Things are happening

First of all, I got a JET interview! In case you've forgotten, JET is the Japan Exchange and Teaching program, which I applied for back in November. Yesterday, I received email notification that I am one of the people who made the cut (a lot of people, including some people I know, didn't), so I have an interview at the consul in Seattle in about three weeks. I'll have to miss a couple of days of class for it, but I'm pretty sure that won't be a problem given that it's, you know, a massively important part of my attempt to have something to do after I graduate. JET is really competitive, so clearly I'm doing something right. Wish me luck with the interview - it's a panel thing and I've been told they can ask some pretty difficult questions. Fortunately, I actually own proper business attire now, so I'll be able to go in looking like a serious candidate.

Suddenly, I feel way closer to graduation. Since I'm not applying for grad school, I've been in a weird sort of liminal space for awhile. Most of the people around me are rushing around trying to get stuff done and turned in, and I've just been chilling because there's not a lot I can do yet. Securing my first interview for something post-graduation was like a reminder that, yeah, I really do graduate in May. And I am definitely ready, let me tell you.

But my classes this semester are pretty awesome. I've got my senior seminar on Milton's "Paradise Lost" (for which I'll be writing a thesis, just one related to the course rather than an independent body of research), Apocalyptic Lit (best class ever), and Baroque and Neoclassical Visual Culture (most entertaining professor I've ever had). Oddly, they all kind of interrelate, which was completely unintentional.

So I'm enjoying my last term, I really am. I love Apocalyptic Lit like you wouldn't believe - Strelow is a spectacular professor who is very tangential and incredibly quotable. Yesterday's soundbite, while talking about Puritans back in the seventeenth century: "We've got the instruction manual, the Bible, so we can just flip through it and find out what we're supposed to do. Neighbors drinking beer on Sundays? Let's go to church and pray for them, and then go beat 'em up. Which is exactly what they did."

Another good quote from that lecture was: "You'll find that Nietzsche is Emerson on steroids."

For that class, we first read the Book of Revelation and D.H. Lawrence's Apocalypse (a very short, scathing little book - I loved it), and now we're working with Eliot's "The Waste Land" and a couple of Blake poems. Then we're moving onto novels: Love in the Ruins (Percy), White Noise (DeLillo), Slaughterhouse Five (Vonnegut), The Handmaid's Tale (Atwood), The Crying of Lot 49 (Pynchon), and The Road (McCarthy). Isn't that a great reading list? I've read Slaughterhouse Five and White Noise before, but the rest of it's new. I'm psyched.

As for the rest, my seminar is pretty sweet. The professor is amazing and chill and there are only 10 of us (one girl dropped), so it's really informal and relaxed. We also only meet regularly through the first week of March - after that, it's individual meetings as needed until we have to start presenting portions of our theses to the collective. My plan right now is to go meet with the professor on Friday, actually, to start brainstorming. PL is a huge work and I feel like, if I don't pick an angle early on, I'm going to feel really overwhelmed later when I have to find a focus for a 25-30 page paper.

And, finally, the art history class is just fun to attend. It's taught by de Mambro Santos, who is Brazilian and has come to us by way of Rome (he used to teach at the University of Rome and has written some books about art in Italian and it's kind of crazy that he settled here). His accent is very odd and his lectures are manic in the best possible way. He's also pretty quotable, making comments about art like, "Look at this guy! He's not only old, he's disgustingly old! He's about to fall over and be corrupted by worms!" That was in reference to a detail in Rafael's Transfiguration of Christ.

And that's about it for me. I've had a lot of insomnia, but overall things are going well. I'm working three hours a week in Ye Olde Writing Center (one hour on Tuesdays and two on Thursdays), which means I'll make more money than I did last semester, and so far this is a good semester for me. As well it should be, considering how much I've put up with to get here.

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Books of 2010, as of 27 January
1. The Sign of Four - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
2. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
3. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
4. Apocalypse - D.H. Lawrence