I was on Georgetown University's campus for about 90 minutes today, doing some preliminary eye-shopping (Konglish for window shopping) for French textbooks; I had proposed a meeting with my potential tutorees for this coming Wednesday the 15th (my brother Sean's birthday), but haven't heard back from them as to whether the meeting is actually happening. Still, I need to prep a bit, and I thought that GU, language learning powerhouse that it is, would have plenty of French teaching resources. This turned out not to be true, but I enjoyed my time on campus none the less.
Georgetown campus seems much the same, with some amusing differences. Paying three dollars for a bottle of apple/raspberry juice (there's a "p" in "raspberry," Stafford!) was novel, though consistent with my memory of campus prices in general. Another novelty was the presence of an antibacterial rub dispenser at the left-side entrance of the White-Gravenor building.* Are students supposed to have clean hands because they're always in contact with those keyboards?
The Leavey Center, a multipurpose complex whose construction caused a lot of controversy back when I was an undergrad, looks a lot more lived-in now; students were slouched over small round tables and sturdy couches like jaguars draped lazily over tree branches. The bookstore-- and this was my first real foray in it since the 90s-- was completely different, sleek and corporatized. I noted with disappointment that it was nowhere near as well-stocked as the UCLA bookstore I'd visited a few years back, though it might be unfair to compare the two: GU's undergrad population is a small fraction of UCLA's. I saw that the GU store had acquired a second floor, something it hadn't had back in the day.
Unable to resist temptation, I ended up buying a small collection of Pali Canon scriptures after a trip to the THEO section.** Despite my current poverty, books are like a drug to me, and ever since I started this walk I've been jonesing, desperate for good reading material, or even the chance to reread many of my old religion-related books from undergrad and grad school.
Students look about the same, though the demographics seem to have shifted East Asian-ward, if today was any indication. Lots of Koreans strolling across the grounds (at a guess, they didn't make it into the Ivy League school their parents had been pushing them to attend... boo-hoo). And quite a few Spanish-speakers, too. I'm glad; GU has long been trying to live down a somewhat-deserved, somewhat-undeserved reputation as a school unfriendly to ethnic diversity (ask my black coworkers from my old job in DC; they won't have many kind words about Georgetown unless we're talking about the basketball team).
After taking photos of textbooks and their price tags with my BlackBerry, I sat under a tree on Copley Lawn (a.k.a. Copley Beach in the summertime), read a bit from the Buddhism book, and drank my tiny, three-dollar bottle of juice. Tasty, but certainly not worth the price. After that, it was time to drive home. Luckily for me, the route to and from the university hasn't changed a bit. Like Bilbo, I was safely there and back again.
*Damn, it just occurred to me that I should have gone up to that upstairs men's room to see whether my old graffito is still there. Years ago, I'd drawn a cartoon of my trademark Alien (see an Alien sample from my online store here), who stared out at the reader with his big Cookie Monster eyes and bellowed, "The way you humans poop just turns... me... on!" Weeks after I'd made the graffito, someone else had written alongside my drawing, "This is the funniest thing I've ever seen." Needless to say, I was perversely proud in that sixteen-month-old "Mama! I made a poopie!" sense.
**Since my time as an undergrad, I've had trouble separating the terms "theology" and "religion" because most religion-related courses were taught through the Theology Department. My undergrad minor was, properly speaking, religious studies, but it's listed for all eternity as "theology" on my transcript. Religious studies is what I ended up getting my MA in at Catholic U., across town.
_
No comments:
Post a Comment