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Sep. 29th, 2004 07:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tylikOh, my heavens, it feels good to be back. Even yesterday I wasn't sure I was doing the right thing -- I've been leery for a long time about returning, at a level I don't think I'd entirely understood. The mushroom class was different -- it was so unlike my prior work, and the set up and subject matter made it seem more like a diversion than school for real.
My last year at the university sucked a lot. Personal suck. Living situation suck. Health suck. Job suck. Academic suck (largely the result of all the other aforementioned suckage.)
Not to say that it was all suck -- there were a lot of individual bits that were quite wonderful. But there was altogether too much of everything, and too much of it sucked. My strongest impression of the time was of fighting what seemed to be a losing battle to hold things together against being too tired, too sick, and too stressed to quite pull it off.
One of the classes I'm taking this quarter, Classical Chinese, is one I took fall quarter of my last year. I passed, BTW, but I didn't do well, and I've regretted ever since that I didn't get more out of it. (Heck, I regretted it, deeply, at the time.) I took the second quarter of the same class winter quarter, but by that time I was getting pneumonia, and ended up withdrawing. So here I am, ten years later, retaking the class so I can finish the series... and it is swooningly wonderful. OMG, classmates who've read and can intelligently refer to Edward Said (brought up, even better, in response to an argument I'd made citing Abu-Lughod)! Evolutionary linguistics! Etymology! Recommendations for books on language and symbolic systems! A Chinese History grad student sitting next to me who made identical faint protest noises in unison when the Professor played fast and loose with chronology! Gods, I had remembered that this was an excellent class, but I didn't remember it strongly enough. Boltz is an amazing Professor...
The Biology and Informatics class (which, yes, I did get into) looks to be exactly what I wanted as well. Though it has that ever risky element of tempting me with whole new fields... As afraid as I was of overcommitting myself, I am also now possessed of an equally strong urge to try and dive in and learn everything. Darn, what was the stats class the genetics advisor recommended?
At some level, I can't believe I stayed away this long. (Of course, along with the bad associations, there's the business of not wanting to go back until I knew what I was going to do... And I'm already getting distracted.)
My last year at the university sucked a lot. Personal suck. Living situation suck. Health suck. Job suck. Academic suck (largely the result of all the other aforementioned suckage.)
Not to say that it was all suck -- there were a lot of individual bits that were quite wonderful. But there was altogether too much of everything, and too much of it sucked. My strongest impression of the time was of fighting what seemed to be a losing battle to hold things together against being too tired, too sick, and too stressed to quite pull it off.
One of the classes I'm taking this quarter, Classical Chinese, is one I took fall quarter of my last year. I passed, BTW, but I didn't do well, and I've regretted ever since that I didn't get more out of it. (Heck, I regretted it, deeply, at the time.) I took the second quarter of the same class winter quarter, but by that time I was getting pneumonia, and ended up withdrawing. So here I am, ten years later, retaking the class so I can finish the series... and it is swooningly wonderful. OMG, classmates who've read and can intelligently refer to Edward Said (brought up, even better, in response to an argument I'd made citing Abu-Lughod)! Evolutionary linguistics! Etymology! Recommendations for books on language and symbolic systems! A Chinese History grad student sitting next to me who made identical faint protest noises in unison when the Professor played fast and loose with chronology! Gods, I had remembered that this was an excellent class, but I didn't remember it strongly enough. Boltz is an amazing Professor...
The Biology and Informatics class (which, yes, I did get into) looks to be exactly what I wanted as well. Though it has that ever risky element of tempting me with whole new fields... As afraid as I was of overcommitting myself, I am also now possessed of an equally strong urge to try and dive in and learn everything. Darn, what was the stats class the genetics advisor recommended?
At some level, I can't believe I stayed away this long. (Of course, along with the bad associations, there's the business of not wanting to go back until I knew what I was going to do... And I'm already getting distracted.)
