No excuses...

Wow. It has been FAR too long since my last entry, and for this I have no excuses. I've just been very, very busy getting back into the whole "school" thing; a month spent mostly just experiencing the culture of a Greek island beach paradise can really mix up your expectations for what school is supposed to be like! I'm sitting here in the library on a SUNDAY and it's like, um, okay, how am I supposed to play soccer and go swimming and go out dancing when I have to spend all my time reading and writing papers! This isn't school!

But seriously. I DO have quite a bit of work to do now; I have 2 papers due two weeks from now (on Nov. 26th), one's a 10 page double-spaced essay for Nicola, my Art and Archaeology professor, and one's an 8 page paper for John Karavas, my Byzantine History professor. We didn't have enough time to do these papers while we were in Athens in September, so now that we're back we have to finish those classes up with these final papers. In addition to those, however, we also have our big capstone paper which we've theoretically been working on this whole semester, but for which both Kugler and Sofia (our Modern Greek Culture professor on Lesbos) have given us so many different descriptions of what they're expecting in this paper and what we should be focusing on that nobody's started writing yet and we're all really stressed out about it. At the beginning of the term, Kugler told us we would be writing a paper on a certain aspect of Greek culture and how it's evolved from the ancient world to the modern one. Then, on Lesbos, Sofia told us that it would be more socio-anthropolgy based, with lots of interviews and fieldwork; very modern-centered. So now we're supposed to be writing a paper on some aspect of Greek culture and how it's evolved from the ancient world to the modern world, somehow integrating 10 subject interviews (I have no idea who to interview, by the way, and neither does anybody else, this is so awkward, only a handful of us have ever taken a sociology class) ... And it's due about a week after the other two are due. Oh, and we've also got Attic Tragedy class, for which we have to write a 9-page term paper, take a midterm exam, produce and perform a 30-minute play and submit a lengthy journal detailing our experiences working on the production. In addition to daily readings of class material, usually a couple of articles and/or a play or two.

SO. That's where my head is right now; somewhere between Aristotle's Constitution of the Athenians (my Nicola paper) and the character of Hecuba 2 in Kassandrama, the avant-garde "theatromontage" my Attic Tragedy professor put together for us to put on. Don't get me wrong though, it hasn't been all work and no play since getting back from Lesbos; we've had a massive, all-school screening of 300 in the auditorium, which was immensely enjoyable, followed by a Q&A on Sparta with a history professor. (Gigantic nerd-fest.) We also had dinner at Ianni's house, with Sofia - it was funny seeing how much Ianni's apartment looks like Hotel Votsa! And we just got back from an overnight trip to Meteora, about 6 hours away, which is this beautiful world of cliffs and hermits' dwelling-caves with all these monasteries overlooking the scenery, it was extremely cool. Two of the monasteries held relics of the bodies of saints, which some of our group found kind of disgusting but others of us found quite intriguing. We also found it interesting that girls had to wear skirts inside the monasteries. So anyway, we're having fun amidst the chaos and stress. Last night some of us went out clubbing in Psirri, a part of Athens that's full of bars and music clubs and all these young people (finally!) and didn't get back until 6 a.m. Now it's 4 p.m. and somehow I have to have written 4 pages by the end of today. That's the goal, at least. More on my oh-so-interesting library life later, I promise! Peace 'n' love...