FSU Explorations

Today, I mostly spent hanging around at FSU and with people associated with it. I'd made plans to meet Brett (zip4096) over there, but ended up going to explore the theatre school with my mother a bit beforehand -- she's gone back to school to study theatre, ya know.

So after breakfast, my maternal unit and myself headed over, and we walked around for a bit, greeted people, took a look at the FSU Mainstage, the costume shop, and the internals of the Fine Arts Building, where she spends a lot of her days, these days. It was cool :) It was good to get to see where she hangs out nowadays... I'd just been curious.

After that, we met up with Brett for lunch. We started out at this place Tommy D's, which features pitas, but in search of more veggie variety, ended up at this lovely nearby Mediterranean place called the Pitaria, where we found some falafel, hummos, and our friend Jack, whom we knew from HS, and who's now in the film school. I was well pleased :)

After lunch, we meandered over to Brett's afternoon classes -- I wasn't overjoyed, at first, at the prospect of sitting in on his French class, when je ne parle pas français, although it went pretty well. The instructor was really cool, an energetic, youngish woman who seemed to really enjoy teaching (and came across as apologetic, to some extent, for the stranger inconsistencies of the language), and I was mostly able to follow what was going on. I think I could learn French without too much trouble, at this point :)

Ah, after that... we went to a class that Brett isn't even in, something about political philosophies. It's taught by this older gentleman, who looked rather like you might expect a grizzled university professor who spends a lot of time thinking about Marxist theory to look. I think that this is, in fact, a pretty good description of the fellow :) Apparently there's a contingency of people who aren't in his class, but make it a point to go to his lectures, because they tend to be interesting, and because it's apparently his last semester teaching. He started off talking about the word "revolution" itself, and the various meanings it can take, and then started in on talking about some introductions from Bernstein and Engels and how they related to (thoughout the hour 'n' a half) Robespierre, Diocletian, early Christians, morality/religion/philosophy in general, Lenin, Stalin, Tony Blair, Constantine, revolutions, guillotines, the production of value, the idea of trying to rationalize a given human action, the different interests of finance capital and industrial capital, materialist interpretations of history... oh man, it was great :)

I took notes, during the lecture, and perhaps I'll stick those up online later. After class, Brett asked the professor what he thought about the war and the whole Bush/Iraq situation, to which he responded that he thought that Bush was working for Al Qaeda... which while possibly not literally true (*laughs* ... although that would be about the most interesting development possible... sort of reminds you of Radio Free Albemuth, a PKD novel in which the KGB takes over the US by means of a president who usurps progressively more emergency powers in his hunt for Communists... this is actually one of the less strange elements of this book. You should read it :) ), does bring up some interesting points. What better way to help the cause of violent Islamic fundamentalism than by giving the Arab world a common enemy, an evil empire to rally against?

After that, we ended up wandering back to my house, having dinner, chatting with people, playing video games... excellent evening. And now here I am. Yay :)

I think I'm about ready to do something interesting, other than just sort of vaguely hanging around. Perhaps I'll go to Houston :)