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Jan. 12th, 2005 08:57 pmMy first day of school, I thought of writing a big, in-depth report of all my impressions; but I'm still learning how to manage my time while trying to do something like this, and one of the results of that is that I've had very little opportunity this week so far to sit down and compose something at a computer (I might have managed more if using the computers at Langara for non-academic purposes were not so apparently frowned upon). Even now, I'm supposed to be doing (will the novelty never cease?) homework, so I probably shouldn't spend too long at this.
College seems a lot like fictional accounts of it, which I find some quiet delight in, though that aspect is diminishing a little as we get into the details of the classes and the various work, the details of which, of course, the stories always skip over. I'm probably going to drop Japanese, even though it's informative and the teacher is entertainingly formidable; it just looks too intensive. She says that in her experience, we'll probably end up having to spend 50% of our time on Japanese, with all our other classes crammed into the remaining 50%. From time to time, I've been thinking that perhaps I should attempt it anyway - since this is all a strange, new experiment anyway, I wouldn't really mind if I failed (or I don't think I would). But more and more it's looking like my other classes really deserve my attention, so I think I'll postpone the language until some term when I'm only taking one or two other things.
So far, my favourite class and instructor are philosophy (and, uh, the philosophy instructor, respectively), though all of the others avoid being uninteresting. He is a bespectacled and bushily moustached man who stammers a lot and says amusingly professorish things like, "When the universe was created at the time of the Big Bang, part of the very fabric of the universe was these deadlines.", and (arbitrarily), "The next person in will constitute a quorum, and we'll begin." (Is that sort of joke funny to people who didn't go to Windsor House, I wonder?) The first class of substance, we discussed whether it was right to harvest the organs of someone who had been born without a brain.
There! That's a non-in-depth report, but at least it's a report. Hopefully I'll get better at making time for things like this and, you know, talking to people as I learn to treat these classes as an ongoing thing, rather than bizarre anomalies. I don't want to slip into being so unsocial again as I've been for much of these past few months; little things, like reading the menu at a restaurant, or puffing up my cheeks, or the strange and wondrous way that this city is still clinging to snow, keep reminding me how much fun it was being around people at Allentown.
Oh, and, belatedly, for Yoon Ha Lee: I think at the time, I meant to write something like, "I've been watching a lot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer lately. I think that, as good as some of the later episodes are, I prefer the story arcs around seasons 2 or 3, when everyone was still in high school, Buffy was with Angel, and Willow was still so adorable that they had to put a warning after each commercial break," end approximate paraphrase. Some time after that, I came up with a way of looking at the whole of Buffy that seemed to resolve my troubles with it, which was to treat it as two distinct series - one which ended when Season 3 did, and one from Season 4 on, which had more scope and daring about it, but rather less focus (not to mention a lot more ennui).
The only trouble with that is that it doesn't take Season Seven into account - understandable, as I hadn't seen it yet. I've recently been watching it for the first time with my family, and it's very good; it looks like it may well turn out, when we're done, to have been good in a way that totally invalidates that new-but-comfortable model just described.
College seems a lot like fictional accounts of it, which I find some quiet delight in, though that aspect is diminishing a little as we get into the details of the classes and the various work, the details of which, of course, the stories always skip over. I'm probably going to drop Japanese, even though it's informative and the teacher is entertainingly formidable; it just looks too intensive. She says that in her experience, we'll probably end up having to spend 50% of our time on Japanese, with all our other classes crammed into the remaining 50%. From time to time, I've been thinking that perhaps I should attempt it anyway - since this is all a strange, new experiment anyway, I wouldn't really mind if I failed (or I don't think I would). But more and more it's looking like my other classes really deserve my attention, so I think I'll postpone the language until some term when I'm only taking one or two other things.
So far, my favourite class and instructor are philosophy (and, uh, the philosophy instructor, respectively), though all of the others avoid being uninteresting. He is a bespectacled and bushily moustached man who stammers a lot and says amusingly professorish things like, "When the universe was created at the time of the Big Bang, part of the very fabric of the universe was these deadlines.", and (arbitrarily), "The next person in will constitute a quorum, and we'll begin." (Is that sort of joke funny to people who didn't go to Windsor House, I wonder?) The first class of substance, we discussed whether it was right to harvest the organs of someone who had been born without a brain.
There! That's a non-in-depth report, but at least it's a report. Hopefully I'll get better at making time for things like this and, you know, talking to people as I learn to treat these classes as an ongoing thing, rather than bizarre anomalies. I don't want to slip into being so unsocial again as I've been for much of these past few months; little things, like reading the menu at a restaurant, or puffing up my cheeks, or the strange and wondrous way that this city is still clinging to snow, keep reminding me how much fun it was being around people at Allentown.
Oh, and, belatedly, for Yoon Ha Lee: I think at the time, I meant to write something like, "I've been watching a lot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer lately. I think that, as good as some of the later episodes are, I prefer the story arcs around seasons 2 or 3, when everyone was still in high school, Buffy was with Angel, and Willow was still so adorable that they had to put a warning after each commercial break," end approximate paraphrase. Some time after that, I came up with a way of looking at the whole of Buffy that seemed to resolve my troubles with it, which was to treat it as two distinct series - one which ended when Season 3 did, and one from Season 4 on, which had more scope and daring about it, but rather less focus (not to mention a lot more ennui).
The only trouble with that is that it doesn't take Season Seven into account - understandable, as I hadn't seen it yet. I've recently been watching it for the first time with my family, and it's very good; it looks like it may well turn out, when we're done, to have been good in a way that totally invalidates that new-but-comfortable model just described.
