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.
Thursday, March 08, 2001
Friday, March 02, 2001
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
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
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