lilyofshalott | (no subject)

Just a random post o' happiness . . ^_^ (and I'm putting it under a cut because it ended up being longer than I thought it would be)

Happy Thing the First: It's snowing!! This is the first time it's snowed since I've came home from school in December. Which is strange because we usually have at least a little snow for Christmas. Of course, when it's being unseasonably warm like it's been (40's and 50's is most definitely not normal for winter in Northeastern Pennsylvania) snow doesn't tend to happen. Hopefully it sticks (I don't think we're meant to be getting more than an inch or so). Snow = glee and wootage ^_^

Happy Thing the Second: I got an email from Dr Persons yesterday saying my spiderlings are doing well. Yes, this may seem silly choice for a Happy Thing, but I was rather worried they were all going to die (especially since I had a huge round of mortality right before I went home). That would be Extremely Bad (and add another suitcase of Bad to that) . . . because I haven't actually started collecting real data yet (I've just been keeping track of molt and feeding/mortality dates) and research is one of my graduation requirements. Live spiderlings = very good

Less recent Surprising Thing (happy as well, but I was more surprised at first): Dr Hubbell emailed me to tell me he thought my final paper for British Romantics was "outstanding." This rather surprised me because I wasn't really sure whether I'd actually answered the question of the assignment. We were meant to write about how the Romantics used the lyrical ballad (or novel) to bring about change (social, political, &c.). My paper was on how Frankenstein serves as a commentary on education--Mary Shelley contrasts the education of Walton and Frankenstein with that of Frankenstein's creation and presents the creature as a model reader. We'd discussed this in class a bit, including how the creature's progression from simply reading to applying what he reads to his own situation mirrors what the reader should be doing when reading Frankenstein. I didn't think I'd worked the concepts through enough to address the assignment topic, but apparently I did. Yay! And the extremely surprising thing? He suggested I submit it to "Transformations" (SU's literary criticism journal).

~Lily/Michelle