July 14: Kathy's Luck Turns and She Shows Good Sense by Appreciating It

Three weeks down and three to go ‘til the end of this term.

It started out as such a yucky week what with the hurricane and power outage, the heat, food spoiling, laptop crashing, a/c going out, and to top it off the bank charged me twice for a large (for me) withdrawal I had made in anticipation of the ATMS not working or running out of $$, as they sometimes do after a ‘cane strike.

But eventually everything ironed out and then life got wonderful on Thursday when I ran into Dr. Fenstermaker in the hall and he offered to do an independent study with me in the fall. This was the most excellent news for me; I danced home, sat down and made up a plan for finishing this degree, and will take it to the director for feedback. I love this experience and wouldn’t trade it for anything, but I also want to go home. I miss my kids and grandkids so terribly. I also miss my town, my friends, my familiar places and my routines . . . I like Tallahassee and FSU very much and am thrilled to be here; but this is not home.

Critical Theory continues to be a hard class but I have to say I’m learning a great deal and it’s easier now; this week we studied Marx, Tolstoy, and Virginia Woolf (“A Room of One’s Own”). I love Woolf’s piece on “Shakespeare’s Sister” in which she addresses the question of why women did not appear in the western canon of art and history -– an important question in her day because that absence was used to justify keeping women out of the universities, politics, and most professions.

I’ve been surprised by how much I love the Film Pedagogy class. I never was much of a major filmgoer and would not have guessed I’d be so into it. But it is definitely the way to connect to today’s students and I will probably make Film Studies my secondary area. This week we studied Film Noir, and watched The Killers; also saw 84 Charley Mopic, a relatively obscure Vietnam war film that I have to say was excellent. Normally I avoid war films like the plague and so would have never seen this. Rogert Ebert called 84 the most realistic film of that war that he’s seen. It was written and directed by a vet and done with handheld camera – sort of Blair Witch Gets Drafted – “Mopic” referring to the motion picture unit that usually filmed ceremonies, but this time was sent to follow a small unit doing reconnaissance. In fact, I suspect that the Blair Witch team (from University of Central Florida, by the way) were inspired by this 1989 film; it has the same sort of premise, that sometimes films by the Mopic unit arrived Stateside and what was on the film itself was often a surprise and not a pleasant one.