--Samuel Johnson

Aren't vicious circles fun?

Say, for example, that you wrote a journal entry immediately after the Super Bowl, talking about the ads from that game. Say that you had the entry 90% done, but went to sleep without putting the finishing touches on it.

Say that you decided to put it up together with the following entry, which would surely come shortly, especially as the new semester was starting the following day, and there would surely be plenty to write about.

Say that there did, indeed, turn out to be plenty to write about. But say that you also had to get back into writing your weekly column for the school paper, and you were busy actually going to school, and you still hadn't cleaned your apartment, but you still expected to get back to your journal shortly, at which point you'd upload several entries and clear away the backlog.

Say that the backlog kept building up, to the point where you shuddered every time you even considered tackling it. Which you were avoiding anyway because if you were writing anything, it really ought to be that long-overdue provocative language project, your fate from which was in limbo as you hadn't yet stopped by the office of the professor advising you on that.

If you say all that, you'll be presenting a reasonable facsimile of my situation over the past couple of weeks.

Otherwise... I'm a bit torn. I could do another one of those mega-catch-up entries, but it seems like a waste. There's plenty to write about, and I'd rather do it right. I do, at least, have a list of topics to work with. It's got eighteen items, of which I've just checked off one ("Super Bowl Ads"), and one of them -- "2 wks. of classes" -- is an umbrella item covering quite a bit of territory.

Well, let me give an overview of those classes, at least. I can get to the rest of the stuff in my life in later entries.

Of the four classes I'm taking, two fill my final requirements. "Fitness through Diet, Nutrition, and Exercise" (or something like that) fulfills my physical education requirement, and "Introduction to Political Science" fulfills my last social sciences requirement. The former is on Thursday evenings, 4:30-7:20; the latter is Monday nights, 6:30-9:20.

The next course settled on was "Public Speaking," Wednesday nights, 6:30-9:20. The selection of this course just goes to show that I'm a bit of a masochist. It's also one of my brighter moves, if a slightly insane one. But given that I'm hoping to go on to grad school and do some teaching, I figure this could be a very valuable course to take. Plus there's the whole speech therapy reinforcement angle.

Speaking of speech therapy, mine's on Thursday afternoons this semester, 3:00-4:00. And my speech therapist is enthusiastic about the Public Speaking course, so that much is good.

Three down, one to go. You'll note that my schedule at this point had one course apiece on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday. The question was where to put the last one.

Tuesday night was out, as Tuesday night had Buffy and Angel, and those two shows were indelibly written on my schedule before anything else got put down. The catch was that while nighttime courses usually take place once a week (my preferred format), afternoon courses usually meet twice, which would probably necessitate my taking two classes on the same day at least once a week. Which I've learned through experience generally leads to disaster.

It turned out, however, that there was an exception. "Introduction to Art," Tuesday afternoons, 2:00-4:50. This became a contender mostly because it had the absolute best time slot of what turned out to be three options, giving me my optimal one class a day. It also had the advantages of being a relatively easy course, and one that I could use, having had no education at all in art appreciation.

It's not the course I chose, though.

The next option was an advanced Honors course in Comparative Literature, looking at gender and sexuality in literature. Not open to the general public, but I was invited to join if I so desired. Monday and Wednesday afternoons. And I was sorely tempted, as, based on the description, the course was right up my alley.

I ended up deciding against that, too, though. While it did, indeed, seem to be up my alley, it also seemed like an indulgence on my part. It wasn't a course I needed, it was in an area I've looked at before and expect to look at in greater depth in grad school. And it would be a lot of work, and that work would lead to lots of simultaneous deadlines on Mondays and Wednesdays. I decided that my time and energy would be better spent elsewhere.

Which leads me to the course I ended up going with. "Introduction to Language," Mondays and Wednesdays, 4:30-5:50. The simultaneous deadline thing is still there, but mitigated by the fact that Linguistics 101 is an easier course. It's also a very useful one. I've been doing work in linguistics, but as an autodidact; I've picked up bits and pieces as necessary when researching various issues, but I've never had any formal training in the field. Given that I expect my future work to continue to have a linguistic component, it seemed a good idea to go back to Square One for a bit.

The silver lining in the Monday/Wednesday conflict is that it leaves me with Tuesdays entirely free. And I've decided to leave it that way, scheduling my job at the English Department for Mondays and Wednesdays, 1:00-4:00. Free days can be nice.

Going in the order that I have them, just to confuse matters...

"Introduction to Linguistics" should be just fine. I hit it off with the professor right off the bat, the textbook is pretty well written (its comments about prescriptive grammarians annoyed me, but let that pass), and, basically, I'm not expecting any trouble here, unless trouble comes from overconfidence on my part. One must always be vigilant against Tortoise And The Hare Syndrome, and that hasn't always been my strong point.

"Introduction to Political Science" should be okay. I rather like the teacher's perspective, and if much of what's being talked about is old news... well, whaddya expect, taking an introductory course as a graduating senior?

"Public Speaking"... I have one classmate I've taken an immediate and extreme disliking to. I'm also getting the impression that the tests (roughly half our grade, with the other half coming from our speaking) will have more to do with remembering just which key phrases the textbook uses, rather than how well we understand the material covered. I find this distressing, but the class should otherwise be okay.

In the second class period, I began keeping a record of some of the aforementioned classmate's pearls of wisdom in the margin of my notes. I fear I am regressing to high school.

"Fitness through Diet, Nutrition, and Exercise"... I don't especially want to know how my body works, thank you very much. I do like the professor; that's the bright side. I haven't spoken to him, but then, this is far and away the largest class I've ever been in, with a bit over 110 students. This dwarfs the second-largest class I've ever been in, which I think is my linguistics class this semester, which has just over 60 students. Usually, a large class at my college would have about 30 students.

The interesting and unsettling thing is that in both of my class sessions in the fitness class so far, I've lost some of the motor control in my right hand, making it hard to write, so I've kinda been using both hands to guide the pen. I'm not sure if this is because I've been grossed out, or because of the lousy desks we have in that auditorium, or perhaps if it's related to my being in the back row, looking way down below to where the teacher is, about a story beneath me. I'm betting on one of the first two factors.

This means that I have my political science class during Buffy and Angel.

Naturally, being a mature student, I am able to weigh the factors carefully, taking into account the relative importance of my class versus a couple of television shows. And I have done so, reaching the obvious conclusion, the conclusion that any reasonable person in my situation would make, I think. I'm cutting class.

I considered coming in for the first hour, but the professor in question takes attendance all the way at the end. And I don't think packing out early would exactly endear me to him. Better to skip it entirely.

The real question is whether I can write about this in the college paper. I'm tempted to, but I mentioned my column to the professor, who said he'll be sure to read it regularly this semester, so that'd probably be a bad idea. Oh, well.