Everything is building to a whirlwind finale of projects and
papers and having a sore throat and losing my voice before a poetry recitation (here's the one I memorized-- my favorite poem) and watching the Big Bang Theory instead of studying and studying instead of
sleeping and getting driven out of the shower and into the cold night air by a
fire alarm and more studying and eating cookies and peanut butter cups and
pot-stickers and neglecting the laundry and every single upside and downside of
college. What a ride. I cannot believe that, by Wednesday afternoon, I will be
totally finished with all of my classes for my first semester, and exactly one
week from then, finals will be finished and I’ll be flying home for Christmas!
I feel really accomplished, having almost finished my first semester of
college, though I probably shouldn’t feel relieved until I’m actually on the
airplane home. There are too many things to do before then.
The last bit of actual "homework" I have to do is for
astronomy. We only made it about halfway through the Cosmology book, but I’m
planning on reading the rest of it by myself over break because it so
incredibly interesting. So I have a long and difficult worksheet for that class
due Wednesday, and then everything else I have to do comes under the category
of “finals”. First, I have my final project for anthropology, which I am very
excited about. I have been working on my research for it for the last month or
so, and now comes the much-anticipated end product – a 10 page research-based ethnography.
That might sound kind of long for those of you still in high school, but
honestly, I am going to have a problem keeping it that short. My research
focuses on the portrayal of gender in ASMR “whisper” videos on YouTube and how that
creates a culture that can be incorrectly presumed/misunderstood as sexual fetishism. It’s something
that truly fascinates me and I am so excited about it! I am not even going to
try to explain what ASMR videos are here… it’s hard enough to summarize such a
thing even in the four pages of writing I have finished so far. Here’s a link to some more information on it if you’re interested.
I also have to write three final papers for poetry. It
sounds daunting, but two of them are quite short – basically a couple of
paragraphs on one of our own poems and then one of our classmates’ pieces. The
third is a longer one relating a famous quote about poetry to an actual poem.
The rest of my work for the term is studying for my in-class anthropology final
(which is going to be a compilation of short answer questions), studying for my
E&D final (an in-class essay and some short answer questions), studying for
my poetry final (which besides the essays I mentioned seems straightforward
enough) and then studying for the astronomy final. That’s the only one I am
genuinely worried about. The other three I can totally handle! Well, I say that
now… I’ll be able to tell you how they actually went next week.
My Mom came up and visited me over the weekend, which was
really nice. I was a little sick, so we went out for hot drinks whenever we passed
a coffee shop. I can’t even tell you how much tea I have been drinking. The
main reason she came up was to see my Ghanaian Dance performance, which was
totally a blast!!! I loved getting to dress up in costume; the colors of the
fabrics were so beautiful. I don’t have any pictures right now, but hopefully I
will get my hands on some by next week. I can show you this video of Ghanaian dancers that I found on
YouTube though. The costumes are fairly similar and some of the movements are the same as what we would do in class. Everything went
really well at the performance. I would highly recommend taking the class, which counts for a PE credit.
Hope all is well with you! Contact me at jessicakostka@lclark.edu with any
questions.
Jess