Books?

My hometown has a really tiny video-rental store... As much as I used to spend there, I probably could have bought the entire store.

Going to Cash-Wise to rent from the old section (77 cents for a week-long rental) was, basically, heaven to me.

So, naturally, I thought that I knew a lot about movies.

That was until I came to Augsburg and a majority of the other film majors completely showed me up with their abundance of movie-knowing knowledge.

After briefly chatting with my film professor from last semester about movies or books I should be watching and reading (Mr. Cowgill--he is a very very very smart man) he responded, "Be as promiscuous as possible." He further explained something along the lines of, "Watch as much as you can... and when you have the choice, pick up a book instead." I told him that I would probably visit him sometime soon at his office for a list because I was in a hurry and had to leave....

...So today, after being very productive and getting everything else done, I went to the library--a place that I have not visited as often as I did earlier in the year.

And so I did something else that I haven't done yet... I just walked around looking for interesting books.

So imagine the big smile that came across my face when I found the film section of the library (a beautiful place that I have never encountered before) and gazed upon the hundreds of books about film.

I picked out two books...

"Truffaut (A Biography)" by Antoine De Baecque and Serge Toubiana.
After seeing three of Truffaut's films, he has easily become one of my favorite directors. I definitely need to see more French New Wave movies... they are not created solely for entertainment as most Hollywood movies are, but rather to convey an aspect of humanity. Please watch "400 Blows" and then ask yourself, "What does this tell me about society?" I would love to hear your answers and thoughts.

I also picked up:

"Becoming a Film Literate" by Vincent LoBrutto
It is a collection of essays about favorite films that reflect certain aspects of film theory and practice. I already read 3 or 4 of the essays and I love it. I will keep you updated.

PS. my roommate listens to extremely crappy music.

I have a dream.

The Martin Luther King Jr. convocation was PACKED.

So many people attended that the chapel was completely full and people sat in the lobby listening to the speech.

Hollis Watkins, civil rights activist who worked with Dr. King and founded Southern Echo Inc., a non-profit leadership and educational organization. He is a very funny, intelligent man.

Over-all, magic was in the air throughout the entire day. People felt it.

It was kinda weird coming back to school after such a long time at home. I really missed a lot of the people here and it was good to see them. Home was relaxing of course, but it was good to be back.

Oh, and the last weekend before I came back to school, I spent the entire weekend with my Katie's (my girlfriend) family. Was it terrifying, you may ask? Well... of course not. I had a lot of fun. Her family rented a very very very nice home up in Brainerd and we spent the weekend relaxing. We also played a lot of board games, which i love doing.

Balderdash is the best board game ever.

Scrabble isn't played often enough.

And when I got back to school I had a poker night with some friends. After a good hour+ of playing, it was finally Jaron and I left in the game.

So I quit because I was tired and took my money and went to bed.

Happy MLK Day

I have an 8 am class tomorrow. The fact that I am watching a Man Vs. Wild marathon at 12:30 at night amazes me... What am I doing?

yesterday was a great day. Katie and i took the bus to the Minneapolis Institue of Arts Museum. (I like riding the bus for some reason..finding your way around is kind of challenging at first, which I like, but it is also a completely new experience for me... and yesterday I had a bus driver who liked to sing and announce the street names like he was a game=show host or something).

It was a lot of fun and pretty spontaneous.... we also went and ate at Noodles, which I love.

Then I did some homework and eventually took a nap... I was planning on decreasing the naps this semester, and yesterdays nap was one of my first ones since I got back to school, so i was pretty proud of myself.

And then last night about 10 of us decided to go to the club at around 11. We got to the lightrail about 30 seconds too late, so we had to wait 20 minutes for the next train to come.

While we were waiting, Tim and I were racing around the benches to keep warm. Oh, and he picked up a peice of cloth to throw it in the garbage... but it ended up being a dirty diaper.... i almost puked.

Finally, all 10 of us got out of the cold and on to the train, got to the club, and then realized that Katie forgot her drivers license... which meant no club for her.

being the nice boyfriend that I am, i went back to augsburg with her (and on the lightrail we had a nice conversation with two Minneapolis Public Transportation police officers... very nice men. we talked for about 10 minutes... i think i accidentally insulted them when i told them that i was surprised they got to carry guns around, but i think they forgave me)

We bot back to Augsburg around midnight, decided to go to Taco Bell because we were starving.
I was exhausted and we fell asleep on my couch watching tv.

Today I woke up around 11, went to lunch, did homework, and then at 1 i went to the Martin Luther King Jr. convocation....

more on that tomorrow. I need sleep.

Finals Finals Finals

Wow.

It's been a LONG time since I've worked on my blog.

A LONG time.

I guess it was somewhat intentional... I really just wanted to relax over my break after the last few stressful weeks of school. So I guess I will start where I left off.

FINALS - I guess it was what I expected. I studied A LOT. I kind of felt that some of my grades were on the line between an A and B+ so I knew that I needed to do really well.

Scholar Citizen: technically, no final for this class. We just had to write our final paper, something along the lines of 'Does Western philosophy and science grant us the knowledge required to be an effective citizen in a culturally complex world?" It was a very difficult paper, mostly because Professor Crockett expects a lot from these papers and his students. He was definitely my favorite teacher and I will miss his class.

Honors Religion: hmmm... soo much to say. I studied a lot for this final, probably more than any other final. I spent an entire day (not exaggerating) in the library mostly studying for this final. Our professor let us take as many notes as we could fit on one side of a sheet of paper, and you should have seen my paper... it was a work of art, i do not know how i fit everything on it... smallest writing ever (I actually wanted to keep it and hang it up in my room or something, it was beautiful, but my prof made everyone hand in their cheet sheets). And the reason for studing so much? Quanbecks tests sometimes have information in them that may have been briefly mentioned in class for 3 seconds 8 weeks ago... pretty much everything is fair game. Luckily (thank the lord), Quanbeck gave us the essay questions ahead of time, which resulted in me, i think, doing pretty well on his final. This was definitely the most frustrating final I had however.

Spanish: hmmm.. spanish. I'm not very good at it. I was expecting to get a C in this class, therefore, I studied a lot for my spanish final. Basically, we spent the last three days in class watching a movie (in spanish with subtitles) and then we had to have a 10 minute conversation with our teacher in spanish. I was afraid. I studied all week and then crammed for a few hours the night before, and then i woke up at 7:45 the next morning to eat breakfast and study until 10. After I had my convo with prof. Fischer, she told me that she could tell that I practiced and that I did a pretty good job.... definitely one of the happiest moments of my entire week. I was basically flying.

Intro to Cinema: Possibly my most difficult final (they were all pretty different, it's hard to tell). I memoriezed the directors of all the movies we watched in class, and basically a whole bunch of terms. Someone asked my professor what we should study for the test.. he just responded "the glosary... all of it". Luckilly, I realized that I knew most of the terms pretty well and the test wasn't that hard. When it comes to analyzing some of the scenes, all I could do was use as much of the vocab words as I could and then hope that Cowgill was a little lenient on my answers. Despite my preperation, I flat-out did not know the answers to some questions, but overall I think i did pretty good.

Finishing my last final was one of the best feelings EVER! It felt like a ginormous bolder was lifted off of my shoulders and i was happy to think that i would not have any homework over the weekend...

Until I realized that I had to memorize some lines, figure out a riddle, and get recomendations from some family members for my honors class, Liberating Letters... oh well, i didn't necassarily expect to be completely free...

Hang Me Up To Dry

I did not have any finals on Monday... so a free day of sleeping and watching movies and doing nothing, right?

No. I had two papers to write and my spanish final to study for.

First of all, my Crockett paper for Scholar Citizen.... those papers are infamous for being extremely difficult and time consuming. The topic: "Does Western philosophy and science grant us the knowledge to be effective citizens in a culturally complex world?"

Yeah, exciting.

I actually enjoy his papers. They're like a puzzle--its just a little difficult to make sure all the little pieces of argumentation fit together. This paper I had a lot of trouble with though; I worked on it Monday, got stuck and gave up, and then yesterday I was in the library from 5:00 pm until 9:30 pm. It was terrible. I was having problems.

Every once in a while someone I know would walk by, say hi to me, and then we would talk for a while..... I eventually figured out that putting on headphones and keeping my head down would make it look like I was extremely busy and I could accomplish a little bit more.

I argued that an effective citizen in a culturally complex world is someone that strives for social justice and peace. Western science and philosophy and their goal of discovering a unified redemptive truth is noble, but it does not lead to the creation of effective citizens. Science itself can lead to effectiveness, as a lot of tools can; a scientist might feel compelled to discover a cure for AIDS. However, that scientist is not motivated by science alone. Sure, he or she may be motivated by money or fame, but a lot of people are first motivated by intellectual experiences.

I defined intellectual experiences as both literary and experiential. One may read about the world through various pieces of literature (this includes worldwide religion and philosophy), and by reading numerous sources, that person will have a better idea of humanity. It is then that he or she is able to construct a more well educated view of humanity. The same goes for the experiential. People learn more from first-hand experience than anything else. Reading about something in a textbook will not do as much justice as actually visiting and touching your subject matter. Therefore, when trying to gather “truths” about the world and how people live, the best way to go about those goals is to personally experience as many different aspects of humanity as one can and to develop and interpret those experiences in order to comprehend one’s own opinions regarding the meaning of life.

And as someone develops their intellectual experiences, then they will be compelled to become effective citizens and strive for social justice.

Ta-da!

I have no idea if that gives my paper any justice at all... but I tried.

oh, and I was so angry last night... The paper is supposed to be 5 pages long double space... Only after printing my paper and rereading it, someone else said "Hey Adam, isn't it supposed to be double spaced?"

Yeah, I wrote my paper single spaced... which means I wrote about twice as much as I was supposed to.

And I stayed up even later fixing it and getting rid of some stuff. grrrr...

Holidazzle

Last night Katie and I went on a date.

I've only taken her out once since we got to Augsburg (Loring's Pasta Bar), so I decided to taker her out and relax before finals this week.

So we went to the Holidazzle parade downtown. We took the lightrail (which was free that day to prevent people from driving downtown and instead park near the mall of america) and got downtown at 6:30, right when the parade was starting.

We probably should have got there, considering Katie is basically 3 and a half feet tall and could not even see the parade... So i felt kinda bad about that, but she didn't really care. We didn't really watch the parade anyway... We both prefer to people-watch.

And while we were kind of watching the parade, we were also looking for someplace to eat. We had absolutely no idea where we were going to eat and we were kidn of just walking around aimlessly. Luckily, Katie wanted to eat at Applebees (I was scared that we might eat somewhere more expensive) and split some food. (Orange chicken is bomb)

After that we went to see the movie Australia. And I realized that my Intro to Cinema class has made me way more cynical towards movies.

A year ago, I may have liked this movie, but after watching all the great movies in my cinema class, it seems as if my standards have been raised.

The movie felt like it was concentrating too much on trying to be epic, rather than actually being epic. The action sequences felt like it was a wannabe Australian Indiana Jones. The romance seemed cliché. The plot between Nicole Kidman and the Aboriginal boy seemed like an afterthought... until the last 45 minutes of the movie focuses entirely on their relationship.

Or maybe it was just that I was tired... and the movie was 2 hours and 45 minutes long.

But it was a great night... Relaxing. And now I've got to write a paper today (after the Vikings game of course)

The Finish Line

Almost there... Finals week is all next week. Nerve-racking, I know.

I was pretty happy to finally be done with most of my classes. It really hit me Thursday after religion... "I am completely done with this class..."

I am definitely happy to be done with Spanish... I hated that class... Not really because it was a bad class but because I was really bad at Spanish. I am also happy to be done with my religion class. I'm usually obsessed with all that jazz, especially studying Islam and other world religions however, I felt like I rarely learned anything from that class. I actually would not be surprised if some students lost faith by taking that religion class... I'm probably being a little harsh, but the class left me with more negative moments than positive ones.

And tonight my professor for that class sent me an e-mail telling everyone all the things we need to study for the test on Thursday. It will be very hard... which is expected. But I was a little disappointed when a lot of the things on the test were barely emphasized on in class. It's not all that bad, I just have a lot of work to do.

My Spanish final is on Tuesday. It will take 15 minutes.

I have a paper due on Wednesday for Scholar Citizen. There is no final in that class. I also have a test for my Film class.

And lastly, I have that religion final.

Sunday and Monday will be spent studying. all day. like A.P.