Procrastination!

Success! Every blog entry I’ve posted so far has been written either in my flat or at AIRC headquarters. Lame. This time, it’s a lazy Sunday afternoon, I’m sitting under a cloudless sky at the Good Café, sipping a cappuccino that I ordered in Italian (“Ciao! Prendo cappuccino, per favore”), and typing away on my laptop. Pretentious much? I don’t really have anything important to say, just some random thoughts I probably won’t even bother to organize or put in sequence. Consider yourself warned.

Just like at school, the constant struggle here in Rome is to find the balance between work and play. We have two midterms on Monday, two five-page papers due on Tuesday, and I have to do a rewrite of my Humanities paper from last week (apparently, the assignment was “Research and write about anything we’ve discussed over the past week that interests you, unless you spend too much time researching and too little time haranguing your reader about your personal philosophy on the subject, in which case you’ll have to rewrite it to emphasize the latter.” Nah, I’m not bitter). Granted, Galinsky and Arya have already given us the essay topics for the midterms, which are open-journal anyway, and I’ve already finished one of the papers, but still, this kind of week usually only comes twice in a semester, not twice in a month.

Besides, in Austin, playing means napping, video games, movies, concerts, late-night chats, etc. In Rome, to me, at least, it seems like every free moment not spent enjoying things we can’t enjoy back home is a waste of time. I’ve been in a movie mood lately, for example, but if I’m only in Rome for twenty-eight days, a mere 672 hours, I’m not going to spend two of them shut up in my room watching Austin Powers. Nobody’s quite at that extreme, but the workload is just frustrating enough to feel like I’m spending too much time indoors with the windows closed to keep me focused. Yesterday, for example, I did research at the Traiano library from noon to three and wrote the first of my two papers from 3:30 until about 10:00 p.m., with quick breaks for dinner, coffee, etc. The Amandas, Elaine, Magown and I walked around for a couple hours after that, but still, that’s almost an entire Saturday.

Another shouldn’t-be-a-big-deal-but-still-seems-like-it moment for me: on Friday night, I went to the bar across the plaza from our flats with Elaine and had a couple beers. That’s legal in Italy, which means I’m allowed to put it up on the Internet. It won’t really matter two weeks from today, anyway, but it’s one of those moments any self-respecting college student who’s always looked to young to be able to pass for 21 on a fake ID will remember for the rest of his life. Even Elaine thought I was weird for making a moment out of it, I think, but I'm sure plenty of other people think the same thing for far better reasons, so it won't keep me up at night.

Hard to believe the trip is already more than halfway over. It seems like an eternity and the blink of an eye at the same time. Studying for the midterm, I was looking over some notes I took last Wednesday, which was only four days ago but seems like so much longer. Two weeks ago, on the other hand, was our first site visit, the Roman Forum, and that seems just like yesterday. Weird how that happens – the days drag by so slowly, but when you think about how they all add up, you wonder where all the time went.

Cappuccino’s all gone; I’ve resorted to scraping the foam off the inside walls of the cup. Just FYI.

Professor Galinsky, Dhananjay, the Amandas, Anne, Elaine, Cheuk, and I went to the Latin mass at St. Peter’s basilica this morning. I remembered bits and pieces of some of the prayers, namely the Pater Noster (Our Father) and the Sanctus Sanctus Sanctus (Holy Holy Holy), from Fr. Paul’s seventh grade Latin class. There’s not much I can say about the basilica that hasn’t already been said in every travel guide ever written, but a paragraph in my Rick Stevens book just doesn’t do it. It’s massive. Marble and gold everywhere. The absolute lowest ceiling I saw was maybe six stories above our heads. Every possible surface is decorated with relief carvings, inscriptions, precious metals, little side chapels, etc. I’ve been there once before, during our trip before senior year of high school, but it somehow seemed more impressive this time. Hate to say it, but on that trip, we’d seen so many impressive churches already that St. Peter’s seemed like just another one. This time, though, after oohing and aahing over half-crumbled stone columns for two weeks, St. Peter’s was epic. Glad I went, might even go again next week.

I should probably log off and start studying at this point. Logically, I know that tomorrow’s midterms aren’t going to be hard, but there’s that little voice in the back of my head shouting “Test tomorrow! Quit Facebooking and study!” With that in mind, two parting thoughts: Happy Belated Birthday, Opa, and Happy Father’s Day, Dad:) I haven’t called home since I’ve been here, so I’ll probably check in tonight and have a real-time conversation with everyone. It’s 8:30 a.m. there right now, though, so I don’t know how appreciative they’d be. Have a good week, gents.