Hawt.
Today, at the suggestion of my friends Christina and Debbie, I went to a Bikram yoga class at Bikram Yoga Evanston. Bikram yoga is 26 poses and 2 breathing exercises practiced in a 105 degree 40% humidity room for 90 minutes. I was fairly apprehensive about it because I had heard it was really hard, and the BYE website is pretty intense. So I get there, pay, introduce myself to the instructor, change into my relatively modest yoga outfit (a tank top and running shorts), and then head into the actual yoga room and immediately start sweating like crazy. I think I had a slight advantage being from St. Louis, where 105 degrees and 40% humidity is an average summer day, but still, it was really hot. The class itself was hard because of the heat, obviously, but the positions themselves weren’t particularly hard, and the time actually passed fairly quickly. The instructor was kind of a stereotypical yoga crazy yoga dude. The only difference is, instead of being like calm and meditative, he talked constantly, which he said (and I believe) was because as soon as he stopped talking and gave you a second to think, you wanted to relax and get a drink of water (which isn’t encouraged unless you really need it). He was also kind of a weird ADD mix of good cop and bad forth. He’d go back and forth between telling us anything but excellence was unacceptable and telling us how awesome and wonderful we were. Overall, I really liked it and felt really great afterwards (There could not possibly be any toxins I did not sweat out, and it burns over 1,000 calories). I sometimes like the solitary feeling of going to the gym and being in your own world with some Lady Gaga, but generally I’d rather be in a group and feeling accountable to someone other than myself. Sports is definitely like that, and a class is close. I would definitely recommend trying it at least once.
Not Just Another Movie About Stealing Resources From People Who Wear Loincloths
I just saw Avatar for the second time, and it was awesome again (if the fact that I’ve spent a total of $30 dollars on this movie didn’t prove that). As pretty much everyone I’ve talked to has said, the plot was pretty standard (think Pocahontas, Fern Gully, Dances with Wolves, etc.), but it’s so visually awesome that it doesn’t even matter. I’ve only seen it in XD, so I can’t say for sure, but I’m pretty sure that’ the only way to go. The one plot thing that I have been thinking about is.. is there any other movie where in the final like climactic battle all you can think is.. kill the humans. All of them. I can’t think of one. Kill all the aliens, or the colonists, or the oil company employees, sure, but at the end of Avatar I highly doubt anyone in the theater was cheering for anyone besides the Na’vi and the Avatars. But anyway, it was an excellent movie, everyone should see it in at least 3D if not XD.
1. Did everyone see Jersey Shore last night? If you didn’t…. get thee to a nunnery!
2. We’ve fallen down the rabbit hole of inner and outer.
3. I feel like if I just find the right metaphor this will be clear. Sex and gender are like… a honeycomb? Maybe?… No.
”Italia, ti manco
Up at 3am trying to write a paper on two days of very little sleep… this is what I did not miss about Northwestern.
Real Grown-ups
My roommates and I are pretty much completely settled into our apartment (and its below-mentioned oddities), and I’m not gonna lie, it’s pretty awesome. Saturday night my roommate Laura and I made a really delicious dinner, which prompted on of my friends from Italy to say, “It’s like you’re real grown ups now.” So here are some pictures to prove it.
Roommates: Laura, Lee, and Eric and Eric’s girlfriend Jenny.
Candlelit dinner: Lasagna, salad, garlic bread, and wine.
?
Our apartment is an anthropological treasure trove. Literally everywhere you look you find something that begs the question “why would anyone do that?”
Examples:
Supergluing a full-length mirror to the back of a door.
Putting 2 outlets in every room of the house except for the bedroom that’s slightly larger than the pantry, which has 6.
Strange.
Back to School!
I’m finally back in Evanston, where it is a surprisingly toasty 18 degrees. I moved into my apartment on saturday and started classes on monday. To start the quarter off, here is one or two interesting facts from each of my first classes.
Medieval Literature: Paganism and Christianity- The names for our days of the week come from germanic gods, and the french, italian, spanish, latin days of the week are named for equivalent roman gods.
Queer Cinema: In many parts of the world, being an out, active, social gay person is almost impossible without learning english.
Human Sexuality- This really doesn’t apply to humans, but the more mates males of a species have, the greater the size difference between males and females (ex: male elephant seals are huge compared to females, but lions who are more towards the middle of the spectrum are closer in size). Monogamous species are roughly the same size (ex: penguins).
Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury- We mostly went over the syllabus in this class, but I learned that grad students can take undergrad classes, John Maynard Keynes and Virginia Woolf were bffs, and there are business majors at northwestern who don’t know who Keynes is.
On a really nerdy note, I think it’s really exciting to get to the level in school where there are no more concrete answers and professors trust you to just kind of run wild. I don’t know what the opposite of patronizing is in this sense, but in my experience, that’s what Northwestern professors are. They are, for the most part completely brilliant and expect students to be equally brilliant, which is both great and intimidating at the same time, but mostly great.
Last Days in Italy Part 4: Cultural Findings
I’m back in Evanston, and I think I need to wrap up this story before I completely kill it (if I haven’t already), so here are some funny “snidbits,” as my sister would call them, of italian culture.
1) Correction: I said earlier that my roommate was always using the hand gesture for “you’re busting my balls.” Not true. She was using the Sicilian hand gesture for “you’re busting my balls.” Northern Italy, and the Veneto in particular, have not only a separate dialect, but also a separate, but equally extensive, vocabulary of hand gestures. Apparently, in northern Italy, the same hand motion means “che palle,” or, “what balls!” Which roughly translates to the english phrase “what a drag” ( you can infer the connection yourselves), and is used when something is excessively boring or irritating. Below is a youtube video that explains “Che palle” and other useful and obscene phrases. The only difference is, Italians rarely say the words along with the gesture (because that would be redundant and not at all helpful to non-native speakers).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVCuyrPk7P4
2) A new kind of adventure in Italian cuisine: I tried all kinds of new and interesting foods in Italy (including wild boar, a tuscan specialty, pigeon, and about everything that can be made from a pumpkin with the exception of pie), but my most interesting italian meal was on my second day in the hospital. I had gotten to the ER around 5 and waited til 9, missing dinner, then been transported to a different hospital in the morning, skipping breakfast, so by lunch time I was starving. I got a sheet with different food choices, and without consulting a dictionary, picked some kind of chicken and some kind of vegetable. As it turns out, I picked chicken and vegetables “frullato,” which means… ground into an amorphous blob that’s easier for people with no teeth to eat. Not one of the first words one learns in college italian. Oops. So I tried to eat it with bread, but it was as disgusting as it sounded so I just gave up and waited til dinner.
3) Throughout the semester I had a lot of small, language-related revelations. For instance, “farfalle” means butterfly -> farfalle pasta. Cavatappi means corkscrew -> cavatappi pasta, etc. Finally, while I was talking to Elisa in the hospital, I was able to do the same thing to her. We had been talking about American doctor shows, which they watch, and scrubs in particular, and then we moved on to her trip America. She said she thought is was strange that American doctors wear what she called a sweatsuit outside of the hospital, and then asked what you call the things doctors wear. I told her they were called scrubs and it immediately clicked that that was the name of the tv show. You might have had to be there, but if you were, it was funny.
The End.
