(I’m not going to talk about Bowie tonight. I need time to process the news.)

I had my music collection on random, and this gem from a lost era popped up^[1] :

Yup, that relic of the 90’s is 20 years now. And hearing it made me think back not just to the era where they first started banning indoor smoking in public places and the phrase “politically correct” was tossed around by everyone (but mostly conservatives), but to my entire life experience with smoking.

When I was a little kid in the Seventies, everybody smoked. My parents, my neighbors, my teachers, my aunts and uncles, my babysitter… virtually every adult I know smoked.

It was ubiquitous. There were ashtrays everywhere in public in a vain attempt to keep smokers from flicking ash and grinding out butts wherever they happened to be, as if they were wild horses taking a shit. “What brand do you smoke? ” was a safe conversation starter. The people on TV smoked and so did the people in the movies. Smoking was as much of a given as having a cell phone is now. ^[2]

And I hated it, because it meant that poor little me ended up sandwiched between my two parents, them both smoking like chimneys in cold weather, and me trying to get clean air by slouching down in my seat until I was below the danger zone.

Thank goodness hot air rises.

Then as I got older, peer pressure came into play. I had eventually made friends with some of the heavy metal kids in 6th grade via being a fan of KISS due to my sister being (way)into them, I made sort-of friends with two guys named Kevin and Trevor, and through them got to know some other metal-head types, and that led to the classic peer pressure scene from every after-school special happening to me.

I remember it like it was the day before yesterday. I was hanging out with these bad seed types outside the YMCA that was across the street from my school. They were all smoking, and the point came where they offered a cigarette to me, and told me I would like it, and didn’t I want to be cool?

And I really considered it. I wanted to fit in, I wanted to be cool, I wanted to be cool, I wanted the acceptance of this new group of friends that had introduced me to the glories of Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, and Metallica. And I loved how they dressed. I wanted to be like them.

But I just couldn’t do it. Instead, I left and went home.

This was a great embarrassment to Trevor and Kevin, who had vouched for me. If I had stayed around, I honestly probably could have talked my way out of the awkwardness. But the whole situation suddenly disgusting me and I just wanted to go home.

Later on, in junior high, when I was sort-of friends with Jason Heisler and Michael Foucault, I kinda sounded them out on the subject, and Jason agreed that smoking was stupid. Michael smoked, but he respected our opinions on the matter.

So it never really became an issue again in my life except for the usual smoke-dodging at home. But that wasn’t a big deal, because my parents didn’t smoke at the table, so even when my sister Anne and brother David started smoking (making the population of the home 2/3 smoker), the number of situations where I was forced to endure smoke dropped drastically.

In fact, all through high school, my only brush was that was outside the “smoking door” (the only place where students were allowed to smoke), which is where all the heavy metal kids hung out.

But I hated it out there. It was so gross. So once more, cigarettes came between me and being a part of the heavy metal community.

No wonder I hate them. (The cigarettes, not the heavy metal community. They rock!)

Then I went off to university, and made the best friends I had ever had. All of us nerdy as hell, we got together in the student cafeteria known as The Pit, so we called ourselves the Pit Crew.

And only one of us smoked, and even he eventually stopped due to the passive peer pressure of being the only smoker amongst, frankly, people too nerdy to smoke. Like me.

And that was the end of it, until my mom got bronchitis.

Up until that point, I didn’t hate tobacco. I thought it was disgusting and I was glad I wasn’t saddled with the addiction, and I wished my relatives did not smoke, but I didn’t hate it.

But one night, I was lying on my bed reading, and I heard my mother start to cough. And cough. On and on, And the longer it went, the more worried and anxious I was, and the angrier I got as a result. And by the time she finally stopped, I knew I fucking hated the tobacco industry in all its manifestations, and that’s still how I feel to this day. I will feel that way till the day I die.

Because tobacco attacked my mother. There’s no coming back from that.

So by the time that song came out, I was all for this new policy of keeping smoking away from us non-smokers as much as possible. Smoke all you want, but keep your filthy fucking smoke away from my lungs, damn it.

And what really amazes me is that the entire culture changed as a result. Now nobody smokes indoors any more. Not even in their own homes. And the number of smokers in North America is dwindling rapidly.

So my hope is that, at least in this culture, smoking just kind of dies off on its own.

Wouldn’t that be something?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well that’s it. It’s done. I have watched all 182 episodes of Scrubs. The goal has been achieved and my long, complex journey is at an end.

I have mixed feelings about that.

On the one hand, I am glad to finally be free. It is a quirk of my nature that once I start something, I focus in on it to the exclusion of everything else. So to my mind, it was effectively impossible for me to watch anything else until I finished Scrubs. I had to finish Thing A before I could even think about Thing B.

Like I have said before, I can be oddly linear for a creative person. Then again, I can be remarkably creative for a rational materialist utilitarian, so it goes both ways.

I’m so darn deep and fascinating!

And it’s not like it was torture going through all those episodes of Scrubs. I love the show. It’s like it was made for me. A wacky sense of humour (complete with cutaways), clever funny writing, extremely good performances (with a lot more depth than you would think for a show this goofy), great characters that are well-defined (without lacking depth) that you love spending time with, and the most important thing and who , a big soft sentimental heart that informed everything in the show.

Oh, and with the ability to develop a plotline over a season and the inherent drama and excitement that comes from being a medical drama.

In other words…. Scrubs is exactly the sort of show I want to make some day.

And it says something about the virtues of the show that it didn’t even start to seem like a long journey until the seventh season. Up until then, it was a delight.

For those of you unfamiliar with the show, it was a sitcom set in a hospital that followed the adventures of Doctor John Dorian (Zach Braff) as he makes the journey from medical student to doctor with the help of his best friend Doctor Christopher Turk (Donald Faison), his extremely reluctant and brutally sarcastic mentor Doctor Perry Cox (John C. McGinley), tough Latina nurse with a heart of gold Carla Espinoza (Judy Reyes), and overachieving and crazy neurotic fellow student Doctor Elliot Reid (Sarah Chalke).

Last but not least, there was his nemesis, the man known only as…. The Janitor (Neil Flynn), who was a very lonely, crazy, hateful person who was inexplicably likable.

Shows what a good show it was… it could make you like a character who delighted in messing with the main character. Always in non-serious ways, though. Well, mostly.

So while I am glad to be done, and free to watch other stuff, I am also going to miss spending time with the characters that most definitely became my friends.

And thus, I am in that inter-show zone for the first time in months. Luckily, this time, I know exactly what I am going to watch next : the new season of Ultimate Spider-Man that arrived on Netflix last week!

Nothing in my queue even comes close to out-competing my love for ol’ Webhead.

After that, I dunno. If I wanted another massive commitment so that I didn’t have to decide again for a long time, I would start in on Gilmore Girls. That had 7 seasons of high quality dramedy. I loved the show when I used to watch it with Angela.

But I think I will probably at least catch up on some movies before that. Like I have that weird Michael Keaton movie Birdman in my queue, as well as In Bruges, which I have heard good things about. Or I could finally get around to watching The Wolf Of Wall Street.

Dunno why, but I keep putting off watching it because I feel like it will upset me somehow. Maybe I am afraid it will remind me too much of the parts of the 80’s I would rather forget. Or fill me with such intense class rage that I choke on it. I don’t know.

I do know one thing : there will always be a part of me that wonders what would have happened if I had stuck to my original game plan and taken business classes when I went to university.

I am positive I would have been good at it. I have the right combination of numerical intelligence, charisma, and creativity.

Plus I am pretty sure I would be really good at bullshitting.

So if I had stuck with the plan and gone business, it’s a strong possibility that I would have done very well in that world and amassed quite the fortune. I could have been one of those financial sharks that works the system and comes out ahead no matter what happens.

But it also would have reinforced some of the worst aspects of my personality. Things like my desire to prove how clever and quick and deadly I am, and my facility for manipulating people, as well as my oral-retentive desire to sit in the center of a web of power and make the world serve my needs. Not to mention my deep well of untapped greed. I could imagine myself going pretty nuts if I was someplace where there was money just there for the taking for the person who is smart and sociopathic enough.

Maybe I would have been able to keep my soul. Certainly, I would enjoy proving that you can be a highly effective shark without becoming a total asshole.

In fact, if I could make a fortune without compromising my morals or even screwing anyone over, that would really prove how clever and capable I am.

And from the shores of wretched-ish poverty, that sounds pretty damned good.

So maybe the real reason I don’t want to watch The Wolf Of Wall Street is that part of me would be really, really jealous of those guys who got to live the 80’s dream of getting rich on Wall Street.

And that’s not a part of myself I particularly like.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I emailed the head of the Arts faculty with my concerns over Professor Mark Glouberman. So the die is cast there. Probably nothing will come of it, at least from my end of the process. But I had to do it. That guy should not teach.

And I said as much in my email.

I’ve already dropped his Intro to Philosophy, which means I am, for the third time, swept up in hunt for that mysterious and elusive creature, the Fifth Class.

I better get this shit decided soon, because the Add/Drop period will probably be ending soon and it won’t be so easy to shuffle stuff around.

If there is another section of Intro to Philosophy open, I will take it. As long as it’s Glouberman free, I am freaking golden.

Turns out, the other Philosophy I have from him is not Intro to Ethics, it’s Philosophy, Culture, and Identity. And I can probably do without that one too, but I will leave it for now because I don’t want to end up hunting for two replacement courses at the same time.

The very thought of fills my heart with fear! Cause course hunting is such a bitch for fussy ol me.

Oh right. Before we leave all things Glouberman behind, here’s my notes from yesterday, verbatim. Editorial comments will be in [square brackets].

MY ACTUAL NOTES

FROM INTRO TO PHILOSOPJHY

JANUARY 6, 2016

AS TAUGHT BY MARK GLOUBERMAN

Sure, wait until class starts before emailing the booklist to us.

My god this man is a twit.

30 mins in, still waiting for him to finish w/computer. Now a student is helping him – god bless him. [The student, not the prof. ]

Time appears to have stopped.

Now he is scrolling through [an online version of] the textbook [and] telling us there’s lots of stuff in it. That’s nice.

OMG, the “course description” [he handed out] is just random pages stapled together. No info. [Turns out that was source material for our homework. I still think my initial impression was justified, though. ]

Now he is looking for the original [course description] document. Found the old one.

THIS MAN IS SUCH A TOOL. [It is of note that I have a four color pen and I practically carved those words into the page with each one of them, on top of each other, for emphasis. ]

Managed to find the right document – online.

7:30 – Finally started teaching.

Philosophy = thinking about stuff. [Those four words summarize about twenty minutes of rambling. ]

Oh great… math. How fun. [This summarizes ten minutes of him trying to explain to us what calculus was. ]

Apparently, arithmetic is interesting. [Never said why. Just repeated it over and over. ]

This man is a triple dunk dipshit.

Must. Not. Heckle. Moron.

I think I will officially complain.

Half an hour to get to “philosophy can be done anywhere”. Mercy. I give up.

Two more hours of this.

This man says more nothing per minute than any other person on Earth.

And bing goes my hope that he is better with a lesson plan.

I can’t take four months [at] twice a week of this. I just can’t.

Fellow student approached me in men’s room to confirm prof is very confusing. I feel pity for him. English is not his first language. This must be hard for him.

More evidence that I should complain.

I wish I spoke Mandarin so that I could talk smack about him with [the] other students in front of him. [Clearly, this man is bringing out the poet in me. ]

I must Google him. [Did that. He has a 5.5 out of 10 on RateMyProfessor.com if you can believe it. Far more than he deserves. ]

He illustrates the futility of asking students to fill in the blanks when you suck at communicating the setup. [Also when you ask bewildered students whose eyes are glazing over with boredom at random moments. ]

I hope he has a headache too. [Proud of that one. Says so much in so few words. ]

This man should not teach.

I’d like to think he’s drunk.

He just said “it’s supposed to be clear”. So he knows.

I…. (sigh) never mind.

He belabors and repeats because he thinks we are not understanding him. But people are just confused.

Class almost over and now he gets somewhere near the point.

And that’s it. Thus endeth my record of a night of mental torture.

Went to therapy. Talked to my therapist about the Glouberman Situation, and told him about the anxiety attack I had in Creative Writing class.

He wanted to know what it was about having to catch someone’s eye that made me freak out big time. At first I couldn’t answer because I was reliving the moment and in the moment, I wasn’t conscious of anything but the full body freakout I was experiencing.

But it didn’t take too long for me to connect it with all those situations I experienced in school where there was something where we had to partner off, or pick teams, or otherwise set up the boy everyone hated (me) for being socially crushed when nobody wanted to have anything to do with me.

On some level, in that moment of total panic, I felt like all of that was going to happen again and I woukld once more be at the bottom of the heap with everyone jumping up and down on me.

Now as you know, that didn’t happen, and in fact people approached me . That’s like the opposite of rejection. And that’s a good thing.

But I am not feeling it. When that panic attack hit, I went numb. Ice covered in snow wrapped around my heart and I won’t be able to feel the good things until my frozen heart thaws.

Story of my life, really. Sometimes I wish I could get rid of the cold forever. Live life in the hot hot sun, no matter what I have to feel to be there.

But it’s just not that simple.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today is my first Wednesday of school, and Wednesdays are Weird. That’s because on Wednesdays, I have classes between 4pm and 10 pm, and that causes a lot of little complications.

One of which is just getting my fat ass home. There are buses that run that late, but they don’t take me all the way home. So I figured I will end up taking a cab a lot of the time, at least till the fancy schmancy headphones I ordered from Indigo arrive.

With them on, I might decided I have the energy to walk home. No guarantees though, at least not at this time of the year.

Another complication is blogging. Normally, I blog after supper. At said supper, I have a liter of Diet Coke in order to give me extra energy for blogging. This has been my system for a long time and it works.

But I can’t do that on Wednesdays because I won’t even be having supper tonight, or at least, not the kind of supper I am used to. My classes run straight through from 4 to 10, so there is no time for me to eat a meal. I am going to have to get into the habit of bringing food with me to eat between classes and during breaks. Simple, easy stuff that can be eaten on the go, like fruit, or chips, or the like.

That reminds me. Must refill my water bottle before I go.

If I didn’t bring stuff with me, I would end up going without food for far too long. Normally, I eat lunch at noon. That would mean I would end up going ten hours without eating, and that would be Bad. Very Bad. My blood sugar would definitely end up in the danger zone.

So this is a matter of life or death, or at least, health or sickness. I will have to learn to either pack stuff, or at least have the money to buy stuff from the vending machines at school.

Back to the subject of blogging. Clearly, my best bet is to do my blogging before class. I might not manage that today because I realized my predicament a little late for that, so I might not finish blogging before it’s time to go. But in the future, I will have a better grip on things.

Or at least, I hope that I will.

Today, I have Canadian History Since 1867 and then Intro To Philosophy. I am not looking to the Intro To Philosophy course, both because I didn’t really want to take it and because it’s also taught by that twit Glouberman that I had for Intro to Ethics yesterday.

I don’t normally use professor’s names here, both out of respect for them and for the prudent reason that I don’t want them Googling themselves and find me talking smack about them, but fuck it. You’re a twit, Glouberman. And Kant was a twit too.

You two twits were made for each other.

I don’t know what to expect in that History class. Like I said before, I haven’t taken History since high school. Hope I can still keep up. So far, my naturally high level of retention has served me well. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that I will find the class easy.

That said, I am looking forward to learning things that have a narrative structure like history does. History is story, after all. It’s right there in the name. So I am looking forward to learning the story of Canada and how we got to where we are right now.

After all, someone has to know Canadian history. That person should probably be Canadian. Too often, we Canadians are mesmerized by the enormous reality TV carnival that is the USA, and we end up knowing more about them than we do about ourselves.

It really is like having ringside tickets to the freak show.

Hmmm. I seem to have run out of blogging energy all at once. Well I am two thirds done. Having to do the last third when I get come won’t be a big deal.

(—)

History class ended an hour early, so, time to finish blogging.

It was quite good. Prof seems young, eager, alert, and engaged. I feel like in the 100 minutes he was teaching us, I doubled my knowledge of Canadian history class, which isn’t saying much.

I was furiously taking notes the whole time, but I am used to that now. In fact, I prefer it. It keeps me busy during lectures so my mind doesn’t wander. Odds are, I will never look at my notes again after I write them, but the process itself is worthwhile.

Hungry. Gonna go buy something sandwich like.

(—)

And now I am fed. Got an egg salad sanwich (was hoping for chicken salad, but they only had egg. At least a chicken was involved), plus two pumpkin spice muffins (one for now, one for later). That plus water from my water bottle and the banana I brought from home made for a very pleasant meal – no starchy carbon component ( like fries or chips ) needed.

In 20 minutes, I got Intro to Philosophy with, sigh, Glouberman again. I sure as fuck hope he has his shit together tonight. I am fairly certain he picked up on my disdain last time. Hopefully that acted as a wake up call of some sort.

The other students might not know how things are supposed to go – but I do!

I feel like maybe I should have used an ellipsis instead of a dash there.

The best part of this delightful unexpected break is that I scored myself an entire couch to relax upon. I have mentioned before that one of my favorite thungs about this building is that there is TONS of seating outside the classroom, and as an experienced student, I know where the good stuff is.

Time for class. More later.

(—)

And now I am home. I have to relate my recently travails, even though I am over the usual word limit.

So phone the affiliates and warn then we are going long.

First off, Glouberman (pronounced GLOBE-er-men) was even more of an idiot in Intro to Philosophy than he was yesterday in Intro to Ethics. I can’t possibly take this for four months times twice a week. I am going to have to do something.

I am going to have to complain to the university. This man should not be in the position of professor. He cannot teach. All he does is ramble off on tangent after tangent. He is a world class dipshit.

I wasn’t sure about complaining until today, though, both because he was worse today than yesterday, and because a classmate approached me in the men’s room at the sinks while we were on break, and confirmed with me that the professor was very confusing, and talked about a lot of things that had nothing to do with what he was supposed to be teaching.

And I felt really bad for that guy, because it was clear that English was not his first language and for him, this must have been extremely confusing.

So now I feel like I gotta do it. For me, and for the fourteen other students. At least, that’s how many were in class today. A lot of them may have dropped the class by now.

And I am considering doing the same thing, for Intro to Philosophy at least. I didn’t really want to take it in the first place. Intro to Ethics, I may stick with. But what happened today was disgraceful.

I mean, he didn’t even have the syllabus printed out for us. Standard operating procedure in all classes is that in the first class, you get a hard copy of the syllabus. But no, he forgot that.

This lead to the first half hour of the class being lost to him, in class, trying to find the file for the syllabus so he could show us what it looked like, all with everything being projected onto the screen. And he is clearly not competent with technology. Eventually a student had to guide him through the extremely simple process of getting the file displayed just to get the class moving.

And then it was just the rambling, babbling, meanderings of someone with an extremely severe case of projectile verbal diarrhea.

And he does it all in this particular kind of casual, airy way that I know is a red flag. It indicates that someone has had to squint real hard in order to keep seeing themselves as getting the job done. These people know they are not doing so good, but convince themselves that they are doing well enough and just messing up a few small and minor details.

Maybe it started out that way, but he’s bloody incompetent now.

Then, after surviving what felt like two and a half hours of mental torture, I decided to treat myself to a cab home. So I call the cab, tell them which entrance I am at and that I will be waiting inside. They say no problem. I wait, no cab. I call back, get different person, tell them the same thing. They say no problem. I wait again. No cab.

Finally, when I called back the third time, before the cycle could begin anew, I said, very clearly articulating, “Maybe the problem is that I am waiting inside instead of at the bottom of the stairs. ”

There was a pause, then the dispatcher said “Oh…. well if you’re not waiting at the bottom of the stairs, the driver won’t see you and they are not allowed to get out of the car. ”

THAT, finally, was the information I needed. Fine, I can’t wait inside. That’s all I needed to know. But this is what happens when people don’t actually listen to the words you say.

You had all the information you needed. All you had to do was pay attention. Dammit.

Well I guess that’s enough for right now. Stay tuned for the actual notes I took in class today. I will make them part of tomorrow’s blog entry. It should be a hoot.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today was the first day of my return to Kwantlen and it went fairly well.

My bus pass worked, which was a relief. I am always worried when I used it for the first time in a year. I worry that some stupid administrative snafu might mean that it wasn’t renewed when I paid them and now I have to go through hoops to make the damned thing work like it’s supposed to do.

Not that I am cynical or anything.

And it felt good to be back at Kwantlen. Just walking through the door made me feel like my life made sense and had purpose again. My mood had already been boosted.

Damn does my mind wander a lot lately. I wonder if it’s a sign of something. Got a lot on my mind, I guess. But the last few days, my mind keeps wandering off while I blog. Then I have to drag it back to the task at hand. It’s getting annoying.

Anyhow, back to my first day. I had one class today, Introduction to Ethics. ^[1] The prof reminds me of my Psych prof from last semester, Doctor Kristie Dukewich, in that she is petite, energetic, and intense. And seems to be willing to be pretty hardcore about teaching ethics. She explicitly stated that her policies are designed to make sure that everyone pays attention and nobody can just coast through the class.

I, of course, am fine with that. In fact, I am thrilled.

Not so thrilling is that the exams will be group exams. That means we will be divided into groups of two or three and said groups will submit a single exam that is the product of everyone in the group.

This really throws me for a loop. I really don’t like it. I supposed I have the smug aloofness of the elite, because I honestly believe that working with others can only lower my mark. I get high marks on my own. Mars that are a lot higher than average. Statistically at least, my objection makes sense.

However, the groups will not be assigned entirely randomly. There’s going to be a test to determine our level of readiness for the program, and people with the same score will be grouped together.

I have never felt more motivated to ace a test in my life. Never before have the results of a test determined whether or not I would be saddled with dolts, lazy people, and dumbasses for an entire semester. I really, really want to be in that top group.

Luckily, the score is measured on a scale of 3, so it’s not that unreasonable. You can bet your butt that I will study hard for that test. Turns out that’s how to motivate me to work hard instead of coasting on my natural abilities : make the stakes worthwhile to me.

Plus, of course, my ego demands that I be in the top group in a class like this one. I mean, it’s ethics. That’s totally my thing. Being in anything but the top group would be humiliating and demoralizing.

It’s weird to feel all elitist about this. But what the fuck, this is something I can do.

Another strange feeling from that class : at one point, as she was explaining all the rules and I was starting to feel a little overwhelmed, I felt the urge to assert my dominance over the professor. Or if not exactly dominance, I felt I needed to demonstrate to her that I was a force to be reckoned with.

What an extraordinary thought. I am not used to such primitive impulses. But I consider it a sign of growth in my malnourished id, and so it’s a good sign in the long run.

Meanwhile, I am intrigued to find that I have found a field in which I feel so strongly about my own capacities. I didn’t feel this way in the two Psych classes I took, even though that’s another field where I am confident in my ability. But make it philosophy and apparently, I sudden feel like I am The Best In Teh World At It and need to prove that in front of everyone.

That should make for an interesting semester, seeing as I am taking three Philosophy classes.

And it’s true that I have never met anyone who could out-think me, and Philosophy is all about thought. That’s why I love it so much.

But fans of this blog know that I would love to meet someone who could. When it comes to thought, I have no mentor, role model, or peer. It’s pretty lonely, and I have nobody to test myself against. I have longed for a teacher smarter than me my entire life, but even in university, my profs didn’t seem to have the kind of mind I have and I could out think them fairly handily.

So in a way, in some primitive part of my brain, I want to shout out to the world how awesome I am so that I will attract challengers who might prove to be worthy adversaries.

But I don’t even know the right words to describe my particular sub-specialty. It involved thinking quickly, but also deeply, synthesizing a lot of information into a theory as to how things connect. As a result, there’s a battleship-like quality to my thoughts, or maybe a frigate…. power and maneuverability combined into one deadly package. And so on.

Oh, and creative thinking. I pride myself in going straight for the answer without any unnecessary preconceived notions and this lets me come up with superior solutions, or at least, ones that seem obviously superior to me.

So clarity of thought is in there somewhere too.

Anyhow, it’s time for me to eat, so I will end this unintended ego trip by saying that I have learned a lot about myself today, and look forward to learning more in the future.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

KSS stands for Kwantlen Second Semester. Originally I was going to call this blog entry “SS minus one” but I thought that might be misconstrued as some kinda Nazi thing.

Tomorrow I start my second semester at Kwantlen. That means I have to transition out of the lazy mode I have lapsed into over the winter break.

The sad thing is, I was just starting to enjoy it.

Meh, whatever. I will enjoy being back in school too. It will be good to have something to do with my time, and something to focus my energies upon. I am a little worried about my messed up knee, but as long as I remember to be gentle with it, I should be fine.

The big news is that yesterday, I took the plunged and dropped my Linguistics class so I would not have three classes on Tuesday, like I had before. I decided I had to bow to sanity, even if it meant I had to resume the quest for that elusive fifth class all over again.

So I dropped my linguistics class and went on the hunt. It’s not easy because I am so fussy. It has to be the Richmond campus, it can’t start before 1 pm, I don’t wanna take anything like hardcore science this semester… my only asset is that I have very broad interests, so I can enjoy a class on history as much as one on sociology or philosophy or whatever.

My cousin has a doctorate in Whatever from Ya Know, Just Stuff University.

Anyhow, after a lot of dead ends, I resigned myself to doing something I didn’t want to do, and that is take (sigh) Introduction to Philosophy.

So not only am I now taking three Philosophy courses, I have to go through Philosophy 101 again.

But now I have a saner schedule. One class on Mondays, two on Tuesdays, and two on Wednesdays. I still have no class classes on Thursdays and Fridays, which is suboptimal, but acceptable.

I will find things to do on those days.

Here’s a breakdown of what I am taking :

Introduction to Philosophy : Yech. I am not looking forward to that. I dunno why I am being such a snob about it. It’s not like I remember taking it the first time like it was yesterday. I will no doubt find it interesting. I guess I just feel like I am too good at philosophy to have to take a 101 class in it. I felt the same when they made me taking a Essay Writing For Dummies course when I went to UPEI. I was like, “I got an 88 percent in ADVANCED English and now you’re making me do THIS SHIT?”. I really did not want to be there and it showed. Now I feel bad for the prof who taught the class. It wasn’t his fault I felt like I was being made to repeat kindergarten. He did not deserve me quiet but palpable contempt. But I was far less socially clued in back then. After all, I was only 20.

Introduction to Ethics : Sounds like a course for sociopaths, doesn’t it? This is one I know I will enjoy because ethics is my all time favorite subject in philosophy and probably also in life. I love it so much that I enjoy hyper depressing stories like The Cold Equations because of the ethical issues it explores. I love super tricky moral questions. And to me, the question of what is right and what is wrong is the most important question there is. Compared to it, everything else is mere engineering.

Philosophy, Culture, and Identity : The mysterious one, in that I can’t imagine exactly what will be in it like I can with the other two. Here’s the course description :

Students will be introduced-through literary and philosophical works-to issues connected with how the modern identity is formed and how it is constituted in Western culture.

Sounds pretty darn interesting to me! It contains two favorite subjects of mine : identity (who am I and how did I get that way, and what does that mean?) and modernity (the same thing, but as a culture). Modern life is so comfortable and efficient that it’s hard for us to understand how rare and amazing it is in the context of history and the world as it is today. I will enjoy studying that.

Canada since 1867 : I realized while mucking about with registration that I have not taken any history since high school. So I am looking forward to this. I have always liked learning about history, it’s just never been something I found compelling enough to study. I thought about taking a course about Europe since World War I instead, but that made me feel like I was being a bad Canadian. So Canadian history it is. Should be chock full of action and suspense.

Intro to Creative Writing 1 : Presumably, this will be the nice, normal, all I have to do is write course that I craved when I was taking Creative Writing : New Forms And Media last semester. That will be a profound relief. Writing I can do no problem. After all, I am the nutbar that decided he would write a million words in a year and did it in 11 months, and has been writing 1000 words a day since. I look forward to being challenged to write things I wouldn’t normally write.

And that’s what my semester will look like. It will be weird going to school three days a week instead of five, and I really, really hope (are you listening, Me Of The Future) that when it comes time to register for the summer semester, I remember to register for classes the moment registration opens so I can have the courses I want for a change.

I still need to pick up some school supplies. Mostly printer paper and hole-reinforced paper for my binders. Plus, of course, my textbooks. I imagine the bill for them has gone up seeing as the linguistics I was going to have had no texts and I am pretty sure Philosophy 101 will have a ton.

Anyhow, that’s what my next four months will look like.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.