A Timeless Reality

So I don't know if anyone has noticed this besides me.... College is stressful!!! Especially when you have 4 super hard classes (+ one easy one)! Add to that work, driving siblings places, etc, and soon everything in your life has to be in your datebook, or else it will never happen.
The other week I had to schedule dinner with my dad just so I could see him!! And even then it was an eat-and-run kind of thing because I had to go to class! Hanging out with my friends also now has to be scheduled. :(
Last night some of us went to see High School Musical 3 and I was planning to leave right after it was over to go finish an online chemistry assignment. I had worked for several hours on the assignment and I had a bit left to do before the 11pm deadline. But sometime during watching Vanessa and Zach gaze into each others' eyes, I decided that I was having fun! (*gasp*) So I then decided that I wanted to hang out with my friends after the movie too. I decided to basically throw away the hours that I had already done on the assignment and do an alternate assigment instead(*bigger gasp*). I hope my professor allows me to do so...
Anyways, I am SO glad that I chose to hang out my friends last night. We went to McDonalds and it was like all those Sunday and Wednesday nights back in high school.
I actually laughed last night. I can't remember the last time when I laughed that hard. Anyone who knows me knows that I cry if I'm truly laughing, and let's just say... it's a good thing that I didn't have mascara on!!
So you know how they say that laughter's good medicine? Take their advice. Put your "life" on hold and enjoy the life that matters. Spend time with the people you love. Laugh as if you have no cares in the world. It won't make your busy "life" go away, but it will make it seem not as bad! :)

For the past two class meetings, my English professor has been sick. Because of this, we haven't had class, but instead we are required to post on an online discussion board. Today I decided to sit down and read the poems and post my thoughts so I could move on to studying for my Econ test. Here are some of my thoughts:

The poetry we read was four poems by William Cullen Bryant: Thanatopsis; The Yellow Violet; To Cole, The Painter, Departing For Europe; and The Prairies. These are good poems, some better than the rest. My favorite is Yellow Violet, then Thanatopsis, and the other two are tied for last (or third if you're an optimist).

In all of these poems, Bryant displays an amazing gift of description. The beginning of Prairies makes me feel as if I'm in Montana watching the clouds cast shadows on the plains below. When I read Thanatopsis, I could easily imagine Bryant walking on a path through the woods.

Thanatopsis is a Greek word meaning a meditation on death. Bryant's poem by this name is the most philosophical out of the four. He uses personification with regards to nature, and his reverance towards nature makes me think he had Pantheistic leanings. I find Bryant's tone throughout the poem interesting. At first he's thoughtful and melancholy, and at the end he sounds like a motivational speaker. The interesting thing is that the end-- the motivational part-- was written a few years after the rest. So that makes me wonder what happened in those years that so changed his attitude towards death?

Yellow Violet is my idea of a wonderful poem. It has beautiful description of a spring scene and Bryant uses this to draw a parallel between flowers and people. He describes how the violet is the first flower to come up in the spring, sometimes even when snow is still on the ground. This makes me think of how resilient people can be. Just like a flower blooming in the snow, people can thrive in the midst of strife.

Bryant more specifically discusses how the violet seems so beautiful at first, but it's beauty is quickly surpassed when the other larger flowers bloom. He draws a harsh contrast to how when people become rich and/or famous, they quickly forget their old friends. Bryant confesses that he has done this, but he now regrets it. The bitterness that can be heard in Bryant's voice at this point made me actually stop and read back to see how he so swiftly got from an innocent flower to the cold world we live in. (And this was written in the 19th century!) Bryant then just as quickly switches back to talking about a flower. I find it amazing that Bryant could so masterfully use a yellow violet to make a point.

And yes, there really is such a thing as a yellow violet.

So... this post might seem random, but it's something I've been thinking about today. It's about something (that I find) interesting that my physics professor said in class last night.
He told us a question posed to him when he was a young engineer working on an oil rig. The question is this: If you have a piece of radioactive material about the size of a piece of chalk (this is the size that he was using on the rig for some unknown reason...) and you don't have a lead box, how do you trasnsport it without killing yourself?
Answer: Well what makes something radioactive is the fact that a whole bunch of neutrons are coming off the substance (not exactly but w/e), and these neutrons are what are harmful to people. So you want to transport it in something that has a lot of protons. Something that has a lot of protons is hydrogen. So... you want to transport it in something that has a lot of hydrogen. One common substance would be water (H2O).
So if you ever need to transport some radioactive material, and you don't have a lead container, just use a bucket of water. I'm sure that would save your internal organs from frying. Or maybe not. :\