tarzanelli

first things first - i just learned the words for dingleberry and skidmark. at dinner. i just thought you all should know that the cultural immersion process is well on its way.

as for my weekend trip, about which nobody commented, i guess it was pretty good. i mean, if you're into amber rolling hills and perfect weather and good italian food (including awesome gelato and homemade olive oil) and not paying for much. and 1100 year-old castle/villas. and pesto. and dogs and cats all over the place, especially a tiny little dog named davidoff. also, listening to dutch people talk is fun. and when there are world-class musicians just hanging around practicing for their upcoming performance in the hague that they have hardly even studied for...well yeah, that is cool too.

so anyway, the story is that j and i went down to arezzo on friday, stayed at the hostel where i was after freshman summer, took lots of stupid videos, as we do, and then met up with adam and his people on saturday morning. hung out with them and spent saturday night at the villa. sunday morning we made some american breakfast, then went to help the hosts do yardwork. it was mostly picking up sticks that tony (the host) had cut off of trees, and then chopping them into fireplace-bundle sizes. jamal and i tried incessantly to drop the hint that tony should hire us to work for him in the summer. by which i mean we spent about 3 hours saying "dang, i love this work." "well it's not so much work as a life calling." "i don't like to think of myself as a burden, i'll just sleep on the steps." "something about tuscany just makes me want to chop sticks up and work on an olive farm and restore old buildings." "yeah, it's cool, that's what i did last summer." and so on. once we had flooded the villa with our inanity, we left for arezzo on sunday afternoon, walked around, etc. went to the duomo and a park that i hadn't seen before even though i spent 6 weeks there. talked about sweet medieval stuff while at the medici fortress, like druids and demons and boiling pitch.

then we came back and met up with umrao (i mean, nlo, if you're up on jamal terminology) and kristin to plan for spring break down in napoli and sicilia, which will without doubt be cool and also expensive. so anyway i will be gone from weds afternoon until april 4. take that, doing work. so if you want to actually make a comment on my site, do it soon, because otherwise i won't get it forever.

gone for the weekend

just letting everyone know that i will be down in arezzo for the weekend, so don't yell at me for not updating...not that anybody other than adam read my last few posts, or so i gather from the (lack of) comments. anyhow, i'll be back at 4h15 monday afternoon, just in time to go to class at 5

Photos

Photo thing has been updated.

http://community.webshots.com/user/mikeinitaly

that's the real url this time.

Schedule for senior year

Well, I think I have most of my senior year schedule figured out. It will probably be:

Monday: NOTHING
Tuesday/Thursday: European Intellectual History 2 10h00-11h30
Open Economy Macroeconomics 11h30-13h00
Contemporary Continental Philo 13h00-14h30
Wednesday: Systems of Inequality(Pass/fail)15h00-17h30
Friday: E.I.H. 2 Subsection 9,10, or 11,

And maybe if I get into this honors program some time for a thesis? I don't know about that though. I'll know by next week, just in time to make or break my spring break. So now, back to business - everyone who needs SD and WI credit, take Systems of Inequality with me, because it counts for both. A description follows:

This course examines systems of inequality in a variety of world regions, including the United States, and includes analysis of their causes and effects. Economic class, gender, ethnicity and race are among the types of social stratification discussed. The course will focus on theories of stratification along with case studies, including those focusing on social capital, individual rationality, biological determinism, social construction, cultural capital and social reproduction, and economic globalization. The course will be designed to maximize student participation.

And here is the little code so you can just go ahead and throw that sweet baby into your WEBStac planner: L65 ISA 4261 01. Once again, it is called Systems of Inequality.

Also, I don't care what you have heard about European Intellectual History, it is the best class I've had. Except maybe for Calculus II pass fail where I didn't have to do the homework and I got a 95 on the final exam. I did enjoy that. Oh, and racquetball class was great too. But really, take EIH with me. Diatribe over.

Recently

So I have been moderately busy lately.

Nevermind, that is a lie.

However, some cool stuff has happened. Like last night (now two nights ago) on the bus, while Jamal and I were returning home, we were moderately verbally accosted by an old guy. He must have heard us speaking in English, because he turned around and asked us if we were...English. So we said no, but before we could really finish describing what we were doing in padova, he started to lecture us on the importance of history (I think). He started off with charlemagne (carlomagno in italian) then i think moved on to charlie chaplin (theoretically the same in italian, but not when a slobbery old man says it), then to karl marx (carlo marx) and then charles darwin (carlo darvin). So you may have caught on by now that the dude was some sort of history scholar, though apparently he had only read the "guys whose names start with C" section of his history text. Anyway the bus was noisy so we did not understand him too well, and also he mumbled. But he told me that I would not succeed in finding a job when i graduate, and that there were 3 great american presidents (washington, lincoln, fdr, who was like a platonic philosopher-king) and that bush sucks. After his discourse on history, I asked him if he thought I should quit taking my lit class and do history instead. The word for instead is "invece", but he heard me say "inglese," so he went on to describe how english history is the most important, and that I should study that. Because lots of people are buried in england, he tells me. Also, charlie chaplin was jewish, and the jews started communism. Valuable life lessons from the old italian guy on the bus.

Before that happened, Adam (not my roommate, but adam from racquetball club) was here. (adam the roommate will be here in italy this weekend, and then might be back at the end of april.) so his trip was great. it started off with me giving him great directions to padova FROM THE WRONG AIRPORT. so yeah, he landed in treviso and not in venice, and then he eventually got to venice, walked around the city from 1 am till 4 am, got a train to padova at 5:30, walked around padova hotel-searching for an hour and a half, found the hotel i had reserved for him, where he was told that i had not reserved a room, found a different hotel, and fell asleep. we met up at noonish (as had been planned) and just kind of hung around padova on friday.

on saturday we went to venice and in about 7 hours we ate lunch and 4 other meals. then we came back to padova for dinner. sunday we went to treviso again, met an aussie and a swede, hung out a bit, had dinner, and adam went to the airport and i came home. on monday i just did all the homework that i had not done over the weekend. and now i have to go to class.

classes are cool so far. lit class is a little boring and uninteresting, but i talked to the professor and he and i are going to do a little 1-on-1 course on the italian poet/philosopher that i am reading, which i think will be cool. the philosophy class is cool, we just listen to him lecture for a while. i have started to read schopenhauer, an old german guy, in italian, and it is not too tough. and now i am planning out spring break, down south, beaches, other stuff. it will be sweet.

tiny update

for all of you who read my blog but do not have a username and do not want to register, i discovered that i have been stupid and that there was an option to allow non-registered people to comment. so now you can all leave your thoughts if you want, which i know you do.

classes per la seconda volta

if you have not yet read the first classes entry (two below), please do so, as you should listen to me and take a class with me so that i'm not totally bored. but don't interpret that as meaning that i'll be taking a boring class.

now, i am taking two classes here, for 8 units. that's not counting the grammar class that i destroyed in the month of feb, which was worth 4. so a 12 unit semester but really, much easier, though i guess being in italian should count for something. regardless i am slacking off much more than most of the other kids, who speak italian worse than i do, so that's a little messed up.

i am taking one class from boston U, modern italian lit (1860-present). i like the professor, he's nice as well as calm and knows his stuff. however, nobody other than me is very inclined to, you know, participate in class, which is frustrating. jamal does help me out sometimes. anyhow i don't know if the fact that the course requires reading stuff in italian is to blame (most of the people haven't had quite as much as i have), or if they just have nothing to say, but there are definitely a lot of awkward pauses and clearly wholly BSed statements floating around. i suppose that's not so different from most classes though, so, in summation, whatever.

the other class is from the actual university, and it is aesthetics (l'estetica). it's a philosophy course that will have to do with lots of stuff, originally i expected it to be mostly about beauty but it turns out to be a lot more, lots of metaphysical and epistemological questions about perception and sensation and such. we've had 3 classes so far (we being umrao and i and somehwere between 50 and 150 other italian students) and i understand everything pretty much effortlessly, which is nice. however, the time will come when i have to start reading schopenhauer in italian, which might be slightly difficult. in fact i'm relatively sure that it will be.

and that just about sums up all of my classes. of course i am reading some other stuff, unamuno and leopardi and all that. so uhhh...yes, there is your update. and once again, check out the other classes post, and then take a class with me.

the most expensive gelato you'll never eat

well, jackie is gone and so i have gone back to the great fun that is reading all the time and doing crud on my computer. i suppose i have much catching up to do, though by now i've forgotten most of the dates on which these things happened.

most recent first: jackie and i went to florence yesterday. we did the whole walking around a church thing, and we made fun of the inside. then we went to the ponte vecchio, the famous bridge, where we sidled up to a couple and then started positioning ourselves like them and mocking them by saying cheap sappy phrases. we weren't too boisterous or anything but the couple caught on and left, which was hilarious. ahhhh, ruining people's experiences in exotic and romantic locations.

now, this next part is so exciting that it merits its own paragraph. when i was in florence a few summers ago, some people and i went to get a gelato (surprise!). i distinctly remembered the gelato being good and the gelateria being in the northwest corner of a piazza. so we went in search of said gelateria, and we came upon one which i thought was it. inside, they had some huge waffle cones, and i contemplated getting one but decided it was too big. so i moved a size down, which was certainly a good decision. why? because i asked for two flavors, and ended up with about 3 to four fist-size ice cream chunks on top of the cone, which itself was maybe 8inches to 1 foot long and 1.5-2inches in diameter at the top. so, needless to say, lots of gelato. i proceeded to start eating it with the full-size plastic spoon that had been provided, and when i got to the cash register, i was kindly informed that i ought to fork over TWELVE EURO for the ice cream. that's a lot, i mean 16 dollars or so. i can't even remember the last time i was willing to spend 16 dollars on an entire meal, let alone an f'ing ice cream cone. in any case i didn't have much of a choice, so i forked it over.

the next step was to try to eat the monstrosity. i really should have taken a picture, because i think the mass of ice cream on top of the cone was about the size of my head. anyhow i managed to eat all that, and was going to share the rest of the cone with jackie. so we started eating it, eventually got down toward the bottom, and i managed to say something extremely funny after having strategically placed myself directly in front of jackie, about 2 feet back. said funny comment caused her to laugh, and said laughing caused the mostly chewed ice cream cone to come flying at my face like a cloud of daggers. or maybe a tasty, tasty hailstorm. i was pelted all about the head and face with ice cream chunks.

now, delicious tidbits of pricey ice cream and waffle cone are not the only things with which i have been pelted lately. at some point earlier in the week, it snowed, you see. jamal and umrao and kristin and i were out battling in the snow with each other downtown when all of a sudden a couple pipsqueak middleschoolers decided they wanted to be creamed by by some people twice their size. they started launching snowballs at us, so we reciprocated the crap out of them. i will admit that one sneaky little one almost crept up behind me in order to peg me in the back of the head, but i did a little dodge-move, he whiffed, and i then i pulled out some sweet moves and made use of my snowball skills in order to vanquish him.

i probably did other really cool stuff this week but none is coming to mind.

make sure to read the post below this one, because it's super important.

classes

you might have been expecting me to give you some news about the two (yes, i know, quite a heavy courseload) classes i am taking here in italian. but instead let us talk about the classes at WU. because, you see, i need to finish my social differentiation requirement, as well as one more science class. so for all of you in need of someone cool to take a class with, or just in need of some requirement-filling, please consider:

L48 Anthro 150A 01 introduction to human evolution
L22 History 2152 01 The Theory and Practice of Justice: The American Historical Experience (woohoo)
L31 Physics 107A 01 How Things Work
L65 ISA 4261 01 Systems of inequality

mind you that all of these classes are to be taken pass-fail and are not to be over-cared about.

and of course, european intellectual history 1890-1930 is a must.

also, suggestions are welcome.