First Day of My Second Semester

Not being one hundred percent sure where my class was, I made sure to leave the house early enough to get to UVU's campus fifteen minutes early to scope it out.  Turns out the cold makes me walk faster and I got there with twenty minutes to spare.  It also turns out that I only needed two or three minutes to find the classroom, so I had quite a lot of time to kill.

I didn't want to be "that kid" who was sitting in class super early, so instead I sat in a nearby chair in the hallway.  The halls were pretty bustling and out of the blue I saw my friend and old coworker Dyann coming at me with her trademark grin.  It was fun to see her outside of her Cinemark uniform and we chatted it up for a little bit.  She had just gotten out of a Shakespeare class, which intrigued me, and she begged for me to take it with her.  I would have, but the class was offered as a Humanities credit and I already transferred in with a million of those.  I'm taking strictly English major courses now.

While we're on the topic of courses, my first class that morning was Critical Introduction to Literature.  Several of the students in the class were familiar faces from British Literature last semester, so that was kind of nice.  It helped me to feel a bit more at ease, since the first day of school always gets my stomach in a knot.  You'd think I'd be used to it by now.

The teacher seemed nice enough, albeit very strict.  She comes from Germany but has lived in the states for half her life now.  She has an accent which I find intriguing and a good sense of humor, but when it comes to absences and cell phones, she's a complete Nazi (which might not be the most appropriate comparison to draw given her nationality).  If a student misses more than three class periods they fail the course!  And if your phone goes off or she catches you texting, she'll confiscate your phone.

"And if it's an iPhone," she added with a wink, "lucky for me!"

The course material seems like it might be more than I can chew, so let's pray my mental capacity grows within the next few days.  We are exploring Franz Kafka's short story The Metamorphosis all semester long, but approaching it from no less than nine different literary theories such as Liberal Humanism, Structuralism and even Lesbian/Gay Criticism.  Pray for me, people.  Pray for me.

One of the girls from my Brit Lit class (and by "girl" I really mean "woman" because she's a married mother in her early thirties) sat in front of me and we made little small comments and jokes to one another during the class.  Her name is Liz and we talked about the courses we were signed up for this semester and discovered we had the next class together as well, so we decided we should be friends.  On our way to Creative Process and Imaginative Writing, we told each other our life stories which conveniently took as long to tell as two flights of stairs took to descend.

That class period was spent going over our names mostly.  Our professor pointed to one of us and asked us to say our name, major, hometown and hobbies.  As each new person was introduced, our professor would run through the names he'd already learned, committing them to memory.  The process took longer and longer as more and more students had been introduced and I was surprised that thirty minutes had gone by in that fashion.  One benefit of the long introduction is that I'm fairly confident I know the names of everyone else as well.  Usually I hate introductions like that, but it wasn't so bad this time, although I always struggle with which hometown to attach myself to.  I've moved too many times!

Anyway, in the last ten minutes the professor went over the syllabus and that's when I discovered that half of the semester will be devoted to poetry-writing.  I'm not much of a poet, so this should be interesting.  We will also be anonymously workshopping our writing quite a lot, which I feel will be very useful.  My friends, God love them, are always very positive and only ever give me words of praise... so I'm looking forward to a taste of what strangers have to say about my work!

I'm only taking two classes so my school day ended there.  My new class buddy Liz loaned me a quarter I was short so I could take the bus to Provo and go to work for nine hours.  With work, classes, commutes and homework I don't know how I'll find time for the gym or for Brian or for blogging or for my novel or for sleeping or for anything at all really.  Again, I say pray for me, people.  Please pray.