End of Semester / Beginning of Awesome

[To avoid hearing me talk about workload, skip one paragraph.] This has been one heck of a full semester, and the end of it pretty much culminated that trend. I believe I mentioned erlier that I had 25 pages of final papers to write before I could start break. Well, there was that, and also a final project in statistics, and three final exams, and finishing mp erly graduation application, and whatever else. Combined, these subtracted from me not only my social life (except at lunches, my main respite) but also a lot of my sleep. Possibly I could have budgeted my time better, but it was already a bisy semester, so I would have just been a little more bisy uniformly, and probably still not gotten as much sleep and social life as I'd wished. Next semester I don't know what to expect in terms of workload. I won't have stats, which accounted for at least an hour of homework four nights a week (and usually more), but I will have a seminar, my first, and my classes are all ones that will probably involve lots of reading and writing: English historical linguistics, philosophy of language, archaeological field methods, and the Costa Rica seminar. We'll see, I suppose.

-I intend to do lots more fun stuff next semester than I did this semester, but I'll get into that later. What I want to talk about ryte now is my list of stuff that I intend to do over this winter break. I noticed a cupple weeks before the break started that I was thinking of doing a whole lot of things during that time, so I started a list, and kept adding to it as I thaut of new things. Here's what I have:

Books:

• Something by Wendell Berry
• The Culture of Make Believe
• Gödel, Escher, Bach
• Several others; altogether, they total 2,672 pages

Writing things:

• My résumé, and then an application for that internship in Chicago
• The novel that I tried to write during NaNoWriMo, before it became clear that I had way too little time
• Some sort of essay for me to clear up, mainly to myself, all my thauts on primitivism and civilization and those sorts of things

Other:

• Meeting various peeple, possibly organizing a krokay game with the old Finneytown Secondary Campus bunch
• Finishig my font Solvejg
• Trying out being a morning person—can I do it?
• Practicing some skills from some books my archaeology professor lent me, the Ancestral Skills books that are abstracted from the Journal of Primitive Technology, where people take a scientific approach to figuring out how pre-Contact tecnologies werked
• Anything else that I think of

So, you can see, it'll be a pretty active five weeks. I'm still getting settled in, but I'm so far about 250 pages into my reading list. Probably I'll write tomorrow, in addition to reading. Oh, I also have to do Christmas shopping.

-Over the last few days while I was in Iowa, I discovered a cupple articles online that inspired me to a degree. One of them was this one. It's about a guy in Scotland, named Steve James, who bilt his entire house according to his own plans, using straw-bale construction and a sod roof. I discovered it while I was looking up information about sod houses, because we were studying those in archaeology—the Vikings who landed in Newfoundland around the turn of the second millennium lived in those during the short time they stayed on this lovely continent. His grand total for construction costs was £4000, which translates to about $6500. And the house looks like exactly the sort of place I'd want to live in. It has an organic geometry to it, and from the outside it looks like the sort of house Frodo Baggins would live in if hobbits didn't live in hobbit-holes. It seems inexpressibly warm and inviting, thanks to its construction out of natural materials and the really personal way he desyned it. He's got a wood-burning stove in there that he says makes great pizzas, and also a loft with a chair that's directly under a skylyte. So, this has inspired me to think about what sort of place I want to live in someday. I've known for a long time that I don't want to live in a suburb in a house with a color choice of brown, beige, or white, but I hadn't given all that much thaut to the matter beyond that. Steve James's house looks pritty much ideal, at least for him, altho not exactly suited to me, since he appears to have sheep* and I, at the moment, don't foresee sheep in my future, and so I wouldn't need the pasture he keeps. I'm also going to be lerning a bit more about primitive house-bilding tecniques in the previously mentioned Ancestral Skills books, and I'll probably try those out whenever I have some chances to do it. A guy who lived in EcoHouse last year, Jordan (I think I may have mentioned him here once before), helped bild a straw-bale toolshed for the college's student garden, so I actually know what such a bilding looks like and I know someone to ask for more information on this sort of thing if it's the route I someday end up going.

-The other article is this one. It's about a guy who went thru grad scool on as little money as he possibly could, by living in a van, being inconspicuous, cooking his meals over a camp stove, and various other ruffian sorts of strategies. What probably got my attention more, tho, was when he mentioned that he came out of college with an English degree and $32,000 in det. Despite the lack of jobs for English majors, he paid all that det back before going into grad scool, by taking jobs that pay room and board, such as cleaning lodges in Alaska and working as a backcountry ranger in the Park Service. These, of course, are not the sorts of jobs that lead to a corner office and a keen six-figure salary, but I don't believe those are everything to look for in a job. These are the sorts of jobs I'd like to try working someday. Shure, they won't make me president of a company, but if a company president gets to look out over hye-rises and smog every day, while a backcountry ranger gets to wauk thru deep woods and protect nature, and a lodge cleaner stays on a remote Alaskan landscape with glacier-scented air and probably clear lakes, then I'm not so shure I want to be a company president. The old wisdom is good wisdom: life isn't a destination, it's a journey. By making a lot of money in some sort of hye-ranking office job, I could theoretically retire somewhat erly and enjoy the outdoor life that I always tauk about. But I fynd it really hard to believe I could enjoy that job, and so, from my point of view, I would have basically wasted those several years of my life. Several years is an incredibly precious amount of time. I get angry at myself if I waste a few hours in a day. Several years would be completely irretrievable, and I would never be able to forgive myself for lusing them. By werking odder jobs for a while, I'll maybe take a little longer to get the monetary freedom to do what I want—altho I'm really not so shure about that, either, given the way today's job market looks—but I would have the opportunity to werk on the skills I want to use later on in life. Tho I'd be doing a job if I werked as a backcountry ranger, I'd also be outside, lerning how to notice things, and absorbing the area. No such opportunity would be afforded me if I were a manager.

-Now, this doesn't mean that I've just completely forsaken the plan of going into the publishing bisness. Far from that, because that's something I think I could also enjoy, in addition to my lifelong goal of being outside a lot. All I'm saying is that I want to try some different things before I launch myself directly into the world of bisnesses. Ideally, if I combine this life strategy with my other plan of going on the JET program (the Japanese thing that pays ¥3.6mil, or ~$40k, for teaching English for a year), then I'll be able to pay off my student loans with lytening speed, and be able to enter career-type jobs with a clean slate. And then my other strategy, which is to live really frugally, comes into play, and so do the two articles above, and the Ancestral Skills books that will (among other things, especially including real experience) teach me about how to live off the land. Every piece is important in shaping what my life will eventually look like. But I'm alredy well equipped, and I just keep serching out ways to equip myself better, for what I want to do. I'm looking forward to life. (Altho it's still alarming to think I'll soon be a college graduate. Just one more year.)

*I get this from the Russian news clip about his house that he has on his website (http://www.envisioneer.net/video/index.php?mv=NTVlg&tn=NTVlg), but it's in Russian, so I'm not actually shure if the sheep are his.