Oh, university...

you're making it hard to keep up my enthusiasm for you.

*sigh*

There are fifteen seminars being offered this semester in American studies.

Five of them take place on Tuesday between four and six p.m.

These also happen to be the only ones that are 1.) interesting, 2.) fit into my plans of what I want to do in my last couple of terms of uni (and possibly in my thesis), 3.) didn't require signing up months in advance, and 4.) that I haven't already taken earlier.

So, I can only take *one* interesting seminar this term. Which means I need to fill the rest of my required classes with a) stuff that bores me to death (19th century stuff; the rise of unitarianism; art criticism; objectivism in American poetry) or b) stuff I've already done.

This is not only annoying because I'll be forced to waste time I could have spent learning something interesting learning about stuff I'm not interested in instead; it's also highly inconvenient because I'm still not sure what I'm going to write my thesis about, and was hoping that some seminar would give me an idea. Seminars on objectivism in poetry are unlikely to do that, as I'm interested neither in objectivism nor in poetry. Nor am I willing to write my thesis about the 19th century, one of my least favourite periods in history, and art criticism isn't something I can see myself getting interested in, either. American religions, on the other hand *are* kind of interesting, but that particular seminar is the third in a series, and I didn't take the first two, so I'd be missing the foundations.

They probably put all the interesting seminars on the same day and time because they guessed that those would be the most popular, and they wanted to force students to take only one of the interesting/popular ones and then take some of the boring/redundant/ridiculously-specialised-in-areas-few-people-care-about ones, too.

Gotta love German universities.

Street art, and a mystery solved

I just solved a mystery that has been bugging me for five years. Five years ago I saw these little white tents all over the city, in random places - tiny tents, about knee-height, made from white tarpaulin and tree branches painted white. The last I found out about them made them out to be a bit of a mystery to everybody - there was an article about it in the newspaper. Then, as suddenly as they had appeared, they were gone, as if a tribe of invisible miniature nomads had struck camp and moved on.

I've now found out that they were part of an art installation that apparently belonged to (or at least was timed to coincide with) a week-long festival in 2002. Unfortunately information about them on the net is next to non-existent, but here's what little I found:

http://www.ap-interactio.net/p_site/ARTEP_TEMPO.HTML

And I also found out today that someone has done what I've been meaning to do for years, and taken loads of photographs of my favourite recurring graffiti here in the city. I'm always cheered when I discover a new one of these guys:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tijuana/sets/72057594088109720/

Re: my writing

Plan for the next couple of weeks, writing-wise: get "68 Wives" plus two of the three old, revised Methos stories ready to put online. They've languished in a virtual drawer long enough.

I'm going to do an hour of revising right now. No more than an hour, though, as it's already midnight and I'm working on normalising my sleep pattern...