Tuesday, January 20, 2004
Back in my element, yo
Ah, classes. It's weird, really - it seems like Madisonian is my ground state, but I've never blogged from the UW before. I started this thing at Middlebury, and then it was off to St. Petersburg, and only now am I home. I'm not really sure how to make this interesting, acutally. I think I might have to start making stuff up. But not today. Everything today will be true, okay?

Heading to my first class in Vilas Hall was weirdly reminsicient of returning to the womb, in the sense that the building is dimly lit, moist, overheated, smells nasty, and feels like home. (Icky similie of the day here, folks.) Since I'm supposedly graduating with a journalism degree this spring, I actually have to take some journalism classes this semester, and this was the first one of the day: Creative Non-Fiction Writing. Based on the course title, as could most things, this could turn out either to suck harder than a black hole or be absolutely awesome. After meeting the professor, I am still clueless as to which way this class is gonna go. I would mock the prof's slightly boastful introduction of herself, but the fact of the matter is, once you've won a Pulitzer, you can be as self-congratulatory as you want, and she has achieved the Big P. (She also wrote a book about those wire monkey mammas that are in every introductory psych textbook, making her automatically awesome. Wire monkey mammas!) Anyway, Prof Pulitzer avowed that she was going to expect professional level work, strict but fair, build the portfolio, etc. etc. skill set. We'll see how this goes. The only real problem I foresee with this class is that I'm really damn lazy, and she seems like the type who might actually call me on it.

Displaying my laziness, I took the bus to my next class --Soviet Literature -- even though it's only halfway across campus. I am not a Soviet Superwoman, people. Anyway, I've had the professor before, and she's just cool. She's one of like 4 professors I've had during my academic career who not only thinks her topic is interesting, but teaches it in such a way that her students think it's interesting, too. She also has a way of staring at people like they are some particularly freakish type of insect when they're saying something stupid, which cracks me up. First thing off, she made us go around the room and tell what our massive research paper was going to be about, as though we'd a)known there was going to be a massive research paper and b)would have prepared a working bibliography and thesis statement for the first day of class. It was fun to watch people suavely making stuff up about their interest in Socialist Realism or Mayakovsky or Perestroika. I personally blathered some total BS about Lenin's strategic use of the press. There were also those poor souls who are either less good at confabulating or, like normal human beings, don't know anything about Soviet literature, and were therefore unsuccessful in their attempts to smokescreen. I mean, the professor had to know we were all making shit up, but I think that was the point of the exercise. She's a tricky woman, yo.

Class number three: Mass Media in Developing Nations. I dunno, guys. On the one hand, the prof religiously treated the word "media" as a plural (i.e. "the media are Ted Turner's lapdogs" instead of "the media is Ted Turner's lapdog"), but on the other hand, she actually said, "the reason is because..." I think we all know how I feel about the phrase "the reason is because." It's a bad phrase. You know why? The reason is because it grates on my very soul. She also had our textbooks ordered at some damn place called "Rainbow Books" or something instead of the U. Bookstore like normal, which means they'll be even more expensive, off in the middle of nowhere, and were not on the university's textbooks listings, so we couldn't even preorder them. Yeah, support local business and all, but preferably not in a way that inconveniences everyone in your class, you know? It does not bode well for the course.

Enough whinging. Sleep sleep sleep time. After all...yay! I have school tomorrow!
- declared by Liusia @ 10:15 PM