…not so great execution. Ugh. This semester is going even harder than I thought.
Tae-Kwon-Do is going all right, I suppose. I still can’t kick to the head - my own head level, mind you, which is really not all that high - without falling on my face. I’m glad “dignity” is not one of the TKD tenets. Aside from all the soreness and the embarassment of not being able to kick very high and the ow-ow-ow, I think I’m enjoying it. Our instructor is Mr. Devereaux, a weight-lifting man with a big-ass tattoo of a dragon across his chest, along with Korean sayings. I can’t read these sayings, but I gather they mean something like “Mess with me and DIE, muthafucka!” in the Korean equivalent. The other day he taught the class how to hold our own in a street brawl. “When you grab someone’s leg, arm, or even head,” he explained, “you gotta snap it off. None of this steady pulling stuff that we do in class. You gotta snap it, like you’re starting a lawnmower. Got that?” I guess it’s a gruesome notion and all, but I admit, the mental image of my muscly TKD instructor starting some punk yellowbelt like he was a lawnmower makes me go all giggly (and want to not get into a street brawl with Mr. Devereaux).
As far as my classes go, eh, I’m already behind and it’s only February (holy harikari, it’s February already? Christ). After only the second class of Ethnicity and Sexuality, the prof. said that we would need to meet individually with her to discuss our end-of-semester projects. I’m one of the lucky ones, I guess, because I -kinda- sorta have an idea of what topic I want to do - she yelled at our class the other day because apparently some people had met with her not having any clue at all, expecting her to supply a topic. This is a prof that laughed at a student in a previous class when he asked if there would be a study guide for the final: “aww, does baby want me to feed him some mushy food in a widdle spoon?” Good plan, folks!
Anyhow, I’m supposed to come up with a title and a description for a project by next week. Tentatively I’m thinking of doing my project about the use of the veil in Islamic cultures and the way it shapes perceptions of sexuality. She’s encouraging us to not do papers, and I could do with one less paper this semester, so I’ve decided to do something with oral tradition/narrative. It makes sense in theory, because Arab culture is infused with rich tradition of story-telling which has influence even in non-Arab Islamic societies - except that I have no idea what this will be like in practice. Do I tell stories from the perspectives of women (and men) about the veil? Should I wear a veil for a day and see what it’s like? Does this sound like an innovative or hopelessly cheesy idea? I don’t know, but I’ve got till noon Wednesday to decide.
And - this is really, really sad - I’m thinking about giving up on the BIAM thing. Yes, already. Maybe I’ll have time on some weekend, but I really need to get to work on researching this project. I don’t get a grade for crapping out 50,000 words; I will, however, get a grade from my E&S prof. Hopefully it will be a good one, but it’s looking less likely. I’m also working on (well, supposed to be working on, until I started typing up this post) a story for the school literary magazine,the Kiosk (I’m linking to their website, even though they haven’t updated it in like forever). Also, I’m working on booking field guides for this tour of the Haskell-Baker wetlands that I coordinate that is coming up in March. And I need to do my financial aid so I can get money to do more stuff to keep me busy.
Sometimes I think I just keep myself busy so that I don’t go insane.
Oh well. I guess I’m better off. If I had a lot of extra free time, I’d probably just waste it surfing the Internet and blogging about it anyways.