The morning after my disagreeable casserole debacle, I felt completely fine. It was weird - I expected to still feel wonky in the morning, but no, I was totally and completely normal... well, as normal as I ever am. I'd even emailed a professor and told him that I had food poisioning, so if I didn't show up to class, it was because I was in a bathroom throwing up somewhere (I didn't say exactly that... but it was the gist of things). So, I got up and went to class. German was fun, for once, because we didn't really talk about German. A banner day.

Then I went to German Culture, this being the class whose professor I had emailed. Attendance is really the only required part of this class - it's 40% of my grade, and any one unexcused absense will result in an automatic A-. So, I figured I better go... and he didn't take attendence. I could've taken my one opportunity to skip, since we didn't do anything but "group work", and since my group hasn't finished the book for our project yet, this means we talked about breakfast cereal, oatmeal, various European adventures, and the virtue of bottled versus tap water. Interesting? Sure. Necessary? Of course not. For about a half hour, we did discuss the reading for the day, a passage from the wonderful works of Walter Benjamin. Similar to Martin Heidegger, this man must've snorted Expo markers as a child. Don't believe me?

"The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced. Since the historical testimony rests on authenticity, the former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction when substantive duration ceases to matter. And what is really jeoopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authenticity of the object."
-Walter Benjamin, Illuminations

Now let's imagine a whole book of this... fun, no?

I spent my night (whole night) studying for a test in Western Civilization. It's worth only ten percent of my final grade, but, being the first test, I want to do well, so I'll go study a bit more, and then I'm off to my test!