Why such a fuss over sturgeon?

So on Friday and Monday we talked about the different kinds of male and female archetypes. For the male, there was the hero, whose character could further be developed into the scapegoat, the outcast, the devil (who can also be referred to as the antihero), and the wise (generally old) man. We also discussed the trickster figure, who seems to be neither good nor evil. The female archetypes were divided into two categories—the elementary, where the positive and negative figures are the earth mother and the smother mother, respectively—and the transformative, where the positive archetype is the Sophia, or muse, and the negative is known as the temptress or black widow. All of these characters need to be met on the road to finding who you are. We also discussed the doppelgänger, or double-goer, the alternate, darker self that you have not yet encountered, or “shadowed side.” Then we were told that we should go back and reread Chekhov's The Lady with the Pet Dog and figure out just what it was about the word sturgeon was so significant. “You were right this evening: the sturgeon was a bit high.” Such meaningless words! Why does this change anything? It seems that Gurov is struck by the utter futility of his own life, the bland worthlessness that consumes his world, and realizes that this is no longer worth pursuing. Therefore, he sets out to recapture the only thing in his life that he finds to be of value.

I'm incredibly excited for the sonnet-writing project. I like to fancy myself a bit of a poet, so hopefully I can come up with something that's not incredibly horrible. Assumably we are supposed to write a Shakespearean sonnet, which is composed of fourteen lines, arranged into three quatrains and a couplet. The rhyming pattern (a-b-a-b c-d-c-d e-f-e-f g-g) and iambic pentameter will take a bit more reading to work out, but I think this will be fun and will give me a chance to learn more about how to write poetry—for no matter how much skill I like to think I have, it's much easier for me to write prose. I've also been catching up on my reading. Right now I'm about halfway through The Tempest, and although I was a bit confused at first I think I might be beginning to understand what's going on. Shakespeare sometimes uses such beautiful words that I am distracted by them and almost forget that there is a plot for the sake of the reading of the words themselves. However, this is a problem that is not horribly difficult to work around. I think I'll be able to master it.