The new semester has started! This should be a new experience for me in quite a few ways. First, I finally have a car to drive to the college and back. I won’t need to get rides anymore. This is also the first semester in which I’m only going to class twice a week, as opposed to four times a week. Both semesters I’ve taken in the past I had one Monday and Wednesday class, as well as two or three Tuesday and Thursday classes. This way everything can be much more streamline.

This is, without a doubt, the largest work load I’ve taken on this time around. To give a little perspective, I had to get eight books (and I’m not getting any that aren’t explicitly required for any courses). Most of these books are literature works written before the twentieth century, so they’re dense reads, too. Moby Dick is also on that list. Basically what I’m getting that is reading will soon be a part of my daily life whether I want it to or not. Take that me!

Before I talk about my specific classes, taking a small tangent here to say that everything in my schedule is also starting to fit in neat little squares. It makes me feel pretty good about myself to have everything fall into place. Tuesday and Thursday will be spent at school all day (I’ll be there ten hours minimum on those days) and Wednesday I’ll probably be going into my old high school to teach improv. After that I have my writer’s group that I need to go to more consistently. More on scheduling later.

So, first class of the day is Major American Writers I. It encompasses the American Literature up to 1865, which equates to Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Hawthorne, that kind of stuff. Far closer to the literature side of the spectrum than the fiction. Of course this is a literature course so I’m not allowed to complain about that. I literally signed up for it. Plus Moby Dick actually sounds like an interesting read. Maybe not a fun one, but an interesting one. This is also pretty much the only class in which I recognize people. There are some I went to high school with, and quite a few people I met in my Creative Writing classes. English majors. Who would have thought?

Next I have Human Sexuality. It seems like an interesting course. Everybody I know who has taken a class with that professor has become actual friends with her. She’s definitely an odd one. She asks people to call her by her first name. Anyways, the class, from my understanding, is a lot of sex ed stuff, as well as learning about the LGBT community. I’m mostly taking it because I heard the teacher was a lot of fun, which was something she managed to confirm on the first day of class. I expect I’ll learn a lot. She gave us a questionnaire to fill out and on it she asked us to rate how much we think we know about sex and sexuality, but she also gave the disclaimer that having had taught it for decades, she personally would give herself a seven. Only a seven! Either she’s super humble or I’m so ignorant on the subject I don’t even realize how much subject there is to be taught! I don’t think it’s hard to guess at which is more likely.

I have a second class with the same teacher, Behavioral Neuroscience, but it doesn’t start until September so I don’t know what that’s like yet! We’ll skip it for now.

Lastly, I just have a basic Critical Thinking course. It’s a general ed class, which means it’s easy because everybody has to do it. She also gave us a few books to read. Inanna, Gilgamesh, stuff like that. Not excited about that stuff, but it is what it is. She wants us to write in a journal every day for ten minutes. She said this blog qualifies and I can just show her, so that’s pretty sweet! Saves me a lot of trouble, though honestly, I would just write my blog posts on a notebook if she didn’t allow it. I mean, it isn’t impossible to tell that I would be copying it, but who would go through all the work to make sure I was plagiarizing myself? Either way, printing out these posts makes my life pretty easy, so I’m stoked about that. We’ll also be writing essays (no shocker there) about the devices and philosophical discussions we have based on the stuff we read. Nothing new to me, though I’ve never had to write an eight thousand word essay before. Not excited about that, but it can’t be that hard, can it? I’ll just have to adjust how I normally write essays to encompass a larger area of discussion, or at least that’s how I think it’ll go down. Either way I’m still debating on whether that should count for my daily seven hundred fifty or not. We’ll see if this semester breaks my will to allow that.