A Little More Positive

Okay, forgive me because my last two posts were rather...uh...angry? You have to understand, it's not that I hate america, or am anti-american or anything. In fact, being in Russia showed me just how much I love my country. It's just I get frustrated with people who are ignorant about things when, what with all our modern information systems, there's no reason to be. Having said that, on to the news.

College is tough. I'm not going to lie. There are a few classes I strongly dislike, but some of them aren't so bad. My Russian class for example. I'm taking a Russian class called "Speaking and Writing." So we write essays and have conversations and stuff, but the best part about this is that we are using MOVIES for the basis of our writing and speaking. Which is pretty awesome if you ask me. The first movie we're watching is called Tsirk which means Circus. It's about an american circus star who has a black child, gets run out of town, meets a German guy and goes to the Soviet Union. This movie was made in 1936 and the most interesting thing about it (in my opinion anyway) is that this is one of the Soviet Union's answers to Hollywood. Apparently, they sent spies to Hollywood to find out about the movies and when they came back, this is the result. I thought that was pretty cool. The good thing about this class is that there's no textbook but we are going to have to buy a few movies which can be either a good thing or a bad thing depending on how you look at it :)

Another interesting thing occured in my "Comparing governments" class. As part of this class, we are required to get into groups and do a presentation about a country. I bet you can't guess what country I wanted?...Do you know what country I got? Britain. How did this happen? Well, mostly it has to do with the fact that because of the way in which the sign-up sheet was passed around, I was the very last person to sign up. (Yet I was sitting in the front of the room. ironic no?) as a result, by the time the sheet got to me, there were already six people signed up for Russia. (For some reason it's really popular right now. Gee, I wonder why. heh heh) I'm a flexible person so I looked at my options, or rather, I looked at the countries that didn't have a lot of people signed up for them. The countries were India with two people, North Korea with one, Britain with one and the U.S. with none (Even though the presentation is the last week of class) I thought about picking India, but the teacher recommended picking Britain. I eventually went with that. Why? Well at first it seems really stupid because 1. I know nothing about Britain's political system and 2. We're going to be presenting a week from Monday. But actually, I went and signed up with it because of its distinct advantages.

First of all, knowing next to nothing about the political system, this will give me a good opportunity to learn more and broaden my horizons. After all, I get mad about ignorant people in the United States, but in some ways, I'm one of them myself. It should be especially interesting because the one guy in my group (There are now three people including myself because another woman switched to ours) is originally from New Zealand. So that should be interesting.

Now to my second craziness of having to present this a week from Monday. The first advantage is that I get my project over with early in the semester. This is great because already thinking ahead, I know as the semester goes on I'll just get busier and busier what with mid-terms and finals a possible job and all. Another advantage to going a week from Monday is that as the first group to go, we set the standard. Also as the first group to go, if we mess something up, it might be more easily forgiven because we don't yet have a standard.

So, there you have it. I'm actually looking forward to the presentation. Now, if we could only get our group together and work.