It's snowing again

I think I may be reaching the point in my academic career where I just.don't.care. Maybe it's just this quarter.

So, I know I alternately whine about school a lot and then talk about how I love it. Well. both of those things are true for my science courses, and for the courses that at least engage me.

I am taking an online literature course this quarter as well. I needed something that wouldn't keep me at school any longer that I could do in my time at home. Well, what I'm figuring out is that I am at the point where I just don't have the time for a reading course that is this intensive. In addition to several hundred pages a week of short stories and poems that we routinely analyze for "theme" and then have "team discussion" on where we are required to respond to one another, we have to read a novel and write several theme papers on it.

Well, the novel is "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I don't like it. At all. Hold on, back up, before you start throwing your little literary academic stones at me, I think that if I had just read this book on my own (it was on my list, actually) when I don't have a million and a half super hard science things I'm doing and reading and writing all of the time, I might actually like it. The style is lilting and meandering, not really told in any kind of a chronological order. The repeating elements of the story are lust, sex, war, death, knowledge, and incest. Pretty meaty, yeah? Well, let me 'splain somethin' to you.

Marquez, in this novel, shows repetition of characteristics of the main characters represented in this work by repeating their names. Therefore, the first male character introduced is Jose Arcadio Buendia, who is married to Ursula. They have 3 children that are actually biologically theirs, Jose Arcadio and Aureliano, the boys, and Amaranta, the girl who came later. Aureliano has a son who he names Aureliano Jose. Jose Arcadio has a son he names Arcadio. Both of these men's sons are by the same mother, who is not married to either of them, but is the town whore. She drops Arcadio off to live with his grandparents when he is little, and he is raised calling Amaranta sister, along with Rebecca, an orphan girl sent to live with them by some mysterious stranger claiming to be a dear friend, and who shows up with a bag of bones in tow that contain her parents' remains. Time passes. Arcadio doesn't know the secret of his birth and ends up yearning after his mother, who pays another woman to go to him in her place. Aureliano Jose is raised by his Aunt Amaranta who he secretly has an affair with later. Jose Arcadio runs off with the gypsies before his son Arcadio is born and then comes back and then has an affair with and marries Rebecca, the orphan girl raised as his sister. Confused yet? Imagine how I feel after reading 187 pages and now there are an additional 17 Aurelianos, all illegitimate, in addition to Arcadio Segundo and Aureliano Segundo, twins from the unmarried companion of Aureliano Jose that his actual mother paid to sleep with him. It just keeps getting more and more confusing. There is no linear timeline to follow, either, so the names keep jumping back and forth in time. I think if I had about a month of free time to read for enjoyment, I might be able to appreciate the style in which this is written, but for now it just kind of feels like torture, a slow torture I cannot escape. It's awful, and I'm hating every single page. I actually prayed for a papercut today so I would have something to distract me. I wish I were joking....

I am supposed to write a 500 word essay (not hard) on a specific symbol of myth represented in the book (okay...) but it can't be one of the main ones. Then my prof outlined 15 things we can't use as symbols. They all happen to be main themes of the book.

I have 4 more lab reports, a 15 page annotated and cited research paper, a 20 page formal lab write up, and TWO big tests next week. I don't feel like I have time for such verbal frippery. I'm pissed off at the amount of work that exists for this class. It's ONLINE for crying out loud. None of the other online classes I've taken have required this much reading, and that includes the other online english course I took that required me to read almost every work Tess Gallagher has ever written.

Also, it's snowing here again. And when I say "snowing" I mean it actually accumulated. At last count, around 8:30 or so, we easily had 3 inches. It's been continually snowing since then, and I just checked the strawberry pot out front. Almost 5 inches on top of that sucker. I shit you not. WTF?

Tomorrow when it gets light again I'll take some pics and post 'em, since by the time the stuff was really accumulating tonight it got dark.

Okay, well I'm giving up on academia for the evening, going to go drink a huge glass of water and clamber off to bed.