¶ … school and all the other crap going on over here. You know something? College would be fantastic if it weren't for these pesky little things called classes…they can take all the fun out of a perfectly good day =/
Actually, I have to say that school's been pretty cool. Some of my classes are boring…of course…that's why it's called school, right? But some of my other classes are pretty interesting and some of them really make me think about things, including stuff we've talked about before.
For one example, I'm taking this Writing class where we just read Lost in Translation by Eva Hoffman, a Polish writer who immigrated to Canada from Poland a few years after World War II when she was thirteen years old. Basically, her family was living in postwar Poland in a town that was still largely rubble four years after the end of the war and where her father had to scurry around scrounging for food to feed his family. We've discussed how lucky we were that we just happened to be born into...
It really puts into perspective the history stuff we read about the Marshall Plan and the reasons that the U.S. foreign policy relied so heavily on providing economic assistance to war-torn European countries during the early Cold War years (Goldfield, Abbot, Argersinger, & Argersinger, 2005).
The other thing that really struck me about this reading was that it also illustrated the idea we were discussing last winter about how people can become psychologically attached even to people, places, and circumstances that they perceived as completely unpleasant at the time that they were experiencing them. I'm not sure if you remember that conversation but it started out because I got in trouble for goofing on my kid sister for crying her eyes out when she got off the bus that brought her home from summer camp whining about missing her friends and her counselors…
