Moving In (September)

So I’ve spent the last four days moving into my new apartment, buying books for the next semester, etc. The week before that I spent procuring furniture for said apartment. Hence my recent lack of postage. (It seems like a lot of the bloggers I subscribe to have been moving in the last few weeks – makes reading my RSS feed much less fun. Guess I’m doing the same to however few people subscribe to me.)

Anyway, this new semester has another interesting feature, aside from what I’ve talked about several times before, with it being the third year I’ve been at the same school, something that hasn’t happened since 5th grade. Namely, for the last year the class of 2011 has been divided in three – the Fall Romers, the Spring Romers, and the people who didn’t go. Now basically everyone is back. It will be fascinating to see how the different social circles meld and break up. If I make any good observations about social behavior I’ll post about it.

And for those interested, my list of classes: Junior Poet (I’m doing Gerard Manley Hopkins), Medieval Literature, Linear Algebra, Analysis I, Intermediate German I. I’ll also probably sign up to audit The Russian Novel.

Musings about Modesty

[Be warned; this post is written from an implicitly Catholic viewpoint, and how it looks at sexuality will probably seem really weird to anyone who's not Catholic - and perhaps to most people who are, as well. It's really just me rambling about clothing and modesty and sexuality for seven hundred words.]

—

I remember a few months (years?) ago, we had a debate on the Wesnoth forums about standards of modesty. Some of the Europeans, talking about how nudity was more acceptable there, were trying to make the argument that nudity was not necessarily sexual, and it was just us American puritans who made it so – if we just required less clothes in the first place, lack of clothing wouldn’t be considered as intentionally provocative.

Well, coming back from Europe after three and a half months, I think I can say… nope, that’s completely wrong. Nudity really is always sexual – at least how it appears in Europe. I saw advertisements for pornographic movie theaters, “adult” websites, etc, all involving female nudity – advertisements you would never see in the US, they would be illegal – but certainly never saw nudity somehow used in a non-sexual way. Perhaps it is, sometimes, but it seems obvious that the primary effect of making nudity more socially acceptable is to make raw sexuality more socially acceptable and pervasive…

Anyway, the point is, it seems obvious that nudity and sexuality can’t really be separated from each other. But… what, with respect to clothing, is not always sexual? I mean, can we really separate clothing or the lack thereof from sexuality? I’m reminded of the part in Perelandra where the devil is teaching the Green Lady to wear clothing. He is teaching her modesty in order to teach her licentiousness…

Perhaps it’s not clear what my point is. Well, my point is a question – what does it mean for someone (well, a female, primarily) to “dress modestly”? The idea is that dressing immodestly is dressing in a sexually provocative manner. But women can dress without revealing much skin and still be provocative (obviously), and they can dress while revealing a lot of skin and not be very provocative (harder to find examples of, but just think of what the difference between “cute” and “hot” is – it’s not necessarily how much clothing is worn) – it seems to be the intent, not the actual manner of dress, that matters…

But this seems to contradict what I said at the beginning. If it’s the intent, not the amount of clothing, that determines modesty, why did I not see any non-sexual nudity in Europe? Why was all of it so highly sexualized?

Obviously there is some sort of correlation, even if it’s not exact, between how revealing clothing is and how modest it is. It’d be hard to be modest wearing a bikini; it’d be hard to be immodest wearing a burqa. But we don’t want to force women to wear burqas, and anything less than that will be sexual in one way or another; all clothing is, really. There must be some sort of middle ground, but I don’t know how one would find it.

And there’s also two factors here I’m conflating, I think – how modest the clothing is, and how chaste the woman is. Someone could wear a bikini but not be being intentionally immodest. I actually know some girls who would do, and have done, that…

I don’t have any grand theory of sexuality and modesty to lay out. My point, I guess, is that this is more complicated than most people realize. It’s not as simple as, “cover yourself up already!” – otherwise Catholics would require their women to wear burqas, which we don’t. But there have to be some standards or something – what I saw in Europe, which was basically the breaking down of standards of decency, was definitely not Christian in nature.

Perhaps the line is drawn where the clothing stops being intended to bring out the beauty of the wearer, and becomes about emphasizing the sexuality of the wearer… though, those two seem almost impossible to separate. So I’m not sure it’s actually possible to formulate a rule for how a girl ought to dress modestly.

Back Home

Finals are over, the partying has stopped, I’ve left Rome, and now I’m back in the US. I got back Saturday night, actually.

So it’s Christmas break now; I have a bit more than a month to read, write, listen to music, watch some TV and movies, and hang out with my family. I plan on doing all of these things.

Specifically, I plan to read Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, a bunch of poetry by Gerard Manley Hopkins, anything by Gene Wolfe I can get my hands on, and probably Frankenstein (this is not a comprehensive list, obviously);

I plan to work some more on the Orbivm campaign I’m slowly writing, and to edit the short story I finished last week, and to figure out what of the stuff I’ve written in the last six months I’m actually willing to post online (probably very little);

I plan to listen to some more of Silly Wizard and The Chieftains, and perhaps find some other bands I’d be interested in hearing more of;

I plan to watch season 4 of the Wire and, hopefully, season 5, depending on whether my mom gets it for Christmas, and to see Wall-E (I finally saw The Dark Knight last night).

—

So, yeah, that’s my plan for the coming five weeks. Nothing else much to say for now; I’ll be back with real posts in the next few days, probably.

Unrecognized (December)

This is it – my final month in Rome. I only have about 12 days left, actually; I go back home early in the morning on Saturday the 13th.

I am really already ready (now there’s a series of three words, ea?) for the semester to be over. I’ve done all the traveling I plan on doing, except maybe this weekend (and it won’t be anything major). All I have left to look forward to is finals, and then I’m going back home.

Going back home… now, this is the first time I will ever have gone almost four whole months without seeing my family. I look somewhat different now that I did when I left – longer hair, different clothes (I lost some and had to buy more). I also feel like a different person – the Rome semester has changed me, I think, in ways good and bad, intentional and unintentional. I might post, later, about some of the stuff I think I learned from it… not here, though. Probably not until I’m back in Irving.

Anyway, this return home reminds me a lot of Malin Keshar, the antihero of Descent into Darkness (an excellent mainline Wesnoth campaign), who returns home several times, with varying degrees of welcome. He ends up, of course, (and this really shouldn’t spoil the ending for anyone, even if they haven’t played it,) becoming a lich, never able to return to his village again. Hopefully I will not have changed that drastically. Being fought off as a murdering blasphemer by my sister and uncle would be a slight problem.

Venice, Florence, Assisi

I just took a class trip to Venice, Florence, and Assisi.

Overall, I liked Florence the best – but, I think, that was at least somewhat because I went into it disposed to like Florence the best, knowing that Dante Alighieri (the greatest poet-philosopher to ever live) and Michelangelo (one of the greatest sculptors and painters to ever live) both came from there. I was also disposed not to really like Venice, because the very idea of Venice irritates me (don’t frickin’ build a city on a frackin’ sandbar unless you’re damn sure you can make sure it won’t sink on you! The city deserves what’s coming to it, I’d say) – and it didn’t help that I’d been to Stockholm, the “Venice of the North”, the previous week, and enjoyed that much more than Venice itself (I was constantly comparing the two). Assisi I knew little about going in, other than it was the home of Saint Francis.

But I’ll try to just look at the cities themselves, minus my preconceptions. First of all, Venice. Well, when we were there it was raining the entire time. I love the rain, but, in Venice when it rains all the streets flood (as in, 3-6 inches of water in some places and they have to put up elevated walkways – it’s called acqua alta)
and it’s really unpleasant to walk around, which is all there is to do in Venice except go into expensive museums that I’m not interested in (I hate most museums – perhaps a post on this later). Venice is basically a huge tourist trap, after all – a bunch of souvenir shops and expensive restaurants. It’s definitely not a city I would want to hang out in for a long period of time. It is beautiful though – the whole built-on-water aspect may be idiotic, but it does make for some picturesque views. So, Venice is pretty to look at, but not that much fun to actually be in, I’d say. At least when raining.

Florence is strange for a number of reasons. FIrst of all, it has museums I actually like. The Accademia, for example, which houses Michelangelo’s David, is actually not bad as museums go, although small. It also has some cool churches, though I didn’t get to go into as many as I wanted. The Baptistery, for example, has some cool mosaics on the ceiling. But Florence is also kind of a slum, the entire city through; except for the area right near the river, it’s really run-down, kind of poor-looking actually, and there’s graffiti everywhere (though that’s true of most of Italy, really). I enjoyed walking around in it nonetheless (it’s actually more flavorful than walking around in generic middle-class neighborhoods), but it could have been better. It’s also rather irritating that you have to pay to get into most of the churches (apparently Florence doesn’t get enough voluntary donations to its churches so it needs to charge for them).

Assisi was probably objectively the best place we went. It reminded me of Delphi in Greece, actually – both are mountain/hill small towns that are pilgrimage sites, Assisi for St. Francis and Delphi for the Oracle. So Assisi had the natural beauty going for it, and the architecture of the entire city was quite medieval (old bricks and stone-paved roads). And it was very peaceful – the city itself was quiet, and when we hiked up to a nearby hermitage it was completely silent. Very relaxing. Assisi is a tourist town, sort of, but not in the same way as Venice – people don’t usually come to Assisi unless they’re interested in the spiritual aspect, so it’s a more sincere kind of tourism, I think. And Assisi has some cool medieval churches. Overall, then, I think Assisi was the best.

So, objectively speaking, Assisi > Venice > Florence. But personally, I have to say, Florence > Assisi > Venice. At least in terms of how much I enjoyed the cities, that’s definitely the order they’re in.

The Land of the Ice and Snow

This last weekend, I went to Stockholm, in Sweden, leaving on Friday and returning early Sunday morning.

Now, I went to Stockholm just because it’s in Scandinavia, and I wanted to go somewhere in Scandinavia before the semester ended. I bought the tickets back in September, but didn’t do any research whatsoever before going, and so had no idea what to expect. I was prepared to be disappointed.

It turns out, though, that Stockholm is simply a stunning city visually. The mood of the city was set by its beautiful blondes in somber black clothing walking amidst multi-colored ancient apartment buildings as if the two went naturally together. This fit perfectly with the weather, which was chilly but not cold, and very slightly overcast). There was also natural beauty; walking along the harbor was amazing, and some of the islands (like Kastellholmen) were a mix of rocky and grassy parkland and quaint-looking 18th-/19th-century “castles” and churches.

So it was a lot of fun to just walk around the city, and I did that a decent amount. This is one of my favorite things to do in new cities, after all; when I was alone in Cologne for eight hours over ten-day I just wandered around aimlessly for at least two or three of them. I think Stockholm is one of the best cities I’ve been in for simply wandering around for aesthetic pleasure.

But my other favorite thing to do is to go into random churches, and at this, Stockholm failed. There were very few churches – well, fewer than in, say, Rome or Munich – and those that there were, were Lutheran. Going into Lutheran churches does not particularly interest me.

This was, of course, expected. I knew Scandinavia was mostly agnostic, and nominally Lutheran not Catholic. But it was still disappointing, in a sense; I could not help but imagine how awesome Stockholm would have been if it had had this going for it as well. If Stockholm had been Catholic, I think it might have been my favorite city in Europe so far.

But that is just wishful thinking. Obviously Stockholm is not going to turn Catholic any time soon. That leaves me seeing Stockholm, and thus all of Scandinavia, in a wishful light; it was amazing, but it could have been more, so much more.

Where from here? (November)

This month promises to be… interesting. I’m going to be traveling probably every weekend (though perhaps not – unfortunately, it looks like my plans to go to Stockholm this Friday could fall through), and actually more (we have two breaks that are 5 and 4 days long, respectively). During this time (which is basically the final stretch of my Rome semester – damn, it’s gone by fast), I have to work out what I’m doing next semester (picking classes, figuring out where I’m going to live, making sure I have funding, etc – most of these have deadlines before Dec. 1st). And answering these questions necessitates having some sort of long-term plan (basically, profession and personal vocation). Plus I am in an odd emotional situation that probably won’t get resolved for several more months but that I think about a lot anyway (and enough about that – I can’t know who’s reading this so I won’t be more specific :P ).

I’ll probably end up making it by without actually giving a definite answer to anything not immediately pressing – it’s usually possible to make a decision without actually thinking about the long-term consequences and not have it turn out too badly. But for the time being, I have time, and thus am going to think about them even if I can’t make a decision.

So the problem isn’t that I’m not going to have any free time; it’s more that I’m not going to have any huge breaks (just a few hours here and there, never a full day or two), and small gaps like that tend to get eaten up with worrying about stuff like this. I’ll have free time, I’ll just be distracted. The question of “what should I do here?” is swallowed up by the question “where should I go from here?”. Which is frustrating, because there are things I want to do here (I have a few story ideas I want to work on, I’m working on an Orbivm campaign, etc), but doing them takes more effort than worrying about the future.

Who does this remind me of? In a certain way, it reminds me of Lokka, the villain in the (unfinished) campaign Gali’s Contract (which I am currently working on – though slowly). He, too, is unable to accomplish anything in the present (and is jealous of those who are) because he is distracted (though he is distracted by the past, me by the future). He could have been great, but he was not, and was in fact a hindrance to greatness, because of his distraction. (Depressing, really.)

So this month, I shall be Lokka, the lord the northern Cavernei and great-great-grandson of the dwarf who forged the Thunderblades. I don’t really want to be – I’d rather be Gali, obviously – but these are my predictions, not my aspirations. Lokka it is, then.

Ten-Day!

I just got back from my Fall Break and traveling around Europe, known colloquially among the students as “10-day” (we get a Friday and all of the next week off, so 6 school days off plus two weekends is 10 days).

I have a lot of random stories from it, naturally, and I’ll give a brief run-through of what we did here. The names of the people I was traveling with will be changed, mainly because it’s more fun this way.

Thursday, 23/10 – I began my journey Thursday after classes, taking a night train to Zurich along with “Beleg” and “Gwindor”. We met a Catholic doctor from India on the train who told us random stuff about his home country, then went to bed.

Friday 24/10 – We got to Zurich and wandered around the city. There were a bunch of churches, and we decided to walk into some of them, but disappointingly (and I suppose we should have expected this) most of them were Protestant instead of Roman Catholic. We didn’t actually do much else. We went out to eat, had some beer, then went to our hotel (we mistakenly booked one near the airport, which is far away from the train station and everything else; ah well) and were in bed by 10PM.

Saturday 25/10 – We took an early morning train to Cologne, where we went to our hostel, dropped off our stuff, and walked down the Rhine till we reached the cathedral (which was Gothic – a refreshing change from the omnipresent Baroque Roman churches). The cathedral is amazing, though unfortunately it’s very touristy and they don’t do a good job of preserving a sacred atmosphere. We went to vigil mass there that night though, and that was awesome. German hymns with organ music sound amazing. Then we went to sleep.

Sunday 26/10 – Beleg and Gwindor both took a train to Freiburg at 11AM, but I stayed in Cologne for the day. (I was to meet up with Beleg on Tuesday in Vienna, and with Gwindor again on Friday in Munich.) Basically, I wandered around the city for eight hours, until 7PM when my train left for Munich. I got there at midnight and slept in the McDonald’s. Fun. Why was I going by myself to Munich, you ask? To meet up with Nienor and Morwen. Morwen was catching a plane Monday morning in Munich (alliteration!), and I was then to begin traveling with Nienor, meeting up with Beleg again Tuesday morning in Vienna. And yes, this plan was unnecessarily complicated.

Monday 27/10 – And so, after a terrible night’s sleep in the McDonald’s in the Munich train station, I met Nienor and Morwen, went to the airport with them, then went back to the train station with Nienor. We decided to go to Salzburg (which is between Munich and Vienna, so it’s on the way) for the afternoon. There we ran into Celegorm, Caranthir, and Curufin (which was completely unexpected), went up to the big fortress on the hill, then split off from the three guys because they had already been to the Mozart Wohnhaus and told us we ought to go. Then we had dinner, caught a train to Vienna, and spent an hour trying to find our hostel even though it should have taken twenty minutes. Then bed.

Tuesday 28/10 – After we met back up with Beleg at the train station, we just wandered around Vienna, saw the cathedral, and decided to go to a concert that night by the Vienna Residence Orchestra. We picked up our bikes (more on this later) at around 4PM, rode them back to the hostel, and went to the concert at 8PM. The concert was amazing – the concertmaster had a Stradivarius, actually, and it was held in a small room (probably only about two hundred seats) so we could hear it really well with no microphones or anything. Apparently they have these concerts every night – probably they get decent attendance, since every tourist who comes to Vienna will be thinking of Mozart and saying to himself, “I should listen to some music while here!”. Then back to the same hostel for bed.

Wednesday 29/10 – So, I may have left you confused when I mentioned “bikes” and said nothing more… essentially, about a week before we left Nienor decided it would be cool to spend two days biking along a trail that goes down the Danube river. So we rented bikes on Tuesday and on Wednesday morning caught a train to Melk, which is about 120km up the river from Vienna, and began to bike back. The actual biking began around noon. Among other adventures, Nienor caused a three-car accident on the highway (she was standing at a cross-walk about to cross, but wasn’t actually walking forward, and the cars got confused, one slammed on its brakes, and the two behind it didn’t stop in time – actually a cop witnessed the whole thing and then yelled at Nienor in German and asked for her passport and place of residence), and, just as the sun was setting (at about 5PM), got lost trying to get to the next town and had to drag our bikes up a steep hill to the highway, bike along it for a while in the dark, then go 20km along the river in complete darkness except for our bike lights (one of which was broken). We then got to the tiny town of Altenworth (which is so small it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page) and stayed in a random bed and breakfast (and ordered pizza for dinner, since there were absolutely no restaurants in town and the stores were all closed – at 7PM). This was definitely the most interesting day of the trip.

Thursday 30/10 – This day of biking was much more peaceful. We basically just got up, left at 9PM, and were there by 2PM. (It was about 60km of biking each day, but the second day was much more even ground so it wasn’t as long – even considering we got lost for went the wrong way for half an hour.) We returned the bikes to the rental place, rode the ferris wheel, and bummed around Munich until 8PM, at which point we tried to catch a train to Munich. Except that this train didn’t exist, the one at midnight required a reservation, and so we ended up booking a random hostel at 1AM and getting up to catch another train at 6AM. So, we spent about 20 euros for 4.5 hours of sleep.

Friday 31/10 – We caught the train to Munich, got to the city, and immediately began running into other classmates (there’s a tradition of everyone meeting up in Munich at the end of 10-day, so this was not unexpected). We did a free walking tour of the city, then had dinner, went back to our hostel, and prepared to go to the Hofbrauhaus (a famous beer garden). At the hostel we met up with various other UD-ers, including Gwindor, Celegorm, Caranthir, and Curufin. (I won’t bother naming everyone we saw at this point because there’d be about 50 of them.) There we had some drinks, went back to the hostel, and slept.

Saturday 1/11 – This being All Saints’ Day, we had to go to mass, and decided to go to the 10AM mass at the cathedral (again, Gothic, though redone after WWII – WWII basically screwed over all of Munich, actually). Once again, German hymns and organ music are amazing together. We had lunch, climbed the tower of St. Peter’s (another church in Munich – the city has an absurd number of churches, it felt like almost as many as in Rome), and bummed around the city until 6PM, when we went to a vigil mass (the next day being Sunday) at St. Peter’s (unfortunately, Baroque). Again, German hymns + organ music = awesome. Then back to the Hofbrauhaus, where we saw more UDers, had more to drink, and got in an argument with drunk Germans who supported Obama (I was better at German than they were at English, which was gratifying). Now, that night, most of us had planned to stay up all night, but what we had not considered was, after drinking 2-4 liters of beer, you’re not really in the mood to be awake… so almost everyone actually decided to get a hostel after all. But Beleg, Celegorm, and I decided we didn’t want to pay for it and slept in the train station (and we were more sober than most of them anyway, so it wasn’t necessary for us to be somewhere safe). So I’ve actually slept in the Munich train station on two non-consecutive nights.

Sunday 2/11 – This was basically a travel day. We woke up (well, we had been in and out of sleep all night – McDonald’s is not the best place to get a good night’s sleep), went upstairs, found everyone who was catching the same train (which was good, since a lot of them had been quite inebriated the night before
and we weren’t sure they would make it to the train, but they did – the people I know did, anyway). The train ride was from 9AM to 7PM, and I slept (having gotten little sleep the night before) and read Merchant of Venice. Then we were back in Rome.

—

So, that’s the story of my 10-day. I’m sure it was somewhat boring (it’s just a sequence of events, after all, no real story arch), and it doesn’t quite get across the feeling of what it was like to be there, but it does tell you what I was doing for the last 10 days and why I haven’t been posting. So, I consider my storytelling duties satisfied.

—

Oh, and one last thing; I managed to memorize the Hail Mary in German while listening to them say the Rosary before mass three times.

Gegrüßet seist du, Maria, voll der Gnade, der Herr ist mit dir. Du bist gebenedeit unter den Frauen, und gebenedeit ist die Frucht deines Leibes, Jesus.

Heilige Maria, Mutter Gottes, bitte für uns Sünder jetzt und in der Stunde
unseres Todes.
Amen

News from a Distant Shore

Just got back from Greece (on Sunday night, actually, so it’s been a day and a half). A few random comments:

• Our travels in Greece took us to Olympia, where the original Olympics were held; to Delphi, the residence of the Oracle; to a Greek Orthodox monastery; to Athens, where we stayed for three days; to Napflion, a modern city near ancient Mycenae; and to Epidarus, where there is an amazingly well preserved ancient theatre. While in Italy driving back to Rome, we stopped at Montecassino, the original Benedictine monastery (rebuild after being bombed in WWII). It was all pretty amazing, but my favorite parts were probably Delphi, Epidarus, and Montecassino, with Montecassino ranked highest, for reasons personal and difficult to explain so I won’t go into them.
• It’s strange how important a part of my life music has become. I didn’t have any access to my music library while in Greece, which meant ten days spent without music (except the music other people listen to). It was rather irritating at times. I kept wanting to listen to the song “And Then There Was Silence”, by Blind Guardian, about the Trojan War (so it seemed appropriate in Greece), but I couldn’t. Yargh. I’ve probably listened to it at least three times since getting back (and it’s a 14-minute-long song).
• The landscape in Greece is amazing, particularly the variety in elevation. There are mountains basically right next to the ocean, with enormous valleys between the mountains. The view from up in the ancient theater at Delphi, for example, is simply amazing. I suspect the inspiring landscape had something to do with the more epic nature of ancient Greece. They were much more interested in beauty than practicality; take their literature, for example, which all deals with great heroes and such; they don’t do mundane drama, and their comedies are not nearly as good as their tragedies. Compare this to Italy, which, while on occasion beautiful, is not as universally inspiring as Greece. Notice that the Romans were more practical than creative. It would be interesting to look for correlations between the physical landscape of a writer’s country and that writer’s subject matter… I might write a longer post on this later.
• Even though the natural beauty of Greece is amazing, and the ancient ruins are cool too, the country doesn’t have much going for it nowadays. Architecture-wise, there are very few buildings from 200 BC to 1900 AD. They haven’t produced much culturally for the last 2000 years either. Basically, Greece has the ancient Greeks, but not much else. So on the whole I prefer Italy, where you have the ancient Romans, but also Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, and modern stuff.

Rushed (October)

I’m making this post just forty minutes before I leave for Greece for ten days (during which time I will not be posting because I don’t have internet access). So I’m kind of rushed, even though I’m not actually going to run out of time or anything.

Actually, this month is probably going to be rather rushed the entire time, besides. Greece will be a constant shuttling between different ancient sites, then we have exams, then just a few weeks later we leave on 10-day (which is actually nine days) and that will be drive-by tour of four, maybe five different cities. Fun. Then October’s over.

Anyway, what Wesnothian character is this like?… It seems kind of like Konrad from Heir to the Throne, the original Wesnoth campaign. He travels basically in a giant circle over the entire damn continent, giving you a tour of the entire country, while gathering up an army to defeat the evil queen. I’m doing something similar; I’m traveling over the entire continent, and while I’m not trying to defeat an evil queen, I do have objectives.

Anyway, here’s Konrad. He’s gone through more portrait versions than anyone else, probably, except maybe Li’sar; this is his most recent one.