Home

Home. You'd think four letters would be easy to define. There are definitions in the OED and plenty of other dictionaries, but it's not just "The place where a person or animal dwells," as the first definition in the OED suggests.
For me, home is where I feel safe and provided for. Of course, that applies to the place where I spent the first eighteen years of my life, and where I go during breaks from school. For the first two years of college, that also applied to whatever dorm I was living in, with the exception of two incidents in freshman year and one incident as a sophomore. To quote Pumbaa from The Lion King, I thought that "home is where your rump rests." That had always applied to me.
Last year was stressful, and not only because of classes. There were issues with friends, and my roommate's negative attitude started to affect my own: negativity is not something that's conducive to feeling at home.
So, for me, "home" is more than just where you go to sleep at night. My roommate this year still says that she's "going home" when she visits her parents every other weekend (they live very close), and I still say "I'm going home to work" when I have shifts at my ghost tour job. Do either of these instances count less as "home" than Room 129? Furthermore, when does Room 129 become more "home" than the houses our parents live in?
WILL it ever count as more "home"?

As I look to the future and when I will eventually have to move out of my parents' house and find a place of my own to stay, when will that place start feeling like home more than my parents' house? When I pay my own bills for eighteen years? When it's a place where I feel totally safe, and alone-but-not-lonely? When it's a place I've built up a life in?

There are some people who are turtles, and carry home on their backs. Maybe it's just easiest if I become one of those people.

This. Is. Senior. Year.

I sincerely apologize for neglecting the blog these last few weeks. I will attempt to resume posting three days a week - Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I may post more or less than that, but we'll see.

This has been an interesting start to an academic year.

British Modernist Fiction involves analyzing James Joyce and realizing he mostly writes about religion, internalized misogyny, religion, politics, the steady march of time, and stage mothers.

Creative Nonfiction is memoir-writing. So far, I have written about How I Learned To Knit, and learned that my childhood recollection of How I Came To Harry Potter is a complete lie, and Why That Is Okay.

Greek History covers mostly the ancient periods, from the bronze age to the Classical era. This is maybe 3000 years, but we just passed the Dark Ages. They were called that because there is no real writing during the Dark Ages, so there's only Linear B fragments and myths of the Trojan War. There's also Heinrich Schliemann, who went on an archaeological dig for Homer's Troy. He dug too far and what could have been Homer's Troy is lost forever, and the artifacts were in Heinrich Schliemann's trash bins. Don't be Heinrich Schliemann.

Greek Philosophy is exactly what I expected. Lots of reading in dead languages about Plato's obnoxious word usage. It's actually really cool to learn the concepts he was trying to argue about - there wouldn't be Christianity if Plato didn't introduce the concept of the soul, for example. In Plato's day, there were good people and bad people, and what you see is what you get. It's perfectly justifiable to hurt those who have hurt you and help those who have helped you. But, Plato argues, is it not possible for good people to make stupid mistakes, and for bad people to act good? YOU MEAN THAT PEOPLE ARE COMPLEX???!!!??? THANKS, PLATO.

Communication Ethics hasn't gotten to too many topics yet. It'll be interesting to see the debates that spring up when we actually start getting into case studies, like Edward Snowden and Rolling Stone's UVA case last year.

Sooooooooo those are my classes. See you Wednesday!