My first panic of the semester, YAY!
So HEY! YEAH! Fun first day! Very nice, very exciting!
You know the semester has officially started when you want to curl up in a twitching, hyperventilating ball in a cold, dark corner and you’re not even five minutes into the second class! The Administrators That Be weren’t content to scare the hell out of me with housing arrangements, were they? NO! They had to fuck with my class schedule, too! The one I was, if not happy, at least mostly contented with! Only three out of the five classes down, and the panic has already set into my bones. Let’s take it from the top, shall we?
Biology (take 2!): Ok, despite my problems with science classes, this one looks all right so far. There was a brief moment of panic when a guy behind me started talking about how the professor was really hard (he or his friend had to take his class three times), but then a different man came in and said he would be teaching instead, because the original one was now teaching in Shreveport. I actually feel very optimistic about his class now after sitting through his first lesson (I think he won me over when he realized he misspelled “metabolism” and said, “I r a scientist.”)
American History 2010: Allow me to rewrite the actual notes I took during the class here.
Oh shit!
I thought I was getting Price again! Lectures and note-taking all around! Group
work?! Big Scary Research Paper of Doom?! SHIT!
Don’t want to scare us? TOO LATE!
DON’T PANIC!
Oh, shut it! This is not an improbable space adventure; it’s a bloody collage
course!
I’d prefer the space stuff…
Yes. Far less horrifying and stressful.
(Yes, I do talk to myself like that, even when I'm writing. Shut up) Yeah, so I scheduled a history class with a specific professor because I know how he teaches, and thought, “Yup, a good old-fashion, straight-up, lecture-and-notes class! That’s what I need!” And what happens? Well, I have no idea what happened, but suddenly, he’s not listed as teaching any history courses, and instead I get a guy who’s into group discussion, classroom participation, and Big Scary Research Papers of Doom (god, I fucking hate research papers...). Now don’t get me wrong, that’s perfect for some subjects, but when I take a history course, I honestly thrive with the lecture-and-notes approach. Really! It’s like story-time to me, only with more droning. So yeah. FUCK.
English, Chaucer: FUCK! FUCK FUCKITY FUCK FUCK WITH A SIDE ORDER OF FUCKING HELL AND A SLICE OF GETTING FUCKED OVER THE TABLE FOR DESSERT!
The CANCELED my class! When, I don’t know, but they canceled it, and I didn’t even know until about a half hour before it was supposed to start! So - being the well-balanced, easy-going individual I am - I worked myself into a state, screaming and ranting in my head, didn’t take my second dose of Adderall and ended up dealing with everything on the come-down, freaked out at the scheduling office (I think my advisor thought I was either a bit slow, or unbalanced), and forgot just about every important thing I needed to remember (like what kind of English major I am...then again, I'm kind of surprised I remembered who the hell I was talking to at the time). How does my mind deal with unexpected confrontations and stress? SUDDEN SHORT-TERM MEMORY LOSS! WHEE!). Turns out, the class was canceled because not enough people had signed up for it (bastards), so in the end I was put in a technical writing course in the same time slot at LITERALLY the last minute. And since I was still frazzled from everything else, I spent the next hour trying to calm down, breathing a sigh of relief over the course syllabus (then sharply inhaling it again in utter terror at the finished descriptions), and running around in circles in my head screaming, “AM I REALLY SUPPOSED TO BE HERE?! ARE THEY SURE THIS IS REQUIRED?!” So, all in all, I’d say I absorbed maybe…an eighth of whatever the hell she was saying.
And I still don't really know what the hell kind of class it is...(Technical Writing...that's, that's never come up before, has it? Has it? You know what? Don't think about it! That usually works...I think.)
I think I’m seeing a lesson in all of this: if you take a semester off to collect yourself and work off some stress, every bit of it will just come back to bite you in the ass before you even step foot back on campus! THERE IS NO ESCAPE. PERSONS OF A NERVOUS DISPOSITION BEWARE.
And now I’m hungry and twitchy. Good times, man. Good times.