Comps Book List Update

Here it is 9:45pm on a Friday night. Is it sad that I’m home and sitting in bed? Wow, that’s so not how life was even a few years ago… some Friday nights I was getting Mike & Ike’s bounced off my head (lol love you Earl). I had other plans for a post for today, then last night hit and I had an allergic reaction to something. I don’t know what but my lip swelled up huge! It was CRAZY! This is the second time in 2 weeks this has happened. But nothing seems to be the same to cause the reaction. Anyway so I came home and took 2 Benadryl and well…. I fell asleep. I woke up this morning groggy, my lip was still swollen, I took another Benadryl and I was out again. (and no, there are no pictures… well there are but I’m too self conscious to post those on the internet!)

So since this post was written and waiting to be published sometime the beginning of this month, now seems like as good of time as any, especially since I now have 27, almost 26 days until Comps. Maybe… just maybe I’m having an allergic reaction to all the stress from studying for Comps while still taking classes…. Just a thought.

The other day I was camped out in the library between my morning class and waiting for study group. I sat for so long that when I stood up I felt a vibration in my legs. I’m pretty sure it was the blood pumping through my veins again.

Okay so this is the month of doom. I have comps the end of this month. Yes, I know I mention it a lot but I’m kind of freaking out! I have 3 chances to pass and then I don’t know what happens. No pressure or anything.

So basically they pass it out, we answer short answer and essay. Then there is an odd number of American professors and an odd number of British professors (specialty not where they’re from….) who grade it. It’s pass or fail. You have to have majority pass or else… you fail. Again, no pressure.

So anyway I’m doing an update on my list and where I stand… well because if nothing else it helps keep me on track, it gets my cheerleaders screaming for me and whatever…. 4 weeks baby, 4 weeks (or something like that)

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Comedy: Masculine versus Feminine….

My Wednesday night class is called British Comic Novel. The first night of class we were asked “What makes you laugh.” Seems like a very straight forward question, but try to put it in words. Then we had to give examples of our words.

The second night of class the professor summed up what we said:

We laugh…….
At the Irregular                                                and at the unexpected
The erroneous (deviation from familiar             the Cathartic (psychological reaction)
patterns and norms)
Physical                                                              release of nervous tension
Verbal                                                                 expression of surprise
psychological                                                     exlamation
intellectual (logical)
moral/ethical

The Incongruous                                               The Coincident
(juxtaposition of unlike things)                          (sudden discovery/achievement of order)
tone                                                                     congruity
appearance (features)                                          connection
situation                                                              reconcilliation
action                                                                  resolution

Since that first and second night of class we’ve been discussing different books that we’ve been required to read. The first was Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding, the second was Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons, and the third was The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse. (by the way we’re reading 10 books in 16 weeks… plus I have books I’m reading for comps, wish me luck!)

Last night we finished up The Code of the Woosters, being a seminar class, we’re all required to talk. That’s part of our class participation, we have to ask a question, state a comment, or feed off someone else’s comment twice.

But one of the guys offered up this… Is The Code of the Woosters masculine comedy. Whoa, that opened a whole discussion for like 20 minutes on what is masculine and what is feminine comedy. Did you know there was a difference? I didn’t. I mean once we sat and talked about it, maybe there is… but I’m not 100% sure I totally buy that either.

Some of the characteristics described for masculine comedy is slapstick/physical (think America’s Funniest Home Video’s and all the people who constantly get racked over and over) and rude/crude. And they described feminine comedy as more predicaments we could find ourselves in. It was more compared to romantic comedies.

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It’s Not Officially Summer

My Cinco de Mayo celebration after class. Yes I’m using a clothes basket as a table.

Are you thinking… Well Duh? I would be but I know why I titled that that way… neener neener neener. Oh fine I’ll share…

Last night was my last night of classes for the semester. Booyah! Now technically I have a final to turn in and a final project to turn in due by 10am on Friday but otherwise… no more classes for the spring semester. I’m doing a happy dance if you can’t tell.

But my summer isn’t going to be all butterflies and kittens. Nope Nope Nope. Instead I get to read 50+ish books. So I’m going to show you my reading list so you can keep me accountable, deal?

First round of comps come this fall. I’m scared!

American:

COLONIAL (Beginnings to 1820)

 

Non-Fiction

 

Benjamin Franklin: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Part 1

 

Poetry

 

Anne Bradstreet: “The Prologue,” “The Author to Her Book,” “Contemplations,” “A Letter to Her Husband, Absent upon Public Employment,” “Here Follows Some Verses Upon the Burning of Our House”
ROMANTIC (1820-1865)

 

Fiction

 

Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter, “Young Goodman Brown,” “The Birth-Mark”

 

Non-Fiction

 

Henry David Thoreau: Walden, “Resistance to Civil Government”

 

Poetry

 

Walt Whitman: “Song of Myself,” “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” “The Wound-Dresser”

 

 

REALISTIC (1865-1914)

 

Fiction

 

Mark Twain: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

 

Kate Chopin: The Awakening

 

Non-Fiction

 

Frederick Douglass: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

 

Poetry

 

Emily Dickinson (grouped by theme) 

Nature: 

  • #207 (#214): I taste a liquor never brewed –
  • #320 (#258): There’s a certain Slant of Light
  • #359 (#328): A Bird came down the Walk –
  • #905 (#861): Split the Lark – and you’ll find the Music 

Death, Immortality, Religion:

  • #124 (#216): Safe in their Alabaster Chambers –
  • #236 (#324): Some keep the Sabbath going to Church
  • #202 (#185): “Faith” is a fine invention

Mind, Soul, and Self:

  • #620 (#435): Much Madness is divinest Sense –
  • #339 (#241): I like a look of Agony,
  • #598 (#632): The Brain – is wider than the Sky –
  • #312 (#252): I can wade Grief –


MODERN (1914-1950)

 

Fiction

 

William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury

 

Zora Neale Hurston: Their Eyes Were Watching God

 

Poetry

 

T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

 

Langston Hughes: “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” “I, Too,” “Dream Boogie,” “Cross,” “Mulatto,” “Christ in Alabama,” “Mother to Son,” “Homecoming,” “Green Memory,” “Silhouette,” “Let America Be America Again,” “Harlem [Dream Deferred],” “Theme for English B,” “Song for a Dark Girl”

 

Robert Frost: “Design,” “Out, Out―,” “Birches,” “After Apple-Picking,” “The Road Not Taken,” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Desert Places,” “Mending Wall,” “Home-Burial,” “Acquainted with the Night,” “Directive”

 

Drama

 

Tennessee Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire

 

 

POST WW II (1950-Present)

 

Fiction

 

Toni Morrison: Beloved

 

Flannery O’Connor: “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” “Good Country People,” “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” “Revelation.”

 

 

Poetry

 

Gwendolyn Brooks: “The Bean Eaters,” “We Real Cool,” “The Near-Johannesburg Boy,” “An Aspect of  Love, Alive in the Ice and Fire: La Bohem Brown,” “the mother,” “kitchenette,” “the children of the poor” (1-5), “A Lovely Love,” “To Those of My Sisters Who Kept Their Naturals,” “The Chicago Picasso, 1986”

 

Allen Ginsberg: “Howl,” “America,” “A Supermarket in California,” “Sunflower Sutra”

 

Drama

 

David Henry Hwang: M. Butterfly

British Literature: Core List

1.     Beowulf, “Deor,” “The Dream of the Rood,” “The Wanderer”
2.     Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
3.     Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales: “The General Prologue,” “The Miller’s Prologue and Tale,” “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale,” “The Clerk’s Tale,” “The Franklin’s Tale,” “The Pardoner’s Prologue & Tale,” “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” (may be read in translation)
4.     Sidney, An Apology for Poetry
5.     Shakespeare, Hamlet
6.     Shakespeare, MacBeth
7.     Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
8.     Milton, Paradise Lost (Books 1, 2, 4, & 9)
9.     Pope, The Rape of the Lock
10.  Fielding, Joseph Andrews
11.  Austen, Pride and Prejudice
12.  Wordsworth, “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads, “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” “Intimations of Immortality,” The Prelude (Books 1, 9, 10, 13, & 14)
13.  Brontë, Wuthering Heights
14.  Dickens, Little Dorrit
15.  Tennyson, In Memoriam
16.  Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
17.  Woolf, To the Lighthouse
18.  Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
19.  WWI, Yeats, and Auden bundle: Brooke, “The Soldier”; Owen, “Dulce et decorum est,” “Anthem for Doomed Youth”; Sassoon, “Glory of Women,” “Repression of War Experience,” “They”; Rosenberg, “Break of Day in the Trenches”; “; Graves, “The Next War”; Yeats, “The Wild Swans at Coole,” “The Second Coming,” “Sailing to Byzantium,” “Byzantium,” “Easter 1916,” “Leda and the Swan,” “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death,” “Under Ben Bulben,” ; Auden, “In Memory of WB Yeats,” “The Shield of Achilles,” “Musee des beaux arts,” “September 1, 1939,” “In Memory of Sigmund Freud,” “Ode to Terminus”
20. Smith, White Teeth

Pumpkin Carving #3

Hubby and I were finally able to carve our pumpkins on Friday night. Now Thursday night I started carving on hubby’s, I gutted it so that it would have time to dry up a bit since we were also going to use it for Baby Girl’s photo shoot. Friday night he was able to cut some leg holes for her.

And then baby girl screamed. I wasn’t able to get a smile, but I at least lucked out and got one where she wasn’t screaming. Note to self: warm pumpkin up next time!

Then we went back in the house, put her onesie back on her and she sat in the Bumbo on the table with us while mommy and daddy carved pumpkins.

We chose to use patterns out of a book. Poor Tbug didn’t have that option because we had to buy a new book, we lost the other one :(.

This one cracked me up. It was either a level 3 or 4 and I must admit that the first time I remember carving pumpkins was when I was a senior in high school. I might have with my parents when I was a little kid, I’m not sure. I should ask sometime. But the first time I remember, I was a senior in high school.

Someone decided that they were tired and it was nap time…

Hubby’s is the one on the left, mine is the one on the right.

We’ve tried to keep it a tradition since we’ve been married to carve pumpkins. So how did we do?

Past Pumpkin Carvings: 2014 – Tbug, 2014 – Underwater, 2013 – Family, 2013 – Underwater, 2012 – Family, 2011 – Hubby & me2010 – Family,

What a difference a year makes….

So one year ago today my life changed… more so than I realized. First I realized I don’t know how to pee on a stick… How hard can it be? Oh, I messed it up…

So hubby went and got the kind that I couldn’t screw up, then read the directions and told me how to do it just so I didn’t screw it up the second time… I didn’t screw it up this time. We also knew I was pregnant way early! It might have had something to do with cussing and screaming in a cabbed tractor at full throttle with the baler running and hubby heard me outside the tractor about 15 feet behind me… maybe… (more…)

Our First Night Apart

This blog is for a lot of things and one thing is to document our life together. My husband and I have experienced a lot of things together and it is so much fun to sit down and take a gander back. Now obviously not everything is on here because with every blog, there is a certain part of your life you don’t share… But here’s a sharing moment.

Monday night was hubby and my first night away from Baby Squirrel (or baby girl, whichever). Here’s how it started:

A week ago Tuesday I turned in a rough draft on one of my papers for Research Methods. It’s about The Rape of the Lock, a poem by Alexander Pope, but that’s beside the point (one last point… I’m not crazy about that poem.. okay done now). I had to go into the school early on Tuesday, earlier than normal for a conference on my paper so I made arrangements for my mom to take baby girl a bit earlier so that I could make it to the school on time.

So Monday when I picked baby girl up from my grandma (her great grandma) hubby and I had plans to meet up at my parents when he got off work. We had discussed it the night before about seeing if mom and dad wanted a sleep over with baby girl, so that I could have Tuesday to work on some homework. He didn’t think I could do it…

So I walked into my parent’s house on Monday and asked my mom to tell me if she didn’t want to, but would she be able to have a sleep over with baby girl and hubby would pick her up on Tuesday night like normal.

You’d have thought I gave my mom a million dollars. She told me she thought wouldn’t get the option until baby girl was in high school and could make her own decisions.

Before hubby and I left my parents house I hugged and kissed and hugged and kissed baby girl. Mom said she felt like she was prying baby girl away from me. Then I handed her to my mom, one last kiss and left for the evening. Told my parents if they needed anything to holler, I’d be over in a heart beat and I don’t speed. lol. Then I left.

Don’t worry, I cried pretty much all the way home and even once I got home.

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99 Things Take 2

So back in June of 2010 I did this little survey about my blog. I’ve been messing with my blog over the last month and wound up stumbling across this blog. I thought it could be fun to do an update… Let’s see what’s changed!

1. started your own blog

2. slept under the stars

3. played in a band

4. visited Hawaii

5. watched a meteor shower

6. given more to charity than you could afford to

7. been to Disney

8. climbed a mountain

9. held a praying mantis

10. sung a solo

11. bungee jumped

12. visited Paris

13. watched a thunder and lightning storm

14. taught yourself an art from scratch

15. adopted a child

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OMG I’m turning into my parents

It’s funny… the chain of events that happen in your life. The way that the world goes round. Evolution if you want to go there… whatever you want to call it, life is weird!

You are a baby and a young kiddo and you think your parents are the grandest. Then you get pre-teens through your teenage years and you start looking at your parents like they are crazy and aliens and everything else.

Then you get into your 20’s and your parents are your friends and become cool again…

dun dun dun…

Then you have your own family and you turn into your parents.

I realized this tonight when I was repeating “sleep sack” in a funny voice saying how much baby girl loves to sleep in her sleep sack. (I don’t know what else to call them… they are fleece things with arms and the bottom is like a sack and they zip in them).  That’s when I had one of those ho crap moments and thought I’m turning into my mother, or what I can only imagine my mother like at my age (maybe not age… maybe point in life).

Now if only I could be the size my mother was at my age! She wore a size 4. I’m not sure I’ve ever worn a 4, not even in my skinny years… ha!

But that’s neither here nor there. Just know, I’m turning into both of my parents in different ways. I guess my parents really are cool. But don’t tell them I said that… lol… we’ll keep that our little secret :).

Happy Friday!