(no subject)

[bedlamsbard]

So, right now I'm currently in sunny California, a.k.a. Palo Alto, a.k.a. Stanford University, as a resident of the Stanford University EPGY Summer Institutes -- more specifically, Investigations in Humanities: The Classical Era and the Renaissance. Or, as I've explained to friends and teachers, classical and Renaissance lit. Which means there's a lot of reading. No, really -- a lot. Like, tons. Like, three or four hours per day. And a reading journal, which is basically a paragraph or so every day on what we read. We're reading a lot of stuff: parts of The Odyssey, The Aeneid, The Republic of Plato, Dante's Inferno, John Donne, Milton's Paradise Lost, The Bhagavad Gita, Macbeth, The Tempest, Plutarch's Greek Lives: The Life of Alexander...I'm sure I'm forgetting a lot. And we're fitting all of this into three weeks, with a seven to ten page paper due at the end of the course. School just ended!

I'm in a dorm with a bunch of other people -- the other Humanities people (Film is the other group) and the Expository Writing folk. Mostly girls, with about a dozen boys. Actually, I'm not sure how many boys; I never counted. Now, the problem comes with the boys. There are two floors in my dorm: most of the girls are on the first, with about eight on the second. However, although the boys are also on the second floor. And the only second floor bathroom is right outside my room.

Yeah. Guess who gets it? The boys.

The girls' bathroom is downstairs, which means that the upstairs girls have to go downstairs to go to the bathroom or shower. We also have to go down the stairs -- which are outside, with all the boys' windows looking out on the mini-courtyard. Joy. On the other hand? The water pressure in the showers is amazing (my house has basically no water pressure).

Also, yay California and no parents. However, I'm craving chocolate something mad. The dining hall has no desserts. Actually, it doesn't have much variation in food at all, and they're not letting us go anywhere alone for the first couple days. Wah. This could get old fast.

Comments

[mentalhygiene.livejournal.com]

Yay Bedlam!

Enjoy your nerdcamp. I send karma of chocolate in your direction.

(crazy; even CTY got desserts with our food.)

[bedlamsbard.livejournal.com]

Nerd camp involves enormous amounts of reading. And by enormous amounts, I mean well over a hundred pages a night. At least it's good reading!

Yay chocolate! Fortunatley I cleverly discovered the convenience store, which stocks chocolate. *hugs* And the bookstore, which has Stanford gear.

I think there's desserts, I also think I'm just not finding them.

[mentalhygiene.livejournal.com]

I remember that about nerdcamp. Although we were only taking 1 course for 3 weeks and much of it was taking up with class discussion time. (We had a textbook, read a chapter a night, and most of the 5 or so hours a day of class was yakking at each other. Mmm, psychology.) I'm glad you're enjoying it!

(they also didn't let us have internet at the nerdcamp. lucky!)

Stanford gear. How keen. :)

There are probably desserts and it's just some kind of hidden IQ test for you to find them.

[bedlamsbard.livejournal.com]

I'm only taking one course for three weeks too -- class is about three hours a day (9 to 11:30) with another three hours of study hall (12:30 to 3:30). Of course, all class is taken up with discussion and occasional movie watching.

They didn't let us bring our own computers. *sad* But they have to have computers and Internet here because people are busy working on their class projects.

I know. Now I own more college gear than just my Harvard sweatshirt.

I found the desserts! They were in a really obvious place. *ashamed*

[mentalhygiene.livejournal.com]

We had class from 9 to 12 and then 1 to 3, then two sessions of mandatory fun, and then more class (usually study time) from 7 to 9. I think with the internet they were worried we'd do something terrible like bring down the CIA in our spare time. So we had no computers and did any research on print.

I think I should send you a BU hockey t-shirt. ;)

Yay dessert! Sugar = friend of nerd.

[bedlamsbard.livejournal.com]

*shudders at the thought* They tried to show us around one of the Stanford libraries, which managed to confuse the hell out of me; I can't do research without the Internet. They're quite fond of us, I think; we've got a lot of free time (6:30 to 10:00 on weekdays with lights out at 11:00; Sundays we have free, Saturdays we've got field trips to San Francisco and then free time) and can pretty much wander around campus without too much supervision.

BU! Home of such figures as Jack O'Callahan and Mike Eruzione...ooh, hockey. Everyone here is all soccerscoccersoccer! Which is understandable, I suppose.

Sugar = lifeline at nerd camp, especially for someone who has no tea.