One Down, Nine to Go

It has only been one week, but I can already tell that winter quarter is going to suck. Unlike my awesome fall quarter classes, my winter classes are pretty uninspiring in comparison and dragging myself to class is already starting to become a pain.

Starting the quarter off sick and completely sapped of energy didn't exactly help either.

The most interesting class of the quarter is probably going to be my environmental studies class, which also happened to be the first class I attended at the start of the quarter. While I was overdosing on Ricola cough drops on the first day of class in an attempt to stop distracting all the people around me with my violent, hacking cough, my mind wandered from the amusing factorid that like my Ricola drops, the professor was from Switzerland, to the sudden, fearful realization that there were NO WINDOWS in the lecture hall!

Being in the windowless room immediately made me feel slightly claustrophobic; I began to pay attention to every other lecture hall I walked into afterwards and noticed that there were no windows in any of them either. Now that the box-like lecture halls have moved over to the conscious side of my mind, I can't shake the trapped feeling that threatens to overwhelm me whenever I walk into one of the rooms and the door closes behind me.

Even though environmental studies is an interesting subject, my professor brings a lot of real-life experience with environmental policy-making to the class, and the assigned readings have been pretty interesting so far, the class itself is pretty intimidating. It is an upper-division class and all the other people in the class look and act like real "adults," so I feel a little out of place. The class is also VERY reading intensive, so I hope I can keep up as the quarter progresses.

My "Political Inquiry" (also known as STATISTICS and RESEARCH METHODOLOGY) class meets in the same lecture hall that my history lecture met in last quarter, and I was completely shocked to see the room so filled to the brim with students that late-comers had to resort to sitting on the floor on the first day of class. Nobody ever came to history lecture last quarter, so the room was rarely ever more than half-filled (aside from the two days when the midterm and final were administered). The professor is very energetic and his slight New York (it sounds Brooklyn) accent reminds me of my AP Gov't teacher from high school. Even though I like the professor, the class itself sucks because the subject is pretty lame.

My TA for the class used to be a math major as an undergraduate and spent a majority of the first section using the example of corn growing to talk about functions and writing weird math symbols on the board that kind of freaked me out.

Even though my earth science book on "The Atmosphere" was ridiculously expensive (and I have yet to open it and read a single page), the class itself seems very straight forward and I am glad it does not have discussion sections. Meteorology is not a subject I am particularly interested in learning about in great detail though, so my mind tends to wander during lecture.

My Muir 50 class on "The Graphic Novel" couldn't be more different than Muir 40 from last quarter; instead of the room with the oval conference table and the cool swivel-y chairs, we're in a cramped room with individual plastic chairs and too-small desks and a chalkboard that does not work. I really liked my Muir 40 instructor, but I am feeling indifferent at best about my Muir 50 instructor.

She was my roommate's instructor last quarter and I feel a little cheated because my roommate either did not warn me about her when I was picking classes because she was jealous of my priority enrollment and awesome Muir 40 TA and wanted to watch me suffer this quarter and laugh at me behind my back or she simply had lower standards than I did. I like to think that it is the former.

I have no idea why this thought never occurred to me when I signed up for the class, but I was completely shocked when I realized, on the second day of class, that a majority of my classmates were the anime and manga-loving Japanophile-type.

When we did "cheesy self-introductions" on the second day of class, we had to include our favorite character from a graphic novel, and I sat in my seat, transfixed in a kind of silent horror as classmate after classmate rattled off names of characters I have never heard of from graphic novel/anime/manga series I have never heard of as a majority of the class chuckled or nodded in apparent agreement at their "awesome taste" in graphic novels/anime/manga series.

As I turned around to face the class to introduce myself, I noticed that a girl sitting in the row behind me was even wearing a t-shirt that announced to the world that she was an "anime freak."

Oh boy.

My favorite character?

I didn't know any, so I picked Snoopy.

When I told my roommates in passing about what happened during my first two days of Muir 50, the one who was a former student of my current TA laughed (in a "I am laughing AT you, not WITH you" way) and muttered something about being glad that she did not choose to take the class on "The Graphic Novel" in a tone that indicated she knew this was going to happen and sought to avoid it by avoiding the class - another reason why I thought the former was more likely than the latter in her TA recommendation. (Bitch!)

It's going to be a long quarter.