Rest! Relaxation!

This past weekend, I officially emerged from the rush of midterms, which meant I actually got to sleep. Fun! I'm in two writing workshops (fiction and nonfiction), and had the brilliant idea of scheduling my second essay and story of the semester on the same week, right after I'd had papers due. Tomorrow, they both get workshopped in class, and then I'll have fun trying to reconcile a dozen different people's comments on each for revision.

I'm also working on a research paper for my American Lit class, due this Friday. I'm going to debate whether the fate of Hester Prynne's daughter in The Scarlet Letter represents a final triumph of the repressive Puritan patriarchy, or whether it's simply a Take That to the idea of inherited sin, and a mockery of the clichés of the women's fiction of that era (btw, whenever I discuss lit stuff, you can expect much linking to TV Tropes, which is perhaps the greatest informal media-criticism collective out there).

Also for tomorrow, I'm reading Book 6 of Paradise Lost, which is rather fun. And I'm going over affidavits and rules of evidence, as part of Hunter's newly formed and very awesome mock trial team.

Today, in itself, is looking to be pretty relaxed. I've just got one class, South Africa And Southern Africa After Apartheid. The best part about this class is instead of a final, we do a two-day roleplaying game revolving around the politics of southern Africa. I'm on the Zimbabwe team, which should be loads of fun, since the Zimbabwean government seems determined to keep giving us stuff to work with.

I'm also going to pop by the office of a the professor who handles the CUNY/Paris Exchange Program for Hunter. I spent the spring semester in Paris (paid for largely by the Honors College Opportunities Fund--in case no one's mentioned it, every student has $7500 available for study-abroad, internships, and such). I'm just finalizing everything so it'll show up on my Hunter transcript. Most everyone I've worked with has been helpful, but the official hard-copy grades still have to make their way through the CUNY and University of Paris systems, which are neck-and-neck for the Dense Bureaucracy Award.