Dariana inspired me to blog, so you can thank her for this blog post.
10:26pm on a Wednesday night is definitely the best time to blog.
Hi blog. It's the end of my first term of college and I haven't properly written a blog since my first weekend here. Oh well. So life happens.
This term has been interesting.
To start off, FP is boring as anything. I'm in How Water Shapes Humanity, and it's one of the most depressing classes I have ever taken. It's about water, in case you weren't able to guess. It's all about how different cultures depend on water and how the planet's freshwater is running out and how we're all basically screwed and we're destroying the planet and we'll all be dead soon if we don't clean up our act. It's über depressing and I can't wait for it to end. Surprisingly though, I'm doing the best in that class out of all of mine - at midterms, I was getting an A- in it. I'm guessing that's gone down to a B+ or so because I've been super bad about having my response paragraph things done. They're just so easy to slack off on! No one cares about FP and it doesn't contribute towards your major's GPA, just your overall GPA, so I'm not too worried about it.
I'm also taking Introduction to Literature, and as I mentioned in a previous blog post, and the teacher is crazy awesome. She's really eccentric and enthusiastic and I definitely love the course a lot, and it's one of my favorite literature courses that I have ever taken. (Previous Lit courses include: American Lit with Mrs. Hall - ICK ONE OF THE WORST CLASSES OF MY LIFE; BritLit with Mom - decent; your basic English courses - whatever; World Literature with Slechta - not bad, not bad, I liked my classmates. Or, my tablemate. He was awesome; Composition I with Slechta - that was also pretty decent. I did enjoy it.) We've been reading a lot of stories that I've never read before and really enjoyed, including "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Gilman and "Sonny's Blues" by James Baldwin.
Speaking of The Yellow Wallpaper, I'm writing my term paper on it! Well, I'm writing my term paper on how the narrator's descent into insanity was heavily influenced by the treatment of women at the time (which was terrible. Yay for oppression.) On Monday, we were supposed to turn in a one-page précis that identified the text we'd be analyzing, a tentative thesis, outline a couple of our main arguments and to identify a couple of secondary sources. It wasn't very difficult to do.
(Sidenote - I'm currently talking to Dariana on fb chat right now, and she just told me to read Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt. I just read the first few pages on Amazon and it's pretty amazing. Definitely going to see if the library here has it, and if not, I'll get it at the library at home while I'm home for Christmasbreak and read it then! And if not, I'll ask for it for Christmas or something.)
Anyway. Back to my term paper. My professor wants each of us to have a meeting with her about our term papers to discuss what point we're at and what we need to do to improve our topic, etc. I decided to schedule mine for yesterday so I can in theory work on the paper all this week. I meant to look at my potential secondary sources and I haven't quite done that yet. Oops. It's only Wednesday. At the meeting, my professor Beth started it off by saying, "I wanted to thank you, Joella, for being the only member of the class who actually wrote exactly what I asked for." She went on to say that she feels very very good about my paper and that she thinks that I'm in a good place with it and that she knows I'll be able to write a kick-ass paper. So I'm feeling pretty good about that paper.
As I also mentioned in my last proper blogpost that wasn't an "OMG STRESS HELP ME MY BRAIN ISN'T FUNCTIONING AHHH," I was also taking Latin this term. I use the past tense was because that is the case. I was taking it, but I was doing super badly in it. I procrastinated memorizing the vocabulary, I didn't get the textbook until half a week into the class so I had very little time with the textbook, and overall I was struggling, something that I'm not used to doing. I'm used to doing passably in the class if I'm not excelling at it. (At midterm, I was getting a solid F in the class. Super lovely.) So I decided to drop it after going through about a week of crying every day over Latin. I kind of word vomited through tears about the whole situation at my RA, and she gave me a big hug and her pillow pet to hug, which did help quite a lot. She also told me that if I was this stressed over it and doing that badly in the class, then I should just drop it and my entire life would be easier. That's exactly what I did. I dropped Latin and I'm much happier for it, because now I can actually take classes that I want to take next term!!!
Speaking of next term, I signed up for my classes for winter term about two weeks ago. I signed up for ENG 200: the Ways of Reading, SCI 100: The Scientific American Course, and HIST 104: The Ancient Mediterranean World.
ENG 200 is a course where students analyze and assess their own assumptions about what constitutes the act of reading. In the course, we'll apparently test the usefulness of models provided by the following movements: New Criticism, Feminism, Reader-Response, Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, New Historicism, and Queer Theory to the situated analysis of a variety of literary and cultural texts (as quoted almost verbatim from the course description on the Knox website).
In SCI 100, we'll be analyzing articles from Scientific American and it's supposed to be super awesome and fun. I'm excited for it. Apparently the professor is super eccentric and you can tell that he's a scientist and he's apparently obsessed with copper. He sounds awesome.
And then HIST 104 is history up through the fall of Rome. I'm so excited for that course AHHHHH.
Anyway, yeah. I'm a happy camper.
THE BEST PART IS THAT I'M ALMOST DONE WITH TERM. I have finals from November 20-22, and then winter break technically starts on the 23rd of November, the day before Thanksgiving. However, both of my finals are on Sunday, so I'm going to be able to go home on Monday!!! TWO DAYS EARLY! This means that I will be home in 19 days. I am so ridiculously excited.
I hope this is an adequate update. I'm going to go read the Great Gatsby now that I'm done with the book i have to read for FP - a whole two days before we are supposed to be done with it. I'm so happy. I love college. I can't wait for next term and for the rest of my college career to happen.
