Whoa, it's February!

Totally missed it because I was so busy.

The last week has been a lot of reading, procrastinating, subsequent last-minute (or last-four-hour) essay writing, and procrastinating by wishing I wasn't procrastinating. My knee is feeling much better, thankfully (and it had better, because it's been a week by now) - though the kneecap is still a little unstable. It slides when I walk in a really weird way... but at least I can walk, so no complaints there. Another gripe about the last week is that I accidentally missed the airing of the season premiere of Lost last night! Oh well, I already got spoiled for it through my newsfeed. I'll probably just catch up with Justin when I go back to the States.

One thing I realized today is that Cherry Coke tastes more of cherries in the UK than it does in the States. This makes me glad to be here with delicious caffeine, but sad to go home to the insufficient Cherry Coke Zero that I adore/am addicted to while I'm at school. ETA: And one interesting thing I learned yesterday was that the old, not so politically correct name for the game we call 'Telephone' (you know, mutation of a phrase either deliberately or unintentionally as it's passed from person to person, comparing the mutated phrase with the original by the time it passes around a circle of several people) is actually 'Chinese whispers.' Either this is a British/Canadian thing (the tutor who mentioned this is British, his wife is Canadian) or I'm just too young to have known the name.

Tonight I'm probably going to a showing of MacBeth, which I'm really excited about because it's probably my favorite Shakespeare play. This'll be my second production of Shakespeare I'll have seen in the last year... I just hope it lives up to the Tempest production I saw with my dad in Chicago. Tomorrow there's a special American formal hall, which I hope to blog about after it happens because it should be hilarious, and then there's the Super Bowl, for which I need to find Bulmer's for myself and my friends. The rest of the week is work, work, and more work, which I hope to alleviate by doing most of it this weekend amongst fun activities.

This is kind of a piddly little blog entry, so I'll leave you with two quotations from my philosophy reading that I enjoyed. The first one is serious, the second is more for laughs (as it literally made me laugh out loud).

"It is certain, that a serious attention to the sciences and liberal arts softens and humanizes the temper, and cherishes those fine emotions, in which true virtue and honour consists. It rarely, very rarely happens, that a man of taste and learning is not, at least, a honest man, whatever frailties may attend him. The bent of his mind to speculative studies must mortify in him the passions of interest and ambition, and must, at the same time, give him a greater sensibility of all the decencies and duty of life." David Hume, 'The Sceptic', Essays Moral, Political, and Literary

"The [Greeks] approached [art] from a different point of view. What this was, we can perhaps discover by reading what people like Plato wrote about it; but not without great pains, because the first thing every modern reader does, when he reads what Plato has to say about poetry, is to assume that Plato is describing an aesthetic experience similar to our own. The second thing he does is to lose his temper because Plato describes it so badly. With most readers there is no third stage." R. G. Collingwood, 'Art as the Expression of Emotion', Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology (of course there's a third stage! you chuck the Republic out the window!)

Back to work for me, this book's on a short loan and I'm easily distracted.

- Jen -