blog.shimer

Crime and Punishment: Rejected Ending

While I'm sure Dostoyevsky went through several ending ideas over the course of writing Crime and Punishment, I'm sure this was never one of them.

Also, I don't know why I turned Raskolnikov into Rapunzel.   For laughs?

Photos from the Concrete Jungle

I'm more of a photographer than a writer, so you should expect that I will regularly contribute photos from my every day life here. I'm starting that off with a few obligatory/touristy downtown shots. I take the train all over the city every day, generally to the North or Northwest side, so I'm also including some pictures from my commutes this weekend. 

As if I haven't been to Millenium Park enough in my life growing up in Chicago, here is an obligatory Bean-Shot for all to enjoy. "The Bean," also known as "Cloud Gate" is a statue in Chicago's Millenium Park. Every tourist takes a million pictures of it. Come to Chicago and get some pictures of it yourself.

A shot of the beautiful Michigan Avenue. 

A performer (whose name I'm unsure of) at a show I went to in Logan Square.

A camera operator filming a newscaster at one of ABC's studios which is visable from the street. 

The Chicago River seen at night.

My guitar player's cat, Walter.

A man reading the in-train CTA map. 

A typically packed traincar on the way up north.

 

Finally, a skeptical look from Professor Albert Fernandez taken just before class. 

Thanks for looking.

I did NOT burn the egg rolls

Shakespeare once said, "A little fire is quickly trodden out, which, being suffer'd, rivers cannot quench." Luckily for me, there was not even the littlest of fires. There were, however, several firefighters.

I was peacefully putting the shrimp & cabbage filling into the egg roll wrappers while the deep-fryer oil heated up. I did two quick test runs and noticed the finished product came out a little darker brown than I'd like, so I turned the heat down some and went back to folding more egg rolls.

I didn't really notice the oil smoking a bit until Jesus and Allison wandered in and pointed out that the whole hallway was smoky. See, smoke rises, and I'm 5'0", and I'd been cooking with the door open.... So I shrugged and opened a window and turned back to the filling.

Then we heard the sirens. "Please don't stop here. Just keep moving. Please go..." No dice. Multiple firetrucks pulled up outside. So I did what any self-respecting college student whose parent was visiting would do: I ran into the other room shouting "MO-O-OM!" and woke her up from her nap. She told me to relax. For all we knew, they weren't here because of us.

Moments later, six firemen strolled into my kitchen. I offered them some egg rolls.

Yes, Michael Canaan, I know they brought the pike and the axes.

---

By the way, here's my egg roll recipe.

Exterior:

Storebought egg roll wrappers

Cornstarch and water "glue" for tacking it all together

Oil for deep-frying

Interior:

Cabbage, sliced like toothpicks

Carrots--I used a Sara and a veggie peeler to get then "sliced" super-thin

Bean sprouts, chopped in half

Sliced water chestnuts

Sliced bamboo shoots, chopped like toothpicks

Minced onions

Celery, sliced super-thin

Scrambled egg or tofu fried in sesame oil and cut into itty bits

Diced cooked shrimp (de-tailed, for Pete's sake!)

Soy sauce & garlic powder to taste

Mix the filling. I had to mix several different fillings, as we had people who were vegetarian and averse to shrimp, people who were allergic to cabbage, and a cook who was absent-minded enough to forget to set some aside before mixing in the shrimp and had to make the filling over again.

Fold like this, using the cornstarch & water mix as a glue: http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1250411

Deep fry. Do not overheat your oil. When it bobs up to the surface, I think it's prolly done.

Then, as my friend Linda says: Omnomnom.

Sick Days and Shimer-Style Fun.

I've fiddle-faddled with the idea of posting about being a Shimer student and having a chronic illness (mine's rheumatoid arthritis), alternately deciding that it's not appropriate subject matter for the blog and that it's highly appropriate for it. I still don't know, actually, but, as the kids are saying these days, whatevs. In any case, this is not a serious analysis of how I do college with a chronic condition. It's a list of things I do on Thursdays. By way of explanation, Shimer allows you three absences per core class per semester. I ran through those very quickly. I have no classes on Thursday, however, and schedule absolutely nothing but rest on them if possible. I can't schedule flares, or bad days, but if I'm lucky they hit on a Thursday. In any case, this is what I do when I'm home sick or it's a Thursday, whichever. It's also a pretty good cross-section of what I do for fun, which , believe it or not, does exist at Shimer.

1.   Watch six-plus hours of Dollhouse and Ghost Hunters on Hulu. Note: Do not click this link if you have anything to do for the rest of the day. It is a time vacuum and kills productivity. You have been warned. After god knows how many pages of Aristotle, you will cling to mindless television like a security blanket, I assure you.

This show has eaten entire afternoons of my life.

2.  Count the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling. Even with all of the restrictions on how you can decorate in Gunsaulus, you are still perfectly free to stick up some stars.

The universe above my bed.

We even have planets. It is awesome.

3.  Whine at Eli until he agrees to run to the 7-11 (conveniently located in the MTCC, or that big ugly building under the tube) for some of the overpriced necessities of life, such as ice cream and little notebooks. As my illness will not go away with a jug of orange juice and a few pills, I am under no obligation to eat "healthy food."

Food of the gods; no product endorsement stated or implied

4.  Amuse myself by poking at swollen joints and counting them. This is strictly useful in terms of charting progression et cetera, but also kind of cool. I am also of course defying the tropes of all of the Humanities 2 readings and neutralizing the morality of my illness by confronting it or something. I do think intelligently about these things, but there has to be a point where theory stops and the relative fun of squishy joints takes over. Words to live by at Shimer, by the way.

Totally not my knee, you guys.

5.  Gaze pensively at the collage on the wall across from my bed. Living in a studio is handy for that sort of thing -- one of the collages on the wall in our living room is visible from bed, and allows for countless hours of staring at cute animals and pages torn from coloring books. And yes, I swear I'm almost twenty and attending a college that challenges my intellect.

The infamous collage.

6.  Daydream. Mine are long and convoluted and sometimes boring. "Oh, if only I could stand up reliably enough to do the dishes!" I cry. "If only Aristotle had dropped dead at birth!"

7.  Pretend I am a devastatingly interesting literary invalid. Unfortunately, my particular illness isn't that awesome. Now, if I had the consumption, that would be a different story, as Sontag knows. Kafka had that, you know, as did Beardsley -- which lends nearly anything credibility. As it is, I share my disease with only Renoir as far as I know in terms of the famous and dead.

Aubrey Beardsley's hands are not a side effect of TB.

8.  Read non-Shimer books, even if I have Shimer reading to do. As sick days are basically blacked out of the calendar, I can rationalize this very easily. A few hours of something light can do wonders. In fact, this is a sick day activity I highly recommend, but play it safe and avoid Sontag's Illness as Metaphor (see item seven), as it is not light reading. What light reading means here ranges from Proust (see Katy's post, below) to Lynne Truss. I like Stella Gibbons, currently. If you end up at Shimer, or of course already attend, drop by and I'll lend you Cold Comfort Farm. It's gotten me through a lot of boring invalidism and never gets old.

9.  Tea tea and more tea. And some more tea when that's finished. Current on-the-relative-cheap favorites include Twinings Prince of Wales; Choice Organic Russian Caravan (which is pine-smoked); India Breakfast Tulsi Tea (half black tea, half tulsi, an herb native to India); Choice Organic Twig Tea (made of the twigs of the tea plant, this tea tastes mildly of mudpies); and Twinings English Breakfast (the old standby). Ginger-lemon tea does wonders for nausea, as well.

The tea and I.

10.  Play with Monsieur Pierre, a little stuffed rat from IKEA who is currently our only pet. He speaks every language but English, and with Eli and I speaking varying amounts of French, Spanish, Nahuatl, Russian, and German between us, he is a super-international rat. Привет, my friends, Привет.

Eli and the Monsieur. Guess who is whom.

This concludes my hastily constructed list of what I do for fun when resting. It's got extra veracity because I'm in the middle of a flare right now and everything. I'd appreciate some feedback from you, lovely readers, on whether this is a subject that seems appropriate for the blog. I also welcome any questions, whether about the mechanics of putting stars on a ceiling or about being a Shimer student with a chronic illness. My email is s.creek@shimer.edu. 

On Lectures

Academic Earth is a website that streams lectures on a wide variety of subjects from college professors at some of the biggest and bestest schools (Hahvahd and the like).  It's a great resource to be able to sit in on these classes for free and learn.

Here is a lecture by Yale Professor Amy Hungerford about one of my all time favorite books, Franny and Zooey, which I just finished reading for the fourth time.

I greatly enjoyed this lecture.  I watched it while on the toilet, taking a crap and clipping my toenails.  I tell you this totally unnecessary piece of information because I had the same experience on the toilet I would have had sitting in that lecture hall. 

Now, you can and should watch the Shimer Sample classes on our website. But don't for a minute think that you have gotten the same experience watching a Shimer discussion in your bedroom, office, restroom, or solarium that you got by being there.  You only experience a Shimer class by participating.

Also, if you watch the lecture or read or have read the book, bear in mind that, in Amy's opinion (At Shimer, we are all on a first name basis, and Prof. Hungerford is in our house, hence, Amy), anyway, in Amy's opinion, the character of Lane is a Yale student.  In my opinion, the characters Franny and Zooey are Shimerians at heart.

Orange Horse

Among Shimer's more notorious activities includes the star-studded, no-talent-required variety show that takes place every semester. It goes by the name of Orange Horse. (This, I believe, is the name of a coffee shop in Waukegan where the original show was started--does anyone know for sure?)

Starting around seven in the evening during the middle of semester, and on a weekend with Weekend College, Orange Horse gives Shimerites the opportunity to show off what they're good at, or not, or just act goofy, or all three, in front of the rest of their peers. Normally there's a great deal of music, poetry reading, acting, jokes, and everything in between. This semester was no exception.

We have some wonderful regular alums who come back every semester, or every year, to rehash old traditions and make new ones as well. Eric, who graduated from Mt. Carroll forty years ago, keeps Shimer history alive with his songs about Francis Shimer and... well, other things.

We have solos and group jams, both of which draw cheering adulation.

And lest you think it's all music (which is only about half of it), you get the weird jokes involving clowns and other things.

Beyond that, we had poetry recited from Percy Blysse Shelley and Robert W. Service; readings from J.D. Salinger; an impersonation of a religious devotee on the El train; improv metal; and an especially anticipated guitar jam from Our Dean, David Shiner, doing "Sandman"  (Dewey Bunnell, made famous by America) and a few other songs with another Shimer student, Pat.

Orange Horse brings the entire community together; I suppose the feeling can be somewhat equated to a home football game at a big university, except there's no opposing team and no contact sports (well, usually not), no weather to contend with, and considerably better halftime entertainment. It's one of my favorite times in the semester, and I've already got plans for the next one. Let's just say they involve Team America, Kate Chopin, and the "Morning Song of Senlin," and leave it at that.

One Book One Chicago: A Shimer Reader's Theater

Three-ish years ago, the mayor of Chicago decided that all people in Chicago should read books together. So he instituted the One Book One Chicago program, wherein he picks one book for the city to read twice a year. Being a Great Books school, Shimer of course doesn't miss out on this, and we usually do theater activities around the choice of the book.

We don't just do typical shows of the book, though. Last year one of the selections was The Crucible, by Arthur Miller; instead of the play, which was the easy example, we did readings from the court hearings of the House of Un-American Activities Committee, calling forth people who were blacklisted--actors, singers, artists, everyone in between--to testify against communists during the height of the Red Scare.  Another selection was Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff--Shimer put on a slideshow based around his work The Painted Word. We try to do things differently--look at the themes in different contexts, connect the literary to the literal.

This semester, though, all the reading is coming straight from the book. It's a work that speaks for itself.

The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros, is set in Chicago, told through the voice of a young Latina girl growing up in the poorer ethnic neighborhood of the city. The story is written in short, page-long chapters, so several of us will trade off on reading vignettes from the story that follow people and themes throughout the book.

I'm one of the people doing the readings, and I hadn't read the book before, so when I went to the first rehearsal I had no idea of what to expect. But it grips you. The story told is particular, but the feelings expressed in it are universal. The people there are described with the briefest of sentences, but they are always chosen so precisely that you instantly get a deep sense of the character. It's not a happy story. While it's about childhood and growing up, it doesn't sugarcoat memories. Some of the things alluded to made me want to cry.

I think my favorite part is about a  girl named Sally. Sally is a young girl, probably not even twelve years old, who wears make-up like Cleopatra and leans on the fence at school and has a father who beats her.

"Sally, do you sometimes wish you didn't have to go home? Do you wish your feet would one day keep walking and take you far away from Mango Street, far away and maybe your feet would stop in front of a house, a nice one with flowers and big windows and steps for you to climb up two by two upstairs to where a room is waiting for you. ...You could close your eyes and you wouldn't have to worry what people said because you never belonged here anyway and nobody could make you sad and nobody would think you're strange because you like to dream and dream. And no one could yell at you if they saw you out in the dark leaning against a car, leaning against somebody without someone thinking you are bad, without somebody saying it is wrong, without the whole world waiting for you to make a mistake when all you wanted, all you wanted, Sally, was to love and to love and to love and to love, and no one could call that crazy."

How I Came to Shimer: a Hobbit's Tale

By March or April of 2008, word had drifted to me that there was “some sort of great books school, somewhere in Chicago.” By that time, I had dropped out of Bard College for personal reasons outside the scope of this post, then taken a few classes at Columbia College,  and then found work at an independent book store.  I had graduated High School in 2006, and not set foot in a classroom since May, 2007. The goal of returning to school was bouncing around in my mind, ever so vaguely, though I still thought I’d return to Bard.

Then, one fateful evening, on a whim, I googled “Great Books Chicago.” Long story short, I fell in love, submitted my application at the end of April, visited and was accepted in May, deposited in June and enrolled in August.

There are two points to this little story:

1.  Firstly of all, Shimer is still accepting applications. Whenever you are reading this post, this will be true. We have a rolling admissions policy. I have friends who applied two weeks before registration. And if you apply after registration, then start the next semester.  We’re small, we always have room!
2. Secondly of all, Shimer loves people who take circuitous routes here. I am hardly the only person to come to Shimer after one, two, or three other institutions. We have high school drop-outs (and not just the early entrants who enroll at sixteen and seventeen), people coming from the military, people who’ve spent the last few years hitchhiking, couch-surfing or drifting across the nation and lots of other interesting stories.  Ages are pretty well distributed from 16-23, despite a notable, if predictable, peak at eighteen.

More importantly, one of the first things I learned here was that temporal age is kind of meaningless. Some of the younger students are far more mature than some of the much older students. Finding out people’s temporal ages is just confusing.

Also, this is me.  I don't usually wear a feather boa, I swear!

Shimmy Shimmy

I'm Sloane, a first year student from Chicago's northwest side.  I'm here to get this party started.

You've probably all heard this sort of stuff about Shimer: it's a intellectually stimulating experience that expands and enriches your mind.  While this is definitely true, it's not all we're about.  We're not just a colony of uber-intellectuals determined to gain all knowledge in a systematic, robotic fashion--we're also silly, silly people, and I'm probably one of the better examples of that.  Here's something that happened in my Social Sciences II class when we read Thomas Aquinas' On Law, Morality, and Politics. 

We were discussing the subjectivity of law, especially how it applied to Aquinas' concept of "concupiscence", which is basically the human desire for things of the flesh: a close synonym is lust.  Anyway, we were talking about the subjectivity of concupiscence and to do this we were discussing how other less biblically entwined laws were also subjective.  One example was a traffic light: red means stop, but if there's a meteor crashing to earth right where you're stopped is the traffic light's law void?  Several others were listed, one of which I could have SWORN was prostitution.  I mean, it does go along with the theme of concupiscence.  So I jump in and start talking about how prostitution and concupiscence are linked, and all of a sudden one of my classmates says, "Sloane, wait a second: where did these prostitutes come from?"

Turns out no one had said ANYTHING about prostitution and I had imagined it.  The rest of the class was spent making references to my "obsession" with prostitutes--even Albert, our facilitator, got in on it at: after class he told me that if prostitutes were what it took to get me to participate more, then I could talk about them all I wanted so long as it was relevant to the text.

In the end an analogy was made comparing concupiscence to a hooker with a knife: concupiscence involves physical temptation (like a prostitute) coupled with a sharp stab (haha) of regret or conscience. 

So you see, there's a lighter side to Shimer that not too many people get to see until they get here.  You can sit in on a class, but to be honest we totally show off when someone sits in.  At least, I do. :)

Also, this is my face:

It's reading some Thomas Hobbes for Social Sciences II.

Also also, sometimes I draw comics.  Often they are about things that happen to me in class, things happen in stuff we read, or stuff that happens at Shimer in general.  Such as this delightful scene from Hamlet:

The Typical Career-Related Inner Turmoil of a Liberal Arts Major

Liberal education is defined as an education based primarily on the liberal arts, emphasizing the development of intellectual abilities as opposed to the acquisition of professional skills. Many people would agree that Shimer College is the quintessential liberal arts college. At Shimer, we don’t just study the liberal arts; we read the liberal arts. To understand psychology, we read Freud, Chodorow, and Erikson. When studying natural sciences we read Mendel and Darwin, Dalton and Lavosier. Philosophers like Foucault and Derrida provide us with an understanding of post-structuralist philosophy. These are just a few examples, but the point is clear: Shimer’s rigorous Great Books curriculum and personally-driven pedagogy cater to the method of liberal education. Therefore Shimer students will not be focusing on vocational skills, and as a result might continue to feel as confused about their career path as they might have in high school.

I’m no exception. I’ve had more ideas for careers than I can count, but I’ve had trouble feeling completely confident in any of them. I want my career to be intellectually challenging, helpful to others, and somehow practical – requirements that make it difficult to narrow down a career path. But since coming to Shimer, I’ve had a couple of my first reasonably-thought-out career ideas, which I figured it would be appropriate to share here.

The first career idea which I gave serious thought to was a high-school teacher. Don’t get me wrong: I absolutely hated high school and found myself completely unfulfilled in that setting. But upon reflection, I realized that at least one of my high school teachers did, in fact, have quite an influence on me, and helped steer me towards my now-realized passion for learning. When taking summer school (in order to exploit a loophole in my high-school’s graduation requirements, allowing me to escape a year early), I took a writing course. The class only had 4 students. We met in a small, office-sized room, and kept our desks arranged in a circle for discussion. Like Shimer’s liberal method, my teacher's didn’t have lectures or rigid lesson plans. We simply analyzed and critiqued each other’s writing, discussing what made each piece more or less effective. We discussed general principles of good writing and tried to apply them to our papers. The fact that I was really learning – and feeling fulfilled by the process – finally hit me when one day, I found myself ignoring the lunch-bell to continue talking to my teacher about how to improve one of my essays.

This is the type of role that I could picture myself in. While it would always be fun to teach students who are passionate about learning, I have a specific interest in students who are like I was in high school -- students who haven't yet found scholarly inspiration. However, there are two interests of mine that this career path lacks: outreach work and photography. I've given serious consideration to teaching in developing countries, obviously because the people there are in more need of help and I wouldn't find myself stuck in suburbia. Furthermore, I've found myself more and more serious about photography, and my long-put-away desire to be a photojournalist has been creeping its way back into my life. Of course, photojournalism is quite the ideal career in photography -- photojournalists are privileged to see historical events in person all over the world, creating images that will be seen by many. But it wasn't until recently that I realized that one role could possibly blend the three ideas together. If there is some way that I could teach in several countries, taking photographs in my spare time, that could be the best career idea I've had yet. I could still focus on those students who are less-than-motivated, but meanwhile do my own photojournalism and post it online.

At this point the decisions I make leading up to a successful career are quite subject to change, and I'm not entirely sure how this latest idea could be worked out. I still have four and a half semesters left at Shimer and I'm sure my ideas will develop in that time. I’m not confident enough to say for certain that I will be doing any one thing with my life, but I am confident that the enriching education that I am getting at Shimer will leave me prepared for whatever next move I choose.