GRE FAIL, Thesis All-Nighters, Forgotten Midterms, and Other Happenings

Posted by Unknown , Monday, October 20, 2008 2:38 AM

Oh, hectic I am.

So many things have happened in the last few weeks that it's hard to recount them all, so I won't. However, there are a few major things.

• The GRE and my inability to speak of it without great acrimony (thanks, GRE guide makers, for giving me over 490 of the most often recurring words on the GRE and it being completely useless in application): Without disclosing too much, the GRE is hard. Though I only studied for a day, I came out ahead of where I could have been, but I can't help feeling that $140 I spent wasn't worth the plastic I put it on. We'll see once I start hearing back from grad schools. There's always window-washing if things don't work out, I s'pose.
• Two all-nighters later, and I have somewhere around half of my thesis done: You may think that I've done well from that alone, but keep in mind that the rough draft was due last Monday. God, someone shoot me. I just want it to write itself already. It almost literally does except for pesky things like "continuity" and "chronology."
• The "Oh-my-God-how-does-someone-forget-a-midterm-*headdesk*" moment: I'm varying back and forth between being disgusted and being apathetic about this, but I let a Monday-after-Fall-Break midterm sneak up on me and bite me pretty hard. From the looks of the study guide, I could wing it and make a passable grade (the first identification term is "Hernando de Soto" - hellooooo, sixth grade!), but why on earth do I need to take that chance. I'm filling out the study guide and studying before class tomorrow, but I am not happy that I forgot.

I've had an otherwise eventful weekend, but it's been one of those survive-now-and-live-to-tell-the-tale type weekends. I will say that it's been one of my most interesting as well as one of my most (negatively) enlightening weekends of my life, and that's excluding the GRE.

I'm planning on starting either a new blog or posting a new page with .pdfs of some of my work (papers and such) so that grad schools have URLs to access my presented-but-unpublished papers and articles. What do you all think? .PDFs and a new blog, or .PDFs on this blog? My only worry about this blog is the possibility that it's inappropriate. I don't think it is too much so, but it is certainly not professional. Let me know what you think soon so I can take your thoughts into account when I decide this week.

Oh, and the top five list changed.

1. UT at Austin
2. Vanderbilt
3. OU at Norman
4. Ole Miss
5. Duke

Now to contact professors in each history department! Hurray for the most time-consuming high-risk activity I've done thus far in my academic life.

Edit: Also, a review of the Fall movie Blindness is up at VDCC.

I'll let you decide.

Posted by Unknown , Friday, March 28, 2008 3:03 PM

So which is it, AF readers?

As a formal poll (and a symbol of my democratic tendencies), I'll let you all vote in the comment section. Whichever one wins out, I will place in a widget on the right hand side. Deal? Deal.

Thanks goes to Dependable Renegade for the site.

News over at VDCC

Posted by Unknown , Sunday, March 02, 2008 3:54 AM

My other blog, Voice from the Depths of the Cultural Coil, has been defunct for a few months now (the last review is The Golden Compass). However, I'm not willing to let it die. I've implemented a new idea for the site. I'm going to repost that here, and we'll see what comes of it.

Feuer der Seele, or "How I found my inner blog."

Posted by Unknown , Sunday, February 17, 2008 5:26 PM

I thought I'd take a break from pissed-off-posting to take a long look in the mirror. What is Adamant's Fire all about? What does it mean to me? What am I hoping to accomplish?

To answer that, I have to explain (or at least remember) why I named this "Adamant's Fire" in the first place.

From the first post back in September 2005:

I'm sure that this sounds frivolous and not as serious as I've read in some of the other bloggers[sic] post, but I refuse to resign myself to that sort of political jargon incessantly. I am not brilliant, but I am far from stupid. I'll make my comments on current events as it suits me, as this is my corner of the web and no one elses [sic].

That first post says a lot about where I was when I began writing here, besides being a commentary on my proofread-as-I-write skills). I wanted an open corner - something that belonged to me, but something that everyone could see. But I dropped Blogger before it could even think about becoming a bad habit. I went over to Xanga, but that went bust sometime early last year. I'd been typing away over at Xanga, but I had locked that profile and even protected some of the posts. What's the point of keeping a blog when it's only a conversation between you and certain people? If that's all it is, then why not tell them personally? That's what my Xanga boiled down to. It wasn't about writing about the world and being aware. It was about constantly turning inward, constantly reaching for something, and then constantly shelving it, away from curious eyes.

If I wanted to be constantly introspective, I should have started a diary. I think that realization hit me sometime ago. I became overwhelmingly dissatisfied at my desire to dissect myself. I accept that the unexamined life isn't worth living. But life is broad, and doesn't just include my own, right? So now, my Xanga sits, overgrown with weeds and ivy.

As clear as my intentions were, I didn't post on Adamant's Fire until that following May. Because that entry came after such a long hiatus, the new entry set the tone. I was leaving for Florence, and it was my first time out of the country. I was very afraid, but I was excited. I felt like an explorer, setting out to chart a legendary territory. While few places are as thoroughly mapped out as Italy, I was able to keep myself from the disenfranchisement inherent in European traveling - the thought of "this has been done before."

I've established that this blog is about possession (ideas, opinions, emotions, space), but also about passion.

A username that I use a lot is "Adamanthenes." You may have noticed that my username for this blog is "W.E.B. Adamant." It was a very conscious switch, though subtle and a lot easier to pronounce.

"Adamant" is a contradiction. As can be seen throughout this blog and throughout many of my other writings, I am adamant about many things - opinionated, sometimes unwavering, and bold. However, I can be just as confused, wishy-washy, and indecisive - even weak - as anyone else. I can be everything, and I can be nothing. Sometimes, it doesn't take much to make me one way or the other.

The suffix, -henes, is very much ancient and not of my time, but I dreamed the fusion of "Adamant" and "-henes" after reading Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, in which one of the characters (Valentine) writes on the "nets" as "Demosthenes." I took due inspiration, and left it at that. (Last summer while I was in the Musei Vaticani, I quite accidentally happened upon my partial namesake's 2000-year-old bust. It was strange and amazing.)

I don't remember when I made the switch to "W.E.B. Adamant", but I did it because I wanted to make a new name for myself. W.E.B. Adamant was going to be my nom de plume. Of course, it was going to be awesome and launch my literary career. Somewhat depressingly, those dreams were somewhat squashed when people missed the hint and associated my name with the my awesome pseudonym. I'm still thinking of another. I'll be alright, though. It'll take more than a pseudonym to get me down.

To the point: Adamant's Fire is about the passion of Adamant. I only post what I feel motivated to write (unless it's filler - and I was motivated at *some* point to write it). This isn't supposed to be the mundane, constantly introspective blog that 12-year-olds write in their ultra-private diaries with the easy-to-pick lock. This is about passion, about fire, and about dreams of the future.

Now, that's not a high goal at all, is it?

A Long Forgotten Blog and a Fresh Feeling of Discovery

Posted by Unknown , Monday, May 21, 2007 8:53 PM

My, it's been so long! Look at the date difference between these two posts. Even though my last blog entry doesn't say too much that's important, I can still tell I've grown since that time not so long ago. When I posted that, I was fresh into college, 18-years-old, and expecting something special out of the world. Now, I'm officially a "veteran," I'm 20, and I don't expect much out of the world except for what I put into it.

This coming Friday, I am leaving for Florence, Italy, for four weeks - May 25 - June 25. This will be my center of gravity for a while - where I'll post my reflections and, possibly, pictures. It will be my connection to whomever will read this, as well as to a piece of myself that I can read and understand when I'm in a foreign land of foreign words and babbling tongues.

I'm excited, no doubt. But I'm also so afraid that I'm paralyzed. I'm afraid I'm going to walk onto that plane and have forgotten my suitcase, or get to Italy and realize I have no money - or worse, no underwear. But of course, things will go well, I'll have the time of my life, and I'll look back at all of my apprehension and call myself a fool. At least, I hope so.

This will become my critical thinking blog, my Xanga will become my insignificant day-to-day blog, and my Wordpress will become my extremely specialized blog - cultural criticism.

I'm probably spreading myself too thin again, but I don't think I know how to live without doing that. When I was in high school, I took three jobs during my senior year and two during that summer, working anywhere between 40 and 70 hours a week. During my freshman year at college, I jumped into five different organizations. This past semester I took 20 hours, became the coordinating editor of a magazine, associate editor of a campus-wide magazine, joined a new organization, worked at an internship, and balanced friends, family, and a significant other.

So three blogs, a million RSS feeds, eight blogs bookmarked on my browser, a constantly updated forum, and an six-hour a day job in the capitol (which I live an hour away from) is nothing special, nothing new, nothing extraordinary.

Welcome to another world of mine. Hope you enjoy.