Well, I’ve still been busy lately, but today was pretty relaxing. My first class of the day was cancelled, so I was able to get myself seven and a half hours of sleep, which is nice for a change. And furthermore, I didn’t do any schoolwork after school either, just taking a night to waste. I may regret that over the next couple weeks, but screw it, right?

I had to write a seven sentence story for a class this week. So here’s that:

Gary Ochterlony was an older man, the oldest who worked at the library. He was quiet, worked diligently, and on his lunch breaks liked to walk around the outside of the library. One day, on his way out, he caught a whiff of smoke and, worried that there might be a fire, he sniffed and searched, soon realizing it was coming from behind a bulletin board on a nearby wall. The board, he discovered, swung open easily enough, and behind it was a tiny model of a city, built into the wall, with one of its buildings on fire. Gary leaned close to the tiny fire, licked his thumb, and pressed it against the building, extinguishing the flame. Only then did he notice the tiny wail of tiny sirens, and the confused murmurs of tiny people moving about the roads in what, Gary now realized, was no ordinary model city. Slowly closing the board again, Gary spent the weekend assume he’d imagining the event, but when he got back to work and checked, the city was still there, even the burnt building being rebuilt, now with an addition: a gold-plated statue of Gary’s thumb.

I assume I’ve complained on the site before about how much I dislike the focus on “class participation” in the English courses that I am taking. I do feel that I should clarify that I dislike this not only because I don’t want to participate, but also because I don’t want my fellow students to participate either.

My professors can not, apparently, string together more than a paragraph of class content without asking the class to answer some minor question, or checking if the kids have any questions of comments. The most unfortunate consequence of this is that the kids in these classes seem to be getting it into their head that they actually have things worth saying. They don’t. Oh, how they don’t. Must every class include twenty minutes of teenagers tripping over words, struggling to think of some interesting fact marginally related to the topic at hand? I’ve seen these foolish children sit their with their hands high, eagerly awaiting their turn to speak, only to fall to “Um”s and “Ah”s as soon as their moment arrives. These students are tedious bores and they don’t realize it. And here we are, not only giving them a chance to derail the momentum of a lecture, but actually requiring them to do it to get their full “participation” marks. Professors, listen, you can not underestimate how much more content you could fit into a class if you didn’t wait five minutes at the end of every sentence just to see if the kids might want to finish it for you. (I’m not even going to address the problem with the kids who try to be entertaining when they speak, because I can’t think about them and retain the ability to type sentences.)

Here’s what I want from a class: to go and learn things from the person who is teaching the class. Instead, I find myself in class after class in which even the professor sees the idea of lecturing as a worst case scenario. During the first day of any class a professor is likely to say something along the lines of “Don’t worry, this won’t be a class where I just stand here and lecture” and I am left thinking “Balls.”

Okay, there’s been two days of school so far and I’ve only had a glimpse at three of the four courses I’m taking this year so far, but I’ve got some comments to make:

First, I have so much reading to do! So much! As I have already mentioned, my plan to get ahead on my reading by doing as much as possible over the Summer did not go flawlessly. I lucked out in the sense that the new reading list for my Comics and Cartoons class included several things I’d already read, such as Superman Chronicles Vol. 1, the Dark Knight Returns, and Maus (though, not owning any, I still had to shell out mo’ money), but there was much I still had to do. This weekend I read V for Vendetta, which, honestly, I would have gotten to at some point given my love for Alan Moore’s work, but I still have at least one sizable graphic novel and a collection of Doonesbury strips to get to for that class. The real reading intensive class of this semester is Pulp Fiction, which thankfully includes Frankenstein, as well as excerpts from Gulliver’s Travels, Murders in the Rue Morgue, and Maus (again), all of which I’ve read. Unfortunately it also includes Pride and Prejudice, Much Ado About Nothing, Lonesome Dove, and a romance novel of my choosing, along with various other excerpts and short stories. Honestly, Shakespeare plays don’t usually take me too long to get through and I’m nearly halfway through P&P already, but Lonesome Dove is nearly a thousand pages on its own. As a slow reader, I am currently mildly fretting about all this. I assume that my Creative Writing class will also require reading of some kind, but I haven’t learned about it yet, so I’m keeping that out of my mind for now.

I am more thankful than ever for the whim that saw me taking a Geography class this semester. The English literature classes may be the ones that I care the most about, but a bit of variety is welcome, especially when it comes with less reading for me to do.

It’s the day before school starts back up and I’m seeing kids everywhere. I can take some small comfort in the knowledge that a bunch of them will drop out and go away. That’ll be nice.

While I’m here, I might as well go on to mention that I am currently roommateless. The last one left in the midst of August, as was the plan, and I put an ad on the Internet, but since I was on my own again for some time, I remembered how nice it is to have to apartment to myself. I answered a few people who responded to the ad, but it was a lot of kids, really, and I eventually just stopped replying. It looks like I’m going to try to go at least a month on my own. It will be pleasant and expensive.

Ooooohhhhkay. Detective Made Easy, the latest of John Swartzwelder novel about Frank Burly is out. As is tradition in the Nation of PDR, this means it is National Bookorderin’ Day! That’s the day when I’m supposed to get all kinds of the books I want to read in a single order from the Internet. Here’s the thing, though. I was already given Dave Barry’s Insane City and Max Barry’s (no relation) Lexicon for my birthday, so I don’t need that much. And to make it worse, just today I noticed an email from school saying that the Comics and Cartoon’s class I am starting next week will has changed professors and, with that, changed the books we need to read for the class. This means that four of the books I got and read over the Summer are now unnecessary and I will have to get and read other books for class. Ugh.

So anyway, the moral of the story is that I’m getting Detective Made Easy for National Bookorderin’ Day, but apart from that, it’s all about school.