Wind Tunnels

The University has become an expert in such matters. I assume without meaning to. They have made at least 2 successful ones on campus, one in the path between Social Sciences and Administration and one now between the old library and the new Taylor Digital. Every time I walk in these areas the wind is blowing. And it's COLD. Seriously is this some sort of multi-million dollar experiment or is the university just bad at placing buildings?

Maybe I should ask the engineers with their shrinking hallways and doors that lead to no where.

Defeat Really is Bitter

And costs me $500 dollars. Seems unfair that a course I believed to be non-mathematical in its approach just so happens to need math in order to solve more than half of the problems. I had to judge a course based on just under less than three hours of instruction, and decide whether to withdraw or not. This first class gave me no clues as to the approaches to the course. The prof said "simple math" was needed. Someone other than a math major PLEASE tell me that calculus is "simple math". I never took calculus in my life. EVER. No where in the course description did it even say that I needed calculus, probability and algebra to complete this course. Sure there were alternatives to using calculus, but that involved more math. I walked into this course, two days a week, three hours each day for six weeks under the impression that it was pure logic, reasoning, graphs, tables and diagrams, NOT equations and numbers. After the "withdraw with no penalties" date, which was a day after the first day of this course, I was supposed to know all this. First class didn't tell me anything. POP THERE GOES $500! Oh no big deal. I'm only an unemployed student with at least a year and a half of university to go. I obviously have $500 dollars lying around to just throw down the drain!

The fact that you don't get your money back is a giant kick in the rear end...a rear end with a broken tail bone. Unfortunately I can't complain about it because it's reasonable. If they gave money back after more than a couple classes, any person could walk in, take up the prof's time, get all the juicy knowledge and then run with it. BUT (and that but is a giant one), University should cost so much in the first place. Education is supposed to be a good thing for a country right? So can someone please tell me WHY they are raising tuition prices again next fall? If you want universities to be selective about how many people they let in, why not just make the standards for getting in higher? Anyone who cannot afford university cannot get in. Oh oops I forgot! Student loans! How silly of me. Those of course take years to pay off, and that only becomes harder when you don't get that lovely high-paying job you always wanted, despite your wonderful degree(s). Of course the money goes to research and upkeep and salary paying etc etc, but the funny thing is, is that the government puts such a small amount of money into schools and universities that they NEED to charge more and more every year. THANK YOU ALBERTA FOR YOUR (lack of) SUPPORT FOR HIGHER EDUCATION.

I'm overly bitter because I was defeated by the course I thought would turn out a lot better than it did. I still think the subject is interesting, and I understand half of what we've learned so far, it's just not good enough. A withdrawal (W) looks better than a fail (F) on a transcript, so that's what I'm doing. And I feel extraordinarily shitty. Nothing like spending sixteen hours over the past two days on a single subject just to condemn it to failure at 3 in the morning the day before an assignment is due. So in the end we have dual blame: false advertising and my inability to comprehend equations I have never seen before in my life. Perhaps if I spent double the time, got some help (though the prof was out of town all weekend and couldn't answer his e-mail), and thought to browse through the textbook BEFORE committing to the class, I would have come out better. I didn't, so I paid the price.

THANK YOU UNIVERSITY AND POOR WORK ETHIC FOR SCREWING ME OUT OF MY TIME AND MONEY.

Long Walks Accomplish Things

Took my visual communications teacher's advice and did a bit of wandering and looking today. I like to wander and walk in the first place, but I paid more attention to the things around me this time. Well...most of the time. Seemed like the only time I ever completely zoned out was in the middle of a busy street. Probably not a good place. I walked for about an hour and a half from my doctor's office, ignoring all the buses on one street. I was tempted to walk all the way home, but the bus that goes to my house pulled up just as I was walking by the stop. Anyhow, I looked at the fronts of people's houses. These houses were the small, boxy and rectangular kind, but it was amazing how different they were. I saw at least 2 bright purple houses, a lime green one, more pink ones than I thought existed, a REALLY bright blue one and another in which I spent a few minutes deciding whether it was yellow or green (I settled on grellow). A lot of people had cute little bird-baths, wooden crafty things, wind chimes, and ceramic animals, which told me someone who likes nature, crafty items or decorating lived there. The houses with little upkeep, overgrown yards, worn-down siding, rotting porches and sidewalks with weeds growing between the cracks told me the owners were either busy, old or lazy (or all of those). One house was the perfect "I capture and eat children for breakfast then use their bones to build common appliances and furniture". I'm not exactly sure how you'd build an appliance out of bones...but definitely furniture. The entire house was run-down, bushes growing over and covering the path leading up to it. Weeds were everywhere and the grass was already starting to get unruly. Cracks in the wall, broken shutters on the windows, a very steep grey-shingled roof and a very un-kept sidewalk. Might have been a little creepier because the sun was blocked by clouds and it was raining. All that was missing was the thunder and lightning. Running away from that tangent before it gets any longer...I also saw houses that were perfectly clean, up-kept, plain, painted, and had straight, even and evenly green lawns. I'm guessing neat freaks and perfectionists live in those ones. A lot of them had sitting areas and lawn chairs out front for people who like to sit and relax, watch the world and chug coffee. People who had kids were easy to identify when toys or bikes were lying out front. Not too many of those. Another rarity was houses with nice gardens. I only saw about two or three of those. I guess people are too busy to work for hours on those things. Either people who love to garden or old people lived in those ones.

All in all I just found it interesting. I may do my coms project on it, but I'm not too sure yet. I keep getting new ideas. I think I'm just excited about running around taking pictures of random things, creeping people out at the same time. I just love how our prof is encouraging us to stare at people at school or on the train, and look at things we normally wouldn't. And that sounds really...creepy. Muaha

Sitting in Poetry Class

Not listening and not doing the German project that was due yesterday. Only thing new about all this today is that my prof got a haircut. I'm not sure how finals are going to work out next week for this class. We're required to memorize poems to use as examples, define a bunch of literary terms we never actually learned about and talk about time periods and authors we sort of learned about. I believe the exam is three hours long...just long enough to prolong my agony and suffering that this class has inflicted on me all year long. The prof seems like a nice guy, but he is too monotone, and seriously, no matter how you look at it, a collection of random words with lines and circles all over the place do not qualify as lecture notes.

I wasn't looking forward to poetry in the first place. When I thought of poets I thought of moody teenagers and fluttery old men ranting about sappy love. After starting the class, I still thought that. Until I took learning into my own hands and started looking at poems that interested me, I didn't have any desire to read poetry. First poet that gave me some faith in the genre is Robert Browning. God he's hilarious, and very descriptive. Then there's James Wright , Gregory Corso and Wole Soyinka, all of whom I really enjoy reading. First poem I actually enjoyed was "The Waking" by Theodore Roethke.

Here's a list of the poems by these authors that improved my opinions of poetry:

"Marriage" - Gregory Corso - http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/1570.html

"Telephone Conversation" - Wole Soyinka - http://www.k-state.edu/english/westmank/spring_00/SOYINKA.html

"Today I Was Happy, So I Made This Poem" - James Wright - http://notwhatyouthink.org/forum/index.php?action=printpage%3Btopic=168.0

"The Waking" - Theodore Roethke - http://gawow.com/roethke/poems/104.html

"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" - Robert Browning - http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/rbrowning/bl-rbrown-childe.htm

Something Short

History research papers are my favourite. They are the easiest for me, yet the most time-consuming because of all that research. I can sum them all up in one analogy:

A history research paper is like a mother bird feeding her young. You eat up all the information, let it digest for awhile, then regurgitate it for the hungry University Profs. And they have to eat it too, no matter how disgusting and deformed it has become.