Meditating on Symbols

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

This morning two men came to our flat, an old but newly renovated space, to install Internet. For some reason the installation for our flat was more difficult because of its location. I didn't ask for specifics. They gave us a free trial 48hours which was nice. I was considering paying to have internet…until they said that it was 96Euro/month. Too steep for a level-walker such as myself.

I had class at 9, and afterwards I went for the first time to Lorenzo de' Medici's Cafeteria with my roommate and classmate, Emily.  I was able to get an iced caffe latte and Panini, which would normally be at least E4.50 for only E3.90. What a deal!

Afterwards I had class at noon: Italian Grand Tour: Italy Through The Eyes of Famous Explorers. I loved all of my classes that I had been to at that point, but I still think that this is my second favorite class - my first being Web Design I.

Next was Philosophy of magic at 3pm. Philosophy of Magic is a class that I could describe as a complete joke. The teacher utilized the first half hour by giving her description of the course, which, in truth, consisted of her saying the same main point over and over in different ways. She probably felt like her translation was wrong or something, which makes me feel bad, but it really did get tiresome. She sent around a piece of paper for us to sign up on with our names, dates and times of birth, and email addresses. After she felt like she had drilled her course description into our skulls - and when the whole class looked fit for a nap - she went on to explain different astrological signs and what they meant and what planets corresponded to them. At this point I was seriously doubting the legitimacy of the subject. She explained that throughout the semester we would be learning how to read birth charts and how to tell what people may or may not be like based upon their birth chart. Completely interpretational - so it made me seriously wonder how on earth she could grade us on this. 

The teacher actually had us meditate. Now I'm all for a good meditation session, but what she asked us to do made no sense to me. She told us to close our eyes and think about the symbols that represent our astrological signs and their planets (pictured above) in a big circle. That's all she told us. So I'm sitting there in class, trying not to fall asleep, all the while listening to our teacher sitting on her desk texting, wondering what the hell I was doing this for. How can I meditate on shapes? What the hell was the point? Give me a book to read or a language to learn or a foreign land to explore, not this interpretational, superstitious cock-and-bull! The meditation – not surprisingly – did absolutely nothing to relax me because I was so peeved at what the teacher had asked us to do. Needless to say, when we all were called from our 'meditation' the teacher asked us what we had seen or felt…and nobody said anything. When she finally was able to pull some sort of response from the class, she got comments like 'I felt like I was falling, and then I had to open my eyes.' All I could think was 'well yeah, dummy, that's called falling asleep!'

I was glad to get out of that class, and glad also that I had previously made the decision to apply to switch from that class to an Italian Food class. Call it fate. I went home to cook some dinner. From my fridge I pulled out a pressure-sealed package of mixed seafood floating with olives and peppers in olive oil that I had bought at the supermarket. I decided I would skip trying to decipher the Italian on the back of the package and just pan-fry the contents in the oil in which they were chilling. Talk about unfortunate events – mid-fry I wound up experiencing the hot-end of a mini oil explosion from one of the pieces of frying food. The feeling of burned flesh invigorated me, truly. Maybe I’m a pain addict. I really did feel alive.

After dinner I showered and used the rest of my barely-conscious brain power to write in my blog. When I got up to get a drink of water before passing out, I walked into my kitchen to see Courtney, Jaimee, and Jennifer sitting at the table. We chatted for a bit, planned our trip to Rome, and then I finally went to bed.