First Day of the Semester

Today was the first day of the semester. I had Anthropological Theories of Religion at 12:30 after sleeping in ridiculously late, then lunch plus a fairly lengthy break before Geology at 3:30 and then News Lab at 5:00. This is the first time I've had any classes later than the 3-4 slot, so it was weird to be leaving class when it was dark. I came home after News, made some Onigiri with teriyaki tuna, (it wasn't very good, the canned tuna flavour overpowered the teriyaki flavor), talked to the three people who had called me during News (??? I'm never that popular!) and -poof!- it's 7:50 now and the day's over.

I can't figure out if I'm going to like the big breaks I have between classes this semester. On one hand, they allow the 'class time' to sort of take over my day. On the other, I think they'll make me more productive. In between classes I stay on campus, and there's only so much time I can spend eating, so I have time to write emails to my penpals (I was so bad about doing that last semester), do homework and readings, study Hindi, blog... really whatever other than napping, stumbling or facebooking for hours. Which is a good thing. I think.

Anthropological Theories of Religion is awesome. The classroom is really too small for the class size, but the class size is still good - around 40 I think. Enough that there can be discussions and questions asked and answered and so on. Tina's in the class with me, which is fun. The professor is Craig Palmer, who a lot of people on campus seem to love, and I think I can see why already. He's quite a good lecturer, very funny. I think the topics we're going to talk about are uniformly fascinating. One sad thing is that we're using a textbook that the professor wrote... exclusively. Apparently before this year, he had students read a lot of primary sources instead, but now that the books published, well, there's just no need. Frankly I prefer having both a textbook to bring everything together AND the primary sources. I'm thinking about asking him if I can get copies of the primary sources he used to use, which the graduate students in the class are still going to have to read. I know that's fabulously geeky but oh well. :)

Geology is... interesting. I find the subject just interesting enough to be tolerable on it's own merits. However, today was not great. The teacher is Chinese and has a very thick accent - I was able to follow it reasonably well, in conjunction with the slides and everything - but it's never really a clarity plus. But, he's also quite funny. :) The main problem is just the breakneck pace at which the class is moving. I spent a solid hour scribbling as furiously as possible as we covered chapters one and two, with basically at least a mention given to probably 10 different branches of science. We talked about geological time era's and periods, the formation of the solar system, the composition of the solar system, the formation of the earth, the sources of energy within the earth, the composition of earth, the history of the earth with the whole "Mother nature is a 46 year old woman" analogy, a really brief history of humankind including agriculture, domestication, the industrial revolution, exponential population growth, and so on, also a quick introduction to about 8 different kinds of natural disasters, their causes, examples of recent big ones, a good deal of talk about Missouri's own New Madrid fault, which natural disasters are deadliest, the trade-off between the effects of natural disasters on more and less developed countries between economic costs and lives lost... and probably a good deal more besides. Zahra's in the class with me, but we didn't manage to meet up today because I got there early and sat in the front of the room. I noticed Peter was in the class too, and my friend Jade who I met in Cross Cultural Journalism last semester. Jade came over and sat by me. Jade is awesome and funny and I loved having her in my Cross Cultural Journalism class. Having her in this class may be another matter, however. It moves so fast that any chitter chatter at all means you've missed probably two or three slides.

News? So far so good, I guess. I'm going to take the class one day at a time, otherwise I think it will scare me too much. Peeking ahead in the syllabus I see that we have to do tons of reporting, actually going out and getting interviews and so on. I frankly hate that sort of stuff - it's not my absolute favourite part of Journalism anyway, but very much improved when I feel I have some sort of legitimacy. It's going to be hard for me to bring myself to go around and ask for interviews even though it's just for a class, that I'm just a student. I don't like dragging other people into things for my grades. It makes me uncomfortable. :S Which I suppose is the point...