Plays, Papers, and Student Protests

About mid-afternoon yesterday I remembered I had a short paper due the next day (this morning).  That's pretty much how my life has been going for the past week.  I've been trying to get ahead or at least stay on top of things so I can have fun traveling when Mom, Dad, Mom-Mom, Gramps, and Aunt Diane get here next week.  Coincidentally there trip corresponds with reading week here at Trinity so I won't have class.  However, my final paper for my history class is due the Monday after reading week, so I've been trying to use my time wisely and get ahead.  Unfortunately, I'm barely able to keep up.  Truthfully, I'm not even that far along.

For my history class especially there's always a lot of reading and none of it is mandatory. You're just supposed to read enough until you feel you have a comfortable grounding in the subject and the historiographical background to it.  Needless to say this is somewhat beyond me. Our course covers such a broad spectrum of countries and topics it's difficult to keep track of it.  It doesn't help that our tutorials (weekly discussion sections lead by TAs) don't cover the same material as the lectures.  I have so much more free time here than I do at Georgetown, but I'm just not great at using it well.  It's nice to get so much sleep for the first time in my life and just to relax in my little cinder-block jail cell of a room.

I don't mean to worry anyone, it's not as though I'm completely floundering.  My grades here don't matter so long as I pass and you aren't actually graded on anything other than the final essay.  (I got my grades back from SSP and it turns out I did really well.)  I just feel perpetually behind in my history class and without the means to catch up.  That's not exactly true since I definitely do have the means, it just seems something else always gets in the way.  Maybe I'm just being moody.  Someone spilled their coffee on me at this pointless English department meeting today.

Anyway, so to get back to something of a point, I turned in my first (still doesn't count for a grade) paper this morning via email (who'd ever imagine Trinity could be so up with technology?).  The problem was that yesterday afternoon I was going to be a really good student and get all my work square away.  This of course didn't happened when I remembered at lunch that I had this paper due.  Plus I went to see a play last night at the Abbey.

The play was John Gabriel Borkman, an adaptation of a Swedish play set about the late 19th, early 20th century about a banker (Alan Rickman), his wife (Fiona Shaw), his mistress/her twin sister (creepy!!) (Lindsay Duncan).  It was a lot of talking and a tragic play, but really well performed by Shaw and Duncan.  Rickman had some pretty funny lines, but I think he must have been having an off day because his performance wasn't as amazing as I'd expected.  But perhaps my expectations were too high.  At any rate, I was there with four other Georgetown students and enjoyed the show.  The set was really cool and they used shoveled snow to demonstrate changed settings between different rooms in a house.  It was very much as one of my friends described it: Snape's unhappy marriage to Aunt Petunia.

After the show, we'd heard Alan Rickman and Fiona Shaw have drinks at the bar upstairs but for some reason they weren't being very social last night.  We waited and eventually when they left managed to snag their autographs, and had a really nice time just hanging out with each other.  I tried to explain the Rent is Too Damn High party.  Alan Rickman and Fiona Shaw were really nice about signing our tickets and I felt a bit bad about keeping them even though it was for less than five minutes.

That brings my long, rambling post to today. (Sorry about the length.)  Today there was a student protest this afternoon against legislation that would double registration fees to 3000 euro per year.  It's pretty cool that the student body is so organized and able to rally around a cause like that together.  I doubt it will have much of an effect, but they had matching t-shirts and made a pretty big display in/along the streets for a few hours.  Nothing violent like in France, but really well put together.  I think it's really nice that the registration fees are/were so low.  I wish it was like that at home so anyone could go to any school without worrying about cost and based on their intellectual ability.

So that's been my day in a nutshell.  Coffee spilled on my new jacket and now I'm heading back to the library to be proactive and get things done.

PS.  Yesterday before the show, I put a dozen post cards in a mailbox, so expect something about ten day from now!!