Category Archives: list

8 Things

So there is this trend on Facebook where people are posting lists of random facts about themselves. Aside from learning things about my friends, I enjoy creating these lists because they get me thinking about myself as in “what do others not know?” or “what don’t I ever explore?” Um… considering I blog about everything, not much. So I dredged up a few things that some people know, but others may not. Quirky? Maybe.

1. I don’t like symmetry. I don’t like things that match. I like off-center art, and don’t buy sets of identical things.

2. I enjoy my time alone more than I enjoy company. Sorry y’all.I love you, but in increments.

3. I use the Socratic method to come to conclusions or decide on things, except in a bizarre way. I won’t know what to do so I talk it out with myself, asking questions. I answer myself. I have yet to come to any good conclusions.

4. Winter is my favorite season.

5. I leave on a whim quite often.  Once I wanted ice cream, and drove all the way up to the Bay Area to get it (Fenton’s Creamery). Had ice cream. Drove back down.

6. I don’t like receiving flowers. I don’t like being given something that is simultaneously dead and continually dying. Keep the flowers and get me a cup of coffee.

7.  I don’t like it when people cry. It freaks me out, and as if I wasn’t socially awkward enough, what am I supposed to do about this?? If it is my fault I can apologize, but really I prefer we just talk. If I didn’t have anything to do with why they are crying… then I am really uncomfortable and confused.

8. Silly things get me very excited. I like all silliness.

The Russian List

I spent all of today and most of last night going over all of my GRE lists and taking practice tests. This is one of those ongoing projects that won’t end until pretty much the evening before the exam.

I know my GRE posts are some of the least popular with everyone, but I *did* promise to finish out my lists/study guide. Here is the last one in the series, focusing on all the Russian authors who may make a brief appearance in the exam. Very short list.

Fyodor Dostoevsky – Crime and Punishment, Notes from Underground, and maybe The Brothers Karamazov

Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and maybe The Death of Ivan Illych

Vladimir Nabokov – Lolita, and maybe Pale Fire

Boris Pasternak – Doctor Zhivago (maybe)

Nikolai Gogol – Teras Bulba, Diary of a Madman, The Nose, and The Overcoat

Alexander Pushkin – The Bronze Horseman, The Stone Guest, maybe Mozart and Salieri, and Eugene Onegin.

Anton Chekhov – Three Sisters, The Marriage Proposal, The Death of a Government Clerk, The Lady with the Dog, and maybe Ivanov

As for the rest, I don’t think they will appear. I know several of these works are very long. If you haven’t read them already, now would not be a good time (especially if you are taking this test in the fall). Look them up and familiarize yourself with the different author’s styles and themes. For the short stories, some of them are very quick reads and would actually be a good way of getting a sense of each author.

I was going to make a French list as well, but really, just read a bit of Honore de Balzac, Victor Hugo, Marcel Proust and maybe some Guy de Maupassant and you should be fine for the exam. I haven’t seen anything on Gustave Flaubert, Alexander Dumas, Albert Camus, Jules Verne, Jean Paul Sartre, Moliere, or any of the other ones really. In fact Victor Hugo was only mentioned in one of the answer choices, and he wasn’t even the answer. The same for Maupassant, and Balzac came up twice. In the world of the GRE the others don’t seem to exist.

Of course this doesn’t mean they won’t be on the version of the exam that is actually given, but considering their appearance in all practice versions, if they do show up, you may miss one or two questions. Which is probably the least of anyone’s worries.

The Classics

So I am continuing my insanely long, lets-study-all-of-this-for-the-GRE list. I briefly contemplated just adding the following to the existing list, but thought it might be best if I kept them separate and added to each one as needed. In fact I probably should have split up the previous list into subtopics too. Oh well.

Here is a list of all the Classics that will most likely be on the test, and the works that are probably going to be mentioned.

Homer – Odyssey and Illiad (it has recently occurred to me that a lot of people think these two are the same thing. I don’t know why. They are not. Yes, Odysseus appears in both, but these are still two separate works!!).

Virgil – Aeneid and maybe Georgics

Sophocles – Oedipus Rex, Antigone, and maybe Oedipus at Colonus

Aeschylus – Seven Against Thebes (this one kind of goes with Sophocles’s tragedies, so if you don’t get to it before the test, as long as you know the Oedipus story, you should be fine), and maybe Oresteia.

Ovid – Metamorphoses

Herodotus – Histories

Maybe Euripides – He focused on telling a lot of myths that appear elsewhere and are intertwined with the other Greek stories (Medea, Iphegeneia, Electra, Helen, etc.), so it may be good to just look him over.

Aristotle – Ethics

Plato – Republic, Apology, and maybe Timaeus

I have not seen anything else mentioned, so even though this list is far shorter than my previous one, I think it covers most of what will appear.