Walkin' on Sunshine

I think it’s a pretty cruel, yet subtle, torture that this university employs, putting windows in classrooms. If, by chance, your mind wanders away from the professor’s riveting lecture or conversation and you glance out the window. Blue skies, sunshine, and no St. Thomas Aquinas await you there. Unfortunately, you’re already in class.

“Come,” the sunshine seems to call to me in class. “Come outside. I have Vitamin D for you. Come play outside, or at least don’t be in class!” “Okay!” I answer, and then realize that the class is laughing and the professor is glaring. Only one logical way to keep this (hypothetical) situation from happening: don’t go to class the next time.

I’m gonna have a really hard time going to class towards the end of this semester, assuming of course that the weather ever gets and stays nice. Which is a pretty big assumption here. Today, winter coats seem like a joke, but two days ago it was snowing so badly it looked like a Head & Shoulders commercial. Of course, then I didn’t want to walk through the snow to get to class, either. I just can’t win.

Today it took everything I had to go to class, and it wasn’t even that nice outside. As soon as it’s good enough weather I’ll be able to rationalize ‘studying’ at the dunes. Yeah, studying equals, uh, sitting on sand and walking in water. Maybe as a Theo field trip: attempting to walk on water?

There are always a million things that are better to do than to go to class, and one of the great things about college is that it gives you the freedom to choose. Honestly, when you look back on your years in college, are you going to say, “Hmm. I wish I’d spent more time in class. I just can’t get enough riveting conversation about calculus.” Or “Hmm. I wish I’d avoided having no friends and that pesky Vitamin D deficiency by skipping class and going somewhere sunny with my friends.” You make the call.

Maybe spending spring break somewhere warm will get this desire out of my system. Surely after a week in the warm Florida sun I will have had enough and be quite sick of it. I will come back to school ready to buckle down and do some hardcore homework and studying. Riiight. Or, it’ll make me wonder why I chose to go to school in Hail-pour-rain-snow Indiana.

So the next time that the sunshine is calling your name, answer it. Go out and enjoy it while it’s there. Outside is always a good time. And if you take that ‘answer it’ part literally, and hold conversations with the sunshine during class, perhaps you’ll get to spend some time in a nice institution with some other people who talk to the voices in the sunshine. Either way, you get out of class.

On the Road Again...

I’ll admit it. I get bored on campus. And when boredom strikes, you can either get creative to have fun or, well, leave. And what better way to leave campus than via road trip? Off-campus is off-campus no matter how you slice it, and if you get to road trip to get there, then it’s just that much better.

I went home with one of my friends this weekend. Her classes were cancelled for Friday so she was leaving Thursday, and I was invited to come along. Consequently, all my Friday classes were, for all intents and purposes, cancelled as well. I do have a class Thursday night, so we decided to leave after that. Why? Driving five hours after a 6:15 class is better than getting up early to drive. I told my dad that logic and he didn’t grasp it. He’s not a college student and therefore doesn’t appreciate the fact that sleep is merely an option as much as I do.

I had burned a CD full of driving songs to listen to on our journey to off-campusness. I had everything from ‘Life is a Highway’ by Tom Cochrane to the ‘Da Da Da’ VW commercial song. And all of them had some vague reference to driving, no matter how distant. ‘End of the Road’ may have been a stretch, but it’s harder to fill up two whole CD’s than you might think. We borrowed a CD adapter, which was for some reason incompatible with the tape player. It kept flipping sides. Over and over again. Click. Click. Click. After some feeble attempts to remedy the situation, we resorted to the infallible fix-it: crank the volume so you can’t hear the problem.

An upside of this solution was that it forced us to sing louder to the music. No problems there. Volume is equivalent to talent as far as I am concerned, and if that is the case we are flying headfirst towards a Grammy. Celine Dion has nothing on us. Also, the louder music effectively drowned out the more-than-a-little discomforting growling noise that the engine was emitting. If you can’t hear it, it’s not there. Really.

When the clicking had finally worked us into synchronized facial tics, we went to the radio. My personal philosophy is that there’s ALWAYS something better on the radio, so I am a big fan of the scan button. A while of this told us that we were getting close to her house, mainly since we were getting three NPR stations, some country stations, and the most boy bands I’ve ever heard on a single station in my life. We sang along anyway. Practice makes perfect. Not to imply that we need it.

We got in at around 1:30 in the morning- the start of normal dorm nightlife. Nice. I swear, if this whole ‘higher education’ thing doesn’t work out for me, I’m going to trucker school. Life would be one giant road trip. And I can’t imagine a more- hey- do you hear that clicking?

3.2.2001

Time to Wake Up

I’m not really a morning person. ‘Not really’ in the sense that I despise them and tend to avoid them whenever possible through sleep. Sleep can make you oblivious to a lot of things. And that’s why I’ve decided that I like it.

Normally I hit the snooze alarm at least four times. I initially set my alarm to compensate for this and everything usually works out. Note that I said, ‘usually’. The other morning was one of those outside-of-normal-circumstances mornings: the revolt of my alarm clock. It went off at the usual time and I hit the usual snooze alarm. Repeat ten minutes later. Snooze number three, however, went terribly wrong.

I wasn’t awake enough to remember hitting the button the first time to stop the CD, but I do remember being confused as to why the music wasn’t stopping, so I know I must have at least slapped in its general direction. Yet the music continued and Mr. Tommy Roe began to sing. (Sweet Pea is a good song, but I’m not so sure of its catchiness when it won’t stop playing when I want to sleep. Most mornings I don’t hear anything beyond the CD whirring and the initial drum solo.) As I woke up more and more I pressed all the buttons I could find, but to no effect. My only goal at this point is to stop the music.

The buttons are not working. I quasi-rationalize that if the cover is open, the CD will not play and therefore the music will stop. With the press of a previously untried button, the lid slowly raised. The music stops… but the beeping begins. High pitched, shrill incessant beeping that was a hundred times worse than the crooning of some teen idol of yore. At least I could turn the music volume down on the music- there is no relief from this new torture. The beeping bores into my head and begins to quicken. When will this foolish nightmare end??

My only way to kill this obnoxious monster is to remove its power source… it must be unplugged. I jump (read: fall) out of the top bunk grumbling unprintable and unintelligible phrases at the clock, Tommy Roe, and the world in general. Reaching behind my roommate’s bed I unplug the clock- and then there’s silence. I plug it back in, hoping that it has reset itself or something and has forgotten its mission to wake me up. But when I plug it back in, the noise continues. ‘Fine,’ I think angrily, tossing the cord at the wall. ‘Stay unplugged.’ Gosh, if only I could wake up this way EVERY day!

I managed to schedule most of my classes at reasonable times. All except one. At the risk of once again bringing fire upon myself from the science department, I don’t wake up until about two hours into my chem lab. Sleep can make a lot of things go away, but not eight a.m. chem lab.

Feb 23, 2001

Math Sucks

Sometimes I wonder about those upper level classes that I will never take. For instance, math. One semester of calc one was more than enough to make up my mind never to take math again. I just don’t understand what possesses people to take calc one million or DiffEq (or even what it means). Personally, I would rather melon-ball my left eye out than do one more derivative. I didn’t need the class, and I pretty much dreaded every day.

One time, I was walking there and hoping against hope that Gellerson had burned down or been hit by a meteorite or my class had been canceled in some other way, shape or form. As I passed Kretzmann, I heard a loud beeping noise. My heart leapt. Maybe class is canceled! I thought in my calc-hatred induced mindset. That sounds like a fire alarm! My pace quickened. I didn’t mind going to calc if I would be able to turn around and go straight back home. As it turns out, the sound of a bus backing out the VUCA parking lot makes that same noise. I ended up having to go to calc anyway. Probably only to fail a quiz.

Maybe that’s the purpose of calc one: to weed out the ones who aren’t ‘math department’ material. (Me, for one.) After you get past that milestone, you’re home free. I bet calc is pretty much one big party. For all I know, anyway. Calc two: you throw confetti every time you open that math book. You party so hard, integrations by trigonometric substitution make sense. There’s music, dancing, laughing, and 3-D graphic plots of hyperbolic sine function. Or something. Calc three? Yikes. Non-stop action. Sometimes you wake up the day after class with a notebook full of equations, neat boxes around each answer, calculator calluses on your fingertips and no idea how any of it got there. DiffEq- I can’t even fathom the crazy fun that goes on in there. I hear there used to be a calc four, but no one had the stamina for a semester long party of that caliber.

As far off as my guesses might be, I’d rather be dead wrong than find out the truth. At least in the case of upper level math, ignorance is bliss. I don’t claim to have knowledge about any of those math terms beyond the names. I had one semester of calc, and I can guarantee I’ll never make a withdrawal from those short-term memory banks again. That account is closed, and I have a nice ‘S’ on my report card for my trouble. Yahoo for pass/fail courses.

Spread the... Word

I think the idea came to us the night of February 13th, 2000. It was another one of those all too familiar ‘let’s stay up far too late for our collective good and pretend to do homework but all we really do is talk in the lounge’ evening/ mornings. A flower sale had been organized through the Union or something – my memories are hazed by lack of sleep – and someone was delivering flowers to the girls on our floor.

She had come to solicit our help, and some of us, most likely those with less of a responsibility towards our homework and probably less of bitterness towards Valentine’s Day in general, offered to help. Anyway, my then future-roommate and I had decided not to have boyfriends. You know, to better concentrate on our grades. The others stayed in the lounge uh, doing homework, and eventually a campaign was born.

We noticed that the initials for Valentine’s Day were, by some crazy happenstance, also commonly recognized as the initials for something else. That’s right, VD also stands for venereal disease. Can you believe it? We couldn’t.

Also, by what can only be classified as more luck, the school we happen to go to began with a ‘V’. In the interest of alliteration (quasi-bonus of having a writing minor: the ability to throw around literary terms) the slogan was coined. VD @ VU. Perhaps it was the lack of sleep but I, at least, thought it was pretty catchy. Still do, for that matter. We wrote it on the lounge window in dry-erase marker, proclaiming our clever genius for all to see. I don’t remember much after that. Maybe I slept. More likely than not, I didn’t.

On the 14th, went about our days clad entirely in black to symblify our general disapproval of the holiday and what it stands for. Unfortunately, our VD @ VU campaign was rather short lived, for several possible reasons. First of all, perhaps not all of the campus is as familiar with the initials of STD’s (sexually transmitted diseases, in case you are a member of the aforementioned group) as we had thought.

Second, there is a slight possibility that everyone on the entire campus does not feel the same way about Valentine’s Day. Maybe this day is more than just empty symbolism to them, and they were maybe offended by our implication that Valentine’s Day is equivalent to venereal disease. This is no excuse.

Thirdly, the possibility remains that our message never made it off of the starting block. Dry-erase marker is a lot harder to read on windows than on the actual boards, and one brush (purposeful or not, we are looking into this matter) of a sleeve could have negated its existence. In any case, this year we are not taking any chances. By broadcasting our message through the popular medium of the campus paper, we ensure that the message will reach far and wide, from Urschel to the frats. VD @ VU: Spread the love.

Slip 'N Slide

Ah, the end of winter. The birds sing, the snow melts, that water refreezes during a cold snap, and more snow falls on the new ice, creating a slippery death trap the likes of which no one has ever seen. Snow is excellent camouflage.

Once, last year, I slipped right before crossing the road. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I have the feeling that the paint on the roads gets incredibly slippery when it’s wet or cold or snow-covered. I usually avoid it, so I don’t have any data on its actual slipperiness. Anyway, this time I didn’t and one leg went out behind me and I fell onto one knee. Some people from my floor came over and asked me if I was all right, and I covered as gracefully as I could. “Yeah, I’m fine… I just… thought I’d pray for a safe crosswalk experience. I try to avoid hit and runs whenever I can… Amen.” Hey, you never know. This is a Christian campus.

Problems arise when no one is nearby, and I can’t be sure if anyone saw me or not. Last year (yeah, yeah- it was a bad year for walking in snow) I was crossing that field behind the VUCA on one of the student-made skating-rinks…er, sidewalks of packed snow. No one had decided to venture across with me, and about halfway through I slipped and fell right to the ground.

I stood up as quickly as possible and looked around accusatorily. No audible laughter, but everyone was quite a distance away. What could I do? Yell, “Uh, it’s slippery here. That’s, uh, why I fell, you know- not because I’m a klutz. So, be warned.”? If they hadn’t seen that would only make matters worse. Bow, taking credit for my marvelous wipe out? The sudden shift in my center of gravity might only cause me to slip to the ground again. I settled for lowering my head and slowly scuttling the rest of the way across the field. And never taking that ‘sidewalk’ again.

Mainly by walking like an arthritic penguin whenever the terrain is questionable (and even when it’s not… it’s a pretty fun way to walk) I have managed not to fall down yet this winter. A few slips are expected in the middle of the winter, even by those who are used to wading through snow to get places. I’ve personally witnessed more than a few people taken out by ice patches randomly scattered through campus. And after stifling my initial laughter I walk on, once again reminded of my traction-dependent vertical status.

Let’s face it, people falling down are funny. Have you ever seen the kid wipe out on his bike in the movie “While You Were Sleeping”? If not, the cost of renting it is completely worth that one scene. Heck, come over to my room and I’ll watch it with you for free, probably more than once. As long as I don’t have to go outside and brave the campus-wide ice slick. I have my pride.