It's been a while since I last posted here on the MacBlog. Not much has happened since my last post after finals week (though I've had more than a few editions of The Macaulay Vlog - if you haven't subscribed to it yet...well, you're just not nice.). It's kind of weird that spring term starts on a Friday, for obvious reasons, but further, a day where snow was on the ground for the umpteenth straight day.
Aside from stepping in a slush puddle when getting a quasi-celebratory (for my blog hitting 10,000 views) lunch at Schnitzel and Things, I felt like I got the semester off to the right start. I was early for both of my classes (Intro to Literature and Readings in Popular Culture, both Honors-level), and picked up all the textbooks I know I'll need for the term. Five of those I found at the New York Public Library (leading to a whirlwind trip where I had to visit two libraries within my 3-hour break between classes), and another three I found at the Hunter library; the other two I had to purchase - a packet of readings for my Intro to Literature course, and the ActivStats packet for my Statistics course.
(A brief rant about the ActivStats packet - it costs $63 for a goddamn CD and a code to access it? Which I can't get anywhere else for cheaper, because I have to get it from Hunter? And which I have to buy so I can actually access the course materials? And which I probably won't be able to sell back to the bookstore, 'cause I assume the code's unique? That's some damn racket Hunter's running right there, some goddamn racket.)
The classes themselves went pretty well. My literature course has a theme of "hauntings," meaning we'll be reading a bunch of stories involving ghosts in some capacity (including Macbeth, probably my favorite of the Shakespearean dramas I've read so far), which seems somewhat compelling. Further, the diagnostic essay (a comparison of one of Petrarch's sonnets and one of Shakespeare's) was a relatively easy task, and one that caused me to somewhat fondly reminisce about my Humanities seminar in senior year of high school. Readings in Popular Culture involved comparing a cover of Vogue to King Kong and bringing it back to minstrelsy, the antecedents to Madonna and Lady Gaga (reminding me of this Nostalgia Chick video comparing blond pop stars of the '90s to blond pop stars of today), and sanitized idealism in High School Musical, meaning this is going to be one crazy course. (That's semiotics for ya.) I've heard really great things about Prof. Goldstein, and today, I saw much of it in action - this class seems to be incredibly thought-provoking; I'm excited.
Just thought I'd point out with regards to the "goddamn racket" Hunter is making on the ActiveStats packet, first off it's not as though stocking pricey textbooks/course materials is unique to Hunter by any means, and second although on the one hand, texts and materials are expensive because a ton of work goes into them - and in this case it seems that those $63 covered a lot of stuff for the class - on the other most professors are very conscious of the how much of a burden book and material prices are and go quite far out of their way to find the cheapest alternatives. And on the third hand, we are going to school for free.
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