Tuesday, February 17, 2004

Today's Onion headline: "CD Slowly Integrated In To Own Collection"

Music: The Juliana Theory - Shell of a Man
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Hair's looking good today. Not flat as a board, but I think I like it better this way.

Not that that is out of the way, I would like to mention that I am *swimming* in new music to listen to. I ripped a grand total of seven of V's CDs while I was home, bought two for myself, and two more just came in the mail from Amazon when I ordered them about a week ago.

So far I'm through about four CDs. This is insane. As if this wasn't enough, I want to get the new Garbage CD now. I think I need to cut myself off from buying music for awhile. It's getting pretty expensive.

In other news, I still have about 485 pages of my French Anti-Semetism book to read. We had Topics today, and I thought it went pretty well. There's this one guy in the class, Keith, who is a Senior and crazy smart. He's, I think, a history major so we all feel pretty stupid.

Now anyone who has ever had a class with me knows that I can't keep my big mouth shut. That's part of this class, though, so it works out. But when Keith starts talking everyone gets very very quiet. He usually makes excellent and well thought out points, but sometimes (and understandably so given the course subject matter) his political leanings keep him from expressing every facet of his argument and he assumes that the opinion he is expressing is just a given.

What happened today was that we were discussing a German scholar by the name of Paul de Lagaurde. Now this guy pretty much hated everything about the Germany he was living in during the Bismark era, so some of his stuff makes him sound like a ranting old man. There are plenty of things that you can rip Lagaurde about, but not that he never came up with some unique ideas for the time.

So we're discussing some of deLaguarde's ideas and Keith makes another one of his well thought out statements that really set us all to thinking. He then remarked that he (deLagaurd) was doing "what all conservatives do: bitch and moan and not come up with any new ideas of their own." From where I stood, he was wrong. And...well...I said something...

I'm probably making this sound bigger than it was. I didn't even realize I was saying it until it was out in the air. It was something to the effect of "Well that's not quite right. He did create a brand new quasi-religious ideology custom tailored to Germany. That was pretty new."

It was more the fact that I felt brave enough to follow Keith, even dissagree with him, that made me really surprised with myself. I've been shell-shocked at this school since Freshman year, but maybe I really am getting better! Maybe I'm getting my voice back!

Of course after this Keith did a good job rebuffing me, talking about the nature of reaction versus action. I would have loved to take another swing, but the discussion leader was moving on.

In short, I think I'm well on my way to recovery.

Plus, I get to lead discussion on my book next week ::grin::

::transmission ended::
This transmission logged byErisSaid on 4:33 PM

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