About to Drown

What $180 buys you. I'm so gangsta.

My first day back for the new semester was cold and wet. Come to think of it, most of my first days of the semester since coming back to college have been rainy (and cold for the Spring semesters). My Behavioral Research lecture doesn't start meeting again until next week, so for today I merely had Modern American History and Philosophy of Science to deal with. And, even though first days are typically non-eventful, I still found myself feeling a bit in-over-my-head by day's end.

As luck would have it, both courses are taught in the same lecture hall in Withers, so I get to sit in the same seat in the same room for two hours every Monday and Wednesday this semester. My history professor is a middle aged woman who seems pretty nice overall. She assured us that we weren't going to focus so much on names and dates, but rather on historical trends of consistency, continuity, and change. That said, there is a great deal of reading that will need to be done for the course, and our grades consist almost entirely on a short paper, a mid-term exam, and a final exam. On Fridays, we will have discussion groups led by the professor's TAs, one of whom I found particularly attractive in a sort of bookish, sexy, academic way. It doesn't hurt that the TA in question was wearing some really nice black leather boots, as I discovered early last year that I apparently have a previously unknown boot fetish! Although, with my luck, she probably won't be the TA for my particular discussion group.

The entirety of my Philosophy of Science course sort of bothers me, however. I don't think the material will be challenging in and of itself, since I do enjoy reading philosophy and science, already. The problems for this course come out of the fact that the professor seems rather pedantic. He is a nice, older man, but he spent an hour today explaining to us about how he did an in-depth statistical analysis of his prior courses to determine what sort of studying behaviors led to good grades in his courses, showing us the results of that analysis, and trying to instill upon us the necessity of regular, consistent studying versus cram-style studying. As both an old man, myself, and a psychology major who has taken Cognitive Psychology, I was already well aware that cramming isn't an effective way to study. Unfortunately, that doesn't stop me from doing it every so often, as I did at the end of the last semester! Another problem with the course is that all the quizzes and tests are online, something I have always detested because I tend to forget to do them when they aren't placed right in my face during a class period.

First Impressions Spring 2009 (Part A)

It was 70° F when I woke up at 7AM today! The day got progressively colder from there. By noon it had dropped to 62° F. It's JANUARY! Those flowers shouldn't be in bloom in January!

When I got to school around 830AM it began to pour down a cold hard rain which lasted just long enough for me to get completely soaked while walking to class. It was surprisingly windy outside, as well, and I wasn't wearing a coat. Why would I? It was 70 freaking degrees outside!

At any rate, my first class of the day was British Literature I. My professor seemed very familiar for some unknown reason, and she seemed to think that I looked familiar to her, as well. That was kind of strange. I've never had her for a class, that I can recall, and I haven't seen her around dancing, so I can't figure out where I would have met her before. The course looks as though it is going to be difficult for me. There will be ALOT of reading. The course is going to cover British Literature from the Middle Ages up to about the early 1800s. We are starting out with Beowulf. God, I hate Beowulf. We're also going to cover some of Chaucer, for whom I also have no particular love. Why did I sign up for this class again? Oh, that's right, it was required that I take a literature course and American Literature was booked up solid. Actually, I don't mind modern British Literature, stuff like Orwell and Huxley, but anything around Shakespeare and earlier can pretty much kiss my ass, as far as I'm concerned. Why couldn't those people learn how to write ENGLISH? They were, you say? No, actually, they were writing in Anglo-Saxon, a broad term for a variety of dialects from around the British Isles during the time of the Middle Ages. Granted, it would later evolve into English, but I wouldn't exactly call what they were writing English anymore than I would call a biscuit with sausage gravy a sausage biscuit!

After class, I spent my two hour break in the library trying to read the first twenty pages of the near 100 pages that we are expected to read by Friday! I say trying since I kept getting distracted in the library by some guy playing hip hop music through his headphones which I could still hear from about eight feet away. I debated several times the possibility of going over and asking him to turn his music down, but I figure that if he had to play the music that loud through freaking headphones he was probably too hearing impaired to fully understand my request, and I never bothered to learn sign language back when I dated that deaf chick in high school because she could read lips reasonably well.

So, Noon rolled around and I headed to my Human Development class. This is probably going to be the easiest psychology class I've EVER taken, and I've never made below a B in any psych class to date. OH MY GOD, I love this professor already. He's a 30-something, thin, handsome, married, Asian-American who wants to be called "Dr. Mike"! He basically admitted that there is NO reason whatsoever to own the textbook for his class even though he is required by the school to make us have a textbook for the class. He said that the tests (there will be four and the final exam) will cover only what is discussed in class, so as long as we show up and participate in discussion we should do well in the class. We only have one paper to write, and there will be quizzes about once a week. The guy doesn't care if we leave our cell phones on, as long as they don't go off in class, and he even encouraged people to eat and drink in class if they wanted to, since he would rather we eat and pay attention than be hungry and tired and sleep in class (his reasoning, not mine).

After class, the sun began to cut through the clouds and fill the Earth with its spirit enriching light, as though the happiness and joy that was Dr. Mike's introduction was enough to call forth from the heavens and make the clouds part like the Red Sea.

Wow... I think I could totally go gay for Dr. Mike!

Have fun, and keep living life... and don't be ashamed to find someone of your own gender attractive!

Baptism by Rain and Bacon

I haven't been sleeping well lately. There's no real reason. My mind just doesn't want to shut off. Seeing as how most Americans don't get enough sleep I'm guessing you can sympathize. I downloaded one of those neutral noise programs for my iPhone called White Noise. It doesn't have as many sounds to choose from as some of the other programs, but it was free so I'm not complaining.

The best noise of the program is its rain setting. Since this is a basic program you can't adjust the intensity of the rain, but I'm still impressed with the realism of the steady downpour that rumbles from my 3G's diminutive speaker. It's difficult to be bombarded by a barrage of mental diarrhea when you're laying contemplatively on your back as you meditate on the obligatory mental image of the rapid splash splosh of uncountable drops causing the surface of a puddle to dance and shimmer with light.

Of course, as I write this I'm at Waffle House again on a hectic and dramatic Friday night at 3 AM, where the sizzle skittle of an unending order of bacon on the grill is doing a good job of bringing my thoughts to singularity. Like the sound of rain, if I can just manage to focus enough to hear the bacon over the cacophonous crowd and the discordant clashing of plates and utensils, bacon is consistent, steady, dependable; it washes over my senses and cleanses me, at least for a moment, of the sins of intellectual dissertation which blockade my calm.

So, perhaps, instead of prescribing warm milk to curb those disabling episodes of insomnia you should fry up some bacon. Just make sure you're wearing something protective because you'll never sleep with 3rd degree burns on your sensitive areas!

Have fun, and keep living life... or some approximation thereof!

I'm Only Happy When It Rains

Okay, maybe that's not completely true. I'm happy at plenty of other times, but good luck finding a song about rain that doesn't sound like a total downer!

It rained pretty much all day. And it wasn't just rain, it was a COLD rain with a steady breeze just to punctuate how cold and rainy it was. It was the first rain of the fall and I was so not prepared for it. It was in the upper 80s for highs the days and weeks before, but today only got up to 65. I didn't bring a jacket or an umbrella, so I stood for a few minutes inside a building with all the other shmoes who were caught off guard by the rain, as well.

For a moment I realized how strange it is that people will wait inside, or under an overhang, waiting for rain to die down enough to walk outside, as though rain were some sort of toxic waste that must be avoided as much as possible. I remember back when I was a little kid, maybe 5 years old or less, I used to LOVE to stand under the edge of the overhang on my grandmother's front porch. The porch was small and had four or five steps leading down to the yard. I would stand in just the right spot so that all the runoff from the roof would pour down on me and get me even wetter than if I had only been standing in the yard. I would laugh and splash around while my grandmother would try to get me to come back into the house. Eventually, I always did, and Mame, although I still called her May May back then (alot of kids from the South have odd names for their grandmothers, like Me Ma, Mammie, Ma May), would fuss at me for getting the floor wet while she dried me with some almost threadbare towel.

After my girlfriend left, one of the things I tried to do to move my life in a better direction was to try and relive some of the childhood experiences that I used to love so much, or some things which I never really did but probably should have. I climbed small trees, picked up a frog and looked at it up close, played with Matchbox cars, and splashed around in the rain, stomping through puddles just to get my pants soaking wet. If you haven't done any of these things in a long time, or ever, I HIGHLY recommend it. There's something so comforting, and yet exhilarating at the same time, about doing things as an adult that you used to love as a child. There's a bible verse somewhere in 1 Corinthians 13 that basically goes, "When I was a child, I thought and acted like a child, but now I have put away childish things." Now, 1 Corinthians 13 is all about love, which is probably necessary for us to really be happy. But, in retrospect, it seems like bad advice to suggest that we must put away childish things. I can tell you from experience, there is NOTHING that makes you feel as happy as taking the time to just jump up and down in a puddle in the rain while you get completely soaked and you just don't give a damn!

Have fun, and keep living life... or some approximation thereof!