22 posts tagged “spanish”

I have my schedule for next semester worked out and it is quite literally nothing short of a miracle. It's my last semester, so I'm taking all the high-end classes for my major and minor, which are both two very tiny little departments here at Western. There is only one of each class offered which usually means if there's a scheduling conflict, I'm up shit creek without a paddle.

But! Next semester works perfectly. I'm actually really excited (I'm also really excited for this semester to be over. This semester gets no dice).

On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays I'll have my two Spanish classes, SPAN 494 (Senior Capstone Experience thingy) and SPAN 460 (Hispanic Lit: Caribbean Dictators). Should be interesting! They're also back-to-back so that'll be kinda nice.

Tuesday and Thursdays I'll be taking all my philosophy classes. PHIL 345 (Philosophy of Religion), followed immediately by PHIL 397 (Women and Gender in Philosophy), then with a couple hours off before COTH 470 (Philosophy and Theory of Communication). All three of these classes are with the same professor, so that will be interesting lol. Fortunately I like him and I think he likes me, so that's good.

Anyway I seem to be rambling a lot about school. Probably because my life is pathetic and I have nothing else to ramble about! Ah well.

Well, on Saturday my parents helped move me down to Gunnison for my last year at the delightful Western State College of Colorado. Woo! Kinda weird to think that I'm a college senior. I don't really feel like it.

Anyway, moving in went smoothly, though I did forget to bring the power cable for my MacBook Pro. So after my initial freakout (I would have just gone and bought a new one but no place in Gunnison sells Mac stuff, apparently) my mom offered to leave her laptop with me for the week since I'm going home this weekend anyway for the Nine Inch Nails concert next Tuesday (!) So I'm on her old Dell laptop now, which is...interesting. It kinda sucks to not have my own computer, heh. Oh well. Anyway, on Sunday we drove up to Crested Butte and around Gunnison County a bit, and I got some pretty pictures that I put up at my Flickr account.

My apartment is largely set up how I had it last year (I'm in the same room I was in last year) so I don't feel too out of place and weird. I even tossed up a quick and random little "video tour" because I'm geeky. Pardon the swearing, inside jokes and other random comments that may or may not make sense.

*sigh* For the past, like, two weeks I've been trying to write a short story for my Spanish composition class. Absolutely no good, solid ideas were coming to me. I'd take some bad ideas that I disliked to class, get them critiqued, and dislike them even more.

So finally I came up with a semi-decent story, and have been working on it here and there for the past couple hours (along with other homework...I'm really not efficient in my assignment-doing, I tend to jump around). Then, something just hit me. A completely different idea, something that totally came to me out of the blue while I was flipping through my Spanish dictionary, and it's going to work perfectly. I love this idea, I hope it turns out well.

Apparently, the creative mind answers to no one and is on no schedule. It doesn't care that I've had to skip class because I hadn't come up with a decent story. But now...HAH! Now I have a good idea. Now I just have to write it....

Going down to Denver (up to Denver?) tomorrow for President's Day weekend...yay! That means I can actually eat good food. I haven't replenished my fridge for a week or so because I won't be here for a few days, so it's majorly slim pickins, especially now when I'm down to a small hunk of cheese and some bread. And a shit ton of cilantro, because they only sell it in GIANT BUSHELS that are completely unnecessary.

Anyway, I'm also getting my hair cut on Saturday. I kinda sorta know what I want to get done, but I'm not positive. I wish I had the balls to do something totally wacky and crazy and wild, but I don't, so I won't. meh.

I need to find a good streaming radio station that's just news/talk in Spanish, so I can sort of practice interpreting. Or just practice repeating what they say right after they say it, so I can get better at sort of mentally recording what I hear so I can "play it back" to myself a few seconds later and repeat it. Which is totally easy and second-nature in English, but Spanish...not so much. I'm not going to be an interpreter (at least that's not a part of the gameplan) but that's pretty much all we do in my Spanish for Professionals class and it'd be a good way to brush up my Spanish anyway...I've been kind of lazy with it recently and don't feel like I've progressed in the language as much as I should have...meh.

For now I suppose I'll just listen to Manu Chao and imagine I'm still in Barcelona.

Yeesh. So much for "oh now I can relax since I'll have a whole extra semester to get shit done." The fall semester looks like it's going to be chock-full of goodies. Though I don't think I'll take any classes over the summer, since that seems totally unnecessary right now. We'll see!

But, what the hell with me needing an English literature class for my Spanish major? Though that's going by the 2005 catalog year, and I don't even think such a class (ENG 250) exists anymore. So, hopefully, maybe, possibly, I won't have to take it, or can at least substitute another class for it. Y'know, a class that's actually a) interesting and b) pertains to my major or minor. I'm not a fan of English classes at all, I think they're ridiculously boring. As Homer Simpson said, "English? Who needs that? I'm never going to England."

I'm listening to Manu Chao (mostly Spanish with some French and English tossed in....and I think I caught some Catalan in this one song, but it could just be French) in an attempt to improve my Spanish listening comprehension. I need to watch Spanish TV and movies and stuff too. I watched Y Tu Mamá También recently and was pretty lost. Granted that movie is full of Mexican slang, which I'm not really familiar with, but I was still disappointed in how little I understood. Blah!

Damnit! Spanish 494, the "Capstone Experience" (essentially a research project thing that I have to do for my Spanish major) class, is only offered in the Spring. Which would prevent me from graduating early in the fall, UNLESS I took the class.....this semester. now. ahora. :o Which would mean three upper-level Spanish classes this semester! 6 classes total this semester! Crap! Oh wait I did 6 classes last semester and had like the best semester grades-wise ever...but regardless...

So I emailed my Spanish profesora, who by the end of this semester is going to be like my best friend since I have so many classes with her, to see if it's ok for me to join the class. It fits with my schedule, so I just need my teacher's approval for me to join. And I don't see why I couldn't? She knows I know my Spanish and am up to the "challenge" I guess (though come on! I have to do a research project about Spanish language and culture. Hello, time I spent in Barcelona, how are you?) I guess now it's probably just as well that I didn't find a job yesterday lol. Not sure if I could juggle all these classes as well as have a job and not go completely batshit insane.

I also emailed my philosophy professor to see what classes they'll have in that department in the fall, if they even know, so that I can start obsessively planning everything. Mwahahahaha! *cackles manically*

Eeeevery morning during the week I wake up before the crack of dawn and go for a half-hour swim. This morning, I peeled myself out of bed after a strange dream in which I was at some sort of Air Force Academy-type place that looked strangely like Halo 3 online multiplayer. I also had an ADORABLE black lab puppy that I named Starbuck because even in my dreams I'm a total Battlestar Galactica nerd (though Starbuck is a cute name for a puppy, don't you think?) But anyway, I digress. Point is, I woke up, walked over to the pool only to find that, "there will be no swimming today, November 2nd. Sorry for the inconvenience." GODDAMN RIGHT YOU'RE SORRY. Ugh. There couldn't have like, been a note yesterday about this? :(

I kinda needed to get up early anyway because I have to go over my speech on the Mexican government from 1824 through 2006 (doesn't that sound interesting?) to do in my Spanish class at 10. I'm having major problems saying both "modernizacion" and "liberalizacion" for some reason. I sound like a total gringa! D:

Something must be in the water in Gunnison, or maybe it's the weather (which has been downright hot recently. 55 degrees wtf!) but this past week everyone has been kind of crazy and class has been downright fun. Not just like "oh this isn't so bad," but like, I actually look forward to going to all of my classes because I know I'll be entertained.

Between my philosophy teacher's expressed desire to have his brain preserved and placed in a robot spider body in the future, my geology teacher making jokes about inbreeding in the South and offending half the class (and talking about the "little birdy dude" that left footprints in a slab of sedimentary rock), discussion of sandwiches in my geology lab and the general craziness of both my Spanish classes...every day is a comedy. I honestly think it's a prerequisite to be a bit off your rocker to be a Spanish teacher. Every Spanish teacher I've had since 6th grade has been a little crazy (most in a good way). Even in Spain all my teachers were a bit wacko, especially our Cine teacher who we referred to as "the skeletal one" because she probably weighed about 80 pounds. Her hair was dyed red and she would wear outfits of all one BRIGHT neon color, usually with matching shoes. It was wild.

Anyway, I had preordered Mac OS X Leopard, which comes out today, because there are no Apple resellers here and it was guaranteed to be delivered today if I preordered it online. Sooo, they delivered it. At my house. In Denver. 200 miles away. :o So, because I'm an idiot and didn't bother changing the address to my school address when I ordered it, my mom is now sending it to me so I should get it sometime early next week. Hopefully! Ojala! I'm trying to clean up some shit on my MacBook Pro to prepare it for the lovely new fanciness that is Leopard. [insert e-penis comment here]

Time to bust out the Orange Box, baby.

Bleh, it's been an interesting 24 hours. (Un)fortunately all the drama has gone on inside my head, so I can't really rant and rave about anything because there's nothing to rant and rave about. I just feel....ugh. Totally not motivated to do anything. I was going to play some Resident Evil 4, or eat, and I found myself wasting time online trying to put those things off. Who the hell puts off eating and playing video games? :|

Next summer is looking like it will be a grand old time. Some sort of reunion of some fashion is more than likely going to occur, though it will probably only be between a handful of people from Barcelona. But, still! I'm excited.

I think I've only said this a grand total of three times in my life, but make it four: I am, to a certain degree, excited for Monday. Why? You don't really want to know.

The 2008 course schedule was just put up. It looks like I'll have Philosophy of Science, Advanced Spanish Conversation and Composition and Spanish for Professionals, and then some other stuff to dull the pain. Those are actually the only classes I can take, with prereqs and all, but it's probably just as well since otherwise I'd probably force myself to fill my schedule with Spanish classes and then I'd go FUCKING CRAZY. I like Spanish and all but....joder, tío, mi cerebro es un poco débil...sea más agradable, porfa...

My lame attempt at typing in an Alabaman accent, a la Forrest Gump. >.>

A couple weeks ago my Spanish professor canceled class because she was in Mexico for a bit of an emergency situation, so today we had a "makeup session" at her house. Only two of us showed up, heh, out of eight in the class. It was cool though, we basically spent an hour and a half chit chatting about school shootings, the price of college, family, and Indian reservations, among other things. I haven't really "conversed" with anyone in Spanish in several months, so it was nice to both listen and talk a fair amount.

It also made me realize that I am a bit better at Spanish than I tend to think I am (which I realize I've said a thousand times before, but this time I mean it!) My problem is usually speaking - I can understand pretty much everything except for bogus slang and weird out-there words (and even those I can generally clear up the meaning of with a simple "¿como?") and I can usually write pretty well. I'm not all that great at verbalization in English either if I'm not comfortable with the situation or the topic, so given that I'm pretty much always uncomfortable with Spanish at this point, the fact that I can't speak it super well doesn't really bother me. I'm totally getting better, and will continue to try and get better, but right now that's not exactly on my list of "Shit I Need To Get On Top Of."

I went on a run the other day, and hot damn. Usually I can run a mile no problem and feel pretty good afterwards. But on Friday I ran up Colorado Street towards Wal-Mart and just about died when I got to the top, which was about a half mile. Whew! I guess running uphill at 7703 ft when I'm used to running on a flat treadmill at 5600 ft will do it to ya...I'm going to stop in the fitness center tomorrow and get my student account setup so I can go there. I'm a fucking genius and forgot to bring my goggles, otherwise I'd pop over to the pool and have a swim for the first time in a long time. I used to be such a good swimmer....I still have manly swimmer's shoulders, but that's about all that's left over from my glory days as a swimming champ. Oh well.