Facebook People: Apologies about this note; it's long and pretty boring -- my notes are imported into Facebook from Blogger, but the only people who can see them are those tagged in the note (and I don't tag people who aren't mentioned); I'm not a fan of inundating people's home pages with boring shit, usually.

Well, I'm back at school. So far, I'm doing a sterling job of keeping up, but that isn't saying much, as I've been here less than a week. I've met some professors who seem to promise topical engagement, but a couple (math, american lit) who seem to have procured a monotonous drone after decades of teaching apparently mostly apathetic students. We'll see how they go. I've already done most of the reading due Monday for American Lit, and I'm not very optimistic about the anthology we're using as our main 'textbook' -- the introduction is vague and useless. I think it's good to be given more questions than answers with an introduction, especially one that focuses on survey cultural and political shifts within the time period of literature we're studying, but goddamn... There are three paragraphs devoted to "African Americans" versus four focusing solely on the automobile as a shift in the direction of 'serious' writing toward 'migrant' modes of thought. Hmm. Cars, Harlem Renaissance; cars, Harlem Renaissance -- their choice of focus is a bit odd and disconcerting. There's a lot about modernist theory in the introduction, but I'm struggling with some aspects of the explanation already; I hope the professor is not disenchanted enough to refuse to listen to a string of questions on Monday - after class, of course.

I feel bad about taking up professors' extra time; I know from having one as a father that it can be a bit annoying to be held up with high-strung undergrads on non-class time when there are graduate students and research proposals to be focusing on (not to say that my dad doesn't enjoy engaging the undergrads in his field). Anyway -- I feel worse taking up 300 students' time with subject matter that they're probably not interested in. I suppose it would be different if my classes had fewer students, or if I was in a more competitive program at a more competitive university -- but I'm at peace with the collective attitude of the ISU student-body, and that attitude involves taking up class-time with material that we're going to be tested on, not asking questions and expecting answers that expand on it.

I'm actually not too bummed about math. I found out today that Phil is in that class with me, and that's a comfort, even though I can't sit with him (there's a seating plan for attendance purposes). It'll be good to have someone to study with when the material becomes more challenging. As Chrissy said, it's easier for two people to know 100 percent of any applicable material between them than it is for one to immediately grasp it all. Plus, Phil is a generally agreeable person to be around, of course.

I'm excited about my criminal justice and philosophy classes for politically selfish reasons -- I enjoy the challenge of being taught classes that involve analytical thought about contemporary issues by teachers who are not aligned politically with me, but I still tend to be grateful when that's not the case. My philosophy teacher read us an essay today comparing Hitler's early career to George W.'s. It's always entertaining to be able to look back from the front row and immediately see the political distribution of students based solely on their facial expressions. I'm actually not really certain about my criminal justice teacher's political orientation, but she is, from what I can tell up to this point, a lovely feminist. Her focus within criminology is on forced prostitution in the United States, but right now she's doing a study on women in the Normal police force.

My semantics professor is going to make that class a lot less boring than I initially thought it might be, albeit a lot more challenging than I thought it would be, too. He teaches from an Orwellian perspective, and his focus so far is on how governments use language to suggest certain underlying and ingrained social meanings. Coolness!

I'm very optimistic about this semester. We'll see if I (and my professors and peers) can sustain my intellectual passion, though. The support I've gotten from my friends (Chrissy, Teryn, Paige and in an extremely large way her dad) has been extremely encouraging -- I no longer doubt that it's highly possible for me to do very well academically.

In other news, nothing romantic is on the horizon for the M-Sak. It's nothing that I'm concerned about from day-to-day, but I've decided that my New Year's Resolution to stay single for a year was more of a gut call than something that was rationally thought out as a means of self-improvement. I discussed it with Chrissy, and she suggested that putting a time-limit on it was potentially destructive -- I could miss a good opportunity this year, or I could feel more pressure once it's over to find someone to be with before I'm absolutely ready to. I'm not necessarily looking for a rebound, but at the same time I don't think it would hurt to get a failed, frustratingly prolonged yet non-committal and bitter fling out of my system. We'll see what happens in 2007.

Peace.

Labels: Chrissy, Paige, Phil, Teryn, Tim

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