Week 3: I Think I Did Absolutely Nothing

Hi, friends. How was your week? 🙂

I’m not really sure what to talk about this week because I didn’t really… do anything… The Northeast had a pretty big winter storm last weekend so I kinda just stayed home watching movies (I saw Sisters and Miss Congeniality hehe) and doing my readings throughout.

Last week after Friday prayers, there was a reception at one of the college dorms to officiate the English House Dining Hall serving halal food starting the 25th of January. That was really exciting! I’m so grateful that we have this option now, it really makes the dining hall experience so much better for us Muslims. I just found out that Penn was, until last week, the only Ivy League that did not offer halal options. I hope now more people will know what halal means and stop saying they want to “get halal” when they mean they want to eat chicken over rice from the halal food trucks because it just doesn’t make sense grammatically, haha.

Last Saturday night as the storm had its fun, Hui Jie and I had popcorn and maggi and stayed up talking, that was nice. A lot of people went out to play but I just… dislike snow. After the storm passed, Shahirah, Hui Jie and I went to Trader Joes (best place ever next to Disneyland) to do groceries.

My classes have been okay. I’m starting to love this Psychology class I’m taking called Language and Thought—we’re learning about the pathway between thinking and speaking. Being bilingual helps to understand some of the concepts in this class and in fact, makes the content a lot more interesting and engaging for me and I like that.

I also love my International Political Economy class! Professor Pollack is so energetic that he makes 9 a.m. classes very exciting and it’s always a great start to the day and week. For now, we’ve gone over some brief economic history and we were assigned to watch this documentary called The Commanding Heights. It gave me the basics to start learning about many things I’ve heard about but never really understood like Keynesian economics and the Raegan-Thatcher years. The readings were kind of difficult though. I don’t have a strong background in economic history or history at all for that matter, so I took a very long time to go through them.

I’m also taking 4 classes again this semester instead of my usual 5 because the work load for these 4 classes seems pretty heavy–I think I’m going to be writing 1-2 papers every week this semester. Plus I want to do less but do better, so I feel good about that decision.

In other news, I was awoken this morning at about 4-ish a.m. because I thought I heard the sounds of a rat or something under my bed, but was too scared to check so I went to sleep on the couch (which, if you know my room layout, doesn’t make much sense because it’s like two steps away from my bed).

But yeah, that’s all for this week. Next week is looking more exciting so I’ll tell you about it soon 🙂

P.S. Last weekend, I also discovered Noah Ritter’s videos on Ellen. If you have never seen it, let this be my gift to you: go look it up!!