any other Texas High School) could have run circles around Harvard and Yale as far as halftime shows are concerned.

            The one interesting part in this break was the emblem-smashing; every year, each school produces an emblem of the other school, and then destroys it. Yale had a giant cloth H; they proceeded to have their band act like a bow and then had some other people, the ‘arrow’, run forward in a line toward the H. It was rather unimpressed. Harvard, on the other hand, built a structure resembling a bulldog (Yale’s mascot), which they brought out. The people inside then proceeded to burst out and hack the structure to shreds. That was a little better, but fortunately, the actual game was interesting, so we didn’t have to rely too heavily on halftime for entertainment. There are also pictures of the tailgate before the game. It was much more pleasant than the one last year – there was a lot more space and a lot more food, and I wasn’t afraid of getting trampled.

            Anyway, the best part of the weekend was our Under Water concert between our group, Under Construction, and Yale’s group, Living Water. We each sang about five songs, which for us included a Christmas carol arrangement we’d only had a week to learn. But everything went fine; Yale sounded great; I thought we sounded good. Afterwards we went to the official Harvard party for the night before the game. I ducked out of that early, too, but it was a good time.

            Why did I keep ducking out early? Partly because I haven’t gotten much sleep lately, and partly because I needed to work on my take-home physics exam, which had its deadline extended until Monday afternoon. It was tedious, but I finished it – I repeat, I finished my last physics take-home exam (hopefully) ever! Now all we have to do is finish our physics projects, and we’ll be good to go.

            And last but not least, the news closest to my thoughts right now – I’m sick. I started feeling bad over the weekend, and Sunday night things started getting a lot worse. I still went to PT on Monday morning – lack of sleep and being in the cold rain for an hour weren’t helpful – and then sent my Arabic teacher an apology and slept instead of going to my morning class. Things were better in the afternoon, but I woke up this morning still worse. Hopefully I’ll be better in time for Thanksgiving. It seems, though, like everyone is getting sick around now; everyone’s energy is running out.

            Whether or not I get better, though, I’m happy to be going home. I’ll let you know how the break goes, but until then, all the best, and Happy Thanksgiving!

Hobbits, Hebrew, and Harvard-Yale

                There are eight days left until Thanksgiving break; I have the exact countdown on my phone. This is, in fact, the last full week of school before Thanksgiving, and when I post again, it will be on the last day of this section of the semester.

                Of course, Thanksgiving doesn’t mean that the semester’s over, but you must realize that we’ve only had one holiday in the entirety of the rest of the semester. A five-day weekend sounds pretty good. Besides which, when we get back from Thanksgiving, there’s only one more week of classes before Reading Period and finals, so the bulk of the semester is for all practical purposes finished a week from today.

                Of course, there is still a lot to do. There are papers to write, projects to finish, and exams to prepare for, on top of the normal work that’s still coming. The fact that we’re close to the end means I have less and less motivation to work; I still get things done, but I’m increasingly distracted by things like sleep and TV. I did watch the second two Lord of the Rings movies for the first time over the weekend. I didn’t get as much work done as I would have liked, but I was glad I finally saw them.

                There is a definite psychological effect to the early sunset here. The sun has started setting by 3:30-ish, and the official sunset is shortly after 4:00. By the time I get out of class, it will be dark. I will either go and sit in one of the libraries, with the artificial lighting reminding me I’m stuck inside, or I will go to my room, where my window will remind me that the lighting would be perfect for sleeping if I’d just flick the light switch off. Either way, I won’t want to work. Everything was amplified by the rain yesterday, although I did manage to get something done.

                Not that I haven’t been doing a lot of things besides studying. On Saturday we had the Marine Corps Birthday Ball, which went nicely. I helped with set-up and check-in, so I was helping out starting around 4:30, and dinner ended up being a little late – 10:30 pm late – so I went ahead and left after the formal part of the evening, but it was good to see everyone in a social capacity.

                Also, this weekend is The Game – Harvard vs. Yale – and I got my free ticket yesterday, so that’s exciting. It also means that in a cappella we are preparing for our joint Harvard-Yale concert – Yale is coming to Harvard this year, so we don’t have to travel; we just have to host. We’re also learning some Christmas songs for caroling a little later in the year, which is exciting. Speaking of which, the feeling of Christmas is definitely in the air around now. Carols are stuck in my head, the store windows are decorated, and everyone’s finally capitulated and started wearing heavy coats and boots.

                Yesterday was a busy day as well; I went to the Hebrew department’s dinner, where I had pita and falafel for the first time since this summer, and listened to a speaker on Israeli music. The falafel wasn’t as good as in Jordan, but I definitely enjoyed dinner more than I did last semester, when I couldn’t enjoy it at all. In addition, this year, when people spoke Arabic as well as Hebrew, I could still make out some of what they were saying.

                Also this week in the Hebrew department, we had two screenwriter/directors come and talk with us about their work. We’d watched movies from both of them in class, and both of them graciously agreed to come talk (on different days) and answer questions about their films. It was very interesting to hear what they had to say, although when I tried to introduce myself I kept accidentally switching to Arabic instead of Hebrew.

                As you can see from the last few jam-packed paragraphs, there’s a lot still going on; college doesn’t stagnate like elementary or high school around the end of the semester, where everyone reviews and has parties and whiles away the time. There’s still a lot to be done, although I will say we do a lot more whiling than usual around this time of year. It’s strange to think that I only have about three weeks left at Harvard before I leave – not just for Winter Break, but for next semester and summer as well; I won’t be back until next August.

                This is the last lap of the semester before the final burst of energy to help me down the final stretch. I’m not sprinting yet; I’m still jogging. But I can already see the finish line.

Sailing and Next Semester

            It seems like, as time goes on, the days get longer and the weeks get shorter. I’m getting plenty of sleep, but it’s getting increasingly more difficult to get myself out of bed in the morning – not from depression; just from indolence. However, despite that, last week was a fairly eventful week, so I will deviate from my countdown of the days until break to fill you in.

            First things first: concert videos are here! I’m posting the link at the bottom of this page, so you can watch them at your leisure. Enjoy! Also, while on the subject of good news, I was quite worried about my physics grade for a while last week. Harvard factoid: we have no way of tracking our grades – sometimes the teachers even refuse to give out overall grades until the end of the semester. However, I did end up crunching the numbers, and it turns out I’m doing much better in physics than I thought, so that was encouraging.

            Another bit of welcome news: I was accepted into my study abroad program for next semester! I didn’t want to mention it on here until I got In, but it’s official – I’ll be spending next semester in Jerusalem, barring any unexpected obstacles, and studying at the Rothberg Institute at Hebrew University. I’ll have more information on that as it gets closer to time to leave.

            For now, though, there are still plenty of things happening here in Massachusetts. Speaking of Hebrew, my Hebrew class attended a film screening on Thursday night for an Israeli TV series that’s being remade in the US. It was very good; I haven’t been able to find it online, but in the process of looking for it, I stumbled over several other TV shows in Hebrew that I’m excited about watching when I get time.

            Not that I’m terribly busy at the moment. I spent the weekend browsing through a bunch of Spanish, Hebrew, and Arabic films on Netflix, along with having a few American films thrown in. It wasn’t all that productive of a day, but I did get some foreign language study in, and I did all the work that needed to be done. The fact that MIT got Monday and Tuesday of this week off for Veterans’ Day meant that I didn’t have PT Monday morning, which helped. Over the weekend I also finished the 600-page novel I bought as a stress-reliever earlier in the week. I haven’t finished a book in a long time; it was a good feeling.

            Also this weekend, I picked up another activity that I haven’t done in a while: sailing. ROTC had a mini-regatta this past Saturday for Midshipmen in our company. We sailed for a while, to practice, and then we ate grilled hamburgers and hot dogs, and then we went out and actually raced. The first time, my boat came in last, since neither I nor my partner remembered much about sailing. However, we moved up a place each time, so we considered ourselves as receiving the award for most improvement at the end.

            Sailing, I found, can be a source of life lessons. For instance, in sailing, the tighter you make your sail, the more control the wind has over your boat, which is to say that a tight sail is good if you want speed and bad if you’re about to tip over; those two have to be balanced. Furthermore, the thing to always remember is that, if your boat is about to tip, one of the best things to do is to let the sail out; the effect is noticeable and immediate.

            However, letting the sail out is very unintuitive for me when the boat is starting to tilt. The more we start to lean, the more I want to pull tight, to hold everything in and have control. Which of course, only makes things worse. By the end of the day, I’d learned that sometimes the best thing to do is to calm down and just give up some of that control. Sometimes that works in life, too – what I think I need to do to make sure things are running smoothly only makes them worse, and it’s better if I just sit back for a while and let the wind take me where it will without worrying so much.

            I hope everyone had a wonderful Veterans’ Day, and I hope you have some free time to watch the concert at the link below. You can also find us on facebook at the second link. Until next week!

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLChmBxANRX4JNYX6VQ7kg-kTzAoxeBtvJ

https://www.facebook.com/underconst

First Snow and Fighting Through

            Welcome to November, everyone! It’s finally gotten cold – we had our first snowfall this past Sunday, one I walked through on my way to church. It wasn’t much, but it was definitely snow, and I finally broke out the winter coat and boots. They served me well. It’s been pretty cold this week in general – it got down to freezing a couple of times. We’ve all taken to wearing our heavy-duty coats outside even when it’s not precipitating.

            Church itself was nice as well – the sermon was on Luke 2, which meant it was both a fresh look at a passage one normally only hears at Christmas time, and it brought back some pleasant memories, as does the Christmas music that has begun to float around campus. And for me, cold weather means Christmas must be close, so it’s almost time to start getting excited.

            Speaking of excitement, the main thing that happened this past weekend was my UC a cappella concert. Hopefully the recordings we made will be put together more quickly than they were last year, and I’ll be able to post the link. The concert went well, everyone did great on their solos and in the block, and we had a lot of fun. We also came together as a group, especially at the last few rehearsals.

            The last rehearsal before a concert is always a little special. We rehearse for as long as it takes, which usually means around 4-5 hours, and in the middle we stop when some of our alumni (read “old friends”) show up with pizza to help us celebrate. At the end of our time, we do “reconciliation”, when people can get together and work out any problems that might have built up over the years, so that we can go into the concert unified. I didn’t get to bed until around one-thirty Friday morning, and I had to sleep over with a friend from UC, since I had ROTC, but it was the happiest I’d been in a while.

            So that was the weekend; it was pretty busy, but it came between two particularly calm weeks, relatively speaking, so everything worked out. I have things scheduled for practically every weekend between now and Thanksgiving, but thankfully (no pun intended) there aren’t that many weeks left. I wake myself up nearly every morning by counting down the days. This has been a particularly difficult semester for me – not overwhelming, most of the time, but definitely draining. I’m burning out.

            Not in a dramatic sense, though. It’s like the battery in my laptop, that still lets me work without a problem, but drains power more and more quickly every time I use it and nearly constantly needs to be charged. Eventually it’s going to be used up. Eventually I’m going to be used up. But I’m fairly certain we both have enough juice left to get us through the rest of this semester.

            Yesterday things came to a head around 5:00. I was sitting in Widener stacks trying to do Arabic. The lights in the stacks are on motion sensors, so if you sit for long enough they all turn off, and that combined with time change left me sitting in relative darkness by 4:30. I couldn’t work. I’m not sure how many things caused the feeling in me, but after a while I found that, even having done very little, I just couldn’t bring myself to keep working. It’s hard to describe the feeling – I just had to get out of there.

            The dining halls open around five, so I headed down to get dinner en lou of finishing my work. On the way, though, I allowed myself to be sidetracked into a bookstore. It was a very good decision. I went from the cold white walls and metal shelves of the stacks to wooden bookshelves in a warm basement with jazz playing softly in the background, and I could feel myself physically and mentally thawing, regrouping, unbending.

            I browsed for a while and bought a five-dollar action novel, the first fiction I’ve read in quite a while just for the sake of reading, and then went to the dining hall, had dinner and a hot cup of tea, and just read for a while. It was much better than trying to cheer myself up with comfort food, and afterwards I found a comfy, wood-paneled, living-room resembling study room to finish my Arabic in. The assignment was much easier than it had looked.

            So that’s my life right now – I’m tired, and I’m losing motivation, but last night I snuggled under the covers with a novel, the way I haven’t in a long time, and I’ll make it through the rest of the semester. I’m worn out but still functional. And in three weeks, I’m going home!