So it is the morning of May 29th and I have yet to go to sleep from the night before; not my usual routine but it has been known to happen. Last evening was Lange Nacht der Wissenschaft, another event in the series of "Lange Nachts". Basically the whole city has been hosting a series of events where, for one evening, either the museums and galleries, opera houses and theaters, or (as in this case) universities and research labs open their doors to the public and display special exhibits and performances. A defining feature of these evenings has been that all of the locations are connected by direct route city buses, limiting the need to navigate or even walk between locations.
For "Long night of the sciences" I visited the "technical university" and checked out their displays on architecture, energy efficiency, solar and wind energy production and energy state conversion and storage. Unlike Lange Nacht der Museen I found the displays to be a bit... "simplified", for the congestion of a large and constantly fluxing crowd. They made a great effort though and I was thoroughly entertained, and all of their displays had something interesting that a viewer would remember and possibly delve into deeper in their own time. Being an avid follower of TED however, I find my standards for lectures and displays in the sciences to have become somewhat high, perhaps unreasonably.
Later that evening, after stopping back home, I met up with Benedict and checked out a club (which was really just a bar with some speakers and a small dance floor) where his boss was djing (although I like techno, this sort was a little too loud and also a little too bland). But I was already there and so I stayed and danced until 3:00 am. After getting home I skyped a friend and then just finished watching Baby Mama, a movie with Tina Fey (whom I've decided I love as much as Whoopi Goldberg and Ellen DeGeneres, but still not quite as much as Jodie Foster, Helen Hunt or Rachel Weisz). Now that the sun is already up I thought I would write an update.
My Berlin adventure has exactly 7 weeks left, it's hard to imagine that I've been here for 4 months already.
Last Friday our Hampshire group had its last student seminar (Maggie's, and we discussed a short story and related essay on Jewish culture and incest in Germany). Afterwards we had dinner together (Vietnamese again, but it was good) which meant I had to reschedule my planned dinner with the Schlueters, which was a bummer because I haven't seen them in quite a while.
Circus has been going well, although I haven't had a trapeze lesson in nearly 2 weeks. I'm learning a lot of new tricks and techniques, but all of my old challenges seem to be staying at their original levels of completeness; very frustrating. I've been watching a lot of movies which, for me, is no surprise. On the plus side, the movie theater closest to me shows only German dubs so I still get to appreciate some linguistic immersion.
Classes have been interesting though I find having only reading homework with discussion and analysis to be far less stimulating or challenging than research papers or critical reaction essays, or even debates or presentation based assignments. I feel that the pressure on students here is incredibly low compared to the US, although I must admit that I could make it more challenging for myself by taking 2-4 more classes. Still, without trying to compare American students to German ones (as there is no comparison when each group shows such wide and similar variety), I fear as to how much information I will retain at the end of the semester compared to classes which I took in my first semester of college or even back in High School, purely from an increase in my own involvement with my assignments and the course material.
To simply "expect" students to read and retain all of the information they could possibly need is, I feel, irresponsible and unthoughtful. I myself wish learning were so simple, that any single individual could read a comprehensive text book or essay on a topic and both understand it and retain it. However, it is my experience that such a method simply isn't effective. People learn the most and remember the longest about topics which they themselves had to explain and express to their professor or class; in the form of a research paper or project, and even more so when they themselves had to actively present it. I appreciate Hampshire more (and my high school, Harmony) all the more when being exposed to this kind of system.
That tangent aside, my classes really are interesting and I enjoy the questions and points which the other students have brought to the discussions.
In other news, our group is leaving on the 2nd of June to visit Poland for 5-6 days which should be very exciting. I have been developing an increasingly intense writer's block (or writer's aversion as I have been calling it), leading me to avoid my mother's one-page-from-complete short story, my novel, various short stories and most notably this blog. In a creative capacity I feel writer's block truly does exist; that it is embodied by the feeling of detachment from one's work (either due to a distraction or simply being unable to immerse oneself in their field); how can you convince yourself to write when you feel that anything you create will be skewed and uninspired? However, in the case of homework or even this blog (as it is a responsibility rather than an outlet; I have always despised journal keeping if it has nothing to do with dreams), then writer's block is more of a laziness, an ongoing procrastination fed by the idea of "well, I just don't know what to write about".
Creative writing suffers when you are uninspired, technical writing suffers when you are unmotivated. I can't imagine trying to combine the two as a career path, sheer chaos.
In lighter news I have found lots of new and interesting music on music blogs and am enjoying my expanded library. I also watched the Alien quadrilogy for the first time and was truly impressed with both the acting and story line (as far as horror movies go). I'm sure I'll post something again, probably from Poland but certainly before my conclusive and comprehensive retrospective.
