First Days of College

This has been a busy couple of days.  I started college, watched a solar eclipse, communicated with human beings outside of my immediate family- quite an adventure.

I started college, which was interesting.  I actually like it a lot.  I always kind of figured I'd like college better than high school, and if the past few days are any indication, I was right.  Though if you ask me again in a few weeks, I might have a very different answer.  We'll see.

So chemistry will be interesting.  I really like chemistry-type stuff, so I'm hopeful that I'll enjoy the class.  Unfortunately, I have to figure out significant figures, something I have never really understood.  Hopefully I'll figure it out by next week, when I have a quiz over them.  I actually had to sign up for four different chemistry sessions- a lecture, a lab lecture, a lab, and a discussion section.  The lecture teaches us the theory, the lab lecture tells us about the lab, the lab's where we actually do the lab, and the discussion is where we have quizzes and where we talk about the lecture.  It seems like a good system, but I can't help but wonder if there's a simpler way to do it.

I'm also taking a psych class on parenting.  It was either parenting or death, and I figured parenting would be less morbid.  Over the course of the class, I'm raising a 'virtual child' from this site called virtualchild.net or something along those lines.  Given my experiences babysitting, don't be surprised if my child ends up homeless under some bridge.  Even worse, I promised my little sister she could help me set up the child.  This is the girl who wants everyone to call her "Larry" and has an imaginary pet falafel named Gina.  My psych class in general seems pretty cool, though.  One of our assignments is to literally read a comic and write about how it relates to parenting.  I'm thinking "Calvin and Hobbes" because 1) my grandpa has loads of collections of that comic, and 2) it would be really easy to connect to the class.  

So, my psych class sounds pretty nice, right?  Wrong.  My first psych course was on the twenty first, so the number seven was able to wreck its havoc.  See, my psych class is what is known as a 'freshmen seminar' class, meaning they try to 'integrate us into campus life.'  This means "force us into campus activities we don't want to do."  Seriously, part of my grade for the class comes from things like going to sporting events, club meetings, and campus art gallery openings and providing proof that I went.  Most of them, I don't mind doing too much.  There are a couple of clubs I already wanted to join, and I had been planning to check out the art gallery when I had the chance.  But its the principle of the matter!  Why does my professor get to force me into participating in campus life, regardless of my feelings on the matter?  And I don't follow sports- didn't follow high school sports, and I wasn't planning to follow college sports.  It's not that I dislike sports or anything- most sports(there are a few exceptions) I enjoy playing, but watching them bores me.  I just don't get into watching them the way other people do.  The one exception to this is baseball.  I really enjoy watching baseball, because I stink at it and I find it impressive that other people don't.

Well, thus are the college woes of an antisocial potato.  I still have one more class to talk about though- biology.  Biology seems pretty cool- we're gonna be talking about evolution, genetics, blah blah blah.  I enjoy that stuff, but I'm mostly looking forward to going deeper than high school did and learning things I didn't already learn in middle school.  I'm almost certain that my old school system had a much better middle school science curriculum than this one- I'm not even sure they have science classes all the way through middle school.  This school system has better math and English though, so I guess its a trade off.

Really, the most important thing that happened in biology today was the professor.  He's also my academic advisor, which surprised me, mostly because I had no idea what my academic advisor taught prior to today.  I also did not remember who my academic advisor was prior to today, so I'm glad his contact information is on our syllabus.  Now I just have to make sure I don't lose it before October.  Also, he likes penguins.  A lot.  I mean 50-something-year-old man fangirling over penguins.  I like penguins, but not that much- I don't really get the obsessive penguin love some people around here have.  Question: is fangirling one or two words?

The solar eclipse was awesome.  On Mondays and Tuesdays I get out of class at 11:15, so I was able to watch the entire thing.  Where I live, we got 90%  totality, so we didn't really get dark, but we did notice it get a bit cooler.  Me and my sister went outside, and our neighbors came out and joined us.  Becca had to borrow my spare glasses, because she's a lame person who lost her pair.I've written a lot, and it's almost eleven thirty, so I'm going to quit now.  Upon starting school I promised myself I would always go to bed at ten thirty on school nights, so you'll be happy to know that I value my commitment to writing every day on prose more than my sleep schedule.