Small Things

A few little things that I'm happy about right now...

- the free tickets I got from work for a Fringe play & the fact that Fringe Fest is coming up soon and I should have the money to see a bunch of plays

- getting to talk about the Bible and debate the gospels this week in class (I might even bring my JW Bible in tomorrow)

- Elliot's post about his awesome Folk Fest experiences (I wasn't there myself but its nice to share happiness)

- Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix comes out today (in which Helena Bonham Carter plays Bellatrix Lestrange)

- I've started watching the Godfather movies for the first time ever and so far they're amazing

- I have an overabundance of good books to read (The Man Who Was Thursday; Tender is the Night; The Other Boleyn Girl; I, Claudius)

- tomorrow is my registration day at the UofW and I might sign up for an English class called Fairytales and Culture and possibly another called Art & Ideas

- the"High A" I received on the season-myth/story/research paper that I wrote for my Religious Studies class

I think that last one is the most satisfying for me. For the assignment, we had to write our own myth story on how the seasons came to be. We had to show a "why" for the seasons and we had to back-up our mythology with scholarly, researched footnotes. I didn't have that much trouble coming up with the story but after I'd written it I started to wonder whether I'd really followed the assignment well enough or if I'd gone off on a different track. Plus, I stupidly left the writing of my footnotes until the last minute and then ran out of time to add in all of the great stuff that I'd wanted to say/reference.

Then to make things worse, our prof prefaced the passing out of the papers with this long spiel about how they had found three papers that had been plagiarized and would the people with special notes on their papers please come up and see him after class.

Of course, I hadn't plagiarized anything. But one of my paranoid fears when I write something fictitious is that I'm unintentionally going to rip off something that's been thought of or written already. So when he said that, I started to panic and mentally ran through all of the stuff in my story trying to think of whether I might have subconsciously grabbed ideas from a real myth or from something I'd read. (Gene Wolfe's The Knight was probably my main inspiration in that I went with a medieval-esque setting, but I don't think anyone would ever think my writing was anything like his.)

Anyhow, finally my name was called and I went up and looked at my paper and saw the High A (a.k.a. A+ - I don't know why, but in this class they call the grades 'low' or 'high'). I think I probably had an appalled expression on my face that was actually just shock/disbelief/relief.

Another bonus to this grade is now that now I'm not going to bother doing the make-up assignment (I missed two of the "pop quizzes") - my grade is so high right now that if I do well on the final exam I should pass with at least a B+/A-. Yay!


P.S. Sometimes when I contemplate the idea of me teaching junior or high school I find myself wondering whether someone like me will ever be able to relate to kids who don't care what kind of marks they get... *sigh*