Aurora Borealis

I've travelled a lot in my nineteen years, but I haven't seen one thing I'd really really like to see.

I want to see the Northern Lights.

I've wanted to see them since I read Philip Pullman's incredible novel "The Golden Compass" as a child (and its subsequent sequels, "The Subtle Knife" and "The Amber Spyglass") - I've wanted to ever since I read out loud to my little sister from Jan Brett's picture book "Who's that Knocking on Christmas Eve?"

"High above the arctic circle in the land of ice and snow, the northern lights shimmer in the night like a curtain of color hanging from the sky," it reads.  

I have not been to Norway, or to Iceland, or to Sweden.  I have been to Denmark, but only in high summer when the bright Northern sky was bluer than anything I've ever seen; I have been to Montréal in the winter but the aurora never appeared.  

In the newest issue of the National Geographic, there is an article about solar storms - and one of the side effects of these huge solar storms is the aurora borealis coming as far south as Hawaii and Panama (well, once).  And it is the most selfish, but I would so love to see the northern lights - perhaps not enough to wish the kind of mass electrical outages on the world that come with such storms, but enough to at least think about it.

Have you ever seen the aurora?  Do you want to?

(photo)

Exam Week

It has been gorgeous in Portland for the last three days.  Chilly mornings give way to beautiful bright afternoons at about eighty degrees (F), the sun dappling through the leaves.  This makes it very hard to study, but I've been doing my best.  Biology is tomorrow afternoon, and then I'm done!
Exam week is always kind of strange for me, a liminal space between classes and leaving.  You still see your friends, though not as much - the girl you eat breakfast with every morning suddenly isn't up when you are - you sleep in or have an exam at eight; she does the same on different days.  Midnight Breakfast screws up your dining schedule so that you're not in Commons at noon with your friends.  People pack up and leave.  It's a period that feels transient, strange, lonely but also full of community, and on top of it, you have exams.
For those of you also in exams, good luck!
For those of you who aren't, have a lovely day!

The College Student's Guide to Surviving Reading Week

Hi guys -
It's been a while, but it's also the middle of Reading Week at Reed College, that lovely week when the library is open 24 hours a day, when you can't get "Eye of the Tiger" out of your head, and your dormies play really really loud music all night to help them stay up and study.  You can do what I did and get the hell out of Dodge and go stay with family for a bit, or you can brave the review sessions, Stim Table, and the inherent stress.
So, here are my tips.
1) DO NOT put liquid caffeine in your coffee (I'm talking to you, random girl on Wednesday).  Seriously.  The liquid caffeine that they offer up at Stim Table in the library lobby is super strong (like, a teaspoon equals a cup of coffee) and you don't need to mix it with coffee.
2) Sleep. Seriously.  Sleep is good; sleep makes your life a little bit easier, sleep means that you won't be tearing your hair out at four in the morning because you don't remember what mesoderm is.
3) While I am totally not condoning this for your only sustenance for the next week, chocolate-covered espresso beans are delicious, and dark chocolate has all sorts of antioxidants, okay?
4) If you're like me, and classical music helps you study, I highly recommend the Bach cello suites for the soothing, going-through-all-the-bio-notes studying.  And Beethoven's 5th and 9th symphonies for pump-up, going-to-get-everything-done studying.
5) Your friends are there for you.  You are there for them.  They're pretty excellent, I promise.
6) And if you're in Portland, the poutine food cart on Hawthorne is open really late.
Good luck!

A little stressed

End of term here is stressful.  More so than last term - I'm not entirely sure why, but this time around everything seems a bit more final, and everything is creeping up at exactly the same time.  A week from tomorrow the three-day end-of-year festival that is Renn Fayre starts (it'll be my first one!) and until then my life is PACKED.
It's okay, though.  All the work I'm doing - my ten-page humanities research paper on faith in Mark and Corinthians, playing the piano for a friend's composition in his final concert, the Mozart Requiem, the biology midterm - all of this is work I'm excited for.  Well, maybe not the bio midterm, but the rest.  I love the singing, the playing music in front of people is totally nerve-wracking, and the paper makes me think critically about Christianity and religion and history in a way that I find very valuable.
I know I haven't been posting much at all this term, and I'm really really sorry, but I promise that is going to change soon.  Reading week is coming up, and in between Seneca and Molière, I will find time to post.  Until then, thank you, and please be patient with me.
Love,
Me.

How Unexpected Classes Change Your Life

Today I registered for my sophomore year classes and changed my advisor.  These weren't the classes I thought I would take when I came to Reed; they weren't the classes I thought I would take in January.  I was a history-literature prospective major when I entered Reed; I flirted with French and English and Comp Lit (well, General Lit, which is as close as Reed comes).
I suppose I can blame (or thank) my friend Esther for what happened next, for taking me with her to go talk to the incredible Virginia Hancock about signing up for a JS Bach class.  And that class - that intimidating 300-level music class that I was barely qualified for (the prerequisite was sophomore standing) - changed the way I thought about college.
I love my other classes.  I love humanities and French and sometimes I even love bio.  But I am impatient for Tuesdays and Thursdays for the rest of the week.  Even today, I can't wait for one-ten to roll around so I can climb the stairs to the third floor of Eliot and talk about the B Minor Mass.  I love Ginny's teaching, I love the conversations we have, I love that my homework is listening to music and writing about it.
I have always loved music, but somehow in college that love got a little more serious.  I listened to a recording of Shostakovich's Eighth String Quartet with a friend and fell head-over-heels for 20th century composers.  I sat down at the piano on school breaks and late at night in Prexy and labored over Chopin and scales.  I went to every symphony concert I could.
So now I may be a prospective music major.  Maybe English still; I don't know for sure.  What I do know is that all of my classes for next year are classes I can't wait to go to - classes that will have me dancing out of them for joy, classes that require one to go see "Don Giovanni" and read about the history of Argentine Tango.
So, um, thank you, Esther.
And to those of you who are going to be in college next year for the first time - take classes that you don't expect.  It's exhilarating and you may find the thing you love best.

Thesis Trees

At Reed College, the cherry trees are in bloom.  They arch over Eliot Circle and are dense and flowering enough so that you only see portions of the sky when you stand directly below (the photo is from a couple days ago).  Walking from Commons to Vollum (the lecture hall) to learn about the Aeneid and to discuss Baudelaire is pretty incredible.
In between all of the work, in between the paper on French poetry and the six books of reading and all three hours of Bach's St Matthew's Passion, between the crossword with my friends and playing the piano and living my pretty excellent life of intellectual inquiry, I get to walk beneath those trees and think about it.  I live here.  I am so lucky to be here.


(photo by the lovely Alexandra, who visited me over the weekend)

Happy Birthday, Mike!

If you've been reading for a while, you know who Mike is - one of my best friends from high school, super-smart, pretty incredible....
And he is twenty years old today!  Or, I guess, one day older than he was yesterday...
I get to see him later today, so that will be lovely, and until then, happy birthday, Mike!