Holding my breath for a response.

(Click for larger)

Seriously? The plane might "miss Pittsburgh"?

UPDATE: RESPONSE GET

Something something bla bla something

Spring semester has started! Yaaaaay! Yaaaaaaaaaaaay!

Okay, done being enthusiastic.

Actually, I'm somewhat more enthusiastic about this semester than last, in hopes that the classes might be a bit more interesting (Not that last semester wasn't good - I had Nobel Prize winner Thomas Cech as my professor and that was fantastic). Besides the requisite chemistry and biology courses, I'm taking Calculus 3, which I'm relatively excited for, and "Advanced First-Year Writing", which I'm not as excited for. I feel like IB pounded writing into us, and find it irritating that college doesn't count the IB experience for writing courses. So, here I am. Being forced to take a writing course. There is one thing that may redeem the course, though, and that is that the professor allows us to do our "reading responses" in whatever genre we want. For the first, we're responding to a piece about the various ways that the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests were portrayed. I decided to respond using a propaganda poster:

(Click for DeviantArtness!)

The "Reject Propaganda - Accept Truth" slogan is derived from my observation that almost every portrayal of the incident seemed to be saying, essentially, "The other sources are unreliable and just Communist/Capitalist/whateverist propaganda. Go with our perspective, instead!". This sort of message seems to be fairly commonplace, really. The 'Department of Truth' was something I came up with, but in retrospect, it was probably subconsciously derived from 1984's Ministry of Truth. In any case, if the professor is alright with this sort of thing as a reading response, then writing class might not be as bad as I'd feared.

In vaguely-writing-related-news, I did a quasi-calligraphic sketch over break for the fictional Top Hat Appreciation Society:

(Click for Artistic Deviance!)

I'm rather proud of the flourishes and whatnot, though much of it came from Google Image-ing and a silly amount of improvisation. It's definitely not the sort of typography/handwriting which I'm used to. The flourishing and decoration is quite amusing to do, though.

2010 in retrospective and some books

Hmh. It's interesting to think that I started 2010 in high school and finished it in college. For all the cynicism and frustration, it was actually a pretty good year. As far as high school goes, I did excellently on my exams, concluded reasonably happily with my friends. And college thus far has had... ups and downs, but I would classify it mostly as ups. I've connected with people I knew from high school and met some (But not too many!) great new people. That, and academic stuff went fine. Yeah, yeah.

There was also a fair share of sadness and frustration, though. I'm usually pretty good about following through on the plans that I make, but that's not always the case. Suffice it to say that there's a difference between being a solitary person and being alone. Ah well. Move on, damaged but not broken, I guess.

On an irrelevant note, I just got copies of The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein and Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo today (Have already read both of them, but didn't own copies). Both definitely fall in my list of Best Things Ever Written, for varying reasons. I'd argue that The Giving Tree is one of the quintessential childhood reads, and it definitely continues to be a moving story into adulthood. Johnny Got His Gun, for those who haven't read it, falls into the sort of hypercritical, disturbing, oft-depressing category that encompasses books by authors like George Orwell and Vonnegut. Put simply, it's an anti-war novel from the perspective of a soldier who wakes up lacking all of his limbs and all seven senses. Although the premise seems a bit... absurd?, the writing is absolutely brilliant at capturing the sensations (or lack thereof) of the narrator. It's gripping, dips into the insane, and as mentioned before, extremely disturbing at times. For anyone who hasn't read it, you need to. I learned recently that there was a movie made of the book a ways back, and think I will look into it - hopefully the cinematography captures the essence of the book.

A new year

It's now 2011! Meaning... something.

I didn't stay up 'til midnight last night, as I've got a cold, so I was in bed. Exciting, I know.

I start school again on the 10th (Which is a bit later than my brother, who's in high school). I'm actually somewhat eager to get back into it, though I'm sure I'll sink back into my usual cynicism pretty quickly. I also need to get my textbook for next semester, something which I'm dreading, since I think I spent something like $700 on textbooks last semester. I also need to sell those books, which I'm also slacking on. Bad.

Ah well.