Verbal Snippets & Snapshots

After a pleasant two-week vacation at home, I returned to Hopkins on Tuesday, January 2, since the first day of Intersession was Wednesday, January 3. Intersession is a three-week period between the fall and spring semesters in which students are allowed to do anything legal on or off campus. I’ve chosen to take advantage of what Hopkins has to offer on campus for this year’s Intersession, and my main activities are (1) taking “Power, Glory, and Gladiators,” a one-credit, satisfactory/unsatisfactory course offered by the Department of Classics; (2) taking “Noir,” a one-credit, satisfactory/unsatisfactory course that’s cross-listed with both the Department of English and the Program in Film and Media Studies; (3) taking a non-credit, recreational ballroom dancing class; (4) working at the Hopkins undergraduate admissions office (i.e., filing applications, supplements, et cetera); and (5) filling my free time in various ways.

“Power, Glory, and Gladiators” is a very enjoyable course! While each class is a dry lecture accompanied by slide shows of images, the topics covered in each class are fascinating. Gladiator fights? Military triumphs? Other types of spectacles during the late Roman Republic and the early Roman Empire? Fantastic. Meanwhile, in each class for “Noir,” we either talk about a piece of hardboiled fiction or watch a film noir and discuss it once we’re done watching it. So far, we’ve read an excerpt of the novel The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett and the entire novel The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler; we’ve also watched the films The Maltese Falcon (i.e., the 1941 version starring Humphrey Bogart) and Double Indemnity. The non-credit ballroom dancing class has been okay. Most people registered for it with partners, so JHU_Roxi, one of my female housemates, and I, who registered for the class without partners, have often ended up dancing with each other or by ourselves. While people are supposed to switch dance partners every few minutes in each class, most people stick with the partners with whom they registered, which is why the three of us have danced by with each other or by ourselves often. Sometimes, we dance with other girls who don’t have partners. Occasionally, we dance with guys who are willing to cooperate with the partner-switching rule, or we convince our guy friends to come to a ballroom dancing class with us and be our partners for that class. Nonetheless, we’ve danced with other girls more often than with guys, so we’ve often had to learn both guys’ steps and girls’ steps.  Learning two sets of steps is confusing sometimes, although knowing both guys’ steps and girls’ steps is quite handy.

Despite my academic courses, ballroom dancing class, and job, I still have plenty of free time! I’ve spent much of this free time hanging out with my housemates, since about half the members of my house are on campus for Intersession. Ah, that reminds me of a joke that my housemate Mariadina said one night when a few of my housemates and I were eating dinner at the FFC. Question: What is the integral of 1/house? Answer: A wooden boat house! Why? The integral of 1/house is the natural log of house plus sea! (In symbols, ln (house) + c) Besides eating meals together, my housemates and I have often hung out in each other’s rooms, either chatting or watching DVDs. One night, a few of us watched Gladiator. My housemate Parker–who’s one of my classmates in “Power, Glory, and Gladiators”–and I had a fun time watching it in light of what we had learned in class.

Two particularly memorable moments that I’ve had with my housemates during Intersession are (1) my dinner with three of my housemates at Sascha’s 527 Café at Mount Vernon (i.e., the neighborhood in Baltimore where the Peabody Institute is located, not George Washington’s estate in Virginia) and (2) a night of frolicking and mud wrestling in the rain with five of my female housemates. (By the way, I also went to Sascha’s 527 Café with another group of college students–including Roxi from SAAB–exactly one week after I had gone there with my housemates; it’s such a good restaurant that I didn’t mind going there twice in eight days!) Meanwhile, the night of frolicking and mud wrestling in the rain was quite fun in a childish way, and after the six of us girls finished playing outside, we continued our female bonding by rinsing our clothes in the bathroom and then watching a DVD of the movie The Fight Club. Embedded in this paragraph is a photo of a bathroom sink filled with muddy water and a piece of clothing belonging to one of my housemates after she rinsed it.

While I’m not using my Intersession as pure vacation time at home, my classes, job, and out-of-class adventures have been so enjoyable that being on campus for Intersession already seems like a vacation compared to the fall semester!

N.B. I found the photos of movie posters via Google Image Search. Meanwhile, the photo of muddy water and clothing in a sink is one that I took with my own camera–whee!