Hello blog, and happy Monday!
I’m going to be totally honest with you all: we’ve really reached the time of year where I’m running very low in my capacity to do all things college and desperately counting down the days until I get to go home. In my time at Wellesley, I’ve found that I’m much more prone to homesickness than the average student, especially as we approach the end of each semester. I love my friends at Wellesley, but when the calendar starts approaching Novembers and Decembers and Aprils and Mays, I really just want to hang out with my family. It’s a very unpopular opinion, but when spring turns into summer all I can think about is how exciting it’ll be to watch fresh green New England forests turn into dusty Midwestern cornfields on the car ride home.
This is on my mind right now for several reasons.
Number one: it’s very hard to do my schoolwork when all I can think about is how happy I’ll be when I don’t have to think about any of that work anymore. My productivity has definitely been down in the past couple of weeks, and I really need to carve out some time in my schedule to just finish the things I’ve been putting off the past few weeks.
Number two: my corn plant! I’ve been trying to keep you all as updated as possible about the progression of the plants I’m growing in my Environmental Horticulture class this semester, and my corn plant made a huge leap of progress this Wednesday. I sent a picture of it to my Papa Larry and he said that it should start forming kernels sometime soon, which is super crazy to think about.
Number three: this is probably the least fun reason, but I’m doing a presentation in my French class either this week or next on a painting, and I picked Stone City, Iowa by Grant Wood, which is the header image of this blog post. My family has this painting hanging up in our living room above the couch- along with a sketch of the Old Capitol Building in Iowa City- and I didn’t really have to think about it before I decided that was what I was going to do my project on.
Art is something that I really like the idea of, but I have a pretty hard time getting excited about it if I don’t know what it’s supposed to be or mean before I look at it. When I was in late elementary or middle school, my grandma took my cousin Helen and me to the Art Institute of Chicago, because we had been reading this book series about two kids who shrink down and explore the Thorne Rooms, which are on display in the lower levels. Once I have a reason to care about a piece of art I always find it really interesting, but a lot of it ends up going right over my head. Growing up in the Corridor- a section of Eastern Iowa known for its significant cultural impact- we talked about Grant Wood more than Van Gogh or any or the artists with ninja turtles named after them. It’s a little weird to be at Wellesley, where I have to describe American Gothic for most of my classmates to know who I’m talking about, because back home Grant Wood is a total given. Hopefully after my presentation some of my classmates will remember his name next time they hear it, although I’ve learned not to be too optimistic about anything that involves my French language skills.
Given the content of this post, you might be a little confused about its title. Today is April 18th, and I like to title my blog posts after songs whenever possible. I’ve been on a big One Direction kick lately- unsurprising given Harry’s upcoming new music and Louis’s current world tour- and when I sat down to write this post I was listening to the song 18, written by Ed Sheeran but performed by One Direction, and the alignment of the song title and the date was too good an opportunity to pass up.
Sending you joy,
Andrew