Chilly Precipice

I had a really great weekend… Mandy came on Saturday and that really helped me relax some after my stressful weekend. I had a group meeting and they decided that I needed to make the powerpoint for our 35 minute presentation… not too bad right? Well they want me to make the powerpoint WITHOUT their input and then they are going to base the speeches off of that… I guess its ok since I don’t have to speak, not that I would mind at all… oh well… Mandy and I saw “Cold Mountain”… really awesome movie. I really noticed a parallel between that and Homer’s “Odyssey”… the long journey home (from war) of a man trying to return to his true love- even included was several encounters with interesting people who tempted him to forget about the purpose of his journey… you need to see it. Let me know if you think I’m crazy or not for drawing that parallel… there were afew other characters I’d like to look into as far as their significance in terms of symbolism and how they might fit into the Odyssey thing…
One of they main evil guys was this pale guy with really dark eyes kinda like the actor in “O brother, where art thou?” who represented whats-his-name… Hades, I think? The guy in this movie seemed to have some sort of supernatural dexterity… I dunno… I think I’ll do a google search and see if anyone else on the web agrees:

Oh cool… I found a lot:

“the film is adapted from Charles Frazier's picaresque, 1997 best seller, which itself was an evident update of "The Odyssey"

“The author was very intent upon incorporating the Odyssey into his novel and in the Odyssey, there were many birds as signs like doves and eagles. The crows are the equivilant to the doves, ducks, and eagles of the Odyssey. Frazier's original intent to the book was to write a story much like O' Brother Where Art Thou? but instead, found it contradictory to his style and wrote in his own style instead but also managed to fuse the Odyssey into the storyline as well. So overall, the ravens were just an allusion to the Odyssey. “

“…two star-struck lovers trying to reunite separated by the evils of the Civil War. From this point on similarities to Odysseus and Penelope and their travails in Homer’s Odyssey abound and provide many of the joy’s in this movie we get to experience.”

Ok 3 is good… but I’d really love to see this movie again… and there arnt too many movies I say that for..


Other than that- I had an awesome weekend- I got to spend lots of time with mandy, but I still hated to see her go. I think things with mandy and I are going about 10 times better than either of us could have predicted when we first started talking over Christmas break… I am really feeing quite good about the whole situation, and I think she is too.

I gotta go study!- oh and I should be getting the thumbs up or down on this pharmacy school thing sometime THIS WEEK…. Man that’s scary… I got a letter from UTK today and when I first picked it up and it was this letter addressed to me… and it was from UT… (before I could see that it was from the Knoxville branch of UT)… my heart just started beating about twice as fast as it had about 10 seconds earlier… one of those “moment of truth” things… but it was something about graduation- OK well I gotta go study- and please pray that Sue, a lady I work with, has her parents start feeling better… and not dying… she has lost 2 parents in the last 2 weeks… and her step-mom had a heart attack the week before that… the main problem with this is... this is the 3rd week in a row that i've had to come in for two UNSCHEDULED days of work... and thats really really really really starting to bug me... alot... i mean... i like money... but 19 credit hours plus 30+ hours of work in a week= i'm going to go crazy and day now... and i really dont want to go crazy...
but i'm still feeling good from my good mandy weekend, so i think i'll be good for another 3 or 4 days... but then all bets are off...
later