Category Archive

I’d be more upset about my first non-math C

if I did not know that knowledge was far more important than grades,

and also that while I like that guy IMO his quiz and exam questions need improvement.

Ah the peace of maturity

where the perfectionist realizes that perfectionism is a symptom of feelings of inadequacy

and that no one really cares what grades I make, so long as I learn and, eventually

graduate.

I did poli sci for myself as a treat, not because I wanted to pursue it professionally but because

at the end of the day

after long annoying classes of media ethics and international communication:

poli sci tastes just like chocolate.

The dogwoods are close to their peak. This time last year, a freak late frost and snow killed springtime. Crops were ruined (acorns, strawberries, apples) and yards and gardens took a brutal and lasting hit. Japanese maples were especially hard hit, with some dying and most just losing all or most of their leaves, and spending an entire year naked and dormant.

Scenes from last year’s spring:

A dogwood limb with dead flowers like dirty tissue draped over the branches.

My back-yard bleeding heart plant, frost-killed just as it puts forth the year’s first white blooms. The stems and flowers rotted and the whole thing eventually died back completely:

Scene from this spring:

This is a college student from good old UNCA, wearing shorts and a dingy t-shirt, relaxing in a tree full of spring blossoms. This pic was taken this past Thursday by John Coutlakis of the Asheville Citizen-Times.

I love it because it captures the ease that most of us seem to lose with age. We trade in the cargo shorts and string anklet for heels and hose and ties and a mortgage. There’s got to be some way to hang on to the right and the leisure to read books in trees. Why are experiences like these the purview of college students, and no one older?

Lately I’ve come to realize that the main hidden benefit of college may be the way it opens avenues to new experiences in new places.

A young woman I knew from last semester — the cross young copy editor, in fact — spent a transformative semester in Washington, D.C. working for women’s nonprofit groups.

She fell in love with the city. She fell in love with her work. She’s thinking of holding off grad school to explore herself and her life more as a nonprofit worker for women’s rights.

This is something college does well, and often at a key cusp-of-adulthood time — take us to new places and let us explore new selves and new interests. After college, we harden up, feel more tied to the sameness of our lives: the bills, the yard, the work, the pets. The routine. The familiar.

I think my next big college challenge is to find a way to let myself be like a traditional college student, and let myself, like a caring and involved parent, have some kind of wholly new experience that completely transgresses all my needs to stay tied to the life I built not completely out of growth and exploration but also out of comfort, settling and default.

Rowan canceled her trip to Ireland out of knowing she hasn’t the time to do research overseas and still graduate this year. An exciting trip to a beautiful place to do research in a discipline she finds fulfilling became just another pain in the ass to be avoided in order to Get Things Done in the sweet daily life she lives now.

Heather, on the other hand, is a glutton for punishment. Days after finishing out a rough semester of biology in early May, she’ll hop on a plane bound for South America and spend two months of medical volunteerism in Cochabamba, Bolivia. She’s going alone, leaving her husband at home.

What will she have to say about her experiences when she comes back to us?

I can’t wait to hear it all, both to know my friend’s adventures and to convince myself there are completely new experiences still waiting for me, ones that can show me unexpected things about myself and my world that in my safety I never knew and never had a chance to know. Never knew how to know. And then one day I was 39 and the cats were hungry and the car was making a weird noise and my deadline for the website was Tuesday…

I realized while talking with a friend that my main problem with the international studies program at UNCA is that it actually requires that one spend multiple semesters abroad, instead of, as the friend and I would have preferred, letting us learn about other countries from the familiar safety of our own town. How inconvenient of the program to ask me and her, women grown and well over 30, to pull up stakes for a whole semester. We didn’t have time or money, we agreed, for such a thing, no matter how interested we were in the program. No matter how interested we were in the world.

Seconds after speaking I realized the utter stupidity of my position.

Not that I live a timid life for nothing but money and work. But I have never spent a semester in Washington working for women’s rights. I have never gone to Ireland to research religious traditions. I have certainly never braved all my excuses not to jump, all alone, onto a plane bound for Cochabamba, turning my back on my own world for two months.

What would happen to me if I did?

Summer 2008:

Humanities 414: The Individual in the Contemporary World (first half of summer term)

Elementary French II (second half of summer term)

Fall 2008:

Newspaper Workshop II (writing for the college paper — again)

History of American Media (required class for major)

Democracy in Asia (required class for minor)

History of the Arts and Crafts Movement (required liberal arts class)

This semester I am a senior!

(Attention conservation notice: College blah blah blah my life blah blah blah new job opportunity.)

I’m nearly a month into the semester, and while my body has indeed been attending class, I think my mind is at home eating Captain Crunch and watching Masterpiece Theatre.

Which is to say that I have yet to find a rhythm as a student, and am constantly oversleeping, arriving to class late, failing quizzes, forgetting homework, and generally floundering in an unfamiliar and unhappy way. It’s like the first few confused, scattered, what-room-am-I-supposed-to-be-in-now???? days of the semester have extended themselves out into a full-on month of unmitigated WTF.

We’ve taken three quizzes in Media Ethics, and I managed to fail two and miss one due to being late for class. One day I knew I had a Latin quiz, but just felt too depressed and overwhelmed to drag myself to class. Another day I had to leave class early to meet a repair person fixing a busted home broadband connection, and stupidly didn’t think to ask the professor if there was some way to get credit for the quiz I knew the class was taking that day.

So I’ve made a zero on every quiz so far this semester but one.

And my International Law book (the class covers dozens of pages a week of incredibly taxing legal writing in a dictionary-sized law text) was supposed to be here Friday — I paid for expedited shipping — and hasn’t arrived yet. I’m way, way behind in my reading, and have had to borrow my professor’s book twice for two gonzo attempts to get in a week’s worth of legalese reading over lunch.

Trying to set my alarm earlier has once resulted in me coming fully awake, muzzily realizing that wakefulness was my goal, and contentedly deciding, half-asleep, that since I had achieved my goal, I could now safely go back to sleep.

One day I when set the alarm early it woke me only halfway, and I spent 90 minutes in a surreal dreamland between reality and NPR, which gave me weird radio dreams, made me feel half-asleep all day and ended up giving me a splitting headache by lunchtime, making it impossible to catch up on homework, even though I desperately needed to spend a few hours hacking away at my load.

None of this is like me. Or perhaps, none of this like the me I used to be. Since when is keeping up with my homework and rising by 7:30 a virtual impossibility? It’s more than just the fact that I’m taking 15 credit hours. Something is making this semester different.

I woke up on time one day, still somehow managed to leave the house late, accidentally walked to the wrong building at the college (I think I was on autopilot and last semester’s morning routine program took over), walked back across campus, and stumbled into Latin class late.

I opened my bookbag to see I had forgotten my Latin notebook.

It’s just going to be this kind of semester, I thought to myself. But then I gritted my teeth and cut off the thought before it could osmose into my soul.

It is not going to be that kind of semester. It is not.

Yes, things are off to a bad start. People, even studious and responsible ones, have bad semesters. And I’m not sure how to make a comeback from three failed quizzes in my Media Ethics class. But one sure way to guarantee a shitty semester is to all but prescribe yourself one.

Today I am making a plan to catch up with my Latin memorization, and let me tell you, memorization — brute, dull, rote memorization — is key in first-semester Latin, a very cool, weird and challenging language.

Today I am calling the bookstore I ordered my Int’l Law text from and asking what the deal is.

This week I am keeping up with my homework, and trying to ease my wake-time slowly back. 6:30 would be ideal, but if I have to start with 8:30, that’s where I have to start.

And certainly, there have been bright spots among the harebrainedness, failed quizzes, MIA textbooks, NPR dreams and general confusion.

In American Politics class, our instructor gave us a survey to show how much political matters really concern most Americans. His favorite reply to “What are your three greatest concerns right now?” was this very honest response:

the separation of church and st BOYS

And then of course there are the two students’ Latin sentences I shared earlier in this blog. Truly, every now and again I find myself not only an optimist, but an optimist with good arguments for being one.

And in the good-but-scary department, I got that job. I have been offered a position as a freelancer with a large, successful, multinational technical marketing company.

The good is that the pay is great, the company has resources and supports its freelancers (setting up calls, providing transcripts), the company comes recommended by someone who works for it, and my editor (translation: my boss) seems fair, nice, smart and likable.

The scary is the chill in the pit of my belly to take on regular, tight, high-stakes deadlines. Because I WILL turn that work in on time, and if anything suffers, it will, unfortunately, be me and my schoolwork.

But there is, of course, every possibility that the work will fit manageably into my schedule, and while I will be stressed out sometimes just like everyone else in the world, I will also be able to handle it, and be glad of the freelancer’s bread and butter, the generous corporate client.

I’ll be glad once my first assignments are underway, and I get a feel for how many hours/days of unbroken focus a typical assignment from the new client will need. You know, I’m not paranoid about what kind of job I will do. I am, in my perfectionist way, paranoid about the price of providing the level of quality I feel biologically driven to deliver.

Anyway. That’s the semester so far. I’m off from the college computer lab to do Latin homework and corner a mass comm professor to clarify my notes.

Nerd out.

In case you are feeling bad about the state of education in America, here is a wonderfully cheering example of some everyday studiousness from two young people I’m taking Latin I with at my city’s smallish public liberal arts university.

Our homework over the weekend was to decline three Latin noun/adj. pairs and come up with a 4-word Latin sentence.

Here are some sentences volunteered by two students, who to me did not appear to be overachievers, but people who just kind of got caught up in learning. As you read these sentences, keep in mind this is the 4th week of a first-semester class in an ancient, foreign tongue, and these students were asked for only four words:

Epimetheus sapienta de aliis petit. Errant! Sapientia in se est.

(Epimetheus seeks wisdom from others. He is mistaken! Wisdom is within.)

Viri sine sapientia et philosophia bella stulta amant.

(Men without wisdom and philosophy love foolish wars.)

It’s week two of the new semester? It feels like week three to me, and that’s with the MLK holiday this past Monday and a snow day last week.

I still don’t have my bloody International Law textbook, which costs $123 new. I have the money, but am morally, spiritually and intellectually opposed to paying $123 for a textbook, especially one I will use for only one class.

I bought a used version of a previous edition online. Amazingly, I got it for $10 including expedited shipping. The prof thinks I can probably get away with a 2004 edition, and so do I. We’ll see.

The reason I’m getting this book so late, aside from the fact that I am offended by bookstore/industry prices and completely opposed to paying such an obscene amount for any book with short-term worth, is that I made arrangements to buy the book last weekend from an out-of-town seller who ended up leaving an inane message on my cell phone explaining that she’d forgotten to bring, on her trip to Asheville, the book she’d made arrangements to sell me.

Asinine young person, a little contrition for the inconvenience you put me though would have been nice.

So not having the book through an ill-fated attempt at thrift, I was of course the very first student to be called on in class by Int’l Law prof. I had no answer for the question he posed, as I’d just tried and failed to cram a week’s worth of crunchy law reading into 90 minutes in the library with the mimeographed material on reserve.

But with luck the book I ordered will arrive soon, and I’ll catch up completely.

In Latin class I have been equally stellar, making an 80 on the first quiz because I managed to study the wrong chapter. How does one study the wrong thing only a week and a half into class? How on EARTH can someone with four semesters of French and one of Spanish fail to conjugate a regular Latin verb correctly? ????

It’s amazing the stupid, absolutely stupid mistakes even a studious and reasonable person can make during a bad week.

I’m not sure why, but so far this semester I find myself scattered, anxious and exhausted. Not quite useless, but on autopilot for extended periods, which isn’t like me at all.

The semester so far:

LATIN I: I like Latin prof, who is young, smart and wears sensible shoes and no makeup. She quickly won my heart by complementing me on my knitted hat.

Latin is my first inflected language, where the NOUNS change depending on their function in the sentence, just like verbs do in French and Spanish (and to a far lesser extent, English).

Latin is complex, weird and surprisingly hard, even with my background in Romance languages.

INTERNATIONAL COMMUNICATION: Interesting, low-stress class. The first thing the prof did was force a class of PC young people to admit that the practices of some people, cultures and religions are wrong and evil by superior Western standards based in Enlightenment principles involving science and reason rather than tradition and religious belief. Bravo.

Int’l Comm prof is a classic professorial type who will not shut up about his foreign travel experiences and (IMO) needlessly seeds the conversation with words outside of his audience’s vocabulary. But like at least one other similar character I’ve had at the college, he is also intelligent, fair, knowledgeable funny and cool. I like him, and I love his pronounced WNC accent.

MEDIA ETHICS: I love this down-to-earth, witty, teacher who couldn’t be farther from the stereotypical college professor making endless allusions to his recent trip to Brittany or his upcoming sabbatical/book deal. My favorite so far in the Mass Comm department. Terrible book; low-stress class. Ahhhhhhh.

AMERICAN POLITICS: Great textbook, intelligent professor. This class looks like the classic college experience with a solid professor and useful, powerful material (the concerns of early American politicians; the shaping of public opinion and the growth of the polling industry in America).

The political science department at UNCA seems the clear winner to me so far in quality of faculty, at least in the areas I’ve fumbled around in. Cornett and Subramaniam are outstanding, and Sabo, the chair and my professor for this class, imparts information solidly and well. If his teaching style were a food, it would be roast beef with potatoes and carrots, you know? Solid, basic, stuff that if it doesn’t set the world afire, is nourishing and filling. It does what it is supposed to do, simply and without fanfare.

INTERNATIONAL LAW: This class has met only three times, and I missed last time due to having an appointment at home for having my cable modem fixed (after all the hassle including picking up a new modem, my problem was a damaged connector cable). Int’l Law prof is that rare person whom you can observe for 90 minutes and not quite be certain exactly how intelligent he really is.

Which is kind of in his favor, to my mind, since I clearly prefer professors who don’t flash their learning needlessly, but bring it out, like a weapon or a tool, when and where it is appropriate to do so. He has strange inflection patterns and is extremely funny, which for whatever reason tends to push the mind toward thinking he is less intelligent, due to foolish ideas even I seem to hold that smart people aren’t loose and funny and casual, like he is. (And which of course they can be.)

The class is full of prelaw students, and I am not sure how much I will get out of it.

But one never knows what life and the future will hold, does she?

My friend found a thin black stray cat on Christmas Day, and because she’s allergic to cats but still loves them, brought her to me to care for until we found her a home.

I took the cat to the vet and lo and behold she had a chip (a microchip under her skin that had her people’s contact information)! I was excited and happy, but the vet tech gently told me that the battle wasn’t over yet, because sometimes even chipped cats aren’t wanted cats.

Then he admitted that a spayed, declawed, chipped cat was probably a wanted cat, and happily walked off to call the chip company for the phone number to where this cat lived.

I pictured a woman answering the phone, tears coming to her eyes as an excited gaggle of kids gathered around her and she told them Lucy was coming home today.

The vet left a message with the number they got, an answering service. Then another.

Last week my vet told me I could keep Lucy, as her person was not returning the messages the vet office was leaving.

Sometimes not even chipped cats are wanted.

Lucy will be adopted out through the Animal Compassion Network, a WNC-based no-kill foster network that finds pre-screened homes for unwanted cats and dogs. So if you want an absolutely outstanding cat with no bad habits who is a grade-A snuggler and has a mellow, affectionate personality, let me know. I’ve got one to give.

*******

Remember my question about my International Law class, and my ambivalence about taking what amounted to a pre-law class, with a fat Paper-Chase hardcover textbook that costs $92 new at the university bookstore?

Turns out that my International Law professor is, according to this press release from the college, a “widely respected human rights expert.”

He mentioned he’d be out of class next week, but didn’t tell us he was flying to the Netherlands to present a paper at an international conference on “Transnational Human Rights Obligations in the Field of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.”

Dang.

Not only is this guy a human rights expert, he is absolutely hilarious (the funniest prof I have had in years), he didn’t drop constant reminders he’s jetting off to the Netherlands to present a paper at an international conference (some profs would, I assure you), and students love him on the always-useful ratemyprofessors.com.

I think I’ll keep the class…

(UNCA magic snowflake that indicates the college is closed.)

The snow came last night at around 9:30.

I was sitting and knitting a hat in the living room and watching Waking Ned Devine, which is an absolutely lovely, funny comedy with an outstanding Roald Dahl moment at the end.

A car drove past the house on my quiet residential road, and in its headlights as they went briefly and brightly by in the darkness, I could see it — snow falling thick and fast.

I paused the movie, dressed up warm, and went out into the darkness to look. Sure enough, I could feel it falling on me immediately, see it illuminated in the streetlight by my neighbor’s house. I stuck out my tongue and felt it swiftly dusted with snowflakes.

I ran back inside for the laser pointer, which makes beautiful shapes in rain or snow, the more and faster the precipitation the better, lighting up the drops or flakes that fall into its beam in a long, dancing conga line of illuminated rubies. (Laser pointers don’t show a beam of visible light, but do project a fat dot of red light a quarter of a mile or more, and will illuminate anything in their path, including raindrops and snowflakes.)

I came in cold and delighted, and sat back down for my excellent movie, with the deep, deep heart-peace the childless, self-employed working student knows when there is absolutely no need to set the alarm tonight or get in the car tomorrow.

With thickly falling snow at night, there’ll be no school. It will be that best of things for the busy person, a day devoted to rest and catching up.

Today I’ll catch up on my Latin and poli sci homework, track down the last of my textbooks, final-edit some web copy for a client, balance my checkbook, pay bills, wash the sink full of dirty dishes, clean the cat box, maybe figure out how to work the juicer that’s sat dormant in my cabinet for a few years. By all means be jealous of my fine day at home, but don’t forget the full package includes student loan debt, exhaustion and chronic overwork.

Just not today. Not today.

Today I may shop for yarn if the store is open and the roads allow, fill the birdfeeders and watch the mother and child set of neighbors sled down the hills of their back yard on yellow plastic saucers.

We got a proper blanket last night, looks like maybe 2-3 inches.

*******

I’d like some college advice. Feel free to share whatever wisdom you possess:

I’ve signed up for a political science class, International Law, which I thought sounded interesting. But it turns out the class is full of pre-law students, uses a $90 law textbook, and is very law and treaty-oriented. Not very interesting after all.

But it works with my schedule, fulfills a minor requirement, and the professor is well-reviewed and very funny. The class requires about 30-40 pages of reading every weekday, but has few tests and mostly consists of understanding the readings (legal precedents from a fat hardcover that is big and expensive as only legal and medical texts can be) and discussing them in class.

The subject matter interests me very little, and I dread dragging my feet to learn case law that doesn’t attach well to any significant interest of mine (I tend to to enjoy the economic and governmental aspects of poli sci over than the cultural or legal aspects).

I’ve got today to decide to keep the class or reinvent my schedule.

Any advice?

*******

In happy news, though no one told me it seems that I am on the 2007 UNCA fall semester Dean’s List, an honor awarded to full-time students with a semester GPA of 3.5-3.9. Sort of like the A-B honor roll (though not the A honor roll) for college students.

*******

Errata: I got the facts wrong from my recent rushed phone call from Rowan in which she conveyed her excitement over the possibility of driving around Ireland this summer doing research. She’s only just been invited by her professor to write the grant, and was calling me to tell me about the exciting possibility of doing such amazing cool and interesting research.

Her grant hasn’t been approved yet, and she’ll be writing it this year for travel and research in August.

Heather’s grant, meanwhile, is pretty much a done deal, though not quite. She’s been asked to supply more information, and expects to have her grant approved after a data entry ordeal.

Wish them luck. I am still gunning to drive the van in Ireland, and have offered free writing assistance to Rose and Heather both.

I’m back at the college, and it feels great.Latin prof seems intelligent, cool and interesting… She’s actually an archaeologist.

International Communication prof gave the most pretentious class-opening monologue I have ever heard. But he’s funny and charming, thank heaven, and despite his insistence on using more words and bigger words than I considered necessary, he made some very interesting points about intercultural communication and moral relativism.

In his class I find myself sitting next to UNCA’s most only famous student, the young man featured in this NYT article from just five days ago.

While I know it’s easy to go on and on about how you really kind of know this semifamous person, and they’re really pretty nice… From what I’ve seen around the campus and in class today, and despite this student’s thuggish photo-face, he really does seem to be a polite, thoughtful and intelligent young man who handles his notoreity with humility.

And he’s a Mass Communication major! (Really, I see him and I think I see a young man with the heart of a nerd.) Go Bulldogs!

And in the best and most amazing news I’ve had all year and last year as well, my very own Rowan called me at lunchtime today to announce her undergraduate research grant was approved. This August, she’ll be flying to Ireland to research Celtic ancient religious traditions. (Heather is still waiting to hear about her grant, one for investigating to what extent local Spanish-speakers are really using outreach health programs targeted at their community.)

Needless to say, I am already gunning to drive the van during Rowan’s trip. :0)

My friends have inspired me with their work, helped me to see that my own undergraduate research (UNCA is big on it, and all Mass Comm majors have to do it to graduate) can, and probably should, be something that I feel excited about doing.

Taken at the right time and with the right attitude, college is really something else. I observed to my friend Grace whom I ate lunch with today that without college, she’d be at Applebee’s and I’d be in the backwaters and bush leagues of the freelancing profession, and neither of us would ever have known the joys and pleasures of study and research, or the kind of growth and adventure offered to us if only we can find the time and resources to pursue it.

She might still be an Applebee’s waitress, but she’s an Applebee’s waitress who wants a Ph.D. in p-chem and to study the chemical basis of obsessive behavior. And while I’m still a freelancer, I’m leaving the bush leagues and dreaming of Ireland. (In still more good news, I just got off the phone with my interview person from the big tech writing job, and it went great!)

Wow. All first days of school should go so well!

Days until the spring semester starts:

 

10

 

Let the countdown begin.

They’re up as of today. :0)

Oh how we have longed
for something that would
make us feel so…

- Kate Bush, “Somewhere In Between”

I went to the last humanities lecture of the semester the week before last. It was outstanding, probably my favorite lecture all semester.

While UNCA’s HUM 324 lectures are hit and miss, this one was a hit. It was about existentialism, and it was my first encounter with philosophy all year that didn’t leave me cold, but completely fascinated.

I didn’t find the school of thought airy or boring or even all that intellectual at its roots, but moral and grounded. I won’t bore you with specifics I don’t have the time, knowledge or skill to present artfully, but I think it was an important moment in my life to view myself as affected by and interested in the study of philosophy. To view myself as not always rational and logical but as feelings-based, as a searcher of not only knowledge but purpose, meaning, feeling.

What followed from that is I think I began to see at last, with time and perspective, that all my ideas of the last few years about myself as a logical, rational science-based being are largely incorrect.

I might love reason. I might love knowledge. I might love learning. But my world is more than that, ultimately including a Dionysian aspect I didn’t so much ignore as fail to recognize.

I love performance, literature, music. I go to church, not as a mindless exercise in morality, but because I love the music, the community, the lessons from the wise person who delivers the sermons there. And when I walked into humanities class late for my exam and my professor smiled at me and made a joke at my expense, the kind you make when you like someone and are comfortable with them, I sat down realizing that humanities classroom was more my place than I had ever realized.

For all my bitching and moaning about that damned humanities class, I have been won over, if not quite to the program as it is run, but at least and definitely to what I learned.

And what I learned is that an education is what happens when you learn things that serve no value other than to deepen your understanding of yourself and of the world and how you fit into the world. If that’s not something that matters to you, go spend your life making money and buying things, and leave the rest of us to the pleasures and responsibilities of doing what’s right and living in ways that matter.

I don’t know that I am presenting this eloquently, and I know that these are the trite and common realizations that people have as they take in the surprisingly big lessons that years of study offers. All I can say is that this is what is happening to me, and when it happens, while it may not be anything no one’s ever done before, it is certainly an awakening of the mind when it happens to you.

I suppose it’s the difference between watching a car crash on t.v. and feeling the crash and the terror as you are broadsided by a Chevy and spin out of control into the brush by the side of the road. I suppose it’s the difference between knowing in your heart and mind that knowledge is valuable and beginning to feel the first stirrings of how differently you see the world once your mind is opened to new, poweful and useful ways of categorizing and digesting everything you know and everything you have yet to learn.

Something else happened with that class that affected me.

It happened last week when we students studying for our comprehensive, weighted humanities final. We gathered in the lobby of the college’s main auditorium, a best-kept secret of a studying place with a central coffee table, a few couches and chairs, and a glass front that lets in sun and night and the idea of weather.

I guess there were about seven of us. In the middle of studying, Hilary admitted that she’d reread the Kierkegaard essay because she liked it, and thought it contained interesting and valuable information.

I suppose it was then, given her strange subtle signal, that we started talking about things the class has encountered in this section differently somehow, purportedly studying but really just sharing information for reasons of pleasure and interest.

The young man beside me, who’d done his paper on Franz Kafka, told us about Kafka’s life, how “The Metamorphosis” is really just a transreal version of Kafka’s own family life. Another young man talked about Freud’s perversion of the scientific method. I contrasted Freud and Jung, and explained archetypes and the mythic imagination.

It wasn’t like we were a salon of intellectuals or anything. We were a perfectly ordinary group of college students. But we were, in the most natural and unaffected way, sharing new and interesting information, sitting quietly and listening. For the test, yes, but also out of a completely genuine and natural interest in the material.

It was all low-level stuff, junior-level undergraduate humanities, really not as intellectual as might sound. But I left with a far, far better understanding of and appreciation for Kierkegaard, whose work I had previously not gotten a drop of understanding from.

The following day I finished my test with barely 5 minutes left, turning in nine handwritten pages of answers, answers, answers. Because I’d had so much to say. My hand hurt from writing.

Holy shit. Something happened that night in the lecture hall lobby, and something else happened when I walked into class feeling welcomed, and something else happened when I stopped hating philosophy, rather foolishly and categorically dismissing an entire discipline for no defensible reason.

I still think the college’s humanities program is too ambitious. I still think that — that one strangely magical evening aside, if indeed one could brush aside something like that — my class had hardly any really good or interesting discussions. I still note our textbook has errors, and that I don’t feel discussions were facilitated very well.

I also note that if UNCA is trying to produce a thoughtful person willing to engage the world on the terms of more than just common sense and the cell-deep prejudices she grew up carrying, it has done a rather fine job.

I’m going to get nerdy here. Cynics and people who hate liberal arts may wish to move on, and in fact should probably not come back, ever.

From my professor’s syllabus (click if any of the text is cut off):

I’m not looking to change the world, except in the ways that anyone can. But I welcome the efforts of anyone or any institution willing to shoulder the terrific burden of teaching things of such great complexity that it’s difficult to explain exactly what you’re learning.

So this was the semester that saw that death of logic, or if not its death, the idea that I am not only not cut out for science, not only better cut out for writing, but that I have an imperfectly rational (irrational) mind with a thought process like a dog chasing chickens, one that seeks and requires purpose, meaning and feeling as keenly and needfully as it does fact and information.

As I finished the first question on my humanities exam, I had to refrain from writing “PS: I love Jung!” at the end of it, like an excited child.

The semester pretty much ended yesterday. It was my last day of class. All I have left is studying and exams.

My poli sci instructor had promised the class, after indoctrinating us over the course of long weeks into a series of mind-blowing major political belief systems, that she would finally tell us “the truth” on the last day we met.

Knowing her, and knowing her ironic tone as she made the promise, I wasn’t expecting her to tell us how her own unique political beliefs were the ones we should all slavishly adopt.

And of course that’s not what happened.

The class, POLS 281: International Relations, is a disturbing series of revelations about international order and disorder. The worst is the first week or so of class studying Thomas Hobbes, in which a man who survived the English Civil War sets out a convincing and deeply disturbing case that human beings are conscienceless brutes and life outside a rigid hierarchy of dominance is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

It was one of the most intellectually disturbing periods in my life, in large part because our instructor taught it so convincingly and well.

Our studies get less emotionally draining better after that, but become more complex as ideas evolve from Hobbes’ Realism (power is All), to the Enlightenment gleam of the social contract ideas of Locke and Smith, to Woodrow Wilson’s blustering, scholarly idealism over the League of Nations, to the U.N., to the Cold War order of peace by threat of mutually assured destruction, to the modern era of globalization and international capital, to the Marxist critique of global capitalism.

Yesterday, the last day of class, our instructor calmly and good-humoredly told us that everything we had learned was important. That each school of political thought offered something useful in an educated critique of the world. That her own beliefs didn’t matter, so she wasn’t going to reveal them.

That what mattered was our education, our minds, the quality of the judgments we made through our ability to sift and interpret information as we shaped our beliefs and values.

We sat there quietly, not saying a word. Not even the few rowdy young people. All quiet and listening.

I’ve chosen my minor well. It’s not really something I’m all that good at, but it’s important and useful and powerful. A political identity goes deeper, or should go deeper, than just local and national decisions and identities.

It should reach into how you feel about your country’s economic choices, the way it chooses to integrate itself into rest of the world, the way it deals with crises and threats, the way it pays people and the way that its people pay it. Politics is a very big place. Big as the whole world.

I leave this semester with a rich feeling of satisfaction. Poli sci is right for me.

You will be introduced to your own political ignorance. You won’t be made to feel ashamed or deficient, but you will realize that despite following the media and voting in elections, you know as much about global politics as you do about woodworking, or any other complex endeavor to which you have devoted no real study at all.

You will be introduced to a series of convincing and contradicting worldviews. They will all make sense to you. You might realize your own political views, which you previously found justified, examined and readily defensible, have been largely dictated by the class and nation you find yourself in.

You will realize that being asked your political identity and responding “left-leaning liberal” is a bit like being asked where you are from and replying, “Earth.”

You will realize, in your last days of class, that if you really want to know anything at all about what is going on and your place in it all, you’ve got your work cut out for you.

* final Blue Banner article

* A 10-page (double-spaced) humanities research paper, 20% of my final grade

* My newswriting final project, an 800-1000 word news article on communal housing. Turned in this morning! This will be reworked into something I hope I can sell.

* Humanities final, December 6 at 11:30 a.m. Comprehensive.

* Political science final, December 7 at 11:30 a.m. Not comprehensive.

Days left in the semester: 14 Eight! The last official day of class is Dec. 11, but my last EXAM is Dec. 7! December 7 is my last day of class in the fall semester of my junior year.

At the end of every semester, me and my friends always have lunch together and talk about what we learned that went beyond what our classes taught us. The overarching lessons that each semester brings.

Since the semester is almost over, I’m gathering my thoughts. Here’s what this semester seems to have brought.

(In college, I’ve discovered that you can tell you are approaching a solution when things seem to suddenly branch out into an overwhelming complexity. And I think that’s where my life is now. I’ve solved so many small problems that all that’s left are the big ones with no easy answers.)

* TIME IS RUNNING OUT

I am nearly 39 years old, and my list of things I’d like to have done in life is not even clear, much less partially worked through. I’ve had a lot of setbacks in life, and the time to get uncomfortable and actually start doing dreams rather than dreaming them seems to be (un)fortunately, NOW.

Time has a stop. Things can wait, but not forever. Time is running out.

* I’M SLOW

I’m a slow worker, a crafter. I’ll never be happy in a job that lets me turn out good work without giving me the time to make great work, or at least work that I have polished to a sheen that satisfies my eye.

I don’t make birdhouses. I made dorodango.

This is not a statement of snobbery in which I am implying the superiority of the dorodango over the birdhouse. Depends on what you want, and what you want to make.

* I DON’T KNOW WHERE I’D WAKE UP

If I was told I’d wake up in my dream life tomorrow, I have no idea where that would be. And the only way to find out is to start trying things that are new, hard and strange.

Nothing is left but what’s uncomfortable.

* MULTIPLE IDENTITIES

People have a work identity. And an ethnic and cultural identity, and maybe, sometimes, a spiritual identity. But do you have a political identity? A philosophical identity? Can your cultural identity integrate itself into a global cultural framework (so you’re an Irishwoman, but what does that mean when you explain yourself to someone from Qatar?) Are these legitimate examinations of personal identity? If they are, what’s the plan?

* final Blue Banner article Turned out well. Turned in Sunday evening, as per my usual reporter’s deadline of Sunday at midnight.

* A 10-page (double-spaced) humanities research paper, 20% of my final grade Turned in this morning! A huge hassle over and done with!

This morning our instructor read the topics of the class’ freshly submitted papers from the thick stack we made on his desk. Burke and his God. The impact of the industrial age on health. Westernization in Japan.

Mine was Lin Zexu and traditional Confucian models.

To his credit, our professor seemed to look forward to reading them.

* My newswriting final project, an 800-1000 word news article on communal housing, is due Thursday at 9 a.m.

It’s going moderately well, with 800 words written last night, but no sources yet because I am having trouble tracking down interviews, and this article requires four.

But I got a nice flow from the information I gathered, and I am learning the trick of choosing a focus and writing economically to that focus, rather than writing a big sprawl and seeing where you focus lies as you finish your first draft.

Since I am wooly minded, I now write out my focus first thing, and write notes to myself IN CAPS to remind me what each transitioned paragraph is supposed to cover.

While both approaches may have their merits, a news story is the place for the former technique. And surely a timesaver overall.

* My humanities final is December 6 at 11:30 a.m. It is comprehensive. Which sucks because a few weeks ago I managed to lose my humanities notebook. I’ve looked everywhere. It’s gone. Note to students: Put your contact info in your notebooks. I wish I had.

* My political science final is in early December sometime. I don’t think it is comprehensive, but only covers Marx and Grieder’s/Hobson’s critique of global capitalism. No word yet from my professor as to when our final is.

Days left in the semester: 14

As I’m nearly done with the humanities term paper (5 pages; 20 percent of my grade) I hope to finish up today, it looks like the end-of-the-semester crunch (a period of about a month when the load of tests and papers seems to snowball and is all but overwhelming) is almost over. WHEW.

About two weeks ago my humanities professor asked us if we had yet seen someone wig out completely. A few had. One young man admitted that he himself had wigged out.

Now begins the end-of-the-semester PUSH, as we students rush to ready for final exams and turn in the final projects that will decide big chunks of our grades.

Regular classes at UNCA end next week. Then we get a reading week in which to study for finals (and recover from the crunch). Then the week of finals themselves, in early December…

The last day of class is December 11. The end of the semester is in sight!

What I’m working on:

* My last Blue Banner article of the semester, a two-page profile of a humanities instructor who ended up being a very cool and polite person. It turned out well. Hope the pic is a good one.

The professor I interviewed is losing his eyesight to a degenerative condition of the retina, and it occurred to me that I am the one who, through the instrument of a newspaper, will officially describe to the university community his situation and his plans to deal with it (as well as the fact that he used to be in a punk band and got kicked out of college once).

Wish I had room to mention he’s named after a late-60s rock DJ from Boston.

I’ve decided that I like writing about people after all. It’s shy-making and challenging, but when it goes well, it’s fun and rewarding work.

* A 10-page (double-spaced) humanities research paper, 20% of my final grade, on the 19th-century Chinese official Lin Zexu, upon whose books my cat Cleo barfed (note to Don: this was a first)

* My newswriting final project, an 800-1000 word news article on communal housing. This is a big project, but about a hand-picked subject I like, and I have already lined up an interview with Greensboro anarcho-commune resident Liz Seymour, who is fast becoming one of my heroes.

* My next Humanities 324 exam is next week.

* My Humanities 324 final is the week after that.

* My political science final (blessedly not comprehensive; it covers only a few weeks of work and not the whole semester’s learning) on Marxism and global capitalism is the first week of December.

And then I’m done for 2007!

I get a month off from school for the holidays, and I plan to spend it knitting, eating, reading, staying warm, petting cats and maybe shaping up the house a bit, room by room. Also maybe trying to find a documentary screenwriter to email with.

Attention conservation notice: For those who are curious about my college experience as a Mass Comm major/Poli Sci minor, here’s my first-round slate of classes for the coming semester, which starts in January.

Historically, several rounds is what it takes to shake out a schedule that works. Last semester in the first week of class I dropped a class with a boring, rambling, self-indulgent prof who taught a 3-hour night class. No thanks.

I also slapped on another year of study, declaring a political science minor very late in the game and with only one POLS class taken.

But still, it was the right thing to do. Mass Comm classes are interesting and important, and I am choosing to specialize where I am already strong. But I’d go nuts if my day were nothing but copy editing, media ethics and the news formula.

This way, half my day is mass comm and the other half is globalization, international relations and balance of power politics. Ahhhhh.

And, yes, 15 credit hours, what I’m taking next semester and tried to take this semester, is more than I’ve ever taken before. I’m tired of dragging my feet. I wasted time studying the wrong thing, trying to balance the impossibility of professional work, self-support without loans and making the best grades I could. Looks like by the time I graduate, which with luck will be in 2009, I will have spent seven years working on one bachelor’s and one minor.

Anyway.

Here’s Plan A for what’s going on this semester:

CLAS 101 Latin I (Taylor) *

* This class is a repeat from 1990 when I took the class as a stupid 21-year-old, quit coming to class (long story) and never withdrew… I got a big fat “F.”

I want to replace this grade and improve my GPA. Only my UNCA grades are counted in my UNCA GPA (my grades from TWO YEARS of almost all straight A’s in community college are not counted toward my UNCA GPA), so my UNCA GPA is 2.2 and my community college GPA is 3.8.

MCOM 482 International Mass Communication (West)

MCOM 104 Media, Ethics and Society (Gouge)

POLS 220 Principles of American Political Behavior (Jenkins-Mullen)

POLS 389 International Law (Gibney)

All these profs checked out well in my research, and I already know and like Michael Gouge, who is the faculty adviser for the student paper I’ve written for for months now, to the tune of a dozen or more articles.

It still kills me to do good work on deadline and not get paid.

Lately I feel like when I am happy and involved in my work, no matter how many hours my workday lasts, and no matter how tired I get, there’s some kind of furnace of joy inside me that keeps me going like a star. I never get sick and I find time for everything, though heaven knows I miss a lot of fun.

And I feel like when this furnace goes out, when work doesn’t stir me and classes lose the intellectual glamor I savor, I swiftly become befuddled and ill.

I go from competent and industrious to confused and headachy. Over the past two weeks, I have missed 1 1/2 humanities lectures, completely due to forgetting that on Fridays I have class at 11:30.

Last weekend some weird bug kept me on my back all day Sunday, unable to keep food down and most grateful for my Netflix subscription. And this week I seem to be one of the first at the college to come down with that unwelcome seasonal visitor, the common cold.

You know the deal. Dry, gaping mouth and stopped-up nose, sneezing wetly into the quiet of the bedroom as the minutes tick by, closer and closer to the time your alarm will usher you into breakfast, classes, the morning hustle you are in no way ready for.

I admit it. I’m in a rut, and a very bad one.

I am missing classes, flubbing tests, rarely leaving the house due to constantly being ill and out of sorts. A good day feels like a sort of compromise between misery and hope.

It’s been a long time coming. The first real sign of it that I remember came this spring, when I lost my taste for caring for my garden, previously a hallowed activity in my life. The garden looks like shit this year, having received the bare minimum of care to not be a total wreck.

And I must also admit that my sweet house, which I once loved with all my heart, no longer brings me joy. I am more and more overwhelmed daily by all the constantly increasing little matters of repair and upkeep that I don’t have the time, knowhow, money or mental focus to deal with right now.

Leaf-stuffed gutters. The mysterious, growing dark stains under the linoleum near the bathtub. The damned bloody leaking skylight, the Moby Dick of my household existence. The tree that needs to be pruned. The broken locks. The dust that gathers in the corners. Cobwebs. Dirty windows too high to reach from the ground. The little things bug me, and the big things, the leaks, are legitimate possible threats to the value and structural integrity of my home.

My old enemy, the forces of decay.

And as I mentioned before, as I have never painted the interior of this house the colors of my choice, nor furnished it properly (my office especially is done in Early Target). Five years on, I still feel that I have never quite moved in.

I used to tell myself that someday, when school was done and I had a proper full-time income and proper not-a-student-anymore free time again, I’d address all these things, and wasn’t I just happy to have this house at all, never-quite-decorated as it is?

Now I think I’m done with that idea. I think I’d take less and find it suited me more.

I’ll likely be in school for years yet, and I need to either creatively start work on turning my house and yard around, or try something new already.

Changes need to be made. The dreaded thing we all must face, the need for change.

My house, my lifestyle, my life, all very likely need to be reworked. And just like my house overwhelms me with all left undone and gone to pot, so too does my life.

My health’s in the toilet. My asthma, aggravated by stress and lack of exercise, got so bad earlier this week that I couldn’t draw a deep breath without a shooting pain in my right shoulder. I figure my lung capacity, which for some reason dwindles when I don’t exercise and let myself fall back into the slough of isolation, is probably close to 60 or 70 percent.

Eat right, exercise, sell my house and start a new house somewhere else. Turn my whole bloody life around when most days I am doing well just to go through the motions. Is that what I need to do?

I feel like I need to have a closeout sale with my own life. Everything must go.

Today I am going to my mom’s pumpkin-carving party, which I’ve been looking forward to for weeks.

I will tell my little East Tennessee fam that I am thinking of selling beautiful Jen Manor for future homesteads still unknown, and also that I cannot get the Peace Corps out of my head. Dr. Allison says their foreign language training is impeccable.

Nice way to pick up a new language, globalize myself a bit, finally see more than my home country. (What I’ll do with my four dear cats, whom I truly love, is a very real concern. But I wonder if a cohousing situation might make it easier to pull up roots for a few years.)

Today the sun is shining after days and days of rain. This weekend is looking to offer the first really cold days of the year, with temps on Sunday night going down to that magic number, 32. Time to bring in the plants.

Last night I went outside just to visit with the moon. Changed and reduced as I am, I am still me. Beautiful Carolina moon, so bright it made sharp-edged leafshadows on the white fabric of my shirt. The night sky that curious blue-white.

I love to step outside and be struck at how bright it is under full moonlight. How well the world is revealed, how bright and strange and rare full moon nights are, how I never tire of them though I get one a month for life.

I am a child of this planet, bred to wonder it at forever, I suppose.

So. I’ve accepted that I am in a terrible rut, no getting out anytime soon, no magic cure, and the three butter rum muffins I ate last night really did not help. Muffins only temporarily relieve me of the knowledge that my choices are A. capitulation and B. making nearly everything different.

While one is certainly easier it stinks like death, or at least like the stack unwashed dishes that accumulates weekly, which I have neither time nor energy to address.

But in life as with dishes, sometimes the only way out is straight through the mess.

As I pulled up to my house today, I saw a man walking down the street in a fluttering downpour of leaves. As I drove home from school an orphan maple leaf, orange and curling at the sides, blew in the driver’s-side window and landed on my chest.

Today the view from the college caf, a lovely vista of the Blue Ridge Mountains, was mostly green with strong touches of gold and orange. I’ll take a pic, as I’d love to show you all how the mountains change color, and how utterly spectacular autumn in the mountains is.

Though this fall seems likely to be less spectacular than most, what with the weather we’ve had that I’ve written about so many times. First a very late snap of cold and frost that killed spring blooms and new growth at its absolute pinnacle, then months of killing drought.

Lots of leaves seem to be moving swiftly from turning to falling. We may not have much color, save on the ground.

Look closely at almost any tree around town, and see many branches that are bare and leafless on the tips, as the tips of the branches receive, presumably, the least water and were more easily damaged by drought. Like frostbitten fingers, even trees have extremities that suffer under extreme conditions.

Trees on my property have bare, dead limbs killed by drought, and my severely damaged Japanese maple just limps along after losing several limbs in the April frost.

*******

Friday is a pretty good day in my world. First I have humanities lecture at 11:30, and sit in the campus’ big hall hearing someone speak. It’s a mixed bag, ranging from the truly dreadful to the interesting and enlightening, and we students never know what we’ll get.

Today was an uninspired, under-rehearsed lecture on Western imperialism in China and Japan. I give it a C-.

Then off to my good old poli sci class. Today in the parking lot at the grocery store I sat thinking about this class, and the phrase that came unbidden to mind was emotional rescue.

I find the rest of my classes this year to be very unsatisfying, and declaring a poli sci minor early in the year was this semester’s golden move. Without my poli sci class to interest me I’d be slogging along, writing articles in which I am not particularly invested, reading Humanities readings in which I find little inspiration…

I like my newswriting prof, but she seems to be a very inexperienced teacher and does absolutely inexplicable things. She tests us on material she has never taught us, and then, going over the test, finally teaches the material.

She gives unannounced exams (not pop quizzes, but tests that are percentages of our final grade). She lectures for an hour or more straight as the class’ collective brainpower boils away in the sink of boredom that an overlong lecture turns a classroom into. She assigns reading that is not related to the week’s work or discussion (we are reading the textbook chapter by chapter in order, whether it has anything to do with what we are learning or not).

She has work experience that is very relevant to her teaching job, but a teaching job requires more than work experience. She seems to be a new teacher who has far to go in the art of imparting information easily and well.

I like her and respect her journalistic credentials, but I could kick myself for doing something I almost never do — signing up for a class with a teacher I knew nothing about.

My humanities class, meanwhile, is part of my liberal arts college’s ambitious humanities program, which to my mind has overreached itself. Due to the nature of the class, focusing on varied topics including philosophy, race, literature and human rights, it is often taught by someone with no special expertise in what the class is discussing that day.

What is the defense of this idea? I’d like to know.

In the textbook for the class, produced by the college itself, some of the introductions to the readings are somewhat poorly written, and a professor friend tells me some also contain serious and obvious historical errors. Lectures, as I have mentioned, are a mixed bag (though to be fair, sometimes they are very good).

And worst of all (to me), the class is designed to mostly consist of discussion. We have readings, but no guidelines for them. We just read. Then we come to class and have bumbling discussions of the sort that college students have about things that no one in the room knows anything about.

I do not find this enlightening, or a worthwhile use of state tax dollars or my tuition money. I am here to learn, not have stumbling, halting, uninformative conversations for three hours a week. I wish we had clearer goals in what we are trying to learn.

That said, just a few weeks ago I did well on a long midterm exam. So clearly I am learning something. The process, however, is not always very linear or enjoyable.

I like my professor, but as a philosopher, I find him relatively unqualified to facilitate our discussions on history, Western imperialism, etc. He occasionally turns the discussion towards his own interests (philosophy, Marxism and French culture, LOL HOW PROFESSORIAL), which have little to do with the material at hand.

Usually I like diversions, but so little gets accomplished in this class that I get more annoyed than I would ordinarily. But honestly, what else is a French-speaking philosophy professor supposed to do while leading a discussion on Native American religion and government?

I do not blame him for the poor placement the humanities program forces him into. It’s hard to tell what kind of teacher he might be within his own field.

It is no secret in this blog that I am a gigantic nerd who loves to learn. So thank GOODNESS for Dr. Cornett, who always swoops in every MWF at 12:45 to save me with her academic expertise and linearity.

This semester, poli sci is my emotional rescue.

Dr. Cornett is a political scientist teaching a political science class (imagine that). She teaches well (if with overwhelming linearity that verges on rigidity) and is always fair, interesting and knowledgeable. We do not discuss. We listen and learn, and when we have questions they are answered from a place of knowledge.

I love my readings, I love the lecture part of the class, I love having the beginnings of a new and powerful way of seeing the world. Which, I think, is what the sciences provide to our species: tremendously powerful, overarching frameworks through which we can interpret, predict and change the world around us.

Was it really me in Newswriting class today

who when asked

if we had had any problems getting a response to a survey question

really used the phrase callow, greasy hipster kid?

As a rule of thumb

from me to you

try to avoid this phrase when in a room full

of young people.

I hate it when I feel

the gulf widen between me and the other students,

as if we are not all people together

all students

all writers

all having just turned in

the same assignment.

And I hated it when people called me a kid

when I was in my twenties.

Note to self: You can be different.

You can.

This sums up my week:

(One empty pint of Julie’s Organic Peanut Butter Fudge ice cream)

On top of my usual workload of 12 credit hours, a weekly news article and a part-time job, I had a humanities test to take (and study for) and a survey article to write for my Newswriting class. And it was my week to donate two hours of copy editing to this week’s edition of the Blue Banner.

I can’t think straight or write straight. I’ve reached the point where I’m no longer quite on top of things.

I had trouble following a poli sci lecture yesterday (tired; mentally overwhelmed), was late for my morning class again today and am falling behind with my homework and reading. And I’m falling behind not because I haven’t enough time, but because there’s only a few hours a day lately when I feel sufficiently rested enough to answer hard questions on crunchy, hard-to-digest political science readings.

If I’m too tired and braindead to answer questions, I just pass on the work until my mental wind returns.

But the weekend beckons. I’m hoping to spend Saturday getting my blog on at Blogapalooza (email me if you’re in Asheville and want to come), spend Sunday afternoon at Rowan’s and head downtown Sunday evening for some chimney swift action before the big colony flies home.

Weeks like this I wish I had one magic day I could pull out of nowhere and insert into the week. Just one. One day is all I need to sleep in, read my books with a refreshed mind, answer my questions with a worthy brain, visit the friends I miss and long for, and spend the evening on the sofa with a cat and the new Harry Potter novel.

Fall break can’t come too soon.

I don’t think blogging is or should be a contest. However, blogging, at least in this fair city, sure as HELL should be a party.

- The Hangover Journals

Attention conservation notice: The Blue Banner faculty sponsor critique was today, Tuesday. This is how it all went down when my error-packed professor profile got publicly critiqued in a room full of mass comm students.

(Dang, do y’all remember when I used to write about math all the time? Now I write about writing all the time. Feel like I’m finally getting the blog’s title right.)

My first Mass Comm classes continue to sock it to me everywhere I need it. Already in the paid professional work I’m doing this week there’s a big difference in my writing. It’s tighter and less trite.

You may not think of me as a trite writer, and in this blog I try hard not to be. But some editors and some publications have actively encouraged cutesiness, and I’ve picked up some bad habits. Not to mention that triteness is a form of writerly laziness, and a symptom of lack of formal training.

Today in class I sat next to a young writer named Jon who took newswriting in high school. He knew I was a professional writer, and asked me if I was bored with the Newswriting class. BORED???? I am only reinventing myself as a no-bullshit grammar badass. I can’t say that I’m bored, Jon.

But he was. He’s had all this before and is acing every quiz. At this point I’d just like to thank the universe for handsome, self-possessed young men. It’s nice to have someone to talk to as an equal, and interesting to hear that what is transformative and vital to me is ho-hum to my young classmate.

So. Tuesday, today, was the weekly critique of the college paper. It’s done in a lecture hall by the paper’s faculty sponsor, a very cool ex newspaper guy. I grabbed a copy of the paper to review, and to look at my profile of Cynn Chadwick.

I wasn’t happy with the changes made in the Chadwick profile. I’m used to bad editing, so I can handle it.

And I could easily see why the changes made didn’t always serve the article.

Sentences got cut, reordered and chopped up to allow the editors to work around errors I’d made. The editors moved a quote out of its context, making the article read like Chadwick may have been serious when she said an education saved her from being a “crack-addicted prostitute in Weehawken.” If we’d worked together in a newsroom, the editor and I, I could have spotted the problem and made changes that served the article as well as the AP Stylebook. But I don’t get to see or talk to the editors, and the unfortunate changes they made that I could have helped them do better, stayed in.

And so the article was free of my ignorant AP style errors, but some of the changes involved the insertion of generic, listless writing I’d never have committed to paper, and  making it sound like Chadwick narrowly escaped prostitution when in fact she had financial and emotional support all through college, and came from a loving family.

Sigh. LOL I hope someone that loves her is enjoying the hell out of all this. And I hope more students learn about a very unusual and interesting writing professor.

So I went to the newspaper critique not quite nervous, but well aware that my article was the work of a journalistic amateur. I am not nervous about being criticized. I’m not so much thick-skinned as I am confident and very used to being critiqued. It goes with the profession, and it almost always makes you better at what you do.

My first writing mentor really kicked my ass over the bad writing I did as a beginner. He actually almost made me cry. And I am actually very grateful, as he made my writing much better, very quickly. And the faculty sponsor, while honest, is never cruel.

And of course he raved about the article to the point of starting “who wrote that?” chatter, and even declared that my sidebar question (”What kind of student impresses you most?”) should be asked in all future Banner profiles. Which of course is much more the kind of thing that I am used to, but let me tell you, was NOT what I was expecting today.

So far in my college career I seem to be the writer that readers love and copy editors have had to take aside for retraining twice in two weeks. An accidental diva.

Go figure.

PS: I am tired lately, y’all, and working hard all day. I don’t know how interesting my blog will be this semester, or how much I’ll post. We’ll find out together.

Attention conservation notice: A roundup of my week and some interesting things going on in my life.

I slept until 10AM this morning. Lately my insomnia’s back, caused by turning my brain all but white-hot with all the things I have to write, study, read, finish and think about beginning as early as 9 a.m. and finally winding down as late as 11:30.

Twelve credit hours and a mentally demanding part-time job can take it right out of a person, and my writing for the Blue Banner in particular is a huge strain. But already things seem to be leveling out.

The Cynn Chadwick profile (which BTW is now over at BlogAsheville with Professor Chadwick’s permission) really was a turning point in my life as a writer.

It was well-written enough, but trite in parts and packed with errors. The work I have historically done as a writer has tended either to pose no grammar or punctuation challenges (ad copy and web copy are bloody straightforward) or to belong to a world where content and story just mattered more (writing for teens, alternative weekly writing, city guide writing).

Now I feel like everything matters. I feel like I am finally starting that Black Belt in grammar/punctuation I always thought I had and didn’t at all. Two weeks — a mere two weeks — of writing for a well-run college paper has shone a harsh light on my writing weaknesses as nothing ever has before.

I tried to take apart my whole Chadwick article in a blog post and explain all my errors, but it ended up being 2,300 words long and very difficult to present, so I shelved the idea. But here’s two highlights, just in case you’re asking yourself what on earth was wrong with that perfectly good article.

Here’s your answer. A lot:

Some sample text cut from the article that I turned in:

That was more than 10 years ago. Now her kids are grown and she spends her days spicing up the lives of her students, who find themselves with a professor who once revealed that after her divorce she threw her wedding ring from off the top of a mountain. She might have a fondness for informality, profanity and dryly delivered outrageousness (”I would have become a homeless, crack-addicted prostitute in Weehawken, New Jersey was it not for getting an education,” she says. “It’s obvious.”). But she’s also a literature professional.

Errors:

Execrable punctuation: How many periods are in that third sentence, anyway?

Italics are not used in print journalism.

Fixed:

That was more than 10 years ago. Now her kids are grown and she spends her days spicing up the lives of her students. “I would have become a homeless, crack-addicted prostitute in Weehawken, New Jersey was it not for getting an education,” she says, “it’s obvious.” Chadwick might have a fondness for informality, profanity and dryly delivered outrageousness, but she’s also a literature professional.

Ahh.

On my first day of class my newswriting class the professor asked us to tell a little about ourselves. I said I was a freelance writer. She said, “Well, I guess you already know a lot of what we’ll be learning.” And I said, “No, I bet I won’t.”

The class laughed, and she looked confused. But newswriting is its own strict world, and its ways are new to me, as I felt certain they would be. I have the art but not the craft.

So far, despite my previous aversion to that kind of writing, I find that these new rules are a delight to my mind and heart. I doubt I’ll ever enjoy doing interviews or tracking down quotes (both of which are time-consuming and annoying as hell), but I like being asked to provide only well-presented facts and not opinions.

I don’t care to go out and forage for facts, but once they’re all in the basket I like the logic-game of arranging them and seasoning them with quotes. You know, maybe it was really magazine-writing and alt-weekly writing that I was calling “journalism” when I said how much I disliked journalism. Because it really would be cool to be a foreign correspondent, is all I’m saying.

:0)

All my classes are going well. I attend a liberal arts college, and while I’m a huge fan of the liberal arts approach, some classes are still bullshit. Like my Humanities 324 class, which is exposing me to Great Ideas, but is such a scattered, 1/4-inch-deep way of learning that it leaves me feeling unfulfilled.

But my newswriting class is challenging, useful and interesting. My writing for the Blue Banner has initiated me into the real rules of journalism (AND PUNCTUATION) at last, making me a far better and more powerful writer than I was before. And my International Relations class is just an endless intellectual delight. It’s like a wonderful nourishing meal for my mind, three days a week. Delicious!

I’ve made nothing but A’s all semester, and the work delights me and comes easily. Which isn’t to say I don’t have to work for it; I do, and very hard. But unlike when I studied math and science, my studies now reward me with flow, skill and mastery, not failed tests, a C+ and endless nights of despair.

Before I go start my day slaving in the yard I’d like to thank the people who nominated me for two categories in the BlogAsheville awards put on annually by Asheville’s extremely welcoming, talented and active blogging community, which I am very happy to be part of. My nominations are for Best New Blog and Blog Most Deserving of Wider Recognition. My sincere thanks to Gordon, Shad and Uptown Ruler (?) for the noms.

In a happy surprise, I recently learned that I sort of know a local blogger and didn’t even know it — Pixiedyke of What the Hell? is a river companion and shares my dear friends Laura and Katie with me.

What the Hell?, thanks for the State Fair quotes and congrats on your loads of noms for Blogger I’d Most Like to See Naked.

(Photo: Edgy Mama’s Flickr stream, via BlogAsheville)

BTW I’ve seen Pixiedyke in a red bikini lolling drunkenly on a raft, and I support her nomination.

It’s about 4PM and I’m in Highsmith, my college’s student union building.

A huge thunderstorm has just blown in, and as I was here buying books, I’m waiting the storm out here. I can hardly imagine a better place in town to take in a rainstorm — the walls are clear glass, and I’m typing this from a third-floor mezzanine with a balcony that offers a fabulous view of the rain that lashes the campus buildings.

I brought my cam with me today, but it ran out of juice just as I raised it to snap an image of two wet-haired students wearing backpacks, standing on the balcony and silently taking in the wonderful fury of the storm. They smiled at me when I walked up behind them.

I guess I’ll be here for awhile, waiting out the storm and rush-hour traffic both. Time to sort out my week as lightning flashes and rain falls and tall trees sway, and I am safe and dry at the computer.

I picked all my Fall ‘07 classes out months ago, in May. Handpicked profs, the schedule I wanted, the number of credit hours I wanted, the works. I’m incredibly picky about my professors and always look them up on rate-my-professor websites and even go talk to them with the sole goal of pre-screening them and checking them out. You see, I’m not going through the hassle of five+ years of student loans and 10- to 12-hour workdays to take some jackass’ class and sit there bored, ticking off classes in a graduation checklist. Shitty classes and shitty teachers at a shitty high school all but turned me against education forever, and set me back a good 15 years in my career, my intellectual identity, my life. Now I go way, way out of my way to get the best instructors whenever possible. It’s an utter and total pain the ass, but it’s worth it.

And I thought I had this semester all lined up.

But three hours with the screenwriting prof convinced me that I was not the right student for his rambling, roundabout, self-indulgent, name-dropping style. I dropped the class the next day. And my Humanities prof, while well-meaning and kind, was too plodding for my tastes. Every day this week I spent hours reinventing my schedule, chasing down professors, hiking back and forth across the campus in baking 90-degree heat, sweaty and bearing a backpack stuffed with books. I probably spent a good 3 hours a day , every day, changing my schedule over and over again, getting special permission to be added to a full class only to find that I hadn’t taken the prereq and couldn’t get in anyway.

A total and utter pain in the ass, one that I freely admit I brought on myself. But I am not here to partake of the good and the passable and the acceptable any more than absolutely necessary. I am here for the interesting and the provoking and transformative. It’s here, I know this because I’ve already found it here. I’ll settle for less when I must — but the race for quality isn’t over until drop-add ends today and the late-add period ends next week.

Drop screenwriting; drop humanities. Keep French, keep Newswriting. Try and fail to add Media Ethics, then Layout and Design. Drop French only because you have to to get a class you want. Add college newspaper. Add International Relations. SHIT I need a humanities class… Today just after lunch, somebody dropped their spot in a full class and the Humanities section I wanted opened up with one spot available. What a stroke of luck! I grabbed it in 15 seconds flat.

And that was that — five days of unrelenting hassle to get a schedule that satisfies me. Two trips to the registrar. Three to see the head of the Mass Comm department. Multiple emails to my Humanities prof of choice. A last-minute visit to my new poli sci prof for a syllabus. Buy books. Drop the class and return the books. Realize that you should be doing homework, but you can’t because you don’t yet know what your classes will end up being.

For five days I’ve been so busy that I’ve barely had an hour to myself all day from the moment I woke to the moment I collapsed into bed, still behind but too exhausted to work any more.

And getting the classes I want hasn’t been the only thing on my mind. I’ve also started to wonder how interesting I’ll ultimately find my new major. Oh, I still think Mass Comm’s right for me, but I am happiest in the world of questions, of complexity, of pattern, of change. And while I think Mass Comm offers all these things, I don’t think it offers them in all that many classes. I am already enjoying Newswriting, but it’ll never be a class that has my heart the way Subramaniam’s Globalization class did, or math prof’s Calc II class, so full of his enchanting side trips into the history of math and the beauty of topology.

So I decided that when the going gets tough, the tough declare a minor. And for me, it’s political science. I did the paperwork today!

I decided that I need a guarantee of future happiness, an agreement with myself that I have a permanent license to take a class every semester that challenges me in ways that don’t directly involve my profession, that asks the open-ended questions I love and doesn’t just teach me how to crop a photo or write a lead. Again I suppose I am coming at writing from strange angles, informing my writing by informing my intellect. A richer Jen is a richer writer. I still want to be a science/nature documentary screenwriter, but I know myself too well. Any learning I ever earn in science will be completely second-rate. I’d prefer to be more deeply informed in a tangential field, and hope for surprising ways that knowledge comes into play.

And today I found a real dreamboat — Dr. Cornett of the poli sci department and her delicious International Relations class (go look her up on ratemyprofessors.com if you want to see some raves). Today we discussed Hobbes’ Leviathan, and (in the first week of class!) it was one of the best college discussions I’ve yet been part of. On day three she knew everyone’s names and immediately knew I was new. I loved how she corrected her students. There’s a certain forceful manner of correction that implies respect, as in I respect you enough to show you why you are wrong, so that we can continue the conversation without misunderstandings and misinformation getting our our way. It wasn’t me she was correcting, but I noticed her doing it because I take a certain almost kinky pleasure in being corrected. Not because I like being wrong, but because I love being right about more than I was right about before, because of my long romance with information, because of my lifelong infatuation with the ideal of perfection.

So. Here’s my new and vastly improved (and so far, pretty dang tasty) fall semester. I’m sure it will be a hard and demanding load, but in a different way this time (no more nights of despair in the math lab). If today’s humanities lecture and poli sci class are any indication, I am going to be having a ball.

There’s a party in my mind, and you’re all invited.

International Relations

Newswriting

Humanities 324: The Modern World

Newspaper Workshop/Campus Newspaper

The storm’s over. Time to head home. Shiny roads and cool air and satisfaction in my heart.

Monday: a stiff drink and a cool bath;OK to issue concurrently

Tuesday: a nap

Wednesday: a foot rub

Thursday: a back rub

Friday: a home-cooked meal

I spent Sunday evening, my last one before the fall semester, at Rowan’s.

She has a big privet plant in her front yard that is so tall that it makes a sort of a privet “tree” a good 20 feet high. It was shaggy and not very pretty. So we whacked it with a hand saw, a step-up and a pair of loppers. Taking down nearly ten foot of tree is not for wimps, and by the time you are done you will have soaked your shirt with sweat and have sawdust in your hair and eyes as well as down your bra, if you are wearing one.

Tiana the little neighbor girl helped, dragging branches to the side of the road for pickup after Rowan chopped them down to a manageable size with the loppers. I usually do yardwork by myself; I’ve never worked in the yard with another person, much less another person and a child. It was incredibly fun! It really made me think how much fun having a family could be. I mean, I think about how much more fun leisure time would be with others, but I had never thought about how much more fun everyday activities like yardwork might be, with other people to talk to, laugh with and help.

Yardwork was completely different when your friend could hand you things and get you a Pepsi when you were thirsty, when you could chase a laughing little girl around the yard telling her you are going to prune her, and she giggles and later puts a branch on her head like a crown.

It was a very fine way to spend my last evening of before-school summertime.

I came home, watched a David Attenborough video, rinsed off the evening’s dirt and sawdust and went to bed.

And Monday morning arrived…

Up at 6:22 without the alarm. I lie in bed watching the world grow lighter and listening to the hummingbirds peep as they drink from the feeder by my front door.

8AM morning light and shadow on the kitchen floor:

Misty golden morning; the view from my office window:

Two eggs, scrambled with cheese. Spinach-feta chicken sausage. Fried red tomatoes from a friend’s garden. Whole-wheat toast. (Not pictured: coffee and a cup of cold water.)

I don’t usually eat this much for breakfast but it is a special day, and because of school I know I won’t be able to eat lunch until around 1:45.

Amazingly, I get a decent parking spot on my first sweep of the commuter lot.

My classmates for French 120:

Unlike nearly every other class I’ve taken as a nontraditional student, this class is composed completely of under-25s save me. I am four years older than the instructor, who is only 34.

Dr. Cathy Pons was listed as the instructor for this class. The word from our new instructor is that Dr. Pons is “sick” and will not be teaching this semester. I met Cathy Pons once and remember her as a white-haired woman who was humble, helpful and very kind. Florin, the new guy, was hired only last week, so something drastic must have happened, and suddenly.

Dr. Pons, I truly hope you will be well and back at work soon.

After my two classes, Humanities and French, I cross the grassy quad

to the cafeteria.

Rush Sigma Nu.

It’s nearly 2PM and there’s hardly anyone else eating. Most of the tables are empty. Sometimes I try to corral Rosie and/or Heather to have lunch with me, but mostly I eat by myself.

I don’t mind a quiet lunch alone — it’s always a nice break.

Sometimes I overhear the kids talking and they make me laugh. I remember one plump and pretty young woman telling her friend that she lived her whole life on the edge, baby, and that she was going to move to New York City after graduation to become a sex therapist, and then have a baby by artificial insemination. Another young woman confessed to me, in August, that she had gotten drunk every night since New Year’s Eve.

I have the cashew chicken stir-fry over rice, with some acorn squash.

The caf food is really pretty good; outstanding even, if you consider that it’s an all-you-can eat buffet of reasonably healthy food for only six bucks, and you never need to leave a tip. Coffee, tea and dessert included.

Salad bar, too.

I didn’t get any pizza today.

I also avoided this temptation, which I find goes great with a cup of coffee.

Here is the actual view from the cafeteria balcony, a little outdoor dining area.

Yes, those are mountains in the background — the Blue Ridge Mountains, part of the Appalachians, a range of the Eastern U.S.

The first week of school is always a pain in the ass. As well as finding all your new classes, getting your books and syllabi and all the obvious things, you also have to do stuff like pick up your refund check and get new parking tags. The first day is always a long day, and the first week can really almost be worse than finals sometimes, if you have trouble with financial aid or getting into the classes you need.

On the way to the bookstore to get a French dictionary, I see that someone is selling posters in the breezeway that leads to the Highsmith Building.

John Belushi assumes the position.

I go to the computer lab to figure out what to do about a French workbook that I am afraid may not be compatible with my college’s online bulletin board service, but…

So I take the elevator up three floors to the good old math lab, which also has computers and internet. I am a little sad to see this wonderful place, for I know I do not belong here anymore.

I was happy when I belonged here, even though I was always lost.

I realize that I need to go back to the bookstore and see if it has a different book I might need. As I leave, I see this and stop dead in my tracks. It’s a sign in the hallway, advertising some alumni group.

U.S. WHAT Academy? I am appalled. I ask around for a post-it note.

I go on to the library to pick up two books I want to look over.

The Self-Made Tapestry and On Growth and Form.

It’s 4PM. I head home, passing the gazebo. I have fantasies of sitting here and knitting something. The new building behind it kind of ruins its appeal, but in spring it is surrounded by hot pink rhododenrons, and is lovely.

This is the horizon view as you walk past Carmichael Hall

to the commuter parking lot.

Then I am off to the grocery store and the bank, and then home.

To start my day at work.

:0)