One semester down, seven to go...

Okay, I have once again fallen into that horrible state of laziness-induced blog aversion, and that is not good. Really, I'm sorry. My excuse is that writing has pretty much taken over my life already, and this blog seems to be the easiest outlet of mine to neglect. In 19 days back at school, by my count I've written four newspaper articles, two magazine articles, and two English essays. I don't feel like doing the math exactly, but I'm guessing it's about 500 words a day.

However, I feel obligated to inform the world at large about every last minute detail of my life, and there's no better way to do that than blogging. So without further ado...

I finally have my classes figured out for this semester. It was quite a struggle, but in the end everything worked out for the best. My little adventure began on the last day before classes, Wednesday the 18th. I bought four books for my music history class, The History of Punk Rock, and was really excited about how interesting they looked. Two hours later, I realized that my econ recitation section was scheduled for the exact same time. Seeing as how there's a chance I might end up majoring in economics, it was kinda obvious how that conflict had to be resolved. Drop number one.

The first day of classes is Thursday the 19th, and my day begins at 1:30 in Judicial Politics. The professor seems really dry, he seems to know more about lawyer jokes than law itself, and the entire class is one big PowerPoint show. Being the PowerPointophobe that I am, I begin to have my doubts about the class. I have a more important polisci course already on my schedule (Intro to Comparative Politics), so I figure that this class is pretty expendable. Drop number two.

Later that day, I have some free time in between classes, and I spend it browsing the Tufts website. I realize that Intro to Comparative Politics, my 6:00 class that evening, isn't really required for polisci majors, since you only need to take two of the four core classes to get a degree. So I go, with the mindset of "this class better be really good, because I don't really feel like taking it." And... the class wasn't that good, so I didn't feel like taking it. Again, I found the professor really dull -- she was the kind of person who would talk for ten minutes to give you the knowledge that most teachers could convey in thirty seconds. Drop number three.

That weekend, I see that a bunch of my friends are reading Descartes, Hobbes and Smith, and they're all raving about how cool their new Western Political Thought class is. I decide to give it a try, and I show up to a class on Tuesday the 24th. I immediately hand the professor an add form after class, and just like that, my four courses are set. And by "just like that," I of course mean "after a week of trying to find my advisor who wouldn't answer my emails and has never given me her phone number, and eventually bumping into her in a hallway and getting her to sign my form approximately 22 hours before the deadline to add classes." Anyway...

Western Political Thought is awesome. The professor may be clincically insane, but I love him for it. He is extremely loud and vulgar, but at the same time he really knows his stuff. Every lecture consists of him starting out with two huge chalkboards covered in notes, and over the course of the class circling, crossing out, and drawing various lines and squiggles across everything he's written. After a 75-minute class, his room looks like a three-year-old's been drawing on the walls, and yet somehow the guy has managed to make the words of an ancient philosopher make sense to an audience of 200 once-confused college students. It's hard to put the weirdness of this man into words without the aid of at least a camera. But trust me, he's crazy.

Principles of Economics started out interesting, but now I'm not so sure. The very first lecture of the semester began with the professor, an short, old Pakistani man with a slight lisp, simply walking up to the board and writing the word "happiness." He then spent the next hour drawing a diagram, branching out from the word happiness, that connected all of the economic terms that we would learn over the course of the semester into one giant web. His point was that mankind's search for happiness in life was all the product of a giant, complex series of economic processes. It seemed deep and philosophical and interesting, but then he spent the next class drawing a bunch of boring charts and graphs and making us take notes. Oh well... at least he was interesting for a day.

I don't regret taking the class -- I'm learning some really important concepts here -- but at the same time I wish he could have kept the interestingness factor as high as it was on that first day.

Astronomy is borrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrring. I'm hoping it will start to get interesting later on, and I think my hopes are reasonable since the textbook is full of fascinating material, but for some reason our professor avoids the good stuff and only teaches us the mind-numbingly easy things that we already know. We spent 45 minutes learning exponents (ten squared is a hundred... really, I swear, it is... I've studied this stuff in college!) and then 45 more learning SI units for measurement. I wanted to fall asleep, but I couldn't, because there wasn't enough leg room where I was sitting in the auditorium so I wasn't comfortable. So I just sat there, slowly beginning to hate life.

Intermediate Journalism is going to be a great class. The professor is a former correspondent with the Globe, so he has some good experience, and he is going to give us in-depth instruction on all different kinds of newspaper and magazine writing, working on everything from news to features to op-ed pieces to columns. Starting next week, he's going to start each student on his/her own beat, meaning we'll all get a topic to focus on all semester. I'm thinking of covering the Massachusetts governor's race for the next few months, seeing as how the election's in November and there's a close race going on right now for the Democratic nomination.

Anyway, I spent the week before last working out all my scheduling issues, but this past week has been, for a few reasons, a lot more fun.

I spent Monday night going to a guest lecture entitled "Religion vs. Morality," by a guy I'd never heard of, named Andrew Bernstein. I was supposed to write about an on-campus event for my first journalism project, and I saw a poster for this talk that looked interesting, so I thought I'd write about it. I was expecting some sort of atheist activist who railed against the Christian right, and I thought it would be interesting. Instead, I ended up listening to a guy first talk about how religion was inherently flawed, but then somehow go on to explain that he had voted for Bush twice, and had no regrets. But then, he continued, and he revealed that he actually hated Bush too, just slightly less than he did Kerry or Gore. The man was half atheist, half neoconservative propagandist, and 100% insane. Among his claims:

-Buddhism wasn't a real religion
-Bush let Hurricane Katrina turn the U.S. into "a welfare state"
-The war in Iraq isn't a war -- if it had been, it would be over by now
-If he were elected president, he'd have been nuking Iran first thing in the morning on September 12th
-The Democratic Party could be more aptly described as the "Party of Treason"

I could go on, but it makes me sick.

Tuesday night was less aggravating and a lot more fun... I was in the front row at the Avalon for a Less Than Jake concert. I managed to get find my way to the front of the crowd, and was on the rail at the foot of the stage when LTJ came on. All of their songs, even the ones that seem kind of annoying on a CD, are amazingly fun to hear live. Almost a week later, I still have "The Science of Selling Yourself Short" stuck in my head. And at the end of the show, the bassist (Roger Manganelli, my new hero) threw his setlist and his pick into the crowd. I caught the former and my roommate grabbed the latter, and we now proudly have both on display in our room.

Wednesday night there was a guest lecture on campus from two Red Sox beat reporters, Chris Snow of the Globe and Sean McAdam of the Providence Journal. I didn't get to write the Daily article about the talk because technically I was one of the people organizing it (I say "technically" because I didn't really do much of anything), but if you want you can read the article anyway. Most of the stuff they talked about wasn't that interesting to me, because I've already read pretty much all their articles, but it was fun when they got a question about the behind-the-scenes aspects of their jobs. (For example, neither of them is that fond of Keith Foulke -- he's an obnoxious, spiteful guy who, in his own words, "doesn't like baseball all that much.")

So that's about all the interesting events of my life that I feel like sharing, so I suppose I'll go on to talking about issues in the world at large. Namely...

-Can someone explain to me what on earth John Kerry was thinking when he tried to block the Alito vote? He must have known the move didn't have a chance in hell of working, and as if voters didn't already think he was too liberal, he's only making that problem worse. It makes no sense to me.

-I'm really psyched about Crash getting six Oscar nominations. I was worried for a while that it was going to get shafted, but it ended up in the running for several big awards, including best picture. I wouldn't be surprised to see the movie coming up empty on five of the six, but if Paul Haggis doesn't win for best original screenplay, I will lose all faith in humanity.

-I'm just about ready to give up on making football predictions. I admit it... I suck. Gun to my head, if I have to pick a winner in the Super Bowl tomorrow night, I say Seahawks by three. But I'm always wrong. I hope the Steelers win -- it would be great for Bettis' legacy -- but I don't think it'll happen.

Last but not least, a bunch of different people have been sending me random articles about things, so I thought I'd share a few opinions on some things I've read online recently. Like these...

-This is one of the coolest things I've ever read. When the Rolling Stones want you to get traded, you just know it's destined to happen.

-This, however, is quite possibly the worst article in the history of journalism. Ninety percent of this article's readers probably had no idea how big the blogging fad had become among teenagers; in my opinion, this means that the authors' purpose should be to inform readers about this new trend in a balanced manner. Instead, you get a series of horror stories followed by a couple sentences' worth of lip service to the opposing viewpoint. Honestly, this is like writing about the airplane, opening with a detailed account of 9/11, and then mentioning the Wright brothers once in the conclusion. It's sad.

-This is a really well-written and well-reasoned discussion of our nation's next president. I'd highly recommend reading it -- my only complaint is that it's the same thing I was saying a year ago. But let's face it, this Eleanor Clift character isn't quite me... she's just a lowly Newsweek columnist.

-This is worth a chuckle, if nothing else. It's horribly written and only three paragraphs long, but I enjoyed the story.

-Okay, this isn't an article, but it is a link to the greatest product ever created.

-This isn't an article either, but it's downright hilarious. The only downside to seeing it is that it makes you wish the movie actually existed so you could see the whole thing. It would be a masterpiece, no doubt.

I'm sure there are more random tidbits of thought that I should be sharing with you right now, but alas, I can't think of them. And since it's extremely late and I need sleep, I think I'll end here. Tomorrow's a long day of studying econ, astronomy, and Adam Smith, followed by an evening of watching my football predictions not come true. (And then writing about it for the Observer.)

Life is just peachy.