I thought going back to school might give me more to write about on this here site o’ mine, and that is probably correct, but I kinda feel like I have less time to spend saying it. Oh well, let us see if I can’t bang out a post before I have to go to work…

I’ve got homework and tests and stuff now. This is the stuff I hate about school. I love being there and learning stuff. I could happily be sitting in lectures and such all day, but the second I have to start proving to them that I am learning, I start to take umbrage. I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before on the site, but I really find that the amount of time I have to spend proving to them that I am learning cuts into the actual amount of learning I do. It’s annoying. I will try, but I won’t enjoy it.

Anyway, something I noticed: Kids these days are sick. Seriously, I don’t know if it is flu season or what, but it seems like the professors can’t get through two sentences in a row without coughing, sniffling, sneezing, or some other sound of illness. Maybe it was like this when I was a student too. Maybe it is always like this in a group of people and I am only noticing now because of how diligent I have managed to avoid groups of people for my adult life. But I can’t sit in these lectures without a constant awareness of how sickly the populace surrounding me apparently is. If I get sick this year I am blaming all these children.

Haiku!

His mother told him
“You should wear your tuxedo.”
So he wore that shit!

Oh hey, I also got my Learner’s Permit thing for learning to drive cars and stuff. It’s been almost half my life since the last time I drove a car, so I don’t know what to expect of me really, but hopefully I’ll learn to drive. Not because I have any actual desire to learn to drive, but because I think it is a thing I will need to know soon. Stupid society always pushing its stuff in my face. Luckily I will basically never be able to afford a car, so I don’t have to worry about that just yet.

So, I have been through three classes now. It’s all been easy stuff so far. “Here’s what we’re gonna do” and that sort of thing. Oh how great it would be if the whole year was like that. But no. Sadly I’m going to have to do things at some point. Lame.

But at this point all I have is first impressions. High among these is: Young people are everywhere!!! Why did people make so many young people? Do we need this many? It seems excessive. Oh well, I assume that as the year goes on they’re going to be dropouts and get alcohol poisonings and leave to join circuses. Ideally the place will be more organized in a month or so and I won’t have to look at so many darn young people.

Speaking of young people, I have been given my student ID card and it would seems that the school still had my photo on file from 1999. Thus, the image of me on that card fits in well among all the young people around campus. Also from my original school stint, at least two of the chairs in the Student Union Building still have my initials carved into it. UH OH! My legacy is vandalism!

Oddly enough during one of my classes in a lecture hall in a building that didn’t even exist back in my original universattempt I sat down to find the initials “LDR” on the desk before me. Who could this LDR be? It is a mystery.

Anyway, to sum up: My “first week” of school was, in fact, only two days of school. I can’t really tell anything about what to expect. I’m nervous about the work I have ahead of me, but I kinda expect (or at least hope) that it won’t be as bad as it seems like now.

I guess that is all I’ve got. More details in the future.

Another thing I’m going to have to put up with as I return to school is that there’s gonna be all those people there. I hate that.

In the time since I last attended school I’ve done a pretty good job of whittling down the number of people I have to be subjected to on a daily basis. I mean sure, I have to put up speaking to people I don’t want to speak to at work, or even just random people on the street who think I might want to communicate with them (like this one probably-drunk guy just last Sunday night who decided I wanted to hear the story about how he got asked to leave a Tim Hortons for smoking), but on the whole I’d say I’ve had to put up with less of that than I will in the coming year.

As I return to school, I’ll be surrounded by people who, probably, will be used to talking with people who don’t have “Why don’t you stop talking” repeating in their heads throughout the whole conversation. b.Some of these people will probably want to speak to me. Heck, I’ll probably actively have to start conversations with people for whatever stupid reasons school will give me for doing that. And, from what I can tell with my encounters with them, the younger generation doesn’t seem like the type cherish succinctness and brevity the way I do.

And it will be the younger generation I am dealing with. I am going to be, like, over a decade older than many of the other students taking first year classes. While this is okay in as much as it means I have a perfectly valid excuse for not relating to them and all their references to young people things (the first time I did university, I had no convenient excuse for my not relating), it also serves to complicate the relations I will have out of necessity. I am already incapable of having a forced conversation without constant awareness that I don’t want to, and the added awareness of the age difference isn’t going to help that.

Anyway, to look for the upside, some of these people will probably not be terrible and boring. I may even encounter people that I can enjoy speaking to (it has happened a handful of times in the past). What’s more, hopefully the fact that a lot of my co-students will be young persons who, for all I know, will be more interested in drinking and reality television will make me look smarter by comparison when it comes to schoolin’. Could happen.

Here’s something I’ve been meaning to talk about for a couple months, but keep forgetting: I found a grey hair on my chin. And not just some loose grey hair that happened to land there, either. It’s totally one I’m growing myself. I’m gonna be a big boy soon!

I tried to take a picture, but my camera doesn’t seem to be good enough to get such a fine image. You’ll all just have to trust me when I say that on the left side of my chin there’s a single white strand.

It’s a good thing for me that I already did my obsession with mortality when I was nine, because now I can experience growing slowly more distinguished without the knowledge of my fleeting youth weighing heavily on me. I pity the many who have been convinced by modern society to fight a battle that is literally impossible to win just because putting such a value on youth is helpful in keeping people unhappy, and thus swaying them to purchase what you’re selling. Or something like that.

After all, why would PDR have any desire to more resemble a generation he has no desire to be a part of? Right?

Those who know Halifax will know the Commons, a pleasant park-area-deal just minutes from my apartment. It’s a nice place. In the Commons there’s this fountain that, for no actually justifiable reason, I have been referring to as “my fountain” for years. Sometimes I like to relax by sitting near it.

Anyway, three times this year I have seen teen-agers urinating in the bushes around my fountain. Unmitigated savagery. Now I don’t like to mock people who go to the washroom a lot or anything. I know that not everyone has the superhuman bladder that I have and I just don’t know what it is like to need to pee that badly. I can’t relate. But here is the thing: There is a washroom in the Commons! They just built a whole building to hold toilets and such right there in the park it a couple years ago! It’s PLAINLY VISIBLE from the area where the fountain is. If these teen-agers are unable to walk a distance that takes less than a minute because their bladders are so useless, maybe they shouldn’t leave the house. Or at least invest in some device that allows for one to avoid the need for public urination. On MY fountain!

What is the world coming to?

In other news, when I woke up this morning I remembered the dream I’d had so I wrote about it to Marq. Now I’ll copy and paste that here to fill up the rest of this post: I had a dream where I wasn’t me, I was some woman who worked in a hospital. Then a non-specific apocalypse happened and I, and at least three other hospital workers all became undead (we called ourselves zombies, but we had no zombie-mindlessness or cravings) and we kept the hospital open for survivors who needed help (there were many). At some point a woman who looked a lot like me came in to the hospital and it turned out it was on of my ancestors who happened to be a vampire. We got caught up and she didn’t drink my blood because I was dead. Then she had to leave town for whatever reason.

And let me add something I forgot to mention in that account: There was a point where I was totally jamming my wrist in the face of my vampire ancestor to see if she could smell the blood. She couldn’t.