Where greatness is learned and couches are burned
I figure that the time has come to make a proper update on my life in college.
I meant to write this entry at the end of my first week here. I'm not into the start of my 4th. As I've quickly realized (although, to be honest, already suspected), college keeps me extremely busy.
But I digress...
The fact that it's taken me three weeks to find time to write this entry should say something - I've been busy as hell. In fact, the only reason I've been able to write this up now is because I'm away back at home for a break this weekend, giving me some spare time that I haven't had so far at school.
My days aren't just busy - they're long, too. I do so many different things in one day that the last two weeks have felt like a month.
Not that I'm complaining. All-in-all, I'm really loving college. This is the place it feels like I was supposed to have been at the entire time, as if the last four years in high school were just a long layover on my way to my final destination. Everyday is filled with new, interesting experiences; in two weeks, I don't know if I've had a boring day yet!
People talk about feelings of loneliness and homesickness. Personally, though, I've not experienced any of that. Of course, I've also been lucky to already know tons of people going to school there before I even arrived. Being that WVU is West Virginia's flagship university, it's easy to guess that plenty of people from my school go there every year. And even in a college of 30,000 people, I can't seem to walk around campus on a day-to-day basis without meeting someone that I know from school.
For the most part, I've just been hanging out with three friends of mine from high school, too. Tony and Johnny, best friends with each other as well as roommates, are actually just a floor above me in my dorm. Another friend of mine, Robbie, lives just down the street at Boreman South. The four of us spend a pretty large deal of time with each other on a daily basis; rarely does any of us eat a meal alone, and we often hang out in each other's rooms between classes.
Perhaps the biggest downside to this, though, is that since we all already have each other, none of us have really been forced to reach out and make new friends. That's not say we haven't met up with new people who we may individually hang out with every now and then. But certainly we haven't added a fifth member to our little family yet. Social connections are like economics - without any kind of outside force pushing it to happen, you're likely to continue on with the status quo.
I think the college itself deserves a bit of a description.
West Virginia University is situated in Morgantown, West Virginia, about two-and-a-half hours away from my house. I don't know which came first, the town or the college, but now they're so interconnected that it can be hard to tell them apart. In a way, the entire city of Morgantown is really WVU. In a way, Morgantown and WVU are really one and the same.
WVU is famous for it's party scene. People from all over the state - and beyond - come to Morgantown and will spend a weekend there just to take in the party scene. The famous claim says that at WVU, "we pregame harder than other colleges party". Weekend nights can be pretty crazy - by about 9 o'clock Saturday night, High Street is clogged with well-dressed college students wandering in and out of bars, already drunk as hell.
The school itself is divided up into two main campuses - Downtown, where I reside, and Evansdale. Downtown is, as the name would imply, in downtown Morgantown. This is where most of the action is - from school activities to the school's party scene. Evansdale is a bit more peaceful, as it's situated about three or so miles away from the city center. Although most of the school's buildings are downtown, there are a few disciplines taught at Evansdale, most of them ag- and engineering-related. In order to get between campuses, most students take the PRT - Personal Rapid Transport. It's a rail system that students can ride between 5 different stops spread from downtown up past Evansdale and all the way to the Health Sciences Center and the hospital. The name's a bit of an oxymoron - it certainly doesn't feel personal when you're crammed in there with 20 or so other people all going to the same place and it hardly seems rapid, as I often find myself spending more time waiting on the platform for the car rather than actually riding on it. All of these are understandable trade-offs to riding public transit. The most ridiculous part of the PRT, though, are the hours. For some reason, they stop running the PRT at 10:15 every night Monday through Friday. On Saturdays, the PRT stops running at 5 in the afternoon. Now why they would make the hours shorter on the day when people are most likely to be riding it later is something that completely baffles me. Even weirder, the PRT is closed on Sundays, another day I would expect to be fairly high-traffic time, since it's a day that students have off and, therefore, are likely to spend hanging with their friends who may live on one of the other campuses.
With a lack of PRT-ness on Saturday nights, it's quite an adventure trying to get from Evasndale to downtown. The only mean of transportation left is the Morgantown bus system, a shoddy, inefficient system to begin with. People don't so much line up in front of Towers (the shortened name for the Evansdale Residential Complex, a massive housing complex encompassing four towers hold a combined 1,800 students) as crowd around outside the doors waiting for the bus. When the bus finally does show up, the crowd turns into a mosh pit as the people in the crowd push and shove to one of the lucky few get a seat on the bus; not making it on means having to wait another 5 or 10 minutes for the next one. It took me four buses and 40 mintues to finally get hone that night. All because they shut the PRT on one of the busiest nights of the week for some reason I can't explain.
Another idea that seems well-intentioned but not-so-well executed is the meal plans they offer. They offer different meal plan options depending on how much you want to pay and what works best for you (although in reality, you don't save much by getting the smaller plans - maybe a few hundred a year at best). The plan I have gives me 19 meals a week - three 5 days a week and 2 on both Saturday and Sunday. While it sounds like a good deal, there's tons of catches. For instance, you have to use the plans at certain times. Breakfast runs until either 10 or 10:30, depending on where you eat. Different places only accept it at certain times, too - Hatfields only takes it during breakfast, while Burger King take it for breakfast and dinner, but not lunch. And if you don't use the meal plan during the allotted time - say, if you're not as hungry that day or if you're too busy to go grab something - you lose it. Meals don't carry over from time slot to time slot, day-to-day, or week-to-week. For instance, if I go home for the weekend, as I did last weekend, all the meals I had for that period of time are wasted. While this fact isn't something I spend alot of time worrying over, it's a little bit of a rip-off when you stop and think about it.
In addition to the meal plans, we're also given 50 Meals Plus bonus dollars. These make even less sense to me - they're basically 50 extra dollars that I can use in place of real money to buy extra food. They end up being kind of worthless, though, as most of the places that take them - such as Quizno's and Burger King - already take the meal plan anyways. And really, when am I ever going to be so hungry that I want two whoppers with cheese? It's kind of redundent. Even places like Java and Cream, a conveience store in the Mountainlair (the name we have for the school's student union), doesn't accept the Meals Plus dollars.
Perhaps the most baffling concept, though, is the Mountie Bounty. It's not actually part of the meal plan, per-sey, but actually a debit system the university has set in place. Using your ID card, you can add money to your account and then debit from that account later at your own will. I don't really see the point in it, though. Why go through the intermediary process of adding the money to the account? Why not just use the cash instead? For people like me, who already have debit cards, it becomes that much more pointless. I probably wouldn't bother using it at all except for that you HAVE to use Mountie Bounty for certain things, like printing off papers from the library or doing your laundry (although it is possible to do the later with actual cash, it requires exact change in quarters, and who carries around $3 or $4 dollars in quarters all the time?). Thus, I'm forced to use it for certain menial things that I may not do everyday but still have to do on just enough of a regular basis to make it a hassel.
My home-away-from-home here is Dadisman Hall. It's located at the very top of High Street, one of the city's main streets where all the bars, clubs, and good restaurants are at. It's right along the area known as Frat Row, where all the large frat houses are located, too. A pretty cool location, for the most part. Except, of course, that it's located at the top of a sloping hill, which is a major pain in the ass to have to walk and down three or four times a day.
My room itself isn't really that bad. I mean, it isn't the Ritz, but as far as my pre-college impressions of college dorm rooms went, this isn't that bad. About the size of a small hotel room in size - not exactly large, but it does have a certain quaint homeyness to it (it's still nicer than the shithole we stayed in during Senior Week in Ocean City, though). Two beds, two dressers, two closets, two desks. I brought the TV and Xbox, my roommate brought the minifridge and microwave. The room comes with a sink, too, which is useful for any of those times when you just wanna quickly wash your hands or face or brush your teeth without dragging all your stuff down the hall. The dorm itself has no air conditioning, which means every room always has their windows open and at least two fans going 24/7. This isn't uncommon, though - with the exception of Stalnaker, the honours dorm, none of the Downtown dorms have air conditioning (although all the newer dorms in Evansdale do).
My roommate is a pretty cool guy. His name is Rob and he's a lacrosse player from Connecticut. He's pretty laid back and cool about things - doesn't care if I have the TV on at night when I go to bed, isn't that concerned if I'm not all that neat (his side of the room is messier than mine) or if I stay up late (I usually turn in before even he does). He actually doesn't talk very much overall. And he's mostly started hanging out with the gangsterish-punk guys down the hall. I dun see us becoming best friends who're going to be hanging out with each other years from now, but we get along and coexist in a friendly, cogenial manner, which in the end is probably the best I can reasonably hope for. He's already looking to join a fraternity, too.
The best part, though - he has a fake ID. When your roommate has a fake ID and can get you alcohol at any bar you go to, well, the world is just a little bit brighter. And a bit hazier, too, if you catch my drift.
The best part of living in the dorms is the socialization. It's hard to NOT meet new people on a regular basis. Many people, Rob and I included, just leave their doors open when they're in the their rooms, allowing other residents to just wander in and out of their rooms freely, giving the whole building a very communal feeling. The rec room is another great place to hang out at night - it's packed with people playing pool and ping-pong even up to 2 in the morning most nights.
At the risk of jinxing myself and completely screwing myself over, my classes are... well, cake, to say the least. Ridiculously easy might be a better description. I mean, all the stories of how college is so much harder than high school with so much more work... I don't see what they're talking about. Yeah, there's alot of out-of-class work, but seeing as how I have so much time outside of class anyways, it doesn't feel as though the workload is anything to give a second-thought about. Nothing at all unreasonable, for sure. So far, I've also been good about getting all my work done between classes during the day, leaving me completely free in the evenings to do whatever it is I want with my time.
My Psych 101 class is simple. The teacher, a cute Indian woman with a thick accent and a lack of understanding as to what the "Freshman Fifteen" is, is some kind of graduate student working on either a masters or doctorate. She isn't very experienced at teaching, I think, although the lack of enthusiasm from the class doesn't help. Most people just sleep. Sometimes I'm "most people" (Hey, it's at 8:30 in the morning! Gimmie a break!).
On Mondays, I have University 101, a one credit course every freshman has to take. It's a class that basically introduces you to the university and the way of life here... or something. I'm not really sure. It never seems like we really do much of anything. We mostly just listen to the teacher make weird jokes, chat with his T.A.'s about whatever comes to mind, and introduce ourselves. The "book" is comprised of a binder with a bunch of papers in it printed by the university. It cost me 40 bucks.
Monday/Wednesday/Friday afternoons bring about my only back-to-back classes - Religion 101 and Geology 101. The former is an awesome class (probably my favourite of my whole schedule) taught by the kind of professor who is actually able to stand up in front of a class and talk about a subject for 50 minutes straight without a break. He knows his stuff that well. He reminds me alot of Coach Brown from high school.
Geology sucks. I hate that class. I hate the subject matter. I hate how the damn microphone the woman uses always squeaks and emits a loud, high-pitched screech every other minute. The only upside is that the teacher is kinda hot. I don't even have the book for the class, either. The bookstore originally gave me the wrong book for the class, and when I discovered the mistake and returned said book, I realized that they only had new copies of the book I actually needed. Even after returning the uneeded book, it would still cost me another $20 dollars or so to get the necessary one. So I decided to risk it and go the class without the book.
We haven't had to use that book yet. You know what I did use, though? The $107 bucks I got from the refund.
$107 dollars > uesless textboks
Tuesday/Thursdays bring me Math 150 and English 154, respectively. Math 150 is Intro to Calculus. It's a math class. It feels like all math classes I've taken in my life are the same. I mean, sure, they have increasing degrees of difficulty. But besides that, they all feel the same - they're all taught in pretty much the same ways and all cover generally the same subject matter: numbers and how to do things with them that make you look smart but will never be remotely useful for anything in the real world. I like the teacher, though - she's straight, to the point, and explains everything clearly and concisely.
English is my other favourite class. It's African-American literature and is taught by an elderly - GET READY FOR THE SHOCKER! - African-American woman who seems to have the energy of a woman half her age and the spunk one would expect from any stereotypical southern black woman. I don't even necessarily love it because it's easy (as far as I know, there's almost no report writing involved - SCORE!), but that it's just interesting. I like reading the books; the other day, I spent almost 2 hours reading the book we were assigned, and honestly I could not have had more fun doing home"work". If all my homework were to just read books and taught about them in the next class, I... well, I don't know what I'd do. Probably orgasm from the awesomeness and excitement of it all. It's enough to make me want to even consider changing my major to English, which I would if I didn't think this class was more of an exception than the way most English classes are taught.
I may end up minoring in it by default, though. My plan is, from this point on, to take an English class every semester. Besides giving me a good excuse to read books - something I never get to do because of how busy I am - it's something I like doing and will give me good preparation for learning to write a novel.
That's my time here so far in summary. It doesn't really begin to touch my day-to-day time here, though. I'm hoping there'll be more entries to talk about that, since virtually everyday here brings at least something worth writing about.
...Sadly, I've yet to witness any couch burnings. I'm a bit dissappointed about this, actually. Then again, we've still got plenty of football games left to play - and the big ones haven't even come yet. Oh please, someone get drunk at our next home game and burn a couch. Or a chair. I've even settle for a lawn chair.
I meant to write this entry at the end of my first week here. I'm not into the start of my 4th. As I've quickly realized (although, to be honest, already suspected), college keeps me extremely busy.
But I digress...
The fact that it's taken me three weeks to find time to write this entry should say something - I've been busy as hell. In fact, the only reason I've been able to write this up now is because I'm away back at home for a break this weekend, giving me some spare time that I haven't had so far at school.
My days aren't just busy - they're long, too. I do so many different things in one day that the last two weeks have felt like a month.
Not that I'm complaining. All-in-all, I'm really loving college. This is the place it feels like I was supposed to have been at the entire time, as if the last four years in high school were just a long layover on my way to my final destination. Everyday is filled with new, interesting experiences; in two weeks, I don't know if I've had a boring day yet!
People talk about feelings of loneliness and homesickness. Personally, though, I've not experienced any of that. Of course, I've also been lucky to already know tons of people going to school there before I even arrived. Being that WVU is West Virginia's flagship university, it's easy to guess that plenty of people from my school go there every year. And even in a college of 30,000 people, I can't seem to walk around campus on a day-to-day basis without meeting someone that I know from school.
For the most part, I've just been hanging out with three friends of mine from high school, too. Tony and Johnny, best friends with each other as well as roommates, are actually just a floor above me in my dorm. Another friend of mine, Robbie, lives just down the street at Boreman South. The four of us spend a pretty large deal of time with each other on a daily basis; rarely does any of us eat a meal alone, and we often hang out in each other's rooms between classes.
Perhaps the biggest downside to this, though, is that since we all already have each other, none of us have really been forced to reach out and make new friends. That's not say we haven't met up with new people who we may individually hang out with every now and then. But certainly we haven't added a fifth member to our little family yet. Social connections are like economics - without any kind of outside force pushing it to happen, you're likely to continue on with the status quo.
I think the college itself deserves a bit of a description.
West Virginia University is situated in Morgantown, West Virginia, about two-and-a-half hours away from my house. I don't know which came first, the town or the college, but now they're so interconnected that it can be hard to tell them apart. In a way, the entire city of Morgantown is really WVU. In a way, Morgantown and WVU are really one and the same.
WVU is famous for it's party scene. People from all over the state - and beyond - come to Morgantown and will spend a weekend there just to take in the party scene. The famous claim says that at WVU, "we pregame harder than other colleges party". Weekend nights can be pretty crazy - by about 9 o'clock Saturday night, High Street is clogged with well-dressed college students wandering in and out of bars, already drunk as hell.
The school itself is divided up into two main campuses - Downtown, where I reside, and Evansdale. Downtown is, as the name would imply, in downtown Morgantown. This is where most of the action is - from school activities to the school's party scene. Evansdale is a bit more peaceful, as it's situated about three or so miles away from the city center. Although most of the school's buildings are downtown, there are a few disciplines taught at Evansdale, most of them ag- and engineering-related. In order to get between campuses, most students take the PRT - Personal Rapid Transport. It's a rail system that students can ride between 5 different stops spread from downtown up past Evansdale and all the way to the Health Sciences Center and the hospital. The name's a bit of an oxymoron - it certainly doesn't feel personal when you're crammed in there with 20 or so other people all going to the same place and it hardly seems rapid, as I often find myself spending more time waiting on the platform for the car rather than actually riding on it. All of these are understandable trade-offs to riding public transit. The most ridiculous part of the PRT, though, are the hours. For some reason, they stop running the PRT at 10:15 every night Monday through Friday. On Saturdays, the PRT stops running at 5 in the afternoon. Now why they would make the hours shorter on the day when people are most likely to be riding it later is something that completely baffles me. Even weirder, the PRT is closed on Sundays, another day I would expect to be fairly high-traffic time, since it's a day that students have off and, therefore, are likely to spend hanging with their friends who may live on one of the other campuses.
With a lack of PRT-ness on Saturday nights, it's quite an adventure trying to get from Evasndale to downtown. The only mean of transportation left is the Morgantown bus system, a shoddy, inefficient system to begin with. People don't so much line up in front of Towers (the shortened name for the Evansdale Residential Complex, a massive housing complex encompassing four towers hold a combined 1,800 students) as crowd around outside the doors waiting for the bus. When the bus finally does show up, the crowd turns into a mosh pit as the people in the crowd push and shove to one of the lucky few get a seat on the bus; not making it on means having to wait another 5 or 10 minutes for the next one. It took me four buses and 40 mintues to finally get hone that night. All because they shut the PRT on one of the busiest nights of the week for some reason I can't explain.
Another idea that seems well-intentioned but not-so-well executed is the meal plans they offer. They offer different meal plan options depending on how much you want to pay and what works best for you (although in reality, you don't save much by getting the smaller plans - maybe a few hundred a year at best). The plan I have gives me 19 meals a week - three 5 days a week and 2 on both Saturday and Sunday. While it sounds like a good deal, there's tons of catches. For instance, you have to use the plans at certain times. Breakfast runs until either 10 or 10:30, depending on where you eat. Different places only accept it at certain times, too - Hatfields only takes it during breakfast, while Burger King take it for breakfast and dinner, but not lunch. And if you don't use the meal plan during the allotted time - say, if you're not as hungry that day or if you're too busy to go grab something - you lose it. Meals don't carry over from time slot to time slot, day-to-day, or week-to-week. For instance, if I go home for the weekend, as I did last weekend, all the meals I had for that period of time are wasted. While this fact isn't something I spend alot of time worrying over, it's a little bit of a rip-off when you stop and think about it.
In addition to the meal plans, we're also given 50 Meals Plus bonus dollars. These make even less sense to me - they're basically 50 extra dollars that I can use in place of real money to buy extra food. They end up being kind of worthless, though, as most of the places that take them - such as Quizno's and Burger King - already take the meal plan anyways. And really, when am I ever going to be so hungry that I want two whoppers with cheese? It's kind of redundent. Even places like Java and Cream, a conveience store in the Mountainlair (the name we have for the school's student union), doesn't accept the Meals Plus dollars.
Perhaps the most baffling concept, though, is the Mountie Bounty. It's not actually part of the meal plan, per-sey, but actually a debit system the university has set in place. Using your ID card, you can add money to your account and then debit from that account later at your own will. I don't really see the point in it, though. Why go through the intermediary process of adding the money to the account? Why not just use the cash instead? For people like me, who already have debit cards, it becomes that much more pointless. I probably wouldn't bother using it at all except for that you HAVE to use Mountie Bounty for certain things, like printing off papers from the library or doing your laundry (although it is possible to do the later with actual cash, it requires exact change in quarters, and who carries around $3 or $4 dollars in quarters all the time?). Thus, I'm forced to use it for certain menial things that I may not do everyday but still have to do on just enough of a regular basis to make it a hassel.
My home-away-from-home here is Dadisman Hall. It's located at the very top of High Street, one of the city's main streets where all the bars, clubs, and good restaurants are at. It's right along the area known as Frat Row, where all the large frat houses are located, too. A pretty cool location, for the most part. Except, of course, that it's located at the top of a sloping hill, which is a major pain in the ass to have to walk and down three or four times a day.
My room itself isn't really that bad. I mean, it isn't the Ritz, but as far as my pre-college impressions of college dorm rooms went, this isn't that bad. About the size of a small hotel room in size - not exactly large, but it does have a certain quaint homeyness to it (it's still nicer than the shithole we stayed in during Senior Week in Ocean City, though). Two beds, two dressers, two closets, two desks. I brought the TV and Xbox, my roommate brought the minifridge and microwave. The room comes with a sink, too, which is useful for any of those times when you just wanna quickly wash your hands or face or brush your teeth without dragging all your stuff down the hall. The dorm itself has no air conditioning, which means every room always has their windows open and at least two fans going 24/7. This isn't uncommon, though - with the exception of Stalnaker, the honours dorm, none of the Downtown dorms have air conditioning (although all the newer dorms in Evansdale do).
My roommate is a pretty cool guy. His name is Rob and he's a lacrosse player from Connecticut. He's pretty laid back and cool about things - doesn't care if I have the TV on at night when I go to bed, isn't that concerned if I'm not all that neat (his side of the room is messier than mine) or if I stay up late (I usually turn in before even he does). He actually doesn't talk very much overall. And he's mostly started hanging out with the gangsterish-punk guys down the hall. I dun see us becoming best friends who're going to be hanging out with each other years from now, but we get along and coexist in a friendly, cogenial manner, which in the end is probably the best I can reasonably hope for. He's already looking to join a fraternity, too.
The best part, though - he has a fake ID. When your roommate has a fake ID and can get you alcohol at any bar you go to, well, the world is just a little bit brighter. And a bit hazier, too, if you catch my drift.
The best part of living in the dorms is the socialization. It's hard to NOT meet new people on a regular basis. Many people, Rob and I included, just leave their doors open when they're in the their rooms, allowing other residents to just wander in and out of their rooms freely, giving the whole building a very communal feeling. The rec room is another great place to hang out at night - it's packed with people playing pool and ping-pong even up to 2 in the morning most nights.
At the risk of jinxing myself and completely screwing myself over, my classes are... well, cake, to say the least. Ridiculously easy might be a better description. I mean, all the stories of how college is so much harder than high school with so much more work... I don't see what they're talking about. Yeah, there's alot of out-of-class work, but seeing as how I have so much time outside of class anyways, it doesn't feel as though the workload is anything to give a second-thought about. Nothing at all unreasonable, for sure. So far, I've also been good about getting all my work done between classes during the day, leaving me completely free in the evenings to do whatever it is I want with my time.
My Psych 101 class is simple. The teacher, a cute Indian woman with a thick accent and a lack of understanding as to what the "Freshman Fifteen" is, is some kind of graduate student working on either a masters or doctorate. She isn't very experienced at teaching, I think, although the lack of enthusiasm from the class doesn't help. Most people just sleep. Sometimes I'm "most people" (Hey, it's at 8:30 in the morning! Gimmie a break!).
On Mondays, I have University 101, a one credit course every freshman has to take. It's a class that basically introduces you to the university and the way of life here... or something. I'm not really sure. It never seems like we really do much of anything. We mostly just listen to the teacher make weird jokes, chat with his T.A.'s about whatever comes to mind, and introduce ourselves. The "book" is comprised of a binder with a bunch of papers in it printed by the university. It cost me 40 bucks.
Monday/Wednesday/Friday afternoons bring about my only back-to-back classes - Religion 101 and Geology 101. The former is an awesome class (probably my favourite of my whole schedule) taught by the kind of professor who is actually able to stand up in front of a class and talk about a subject for 50 minutes straight without a break. He knows his stuff that well. He reminds me alot of Coach Brown from high school.
Geology sucks. I hate that class. I hate the subject matter. I hate how the damn microphone the woman uses always squeaks and emits a loud, high-pitched screech every other minute. The only upside is that the teacher is kinda hot. I don't even have the book for the class, either. The bookstore originally gave me the wrong book for the class, and when I discovered the mistake and returned said book, I realized that they only had new copies of the book I actually needed. Even after returning the uneeded book, it would still cost me another $20 dollars or so to get the necessary one. So I decided to risk it and go the class without the book.
We haven't had to use that book yet. You know what I did use, though? The $107 bucks I got from the refund.
$107 dollars > uesless textboks
Tuesday/Thursdays bring me Math 150 and English 154, respectively. Math 150 is Intro to Calculus. It's a math class. It feels like all math classes I've taken in my life are the same. I mean, sure, they have increasing degrees of difficulty. But besides that, they all feel the same - they're all taught in pretty much the same ways and all cover generally the same subject matter: numbers and how to do things with them that make you look smart but will never be remotely useful for anything in the real world. I like the teacher, though - she's straight, to the point, and explains everything clearly and concisely.
English is my other favourite class. It's African-American literature and is taught by an elderly - GET READY FOR THE SHOCKER! - African-American woman who seems to have the energy of a woman half her age and the spunk one would expect from any stereotypical southern black woman. I don't even necessarily love it because it's easy (as far as I know, there's almost no report writing involved - SCORE!), but that it's just interesting. I like reading the books; the other day, I spent almost 2 hours reading the book we were assigned, and honestly I could not have had more fun doing home"work". If all my homework were to just read books and taught about them in the next class, I... well, I don't know what I'd do. Probably orgasm from the awesomeness and excitement of it all. It's enough to make me want to even consider changing my major to English, which I would if I didn't think this class was more of an exception than the way most English classes are taught.
I may end up minoring in it by default, though. My plan is, from this point on, to take an English class every semester. Besides giving me a good excuse to read books - something I never get to do because of how busy I am - it's something I like doing and will give me good preparation for learning to write a novel.
That's my time here so far in summary. It doesn't really begin to touch my day-to-day time here, though. I'm hoping there'll be more entries to talk about that, since virtually everyday here brings at least something worth writing about.
...Sadly, I've yet to witness any couch burnings. I'm a bit dissappointed about this, actually. Then again, we've still got plenty of football games left to play - and the big ones haven't even come yet. Oh please, someone get drunk at our next home game and burn a couch. Or a chair. I've even settle for a lawn chair.