Pumpkins and Creeps!

If you weren't aware, Autumn is my very favorite season! I love everything about Fall. I love the colors, the smells, the jackets and scarves, the crisp air, the foods, and of course the holidays!

This is the first year of my college life that I have been living off of my campus and in an actual house. My roommates and I love all the freedoms that come with having our own house and at this time of year, those freedoms include sitting around the fire, drinking hot chocolate, and carving pumpkins to put out in our cute little front yard.

This year, I decided to carve my pumpkin in honor of my favorite superhero: BATMAN! He is my favorite because he doesn't need actual super powers to be awesome. He just needs a good heart, crazy courage, guts of steel, and billions of dollars. Haha. I kind of want to be Batman for Halloween, but I have yet to come by a good costume.

Yesterday, my roommates and I took a break from our crazy schedules and came together for some quality bonding time. We broke out the knives, the newspapers, the hot chocolate, and the decorations and we set about making our home ready for the most fun holiday of the year.

I love me roommies and I love my life. I can't wait for actual Halloween now!

Here is some photographic evidence of our fun and awesomeness from last night!

(My Batman Pumpkin!)

(I got it all out in one chunk)

(We made a little bit of a mess)

(I love my roommies!)

(A classic pose from "the creeps" of The Burrow)

(The Originals! We miss Annie!!)

(The three pumpkin masterpieces)

Oh! P.S. We renamed our house. Once we finally got our stupid fire alarm to stop beeping, we decided to rename our house "The Burrow." Yes, that is a Harry Potter reference. Our house is a skinny three story tall house so we felt it was fitting.
That's all for now folks!

The Five Femme Fatales of Beeping Purgatory

I love my roommates! Or, I guess I should call then my housemates. Only one of them is my actual roommate, but I seriously love all of them so much. They are exactly the people I want around at all times of the day to complain to, tell my funny stories to, whine with about homework, and go out and have fun with.

We are all extremely different, yet we have a ton in common. I feel like my senior year would not be off to a good start without them. They are simply awesome and I just wanted declare a little roommate love for memories sake.

(The Five Femme Fatales of "Beeping Purgatory")

Just a little side note of explanation, we are calling our house beeping purgatory because one of our fire alarms has recently become possessed and won't stop beeping. Pretty soon I feel like we will all develop some sort of twitch in response to any beeping noise. Beep! Why won't it end!?

Ulysses, To Thee I Fall

I am an English major. I read and write a lot, probably about three times than the average college student in a major like business or geology or really any of the non-humanities related subjects. I love reading and I love writing. Those are the two main facts that led me to declaring English as my major on my college application. In my time at college I have always been an English major and I will continue to be one until I graduate this June.

Although, as I have said before, I love being and English major, there are at times, texts that simply seem to overload my mind until it feels on the verge of exploding from too much rhetoric. To what type of texts am I referring?...Well, most recently, James Joyce's Ulysses.

James Joyce is a fantastic writer. No one can argue with that fact--although if they should want to, I would definitely like to put them up against my professor who teaches solely James Joyce texts. In my opinion, Joyce perfected the  of stream of consciousness writing style and outdid all those writers who had attempted it before him; and in all honesty, I don't think anyone has done it as well even after him. But Joyce didn't only write in the stream of consciousness style, he pretty much combined every style known in the English language and made them flow together in the most poetical, complicated and beautiful manner ever. In short, he was way too good at what he did. Scholars will often spend their entire careers and lives attempting to study every detail of just one of Joyce's texts and still never be fully satisfied. According to my professor (who has read Ulysses at least 20 times), it is impossible to ever come to a full Joyce-like understanding of the text because that is just how complicated it is. Ulysses is commonly considered the best and most important text of the twentieth century in any language.

I just wish I had known all of that when I signed up for the class. Maybe then I would have been a little better prepared for what I was getting myself into.

I registered for a class entitled 'Author Seminar: James Joyce's Ulysses.' What was I thinking? Apparently I was thinking that it would be fun to make my life ridiculously complicated for the first quarter of my senior year.

Do I sound like I am complaining? Maybe I am, maybe I'm not. I can't yet be sure. Probably both.

Although I have three other classes to focus on this quarter as well as independent language study credits, most of my studying time ends up dedicated to reading and analyzing Ulysses as well as all of the supportive essay texts we are assigned in order to help our understanding and dissection of the text. I feel like my life has come to revolve around this one book. This one 643 page masterpiece that details the life of essentially two men in one single 24 hour period on June 16, 1904 in the city of Dublin as they experience happening that are designed to be parallel to the story of the Odyssey. It is utterly overwhelming and immensely satisfying and amazing at the same time.

Every chapter I complete and understand gives me confidence going into the next. It still take me about three days to really discern each chapter, and the chapters are only getting longer and more complicated, but I am confident that, eventually, my mind will quit fighting against the information overload and just start absorbing the grandeur within the text.

Until then, this picture pretty much sums up my life.