Day
Day Two, More Classes
Tuesday, January 27th, 2009.
Today completed the introduction to my new classes (which started yesterday), and I even had enough time to go into town with my friend, Kelsey, to find books. Of course, I ended up getting all of them online for much cheaper, but the walk was nice! I will give a synopsis of my first impressions of my new scholarly endeavors. This list will only include my academic classes, and not the extra classes and activities I’ll be doing (of which there are many).
Yesterday I had biology 101. This is the next step in what I took last semester, biology 100, and it builds off of it. In other words, if you took bio 100, then you take bio 101. The only difference seems to be that we have new instructors. For bio 100, our professor was a man named Randall. He was blunt. He was sarcastic—at our expense. In a word, he was amazing. His approach to teaching such difficult material was brilliant, and I feel that I learned more from that class than any other I’d taken. He was also a neuroscientist, and he helped me to personally find my way and how I was going to go about getting where I want to go. My new professors seem to be more akin to dried up hippies.
Today, I had three classes: Intro to Afro-American Literature, followed by Medical Ethics, follow by Calculus. Afro-American Lit is a course that I have almost no interest in taking and am only doing so to complete a Gen Ed requirement. It seems to be a rather boring class, and so far this has proven true. But to my instructor’s credit, she is not jumping to slavery and slave narratives as the only literature worthy of dissection. In fact, none of the books we will be reading are written by slaves or about slavery. I think that the discussions may be more exciting than I originally thought.
Medical Ethics was the class that I was looking forward to the most. But so far, I am most disappointed by it. The professor is a pretentious “quantum theorist” who spends his time teaching here and as a visiting scholar at MIT. Okay, so that’s alright. But that doesn’t mean he’s bringing in the good money. Indeed, his wife is a doctor. Furthermore, he has made it clear that he “doesn’t care what [we] think,” stating that we have never taken a philosophy course before, and therefore our opinions are essentially base and unimportant. This was where my appreciation of the man flatlined. How many courses do I need to take to know what my opinions are on abortion? Furthermore, I have five adopted brothers and sisters. During their pregnancies and in the early stages of their life, they would have been considered by a man like this teacher “babies who should have been aborted.” My little brother was shaken, beaten, and abused. He had severe brain damage and was expected to be a vegetable. He is now one of the most brilliant and intuitive seven year olds I’ve met. My little sister was neglected and near-starved when she was found in an abandoned apartment. She was completely unresponsive to all stimuli for several months. Now she is one of the most vibrant, playful, and well-natured kids I’ve ever seen. My experience compels me to believe in a greater purpose and a greater good than this man’s ideologies could ever proffer. I have a feeling that the material we’ll be covering in that course will be a big topic for me over the next few months, and it will be hard to stay on his good side while fighting the urge to argue with him. Of course, it may be too soon to judge such things, and I will certainly remain objective to the situation until he completely proves himself one way or the other. My last class was calculus, and it will be run much in the fashion of the math class I took last semester. I even have the same teacher!
After classes I went into town for a bit, and later settled into my friends’ room downstairs to watch television and talk into the wee hours of the morning. I’d say that today went pretty well, and I am looking forward to another great day tomorrow!
Another Day
Sunday, December 14th, 2008.
Every day as of late has proven only to immerse me deeper into certain ongoing struggles. Most of which I have stated before, only they are more developed and complex now. I turn on the television. There’s war. There’s unrest. I read the ads on the campus bulletin boards. There’s war. There’s unrest. I am beginning to wonder how anyone can be happy.
In fact, I was at a party the other night, when I spotted one of my friends sitting in the corner, looking down. “What’s up?” I asked him. “I’m just depressed. A lot of things. I don’t know.” He replied. I don’t know… an interesting answer. I don’t know either. “They say alcohol is a depressant,” he continued, “but look at all these people. They don’t look depressed to me.” In fact, at that moment I felt like only two people in the world were depressed, but only one of us were willing to admit it. Most people say that it is a matter of acknowledging it and getting over it. Most people will offer solutions: religion, friends, drugs. I guarantee that all of those things will cure your depression for some amount of time. But you’re bound to be depressed. It’s inevitable. It’s like an airplane, which only flies as long as it has fuel, and must land eventually, or come crashing to the ground. For me, I should have seen it coming. It hit me at a time when I least expected it. As my new life bloomed around me, my former life withered, and I lost the best relationship I’d ever had. That was where it started. Over the past month I’ve been experiencing many different types of emotions and trying to make sense of everything that is constantly and violently changing.
I feel as though I have succeeded in one realm: I am well liked. This is something that I am afraid to embrace. My self esteem leaves me assuming that people are always only tolerating me, and no matter how hard I try to beat such defeatist feelings, I am overwhelmed. But lately I have been warming up to these new people, new friends, and this new life. And with the introduction of the new comes the ending of the old. As for Toni, what was once the apple of my eye, and a precious gem, is becoming bittersweet memories. The pains and the heartbreak that still linger on after what has happened are best buried, and I must look forward. Love letters, gifts, dreams, promises—all in the past. It is difficult to comprehend that, because, if three months ago you had told me that I would be saying “I can’t talk to her anymore,” I would laugh. Our relationship, our friendship, was such a strong, immutable thing. I wanted to be with her forever. I never could have imagined any of this. But I guess that is a testament of how young and naïve I still am. That’s high school, I suppose, and although I’m beginning to accept that this is all happening, I am upset that I am accepting it. It is an awful situation in every sense, and I have learned that trust and love is as sturdy as cardboard in many cases, and that a small amount of rain can melt your heart into nothing.
My heart is nothing now. The confidence that I began to build over the past couple of years has been severely shaken, and once again I am questioning my own worth. Other problems, perhaps even greater, surround me as well. But they are for another time. Things are nowhere near being sorted out, and I suspect that they won’t be for a long time. In the meantime, there is a passage from the book No Country for Old Men which I found particularly interesting. It has to do with the sheriff—now retired—recounting a dream he had recently had about his father, who had been dead for many years now. Sometimes it seems that the only comfort you’re going to get has been dead for many years. Sometimes it is in transitory dreams that will be remembered but not felt in the morning.
“it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin’ through the mountains of a night. Goin’ through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin’. Never said nothin’ goin’ by. He just rode on past… and he had his blanket wrapped around him and his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin’ fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. ‘Bout the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin’ on ahead and he was fixin’ to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold, and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there.
And then I woke up.”
Long Day. Short Post.
Wednesday, September 24th, 2008
Today was possibly one of the busiest days of my college life thus far. It started with a lab at 9:05 and ended with an exam at 7:30. Nonstop classes all day, with fifteen minute intervals to get where I was going. However, today was a good day.
The exam was in bio. It was a two hour test and it took twenty minutes. I felt pretty confident… Hopefully I didn’t fail it miserably. Oh well. I’m going to sleep.