PDR is Not Back To School

At this point the city is teeming with students again, and classes have begun anew. I am not attending them, though. Intent on becoming financially stable, I am taking at least a year off of my schooling. This is the monetary saving that I should have before I quit my job to go back to school, but that I had not the forethought for.

I am a little sad that I won’t be in school (though if I can find some that fit into my schedule, I may sit in on some larger, easy-to-blend-into classes), but I was also getting pretty tired of all the stuff I hate about school too. Perhaps this break will allow me to refocus on the positives sides of schooling before I go fully hateful of the system, as I did back in my teenage years.

And also, maybe I’ll have more money when the year is over.

But I will to work on my education in my own way through this year. I have taken fifty books from my Unread Books bookshelf and set them aside in a pile. I plan on reading the heck out of all that pile before this time next year. Some are the kind of works of literature that could come up in my education. Others are not. Either way, it’s more reading than I’ve been able to do during a school year, which is generally close to none. Here goes.

PDR’s Report Card 2015

Oh hey, I just remembered that I get marks for those classes I did. There weren’t many this year, but here they is:

Outlaw Tales: A-
The Vampire: B+
The Short Story: B+

There were also two classes I took that I dropped out of a few months in because I was feeling burned out. For these I’ve been given a “W” for “withdrawal” I assume, but the joke is on them because I still learned a bunch of stuff and didn’t even have to write any exams.

Popular Cinema: W
The Pirate and Piracy: W

The bigger news, though, is that I am probably taking at least a year off school. As mentioned, I have scaled down from a full-time student to a part-time student because balancing work and school has worn me out. But the consequence I had not foreseen about this plan was that I now have to start paying off my student loans already. In order to afford that, I need to work more. To be honest, I could probably use the break from school. This winter really got me down on it.

My 2014 Report Card
My 2013 Report Card

General PDR Updates

It’s been a while, let’s see what PDR is up to:

Okay, yesterday I wrote my last exam of the semester, so I haven’t got class again until the new year. This is nice, because I’ve been feeling kinda mentally exhausted lately. Last year I was doing seven days a week without a day off from both work or school, but I just can’t bring myself to do that again. I assume that this is all proof that I’m too old, but I don’t want to do that again. I’m only going to be a part-time student from this point onward.

I’ve also been off work for a little while for a reason I will likely expand upon in a later post. I’ll go back this weekend, but the time with less school and work has allowed me to be more productive at other things. Kip and I are still working on a project, which I mentioned last time, but which I am still being vague about.

In more noticeable news, I have started a new feature of the site: I am reviewing fictional beekeepers. I’ve done two so far and I hope to do about four or five more before classes start back up. Once busytimes begin anew, I’ll drop down to about one beekeeper review a month, essentially filling the gap I left when I stopped doing Canadian Heritage Moment reviews. (On that note, there are still a handful of those left that I haven’t reviewed. I’ll try to do them if inspiration ever strikes.)

Haiku!

Trouble from the moon.
Reverse astronauts are here
and they want our cash.

That’s it for now. I’ll be back at some point before January, though, because experience tells me that once school starts I’ll be silent for months.

The Story of the Class I Didn’t Drop

I mentioned the class I dropped during the first week of this year’s schoolin’s, but I haven’t said anything about my other classes. Let’s do something about that. I’m taking a class that is about the history of Vampires.

I wouldn’t say I’m a big reader of vampire fiction. I’ve read Dracula, and I’ve read Salem’s Lot, and I’ve read the Tomb of Dracula comics, but that is probably about it. Still, it seems like an interesting enough topic. So here I am.

So far, I very much enjoy the class. The professor actually lectures! That may not seem like an exceptional thing, but far too many professors I have encountered try to have a dialogue with the class. They stop every five minutes to ask a question, or even just get them to finish a sentence. I get that they’re trying to draw things out of the students so that they have to actually think or whatever, but it always slows everything down. We get significantly more class when they don’t stop class every five minutes. I pay attention to the lectures, so the interminable nuisance. It’s nice to have something better for a change.

Still, though. There’s a lot of reading in this, and all of my classes. I made a real effort to keep up with all the readings this year, and with only three classes I thought I could do it, but I failed. I am already behind. To be truthful, it’s kinda disheartening. There’s plenty of ways, good and bad, that school makes me feel stupid, but none gets to me more than the repeated insistence that the more I read the quicker I should be able to read. I read a lot, but I am and always have been very slow at it. I shouldn’t take it so hard, after all, I skipped whole books I was supposed to read last year without hurting my grades, but it’s sad to me because I really did try and I really did fail.

Anyway, in the meantime, I’ve been failing to keep on top of Secret Government Robots again. This time, it is for a better reason: Kip and I are working on a pretty neat project (details will come in the future). I’m pretty excited about that, so pretty much any time I’ve had that was not already claimed by school, or work, or sleep, I’ve been spending on that. If I’ve now given up on trying to keep up on school readings, maybe I’ll have time to do that instead.

The Story of the Class I Dropped

Okay, so I’m back in school again. I haven’t had all my new classes, but yesterday I had one that I signed up for without knowing exactly what it was. Then I fled. I mean, it looked like a really interesting class, mostly about adapting stories from one medium to another I guess, but it looked really hard. I could probably have enjoyed it if it were the only class I was taking in a year, but as it stands, I chickened out and ran away. I did enjoy the one day of the class I took. Were I rich enough to sit in on classes without having to worry about the whole workload, I’d be all over it, but I ain’t. Even the professor seemed really cool, so much so that I actually feel bad about dropping his class, but I didn’t go back to school to challenge myself. I want easy classes and plenty of ’em.

I replaced it with a class about the history of pirates that, is probably not going to be super-duper-easy, but it will probably be easier than that class.

Haiku!

Dead kittens are fun.
You need not ever feed them
and you can kick them.

In other news, I had a dream last night. It was like this: It was your general post-apocalyptic zombie-style setup, but instead of zombies, it was a world where statues had come to life and started attacking people. Since, I assume, there are fewer statues on Earth than there would be human corpses, getting attacked wasn’t too frequent, but when they came they were tough to fight because statues are harder to smash than zombie skulls. As is frequent with dreams, I don’t remember too much, but there was an ostrich statue among the horde.

Also, there was this other side-plot about a girl who lived in a high-tech pod thing. She had no idea what the pod was about, and seemed pretty unaware of the statuepocalypse in general. She was discovered by some survivor boy and they were hanging out. He tried to call someone on a cell-phone and it seemed like that person got hit by a space laser. The girl was intrigued and actually tried calling herself on the phone (a stupid idea), but before the space laser came down to kill them, some big thing in space (spaceship? moon? I don’t know?) moved itself in front of it to take the hit. I never found out what the deal was with this and how it connected to the comparatively more sensible statue attack plot.

Anyway, that’s it for now.