I've had my last final exam today.

It went really, really well, much better than expected, especially considering all the things that went wrong with my final exams.

And it's over!

I'm going to be a teacher!

I found a video (in German) on my uni. I love how they whine about the quality of the buildings in this video when there are things that make this uni much worse. Admittedly, the mould is quite disconcerting and the Anthropology course I once had in a smelly, damp room in an old basement with dark, wet spots on the walls where the plumbing was getting old was not much fun, but I'd have still gone with the course sizes (very large) and the course organisation (90min of bad student lectures, mostly).

The University of Hannover is hosting the German Tolkien society's annual seminar this year. It's free, it's this April and it'll be on conflict, violence and war in Tolkin's works. The organiser is the Professor whose seminar on "literary masculinities" I was allowed to attend for kicks at Hannover university in spite of not being enrolled there (he is an awesome teacher and has worked on Tolkien, too).

I am tempted - and I'm especially looking forward to "Tolkien as war poet", "violence and song" and the talks on the "just wars". My knowledge of Tolkien's works may not be sound enough to fully appreciate everything, but I'll try.

In case any of the more Tolkieny-inclined among you are interested:

I have a question for my fellow Fantasy readers out there (I'm looking especially at you, fourthage ), do you happen to know any (recent) British (high/epic/heroic/parallel world) Fantasy books which have been fairly popular which have a female heroine?
Preferably written by a female writer?

Crocky asked me for suggestions, but all I could come up with were mumbled suggestions along the lines of Marion Zimmer Bradley and Tamora Pierce, neither of who are British, and Susan Cooper, whom I love to pieces, but whose Jane Drew does not make her a good example because the other characters are all male.

The only real example I could think of was Jill Murphy, whose books were fairly popular but whose target audience is a good deal younger than the ones Crocky'd need (the books she's going to examine are Harry Potter, His Dark Materials, The Bartimaeus Trilogy).

Some  help?

Yesterday was pretty much the perfect day. Perfect. I had asked Crocky whether she'd like to see What the Butler Saw with me, and so she came along and spent the day with me in Hamburg, which is always a good foundation of a perfect day.

At first, I went to see one of my examiners, the didactics one, who is just generally wonderful and awesome and who chatted to me about my final paper and was very interested in my topic. I love her. Then, I picked up two Scheine, which I was very pleased with, as well.



Since by then it was only around 3pm, there was a lot of time to kill until 7.30pm. Thus, we went to see Hancock, which I had unwisely not read any reviews of and which I was exited about because it features a Will Smith as a superhero.


Why I Did Not Like Hancock In Spite of Will

After three quarters of an hour, feeling vaguely self-conscious and nerdy for doing so, I leant across to Crocky and told her I was wondering whether this movie is actually worse from a gender perspective or a race perspective only to find out that she'd been trying to make up her mind about that, too.

Of course now some people will roll their eyes and marvel how she and I can even be bothered to care enough about such things to let them interfere with watching a good movie, and rest assured that I really wouldn't have, had there been a decent enough movie to watch. Now, it's not as bad as The Happening, which had me wondering and thankful for watching it, because it may actually be the absolutely worst movie I have ever had the privilege of seeing, but just generally... sort of... wrong on several levels.

The only good things were probably the special-effects and the mere fact that it has a black superhero! As a main character! As the title role! Which was awesome.

Not so awesome was pretty much everything else.

The blatant, really unnecessary nationalism, which was probably only to be expected of a movie that opened on the fourth of July - and still I think that the film could have afforded to lose a few eagles, especially the random real eagle that made a WTF-inspiring appearance in the closing scenes.

The way the hero had to be told to adjust to the role of the tradintional, white superhero to be accepted by society, guided by a wise, well-adjusted white mentor figure and with the vulnerable white, blonde woman as the ultimate prize at the end. How- in spite of her freaking super powers- said white, blond woman's purpose was to be saved by the male hero, for heaven's sake. How this is also a movie about a poverty-stricken, aggressive alcoholic being polished up for society by the nice upper-class, white family.
How the backstory stayed lame and vague and was only introduced in the last part of the film, making a rushed appearance.

How, in spite of Hancock, there was just one other black character, who was of course a male news presenter, and a few criminals without lines, and no black women at all. This especially made Hancock not only "the only of his kind" as a superhero, but also the only of his kind as a black character, which is sad, as the film was promising.

So, I did not really like it. I still love watching Will Smith, but the first black superhero could really have deserved a different context in my eyes.


We then went and watched the University Player's performance of Joe Orton's What the Butler Saw, which was very, very enjoyable.
Even though I know that some people had had their doubts about the effectiveness of having the characters played by cross-dressing characters of the opposite sex, that made the play all the more enjoyable to watch for me.
The skill of the actors and the professionalism of the production once again made me marvel at the skill of the people involved.

And in more than one sense, but most of all emotionally. I know that Hamburg is a city in which a lot of children live in broken homes or come from incredibly poor and difficult backgrounds.




I feel so silly. I knew these things were going on, but hearing people talk about them who had witnessed them made them more real, and more horrible.

Somehow, I am at the same time both sad and glad that I did not take part in such a more "difficult" trip instead of the six comparatively easy weeks at the kindergarten. I would have wanted to do something to make them - all of them - feel better - but I would have never been able to, and that, and the terrible burden of knowing that there are children who are raised in such horrible conditions, would have just about killed me.  This seminar really makes me want to find a way to reach out to children living in such difficult conditions and help them, one at a time, so that I can help without breaking.

Stine. Has eaten. Two of my applications.

Not more.

Just the two.

All others are fine.

Two seminars I know I have applied for, because they were the first seminars I applied for.

Also, I was turned down for the two education courses I really need, which means I'll probably have to graduate a semester later just because of those two seminars.

High five?

Imagine you want to be an EFL teacher.

What kind of language, do you think, should you be able to speak really well?

And in the requirements for the final exam, which language should be the ultimate, absolute requirement?

Yes, exactly.

Latin.

Some completely reactionary, antediluvian brainless dickhead decided once upon a time that what prospective EFL teachers really need is a sound knowledge of Latin.

Oh, and they "should", "if possible" "have spent three month in an English speaking country".

The level of proficiency required for EFL is higher than the one required for the friggin' Latin teachers. Of course their knowledge should be and is a lot sounder than ours, but it is NOT on the books, they do NOT have to take costly courses to reach the required level of proficiency. Our language requirements are, and we have to pay.

I had been relatively ok with that situation, even the fact that we have to take expensive courses and sit an expensive examination on top of the fees introduced by our darling alma mater to gain that requirement, but what really made me angry was the fact that another completely incompetent dickhead with a pen decided to make some of the language courses free of charge, modern languages a lot of people learn for fun like Spanish, Italian, Russian, Portuguese because there are some people who need them for their courses - but they did not include the fucking Latin courses.

So if you want to spend your holidays on the beach and be able to order your drinks in Spanish the university will happily pay for your course, but if you are forced to reach a medium level of proficiency (the Latinum, in other words, Hamburg still has the small Latinum, the Latinum, and the Big L), you have to pay for that yourself, €100 per course (either three intensive courses or six courses during the semester) plus the fucking fee for the examination at the end.

I want to get hold of the intellectually depleted fossile who decided we need a Latinum instead of a small Latinum - as EFL teachers do pretty much everywhere else in Germany, and of the unthinking idiot who decided to make other courses free of charge and not Latin.
I like Latin, and I would not mind taking the courses and not even the ridiculous amount of extra work if there was sense in that and I would not have to pay for it, if there was some kind of remote sense to it.

Alright. Enough anger, off to see Crocky. ♥

Seen Films Meme

SUPPOSEDLY if you've seen over 85 films, you have no life. Mark the ones you've seen. There are 239 films on this list. Copy this list, go to your own facebook/myspace/ell-jay account, paste this as a note. Then, put x's next to the films you've seen, add them up, change the header adding your number, and click post at the bottom. Have fun...

( 81. I have a life. Close call. Thank god they didn't include Star Trek, or The Planet of the Apes series. )
I am back from a weekend at Crocky's, which was wonderful.

And back from an excruciating meet-up with a group I am doing an oral report with. These guys SUCK. They don't know what they want, they don't know how to do what they want, and, most of all, they don't know anything about the subject of the course. All of the suggestions they've made so far have nothing to do whatsoever with what we are supposed to do. I wish I could do that project on my own.

Also, it seems as though I will lose a semester and finish a semester later than I planned because I can only hand in the Scheine I receive for the successful participation in courses until a before the end of the semester, and that would mean, once more, submitting papers early. FIVE papers, in that case, and that can't be done. Sucky, sucky.

Oh, and an oral report no one is interested in tomorrow morning. Which also sucks.

I am SO tired and worn out, I don't know why. Will catch up on everyone tomorrow.
Night!

My weekend was outside of space and time, because Crocky was here. Something about her just makes time stop and moves everything to another plane of reality that is not exactly unreal, but isn't coherent with my everyday reality of university and family, either.
It is scary how much my week depends on the knowledge that on the weekend, we will be seeing each other. If we do not, I don't feel well, I grow very dependent on our daily phone calls, and I miss her terribly every day. Sometimes I doubt it's entirely healthy. On the weekends, I feel that they belong to us and us alone, and I meet disturbances only very, very grudgingly.
I have become absolutely addicted to this relationship, and time with Crocky. So far it hasn't had any dramatically negative side-effects, but I doubt that addictions are positive, even when they're to people.

She went home again this morning and I am waiting for my courses to begin at four, in the Mac pool. There is so little oxygen in the buildings that I feel completely light-headed and unable to concentrate on any work. It's too cold to open the window, too. Great.

I hate the fact that my university is obsessed with Macs. There is one PC pool, and two Mac pools. Blegh. Are there Word-like programmes on Macs? Do they exist? If they do, why doesn't my university bother with having them installed on these computers? I am about to write my homework in an e-mail programme. Although seeing as the two girl working on their presentation on Scots (which makes my skin crawl - do they know anything at all about Scots??) are using a PowerPoint-like programme, they do seem to exist.

Why do we even bother with presentations? I think in all the years at this university I have been to about two presentations that were really worth attending. No one ever takes them seriously and the value they have for the courses are close to zero, especially with people doing the presentation who so obviously don't know what they're talking about. Sadly, I can't find the great site with sound samples Crocky showed me the other day, but here's an example for synthetic Scots.

I've been looking everywhere for material on "The Widower" by Hugh McDiarmid, but there's just nothing on the little poem that contains two very pretty words, "pitmerk" and "snell". "Pitmerk" means pitch dark, "snell", which means piercing, icy, cold, severe.

It doesn't help that there are so many other pretty poems on the poetry pages that distract me, like ( The Twa Corbies - anonymous, Scottish ), or the unforgettable ( Tay Bridge Disaster - William Topaz McGonagall ). Or this poem, ( Lovesong - Ted Hughes ). I loved his "Examination at the Womb Door".

Off to try and get some work done instead of slowly dozing off.