Haruspex Games

Again, I haven’t really been up to a huge amount this week, so I’ll keep it short for now. I was going to go to Baltimore and Annapolis yesterday on a trip with the Office of International Studies. I got pretty badly ill in the morning, and I couldn’t really go. Hopefully I’ll have enough free time to get a bus to Baltimore and look around some time very soon. My exams are finished for now, and I can tell I’m at the tipping point with my workload; just a few more productive days and I’ll be able to justify giving myself more free time to explore D.C. and further afield. I might be able to even go to New York next weekend at some point.

I’m much better today, thanks for the concern. So luckily I felt up for going to look at Latin and Ballroom dancing shoes with BAM (Ballroom at Maryland). They were pretty darn expensive, but I’ll be using them a lot (there’s the competition at our University on the 6th and 7th of November, as well as one a fortnight later in Ohio I’m going to sign up to, and a final one for the semester in New York at some point). They’re very nice, and I wore them for the latin workshop earlier this evening. I took a picture of them, but I’m not really sure why. Maybe because I really do like them. They certainly make dancing a lot easier. In today’s workshop we focused on Jive, and though it was pretty daunting we made a lot of progress. Jive is tiring, but a lot of fun once you have a bit of an idea what your feet are meant to be doing. I went into this whole dancing thing thinking it would be a useful skill to pick up, and to force myself to do something I’m not wholly comfortable with. I didn’t really imagine myself getting into it in such a big way. Of course, I didn’t expect to actively dislike it; it’s just that I didn’t really expect it to be just as much fun as it’s turning out to be.

Other than that, well, there’s not much else to really talk about. Unless you want me to start talking about what I’ve actually been doing this week, which is philosophy. I won’t talk about that, unless, of course, you want me to. Imre Lakatos’ views on scientific research programmes are pretty interesting. They’re certainly a lot more convincing than Paul Feyerabend’s strange, almost iconoclastic, arguments concerning the nature of science as an institution.  Okay, I won’t talk about that. I suppose I’ll leave it off with a few pictures I took a while back of my flat, as well as a picture of my brand shiny new shoes:

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Not really got any recommendations for new music this week. Just got Sufjan Stevens’ The Age of Adz, which I’ve been waiting for for about four years now. I need to give it a couple more listens before I recommend it to anyone though. I’ve been listening to a lot of Pulp this week though, Good old Pulp.

It’s been a fair while since I last posted any updates here. Last time I left off just before going to a party. Let’s not talk about that party. It was not big and it wasn’t clever. There was a watermelon. Let’s not talk about that watermelon. Let’s have a moratorium on talking about watermelons.

I’ve not written anything here for the last few weeks because I’ve been pretty busy with work. I’m just finishing my first set of midterms, and I had to do a lot of reading and revision to make sure I was ready. I worked out that altogther this set of exams is worth a total of 10% of my total marks for this year. They’ve gone well, or at least far better than I thought they would. Most of my work was focused on Symbolic Logic, and though at first I was convinced I just wasn’t smart enough to understand it all, it turns out that like with philosophy in general, half the time you think something’s going above your head it’s simply because the person writing it is being needlessly vague, or assuming a level of knowledge they haven’t stated you’ll need. Most of the time in philosophy, in fact, any problem of understanding is the result of the philosopher thinking they’re really clever, and using obfuscating language, or failing to understand the difference between philosophy and literature. As my Philosophy of Science lecturer said; ‘The German Idealists are hard to understand because they’re not actually saying anything‘. In other words, Hegel uses complicated language to mask the fact that he hasn’t got anything important to say; he’s essentially saying ‘blah blah blah’ for three hundred pages.

Sorry, I realise you probably don’t care about the German Idealists. I’ll write a little more about what I’m up to, and I’ll try to avoid talking about philosophy.

So, I’ve joined BAM (Ballroom at Maryland), thinking I’d get outside of my comfort zone (I’m getting into that habit) and go a couple of times a week so I can hopefully something. Somehow I got entered into a competition; as in an inter-University competition. I’m now going four nights a week, and hopefully I won’t make a mess of myself when the competition comes around. I think I’m getting better; at least, I’ve stopped measuring how well I know a specific dance by how few times I crush a girl’s foot. A couple of fridays ago, when I was first entered for this competition in November, and met my partner (who’s very nice) a bunch of newbies and veteran dancers went out to a noodle place. It was a lot of fun. A guy I didn’t know had a go at me for the Indian Mutiny, and then I had a go at him about Manifest Destiny. Afterwards we all went to a dancing event somewhere just outside of college park. We arrived halfway through a dance class, and after that there were a good few hours of music where you could just dance with anyone. It was mostly just us University students and the regulars; local people in their fifties and sixties. I got asked to dance a few times by semi-elderly ladies, and did so. Some of them seemed pretty ecstatic that I was English. And they were all very tolerant of my complete inability to dance. I danced with a few people in my class, slowly worked my way up to moving my feet in a passable manner, and met some pretty cool people. All in all a fun evening, and one that I had no idea I was going to experience when I went to the ballroom class that afternoon.

As I said, I’ve been mostly working this past couple of weeks. But this past saturday I went to a dance at Somerset Hall. It had a DJ, and dancing, and Skittles. We had fun pregaming before the dance (drinking lemonade, 7UP, and mixers), and we had fun afterwards, where I ate a whole heap of egg fried rice and shrimps from a chinese take-away.  The dance itself though, well, it kind of felt like a secondary school disco, only with far more grinding (at least, none of my secondary school discos had grinding). And that grinding was questionable as hell, and mostly one-sided. I sat down with a non-dancing ally, did the cha-cha-cha to a club anthem, and methodically ate all the red Skittles.

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Amiina, an Icelandic string-quartet that works with Sigur Rós a lot, have released their second album. It’s lovely. If you like quiet, slightly slow post-rock music (and honestly, who doesn’t?) then give it a listen. It’s ace.

I’ m currently sitting in my living room watching my flatmate, David, play Pokémon Puzzle League. He’s fighting Mewtwo for what I can only estimate to be the eleventh time today. Yes, it’s almost ten o’clock on a saturday night. No I should not be ashamed. We’re killing time until eleven, when we’re set to go to a party. A party that is, I’m told, pretty great. You have to pay $10 to get in if you want to drink, but I figure I can probably break even if I have a fair amount of alcohol. That is a joke, of course, the drinking age here is 21.

So we’re going to head out soon, and it should be a lot of fun. Earlier today David and I went into D.C. with a few people, and we went first to the Air and Space Museum, and then for dinner in Chinatown. I realised how much fun I am to be around when I started questioning the veracity of the museum’s display on Galileo and the Copernican Revolution. I have just spent the last month studying the Copernican Revolution in my Philosophy of Science class, but that’s not really an excuse. The day in D.C. was great though, and I really should go down next weekend to walk around and see some more things. There’s an exhibition on Rothko at the National Gallery of Art that I’d really like to see, and I’ll probably head down to that next weekend. I’m sure Annie’s probably going to make a smart-alec comment having a go at me for liking Rothko, so I’m going to preempt that right now and say that yes, he does just paint blocks of colour. That doesn’t mean you have to be pretentious to like him, but hey, I suppose it helps.

On wednesday and thursday past the university held their ‘first look fair’, which is where all the university clubs and societies put up a stand and try to get people to join. It was great, although at one point I accidentally walked down the Fraternities & Sororities aisle and spent the next fifteen minutes talking to the head of a fraternity, who wanted me to rush. I would exactly call myself the fraternity type, and I’m only here for a year, so I left, sadly, a non-member of Phi Sigma Kappa. Then I walked past a guy talking to some very disinterested girls at one of the counters. I think he was trying to join their sorority. Not much later, I talked to a bunch of the people heading the society stands, and set myself up to join a fair few. There’s the badminton club, the paintball club, the Weekend Players (they’re a theatre troupe, and you have to audition to get in. I haven’t acted in years, and I’m sure there’s loads of theatre majors there already, so I probably won’t get in, but I’m hoping the audition has me acting as a character with a British accent. If so I at least stand a chance), The Stylus, which is a literary journal (or, if you’re feeling less than pretentious, a magazine where you can read some students writing about feeling alienated), and a couple others I’m not sure if I’m going to pursue or not. There’s another club that I’m definitely joining, which is really quite exciting, but I know Annie will be reading this and, for her at least, it’s a secret, so I can’t mention it.

I said to myself this was going to be a short entry, as I need to go get ready in a bit, so I suppose I’ll wrap this up. David’s still fighting in the Pokémon Puzzle League at the moment. It’s now 10:40.

By the way, the title of this entry comes from a song by a group called Insane Clown Posse. David told me about it a couple of days ago, and now we can’t stop questioning how magnets operate. If you’re not keen on hearing the occasional swear, well, best not to follow this link. It’s delightful. I could write something about every second of this music video, but I think it can speak for itself.

Now I realise most people won’t care, but here goes:

of Montreal released a new album: False Priest. It’s very good, buy it here if you like them, or are confident you will. You can probably listen to it on Spotify as well, but I wouldn’t know because it doesn’t bloody work in America. If you haven’t heard of Montreal and want to get into them I’d recommend Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? Now I know that’s on spotify if you care to listen. Might take a while to get into but once you do it’s definitely worth it.