duck-shaped pain

I mentioned in my last substantiative entry that I was originally planning on taking a public history class, but bailed out at the last minute because of how it was scheduled (three hours, once a week, late afternoon, in a tiny warm room = recipe for some looong naps [1]).

But I have another class taught by the guy who teaches the aforementioned class and yesterday, after the first session of it was held, I stayed behind so that I could point out to him that the name that was on the class roster was incorrect, that I wanted to be called this instead, and that calling me by that other name would bring dire consequences. (Actually, I didn't come out and say that last part, but it was implied.) After that was finished, he said, "Hey, you were signed up for my public history class." I said that I had been, but claimed that I had dropped it due to "work conflicts" or something else that sounded important.

He had given a spiel in class about how more people should take this particular course, due to the amount of hands-on experience gained in it (rare for a history class). Students in it get to work at the local museum for a few months, do research into jobs, things like that. It's sort of like a five-month-long career fair, of sorts. I was intrigued by the idea of working at the museum, so while he was talking, I was thinking, maybe I should have taken that instead.. Because one of the other reasons that I dropped it was that I thought it would be too much work, work of the sort I hate: interviewing people, giving class presentations, etc. And then I decided that it did sound like something I should take, talking in class be damned.

So when he started to talk about with me one-on-one, I got to ask the relevant questions, and then I ultimately decided to sign up for it. Which means that I had to drop my history of the American Revolution class, which was okay with me. That one offered a few benefits: no class presentations, attractive professor -- but a lot of disadvantages: held at 8 a.m. three times a week, lots of wars and dates, 8 different books. So the choice, really was easy.

Everything else so far sort of pales compared to the inner Should I Take This Class? Or This One? debate. Yoga is very touchy-feely, and most of the other people in the class are very, very skinny 18-year-olds who all live in the same dorm and made a collective decision to all take the class at once; Western civilization is your archetypical 100-students-in-a-room, easily-graded-multiple-choice-test class; I'm one of only two people in my beginning Spanish class that have never taken Spanish before (there are some people in the class who have taken three or four years of it, which makes me wonder how they got herded into a class where we haven't even learned Hola! yet); geology is, well, geology. It makes me think about work, which is a bad thing, but it's also my "easy class."

Speaking of work, I haven't been in a while. Which is nice. Actually, I showed up yesterday, and there was no one there. There were no signs that anyone had been there in a while, and so I puttered around, ate my lunch, read email, and looked for something to do. Then I left.

One of the nice things about being back in school is having access to the college library again, what with its many obscure books, late hours, and indulgent interlibrary-loan service (getting interlibrary loans out of the public library is like trying to milk a chicken). I went there last night, planning to study, but I ended up looking through the books instead, trying to reacquaint myself with where everything was. So many books -- so little time to read them.

Oh, by the way:

Happy birthday to me,

Happy birthday to meeeeeeeeeee,

And so on.

I'm not really thrilled about it being my birthday today. I turn 28, which isn't the greatest number, and January is just a bad month to be born in. Everyone is hung over from Christmas, no one wants to celebrate anything, and I can never figure out what I want when people ask me what I want for my birthday, since I spent the last month trying to figure out what I wanted for Christmas. January birthdays should just be outlawed. But until then, my birthday comes at a time when I'm too busy to really think about it much, which I suppose is good.

[1] One of the worst classes in my collegiate career to date was like this, sort of. It was an art history class (History of Contemporary Art: 1960 - Last Month's Issue of Artforum), and it, too, was late in the afternoon, dreadfully long, held in a over-warm room, but the thing that made it oh-so-worse is that it was taught in the dark, so that we could look at slides. Adding to the charm was the professor, who mumbled and had a very quiet, monotone voice and talked a lot about the fact that she had once been to a party with Chuck Close. Fully a third of the class was asleep at any given time, another third were doodling or doing other assignments, and the third that were close enough to the instructor to hear her were caught up their thoughts of wow, this person doesn't know anything�

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