First Day of School

    Well here we are. Finally. The first day for this awkward 32 year old's college education. Last week, though you wouldn't know it from my lack of updates,  I attended freshman orientation. It started off with a motivational speech by Jon Vroman with the theme Living College Life in the First Row. He stressed the importance of getting out of your comfort zone and taking responsibility for your education as well as your social life. We were implored to say hi to others, ask them questions and hug somebody. Which felt good and not at all strange for a bit until everything was awkward again afterwards.

    Moving on, today is a beautiful day outside. I kicked off the day with some duolingo practice, a quick workout on the total gym while watching the bonus video for the latest Talking Bad along with a Crash Course history video via Khan Academy and returned a few books to the library. Time was getting short. I started to get worried that I'd miss my opportunity to "live life in the first row". My concerns would all be for naught as I found myself amid the future of humanity while waiting for our English professor to arrive. It's a somewhat strange social situation that I found myself in. Here stood about 20 people whom appeared much younger than I and some of which surely were already familiar with each other from finishing high school together. I am a new fish in a very weird pond. These fish apparently didn't subscribe to the frontest of row sitting philosophy as I was one of the last to enter the room and still had a center seat at the bow of this ship.

    Gestalt. The whole is bigger than the sum of its parts. If we step back and look at the forest we may appreciate the trees more. That last sentence is my way of paraphrasing the opening lecture with a little help from a cliché. We were presented the syllabus and an outline of what this composition course is about. I couldn't help but be a little excited* when I saw that we'd be learning how to properly use MLA style citations in our project where we construct a research paper. This is the kind of writing that I'm going to need to get better at if I have any hopes of a successful science research career. We have to write three papers over the next few months. The first being a clear, concrete and rational argument. The second is an analysis of some writing and the third is the research paper (the meat of the course).

    After about an hour of lecture, we were free to leave. I headed to the library to see if James Gleick's Chaos was still there. I had spotted it on the tour given during orientation as well as another book on Hypatia that I'm just going to have to check out later. After inquiring about the reference sources like JSTOR and other academic journals, I checked out the Gleick book and headed outside for a walk. I had some time to kill so I started writing this blog post. Do you know that feeling you get when you spend quite a bit of time writing out a good post only to run into a technical problem that undoes your hard work? Yep, that happened. I was using the Blogger app on my phone and clicked save when the screen flashed off and a tiny amount of feces escaped me. Just a tiny bit. When I went back to the app, my post said that it was stuck on saving and was still malfunctioning when I got back home later on. So I had to do most of this all over again. What was that Hemingway quote that Dr. Ancona mentioned? Ah yes "writing is rewriting".
I actually wrote that quote down on my technologically infallible paper with a pen (no thanks to you, smart computer pocket thingy!)

    On the way to my Foundations class I passed by a couple of conversing girls, one of whom said "I don't have any of my friends in my classes". Funny. I don't seem to have any friends at this entire school. At least not yet. Hopefully that will change. Tomorrow should be interesting. Calc I and Intro to CS here I come!

* - It's possible that I am easily amused.