this place can spin boring. slow and steady. it can storm and scare you. wars and famine. but every once in a while the planets align and it can charm you. make you not wish you were other people, but hope you get the chance to know them so they can know you too.

Thanks, P.

I stayed up until an ungodly hour Monday night studying for my AmerHistory exam and okay, finishing the study guide that I totally slacked on, obviously...only to be reminded when I got to school that it was an open journal test. Oh, did I tell y'all about our journals? No, I did not.

He required that we get notebooks dedicated solely to our history notes. Usually I just get one three ring binder and keep my stuff for all my classes in there but nooooo. Now I have a journal. I will not call it a vade mecum. He cannot make me. He also requires that we take notes his way. Like this:

date........................definition........................term

(Date and term being in the left and right margins, respectively.) He graded the journals while we took our first exam. I forgot mine (because I'd been busy trying to recopy the notes in my style into his style) so I escaped his judgment, but when he gave the tests back, he gave a lecture again about taking notes in his style. He broke his laptop, so we no longer have PowerPoint and lots of times, I find myself just listening to him lecture rather than taking notes. So to sum up, for the purposes of the test, my notes were pretty crap. The test is a pretty standard format--50 multiple choice questions then mini-essay questions. He gives us around 15 terms and we have to answer 10 of them. He said that since this test was open journal, he'd be grading more critically than usual. So I was throwing everything in there, whether it was relevant to the chapters we were studying or not. For example, in my answer for Crispus Attucks, I mentioned that he became a symbol for abolitionists. Was he? Sure, why not?

In the early 1800s, as the Abolitionist movement gained momentum in Boston, Attucks was lauded as an example of a black American who played a heroic role in the history of the United States. Hey, alright!

Before that, we were discussing reinforcements in Psychology. Dr. E brought up the topic of serial killers and the attention they get--how probably everyone knew the name Son of Sam but not many, if any, knew the name of the Navy Seal who will be posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor next week for throwing himself on a grenade to save the rest of the men in their hideout. (His name is Michael Monsoor.) Then he was off on a discussion of serial killers and I inadvertently showed my vast and somewhat scary knowledge of them. Off on a tangent about Charles Manson, he asked if anyone knew what Manson's ultimate goal was. Ooh ooh, I do! (He was trying to spark the race war that he saw as inevitable.) I'm amazing!

You know who else is amazing? Pearl Cornioley. She passed away this past February, but during WWII, she was a resistance fighter and an all-around badass. The files on her have just been declassified, so her badassery is becoming more well known. They didn't think much of her at first, although they acknowledged that she was "probably the best shot--male or female--we have yet had." According to the International Herald Tribune:

"After parachuting into France, Cornioley passed on secret messages to her first handler in France that she had carried in the hem of her skirt. Following the capture of her leader, she assumed control of the cell in the north Indre department of the Loire River valley, about 240 miles southeast of the Normandy beaches. She interrupted the Paris-Bordeaux railway line more than 800 times and attacked convoys in June 1944, the month of the D-Day invasion. All told, she led 3,000 French Resistance fighters in a host of guerrilla warfare missions. She proved so crucial that the Nazis issued a 1 million franc award for her capture, hoping to quash her pivotal role in the Resistance."

But she could not be quashed. Years later, the British government tried to honor her...with an award for civilians, being ineligible for a military award because she was a lady. She refused the civilian award, because "there was nothing civil about what I did" and that "the work which I undertook was of a purely military nature in enemy occupied country. I personally was responsible for the training and organisation of nearly 3,000 men for sabotage and guerrilla warfare." She was awarded her Parachute Wings from the RAF in 2006.

Of course, I can't think about the resistance without thinking of this scene. "Fun" fact: Many of the actors and actresses playing refugees in this scene were refugees. The tears were real. Vive la France. Speaking of France, I love this commercial for a French movie network, which uses the French title of March of the Penguins (in France, March of the Emperors) to fun effect. Speaking of movies, I finally saw Sweeney Todd Sunday night. It's my favorite musical so I was nervous but I loved it. I've been walking around singing the songs, which I should probably stop before I bust out in public with "They aaaaall deserve to die!" from "Epiphany." [That's the scene from the movie, so you know, slightly spoilery I guess.]

And I've got some other stuff to ramble on about, but this entry is long enough, so I'll do that later. Later!

This isn't what I wanted to post about. I wanted to talk about something fun, something lighthearted. I'm going to try to talk about that in a bit, but this is something I should tell first. As most of you know, I live with my grandmother. I've lived with her since 2001 and in November 2004, she had a disabling stroke. She's done pretty well since then, although she's had to use a walker since then and her mental outlook took a dive.

Earlier this week, she was having a lot of shoulder and back pain. She had torn her rotator cuff before the stroke and it hadn't really healed like it should. For some reason, her doctors never thought surgery was the best choice and her weakness hampered a lot of the rehab she could do. So when she had pain, she figured that maybe she'd pulled it in the night or something. But it became clear that something different was happening when we noticed other things. She was in an enormous amount of pain and she wasn't making much sense. She went to the doctor on Sunday but they just prescribed her painkillers and sent her on her way. Wednesday, we had the EMTs take her back to the hospital and they finally admitted her. She was still very loopy and was talking about things that didn't make sense, that may have happened decades ago. ("What about the van?" "What van?" "The van tipped over and all the affadavits fell out"--she used to work in law) She was having trouble recognizing people. They diagnosed a major kidney infection and shingles, among other things.

Friday morning, her nurse reported that things were a lot better. She was speaking logically and was eating a regular diet again. I took it in stride, as an example of the way things ought to be. Of course, the universe said, ha.

This morning, my mom told me that they don't expect her to make it. I don't know all the details--they believe her kidneys are shutting down--my ears starting ringing after that. There is always the possibility of miracles--and this is the weekend for them--but a cold, hard reality has begun to set in. I'm not going to try to be philosophical or poetic about it. That's really all I have to say right now.