Saturday, February 11, 2006

surviving with class

So I am clinging to the life raft known as “the weekend.” Ah, a beautiful thing. These first two weeks of the spring semester have been crazy. Deeply good, but insane nonetheless. I really, really shouldn’t be surprised by this. My normal pattern at the start of semesters is a week of “syllabus shock,” when every assignment listed on each of the syllabi feels like it’s due, oh, tomorrow. And so I either try to do everything right now (my weekend to-do list last week was ninety-seven items long. I’m not kidding. Have I mentioned that I have a problem with proportion?) or I freeze up and buy magazines and do nothing (hence my current obsession with Gourmet).

This semester, though, syllabus shock set in one week later than usual. So I floated through Week One thinking “Heyyy, this isn’t so bad. I’ll be able to keep it all together this semester—I have finally figured this balance thing out.” Enter Week Two. Three upper-level English classes, an internship, side projects related to the internship, a copyediting correspondence course, and a part-time job… they add up. Plus unimportant little details, like unburying my desk or washing the dishes. (Major bonus points go out to my two roommates: Vonny and Kim. They did not threaten or abuse me (verbally or otherwise) for not doing my dishes for a week.)

Last weekend, we had a bed fiasco, too. Kim and I have been trying to bunk our beds, but we found out—the hard way—that bunk beds in the apartments are not interchangeable. (Unlike the ones in the dorms.) You can’t flip a bottom bunk over and have it become the top bunk. It just doesn’t work. (The hard way, if you’re curious, is taking the bed apart, flipping it over, realigning it, putting it together again, heaving it on top of the other bed, trying to get it to fit on all the metal pegs, trying to get it back off the poorly-fitting pegs, setting it back down, and taking it apart again. This might take awhile. And you might be sweaty by the end.) That was last Saturday, and after admitting defeat, I just left my bed down. Various head and foot boards from two different beds are strewn around our room, and I’m sleeping on the metal springs and a mattress about three inches off the floor. (Incidentally, the bed makes a great trampoline. Not that I’ve tried it. I just have a hunch.)

Today, I’m hoping, is the Day of the Bed. Maybe, oh maybe, we can get the right head/foot board combination and get our room to rights. It’s a little crazy otherwise. (Though kinda fun to sleep at floor-level.)

Compared to bed-engineering, classes are easy. (Well…) Okay, not easy. But they really have been interesting. We’re critiquing fiction pieces on setting and characterization right now in Creative Fiction Writing, and our first short story is due on Wednesday. (Gulp.) In History of the English Language, we’re looking at phonetics and proto-indo-european languages. (Or the languages that sprung out of proto-indo-european. However that works.) Senior Seminar has been so good—it meets once a week for three hours, which means we can have good, thorough discussions. That’s the sum-up class for everything we’ve learned at Calvin and everything we’ve experienced as English majors. As our professor said the first day, we’re looking behind and we’re looking ahead. Everyone in that class is graduating in May, so we’re all at various stages of panic about what happens after May 20.

So that’s what’s going on! It all looks so tame written out, doesn’t it? Nice and contained. (Don’t be fooled: it’ll be crazy for a while.)—jl

Posted by Jenn Langefeld on 02/11 at 10:20 AM
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