School Coming to a Close
May. 5th, 2015 06:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stormdogTwo presentations down; I'm almost done. I'll be graduating. That's so weird. In the past, I've felt like I didn't know what to do with myself after the semester. This time, I've got a good long list.
There were therapy dogs at Parkside for their last set of appearances this semester. I totally forgot and didn't bring my camera, but they'll be there for another two days so there will be photo ops. I still stopped in to play with Cahill the Staffordshire Bull Terrier (a champion show dog!) and Paxton the pug.
Cahill wears a vest with paper hearts zipped into it. He and his person go to children's grief camps, and the children write the names of their loved ones who they've lost on a heart, and Cahill keeps them safe and remembered. When she talked about that on her first visit to Parkside, last year, I got a little teary-eyed.
I was worried about my history presentation, which was on both a historiographical comparison of the two books I'd read for class, and on my own progress as a historian through my undergraduate career. The class is for history majors, which I'm not, but I'm a minor so I had a lot to talk about. I framed my academic progress in history as a progression in understanding the city from an emotional, nostalgic perspective to a knowledgeable, rational perspective. (Though the emotion and nostalgia are definitely still there!)
When I was little, I was never interested in the history of real places that I knew, but I was fascinated by fantasy or science fiction civilization, or the ruins of lost empires. In a way, that's what abandoned buildings are to me; ruins of a lost empire. The empire that was a different age of American history. I was self-conscious about talking a lot about myself, but my talk seemed to be pretty well-recieved, so that was nice. One person told me specifically that I was a really good public speaker. Personally, I feel like I'd like to be a lot better at it, but it's nice to think that I've gotten a lot better than I used to be!
There were therapy dogs at Parkside for their last set of appearances this semester. I totally forgot and didn't bring my camera, but they'll be there for another two days so there will be photo ops. I still stopped in to play with Cahill the Staffordshire Bull Terrier (a champion show dog!) and Paxton the pug.
Cahill wears a vest with paper hearts zipped into it. He and his person go to children's grief camps, and the children write the names of their loved ones who they've lost on a heart, and Cahill keeps them safe and remembered. When she talked about that on her first visit to Parkside, last year, I got a little teary-eyed.
I was worried about my history presentation, which was on both a historiographical comparison of the two books I'd read for class, and on my own progress as a historian through my undergraduate career. The class is for history majors, which I'm not, but I'm a minor so I had a lot to talk about. I framed my academic progress in history as a progression in understanding the city from an emotional, nostalgic perspective to a knowledgeable, rational perspective. (Though the emotion and nostalgia are definitely still there!)
When I was little, I was never interested in the history of real places that I knew, but I was fascinated by fantasy or science fiction civilization, or the ruins of lost empires. In a way, that's what abandoned buildings are to me; ruins of a lost empire. The empire that was a different age of American history. I was self-conscious about talking a lot about myself, but my talk seemed to be pretty well-recieved, so that was nice. One person told me specifically that I was a really good public speaker. Personally, I feel like I'd like to be a lot better at it, but it's nice to think that I've gotten a lot better than I used to be!
