1/31/14 in Journal Stuff

1/21/14

Day one of classes.

I am afraid. It’s of nothing I know of, though. It’s always a fear of the unknown. I can’t even tell if it’s built in instinct or some prideful want for control over my various situations. I have responsibilities to take care of. To my parents, to succeed in graduating. To myself, to not accept a lesser version of what I want of myself. To my neighbors, to show them the same respect I’d want to be shown.

This semester, I need to change my majors, get it in writing that I’m down for the double in Philosophy and Engineering Management. I need to pass my classes with nothing less than B’s and not put off homework for games. I need to find a way to get a different roommate, probably through moving to another building on this complex. I am at the point that the evil I don’t know will probably be more conducive to my life than the evil I know. I need to find an internship or co-op for the summer, which means I have to thrive at the career fair and not just avoid the congestion and poke the kiosks.

I had hoped Letsha (pronounced let-sa, accent on the sssha. Like, letsa go!) had found someplace else to live, as he claimed he wanted. In retrospect and considering he isn’t acclimating himself at all to the melting pot, I am the perfect roommate for him. He can sleep alone without getting tired of his girlfriend from day in/day out exposure to her, he can fuck when he wants, I’m not social or needy of his time and I stock various items in the kitchen that he takes full advantage of, and I have information on various bureaucracy dilemmas he may run into, and I’m probably the most passive passive-aggressive person he’ll ever meet. I’m tired of being roasted out of my room and then frozen in the kitchen alternating daily based on how much he sets off the smoke alarms. Yesterday, he asked me whether it’s going to rain soon. Or rain more often. I’m guessing he’s thinking rainy season. He asks whether it will rain a lot. Define a lot. More. More than what? Than it has? Maybe, depends. Global warming is messing stuff up. It’s really not something people worry about. I should have told him about the tornadoes. But after asking him to repeat every single sentence 3 times before I can pick out individual words, I get very short with him.

My Thermal Analysis teacher is the same Billy Bob Thornton guy that taught my Dynamics course. So I’m looking forward to it. The three out of the four Chinese guys that were in class all raised their hands for each other’s names because they couldn’t understand the teacher when he started spelling them out. Then they all asked to be called by other names like Joe, or Ty. A huge fraction of the class is the flannel/camo wearing crowd, so I feel even more like I’m in remedial Thermo. It’s at 8 in the morning…so I have to get used to getting up at 6:30. I’m the only person in the whole class that during role call he referred to my last initial instead of trying to pronounce it. And there were some doozies.

The other class I had was a required speech class named the “Theories of Communication” which is taught by a very round wheelchair bound woman who loves teaching this “free-form” class. We have to do two oral presentations, one on some communication theory that she’s going to give each of us and the other on a personal story of some sort. So we’re supposed to bring in topics to talk about every class time, at least one. Next Tuesday I have to make a list of ten questions I want answered by the end of the semester over social events. It has to be something broad (ie, vague) that everyone can get involved in. This is me in every single philosophy class so far. I’ve answered most of my questions, or at least got myself moving to a point that I can’t imagine someone else helping me out any on my self-discovery stuff. So if anyone reading this has any good questions that might pique my interest, I’m all ears. The only frustrating stuff is I that I want to answer every question she asks with a “that’s a bad question” or “define useful.” I could steamroll most of the conversation for most of the class, because we’re covering ethics, identity, what it means to “be” in the moment, etc. All philosophy and personal meditation stuff (which she verbatim said we’ve probably never experienced). Her last name is Kaiser and she couldn’t pronounce my name.

1/22/14

Roommates girlfriend has gone back to wide-eyed staring at me every time she sees me. I can only conclude that I’m an oddity to them.

And my Eman class is kind of awesome. The professor is the mayor of a town and claims that “I’m going to teach you in this semester what would take you around five years to learn out there.” First thing he did was set out a bunch of leadership books and told us we’d be writing book reports on either them or ones we picked that had similar topics. I was the first one to show up (20 minutes early to class) and we talked for a few moments. From what I can tell, Eman teachers have a high opinion of philosophy and those studying it. It can be pretty flattering. Also, he was probably working in the registrar when dad went to college there plus he pronounced my last name right. See the trend? Name pronouncing sticks with me for some reason. Ryan, TJ’s friend that would come over to Farrar and wander into people’s rooms while they were doing stuff, is in this class, too. He sits with me because I’m the only one he “knows.” He’s lost a ton of weight since the last time I saw him.

1/24/14

He found someone else he knew, so now I’m sitting with what seems like the sinister portion of the class. No really…we’re all lefties and sitting in a huge group naturally. Everyone found out after someone started complaining about the desk he was in. And we told these would be our assigned seats…so yeah. Lefties unite.

1/30/2014

Listened to the college’s radio station on the way back to my dorm. One guy lost his train of thought every two sentences, mid-sentence. Was not prepared for anything he wanted to talk about, then would stop mid-sentence because he’s get lost. Then a soft-spoken girl would step in and quote something (in this case, Obama from his SotU address) and would likewise have to stop every other sentence when she mispronounces words and has to giggle at it. Then it’d be back to the guy to forget what he was saying again. I know there’s the phrase that if you want something done right, do it yourself, but geez. I would need a good pair of headphones to work with those people every couple of days. This is what I get for getting too anal about being your best at what you’re doing. A lot of people on this campus choose the easiest path when it comes to themselves. They respond “naturally” and it ends up seeming like they don’t care whether they do a good job. I could be wrong, but so far I’ve only heard one DJ that actually projects their voice, doesn’t mumble or talk like they just took a big hit off a bong, and says things on point without getting lost. I actually tried to look them up on the station’s website to see when their shows were. But it seems to be a random schedule or something. These shouldn’t be unattainable attributes, but it’s rare to hear people sound like they’re wanting to do a good job of radio DJ’ing. Good job as presented by the large scale radio stations. I guess I should be happy they’re not doing shows like Sean Hannity or Rush. All rage, straw man, and texas sharpshooting. Instead they’re normally talking about pokemon and drinking.

1/31/2014

Freezing rain. The entire parking lot, most the sidewalks and random bits of the grassy patches around were ice sheets. And I ordered carryout dominos before noticing. So I walked the mile and a half from the Village to Dominos and back to get the pizza. Lots of sliding. Some “oh shit” moments, but I avoided falling. Lots of seemingly drunk people driving around yelling at people on the sidewalk (me). Turns out there really wouldn’t have been any consequences to canceling the order, but I didn’t like making other people pay for my mistakes. I had plenty of warning about the weather, including how, when I was ordering, the dominos website said there was no delivery available. Because all their drivers called in.

My Eman class today was a whole lot of the teacher putting clip art pictures with mspaint drawings up on the screen while explaining to the class how being a leader means we’re the ones that “illuminate the path” of the led. We are the big gears, changing the difficulty of the pedaling to match the small gears of the led. We’re the tow truck to their…crashed Volvo? I feel like this guy thinks we’re all 8th graders. We just got our take home portion of the exam. It’s philosophy meets psychology. We look into the ink blots and make it into something about being a leader. Then he grades it based on his idea of a good leader, which doesn’t include the average women or the typical introverts based on his class teachings.

Billy Bob is the only professor who has his shit in a pile. My stat teacher is a TA from Nepal who uses his friend’s notes for class only to find out they’re wrong after he teaches them. And talks like he’s yodeling.

Played some Mass Effect 3 with John and some guy who’s really nerdy. Like…proud nerdy. Kept talking about some calc question he was working on that took him 11 pages of work. He prefaced his question by asking us about our educations. Long story short, and according to John, his parents thought I was an ADD kid on Ritalin when I was a kid. Because I was so hyperactive and talkative. Which is kind of the exact opposite of what I remember myself being. There’s also a chance that he mentioned that a lot of the parents from grade school thought the same thing. I may have misunderstood his word choices, but yeah. Now I feel like there’s confusing, question mark shaped hole in my past. When it comes to the day to day of grade school, I keep remembering the teachers being angry with me for not having my homework done, yelling and reprimanding nearly every day, but I never really said anything. I didn’t raise my hand. I didn’t ask questions. I sort of turtled up in all my classes. Recess, same thing. Probably once a month I’d get vocal about not being included in whatever sport everyone else was playing. I didn’t really have any outside play dates with anyone from school outside of kickball in the neighborhood and hanging out with Lawson. So I don’t really know where John bases his memories off of. He played none of the same sports I did. He literally only saw me in the same classes that my main memories are. But he remembers me as being hyperactive. I really don’t get it.