Reconsidering English

Today was a rough day, and it has not yet ended.  It seems simply to be the continuation of the day before; I have not had a proper sleep, but thankfully, the day has been kinder to me than I have anticipated about it.  I did not bonk and fall asleep in the computer science as I did on Tuesday, and while I did become fidgety during work—oh god, I can’t believe she wanted to pay for the five sandwiches separately in the middle of a lunch rush—I have yet to really fall asleep and take a nap.  I am still quite tired, but not enough to keep my head swerving and my mind hazy.  I am okay.

I did skip the CIS class though.  I feel bad about it.

And something happened right after the English class that I was seriously considering to drop.  Right after class ended, I went around to check out the library that a reading was going to be in; ZZ Packer is coming to my college, and my English instructor is supposedly having a dinner with her… I wonder if that was why he wanted the students to come to the reading as well?  Of course, we also have read her book as an assignment, but that, too, could have been the effect of her reading later tonight.

But I digress.  Carrying on…

The library was surprisingly close; it was at the same floor as the classroom that I was in, which the English department also calls home.  It was at the opposite end of the same corridor as where my classroom (which also happens to be the seminar room… why do I get the feeling that the department is severely underfunded and underrepresented?), revealing the rows of books through its open door.  Closer inspection of the room revealed the sign of the library, indicating that this indeed is the place that I should be later in the evening.  I peered through the door with a peek, my feet outside the library (which is frankly more like a room) but my head inside.

Guess who I saw?  My former instructor.

He taught my creative writing class about a year ago, when I was going through the similar motion of trying out different classes for choosing my major.  Of course, it led me to nowhere, but I at least passed the class with flying colors, grade-wise anyway.  Have I done that good of a work?  I think to this day, wondering if it was through merit or through pity that I received an A in the class.  Such thought eventually led to the death of my confidence in skills of the creative writing, which is a part of what led me here, career in college-wise.

I thought, for the longest time, he hated me.

I was kind of a dick in that class.  Discussion classes that do not seek actual knowledge but speculations, such as English classes that do not teach rules, turn me into thus, or so I have realized.  I am sure I looked down on majority of the people in the class.  Here is what I have explained to my career advisor concerning the class:  “it fills me up with the feeling both of alienation and superiority.”  I am not sure where the latter comes from, actually.  I am quite terrible at thinking about the characters.  While I can easily see what people are talking about when they point out the characters’ thoughts and motivations, it is not so easy until it is pointed out, and I am hardly the one that notices things first.  Nonetheless, during that creative writing class, I basically tore the short stories by the fellow students apart like a paper machete wielded by a bloodthirsty librarian.  Some did survive, but that was more through skills in the grammatical department than the story one.  Funny thing is, though, that I even tore my own story apart, presumably irreparable.  I have yet to touch the story again, even after nearly a year of leaving it be.

But it was all right.

We talked for a bit, both of us trying to fill in the bouts of awkward silences.  I think it worked, but I cannot be sure.  I get the feeling that while I did not leave a lasting impression, he did recognize my face, and that was good enough.  After a bit of chit-chat, I thought over the decision to drop the class right after this class.

I am going to wait.

I will wait it out and toil through the class again.  I may not like it, but I would like to know if there is more of what this class has to offer than what I have experienced so far in it, which is rather lackluster.  I have until the end of February, and I will decide if I want to withdraw by then.  Yes, it means I have not changed my mind, but no, I have not shoved the very idea of sticking with English and creative writing in general out of the door, but only just.  The idea still hangs by the thread.

Hopefully I will make a right decision soon.

(I may add a few pictures later.)

Now, pictures from reading:

The reading was pretty fun.  She actually sung some Brownie songs!

Oh how I sleep

Today has been a day-long endeavor against sleep.  It started at the metro, where I could not take a much-needed nap during the thirty-minute ride to the downtown (and the campus).  The first class was all right; the room was cool enough and the lecture went fast enough.  The second lecture that I went to, though, oh… it was disastrous.  Head bobbed all throughout the hour that I was in the classroom.  After that, I went to the library—not to look for a book, not to study, but only to take a catnap for a few minutes.  It worked, but only just; the dream I had during the short period of time was lucid and trippy and had me floating across the library in my mind.

The overwhelming lethargy bordering on narcolepsy subsided once I started working, though.  It was okay, until I took the metro back home.  After that, it was the race to catch every last minute of idling moment and contribute it to the art of napping.  It is not pretty; nobody said it was.  If you do not require as much resting period or sleep as me, I highly discourage this behavior.  Doing this cost me my freelance gig, unfortunately.

I did stay up enough in the evening, though, to get a nominal amount of work done… I probably did not do enough studying, which will undoubtedly result in me crashing through the homework and reading assignment tomorrow.  Joy.

By the way, it feels awkward to go to a library of a different college and try to borrow a book… and fail.

Thank god I do not have to wake up at 6:30 tomorrow.

Writing shorter

Among the things that I have learned through the years is that people generally do not want to read long posts.  I am not sure where the ideal word count lies, but it is definitely shorter than how much i used to write while I was in high school newspaper—around 500-600 words in length.  While plenty of people are capable of writing such length of pieces (in fact, much of college papers tend to run much longer than that), I have learned that longer blog posts generally get the “tl,dr;” treatment:  the sheer volume of words that fill the monitor becomes so overwhelming that people skim over the words at best, and at worst, the post is simply scroll down to the end, not a single word read and entire thoughts ignored.

Sure, chances are the post is filled with angst-filled rambles that make little sense, but think of how many quality reading materials people has given up on.  This phenomenon is rather funny, too, as it corresponds with the society that is endowed with ever-shortening attention span.  That explains a lot of the newer applications that have recently gained popularity on the Internet—how about Twitter, or maybe Stumbleupon?

With that in mind, I will try to trim my posts as much as I can.  It will not be all that hard; much of what I have to do is to get rid of excess words.  Maybe Hemingway was on to something with his writing style.

And this is what pulls me close

Every now and then I find something that gets my attention, something I wish I could do, and something that I could actually (probably) do.  I am looking at the robot that I have gotten last week.  There are many like it, but this one is mine… for now.

No, I cannot say that I find it cute.  It looks like a Roomba prototype without the vacuuming apparatus and with double-A batteries as source of power.  I have a feeling that it will suck through them like Game Gear on a holiday.

So far, I can’t do anything with it.  I have connected it to the computer using Bluetooth module that came with it… and as a test, I used the included joyStick software to move it around (or roll it around, if it were).  It is growing on me, though.  Yes, I thought about actually buying it and tinker with it on my own, but no, I am not going to do that; I will try my hand on the iRobot Create if computer science tickles my fancy.

And tickle my fancy it does.  Consider if I went to, say, a field in English.  I do not mind teaching English, although I sometimes have erratic accents that pop out, unwarranted, as though the shackle that chained it behind the oh-so-practiced “American” accent has been torn off by the forces unknown.  I probably know more about grammar and spelling and word usage than your average American.  I, however, am not terribly interested in it; I just wanted to write, and be a novelist of sort that will leave my name in a hardcover book.  It’s a lovely idea, but I do not think I participate enough during English classes to do well in it.  It is just a hunch, of course… I am pretty sure the last instructor I had for creative writing class was not too fond of me.  Just a hunch.

But the CIS department in my college is more highly regarded than the CS one.  What am I to do?  Do I toil through the business classes for rudimentary knowledge of coding and hardly an algorithm?  Or do I jump into the world filled to the brim with math, choking under the weight of integrals and theoretical numbers?

I think I will need to talk to my advisor about this.

But I hope that things will turn out to be all right, and it will serve me well in my lifetime… and I pray that the things I learned will not be turned to naught.

The Stranger

I was listening to the “Dead Flag Blues” by Godspeed You! Black Emperor earlier in the evening. It is one of my favorite songs—dark, brooding narrative delivered over echoic tunes in the background. Bored, I googled the name of the song, and some videos—fan-made music videos, as the band did not seem to have made any music videos at all—were on YouTube.

One of the videos likened the song to that of the recollection of 9/11. While the album was initially released back in 1997, the words do resonate as such:

The video by itself was insightful (as using the song for purposes unintended by the original artists sometimes is), if a little lacking in finesse. It also reminded me of the time back in high school when it happened.

The class started at eight, and I never fared well in the first period, so I could have dozed off... Not very interesting. I cannot even remember the second period. By third period, though, things got… unusual. Students in my class turned on the TV to catch the ever-elusive airwaves, which were never meant to be received on the school ground, and teacher did nothing to stop them. The class went by and we did not learn a thing.

The trend continued in all the classes I went to afterward. I did see the glimpse of the building, and while I did ask people around, I did not notice the significance of the event. Some kind of building fell… as an accident... was the extent of the info I got.

When I went home, I watched the television—again, same stuff, but things becoming much clearer—beginning with the reception. CNN was playing in place of TBS (we do not have cable at home), replaying the footage of the incident over and over again. The tower on fire, another being struck by a jetliner… it was so surreal, I found it to be almost comical. Did that just happen? Did the airplane just bring down the huge, brutalist structure? I realized that it was a big deal, though, only after realizing that the World Trade Center was an iconic part of the New York skyline. The smoke fuming from the what is later known as Ground Zero for days on end helped with this.

But I could not help but feel apathy out of this. Even after Taliban’s claim of deed and subsequent invasion of Afghanistan, it felt like someone else’s problem, with me uninvolved--

--and that would be right. I am, in fact, uninvolved. I have no family in New York. While I stopped by the City earlier that year (or maybe a year before), I could not feel much connection with the city. I have not ridden their subway, nor stopped by to eat a hot dog from a stand. All I remember from the ascent to the Empire State Building is the Chrysler Building that stood right before it. I do not even have much connection with the city in which I live and grew up in, so caring for the Big Apple, the ever-imposing city portrayed as Gotham and just about as distant, was—and still is—hard to do.

Call it an apathy of the stranger, much like the protagonist in the novel by Albert Camus.

That gets me thinking. Would I have to make myself care for the things happening around me, if I were to feel something out of it at all? Did I have to decide, for one, whether or not to care for a monumental event like 9/11? I am having trouble even to give a damn about much of the things around me, and to some extent, myself. It is a surprise that I care enough to write here, right now.

So what could make me care about what is around me? My thoughts—or lack thereof—must have led me to this road, the road with failures in school, lack of friends, and general dissatisfaction of life. I should be caring more, but it is not happening…

Do you get me?

What should I care, how should I care, why should I care?

It is probably among the many things that I need the answer for to keep me going forward.

You can’t stop the thieves

Went to Office Depot to pick up some supplies.

While perusing the binders section, I saw this:

The economy is only going to get worse from now.

We will probably see more of these in the foreseeable future.

Unfortunately.

Second week and nothing

So far, I appear to have failed.

Before I go any further about what I am talking about, let me elaborate about what I wanted to do once the school was in session.  I wanted to, first of all, do everything right.  I wanted to talk to the instructors, make acquaintances, and generally get off to a good start.

So far, though, it does not seem that I am doing a good job.  First few days were all right:  I woke up generally early enough, read ahead on much of the things that I had to read, and did all my assignments.  In the academic side, it was all right.

Not so much on the social front, though.  I do not think I even tried to strike a conversation with others.  It could be because I just get into the class in time and not early, and I take off right after the class is over—I do not have much questions for the instructors, and I have a job to go to in the morning so I cannot stick around for long.  And the nature of the job—taking customers’ orders and possibly making small talks—basically saps away all of my need for socialization outside it.  In fact, outside work, I can just do things and not say a thing for rest of the day.

It may be all right if I were to simply go about on my day.  But it is not that simple, is it?  I need to make friends; talking to the same people every day does not cut it.  Having a girlfriend—or rather, a long-distance transpacific relationship is not helping, either.  When was the last time I hugged someone?  I want some physical contact, someone that can keep me company, even though I may not say all that much things.  I will talk to strangers if I were inclined to, but all I go are library and work and classes, so it crimps a lot of options, I think.

Or maybe I just think that, and I could talk to anyone I want to.  Who knows.

I was hoping that I will be better off this semester.  I still do, although the hope is fading somewhat.

College, part two

One of the classes that I have the most mixed feelings about is the English one that I have added on at near the last minute. I have added the class soon after the semester began; my university gives the students a week—from Monday to Friday—at the beginning of the semester to muck around the class schedule. It is different from auditing: if you were to audit a class, you would simply sit around the class, taking lectures but not get graded by it. Although I have stayed at the university for four years, I have yet to take advantage of things that it has to offer, such as auditing. I wonder if things would have been better if I took advantage of auditing and sat around the classes that I was interested in? It is probably not too late to do so now, although it is but a missed chance that I would have to live with, as I could not take advantage of it sooner.

The class I put myself into—and the one that I cannot get out of now as I have missed the last drop date (which was yesterday)—is called “Modern Fiction Craft.” I have less of an idea of what the class is about now than what I have thought it was going to be like before I stepped into the classroom (or rather, as I found out when I looked for the classroom, a seminar room with desks all connected and everyone facing the center of the room). My initial before-in-classroom thought was that the class would learn about the techniques learned from the books and stories and apply them to our own writings. The syllabus that I have received some thirty minutes after a normal class would receive tells otherwise, however. Reading books and short stories? Great. Presenting book and author? I suppose that is fine. There are even two tests and a final exam… wait, what? Despite my hopes of being in a class that is a bit of unconventionality (while my introductory creative writing class was not entirely so, it was a refreshing change from AP-esque biology classes that seem to decide to haunt me from my high school days in the history class) and the class’s interesting setting (I have not been to class with a seminar-style seating arrangement, ever), I find the curriculum to be a bit of a letdown. Oh, but what am I to do? Perhaps it was a bit too much for me to expect miracles and hope that a refreshing change was on its way. Funnily enough, the pleasant surprise was from the introductory computer science class…

…oh, crap. Don’t tell me that introductory classes are baits to get the students into certain majors? On a second thought, that is painfully obvious, but again, I am not too quick on realizing some things (like this) that are supposed to be common sense. I guess the common sense is not very common when you do not know them?

Choosing a major is hard.

Through the first week

The first week of school is over.  I have not been this busy--or tired--in a while, and I speak from attending the classes on the easiest week of the semester: the first one.  This probably does not bode well with me, at least concerning my stamina.  I dozed off in the computer science class, not because I found it boring, but rather, I got up at 6 or so and had about four hours of intermittent sleep.  I am not sure what the instructor thinks about that—I pretty much dropped in the middle of note-taking, with the pen rolling off my and and onto the floor.  Waking up every few hours with a coughing fit did not help me rest.  I did recuperate after a short nap in the library, but it does not change the fact that I was groggy and tired enough in late morning; when was the last time I did that?

Aside from sapping my energy, how was college?  Pretty all right, but pretty busy.  I am working at a shop right near the campus--so more often than not I go to class one hour, and on the next hour (or four) I would be manning the register and bouncing about for other chores.  Working like this is not bad, really; I get to make money while going to school, and the shift is neither on the weekend nor at night--I am done much of the time by the time the sun sets, free to pursue other interests.  The recession's reach is great, however; I have been facing cuts in hours because the businesses are suffering--including, of course, where I work.  I have thought about whether or not I am a part of the problem--I am not very good when it comes to human interactions, and I have had my share of troubles with customers--sure, I have been able to weave through many situations, albeit barely, but I probably would not be able to make a living as a door-to-door salesman or even as a fundraiser of sorts.  On the other hand, I doubt that I could be doing that badly.

I have two classes that are in the afternoon.  Both have crammed the three-hour week into one day.  It is very hard to sit through three hours and not get bored or tired; I am naturally fidgety.  Thankfully (unfortunately?) the classes seem to be engaging enough, although I am wondering if I can keep up with the paces of five different classes.  Time will tell, will it not

I have been taking pictures, albeit not great ones—so no pictures today.

Camera change: SD790 IS

The camera I have been using for this blog, as well as for past 8 or so years of my life, is this bad boy.

It was a state-of-the-art camera back when I bought it.  $599, 3 megapixels, took the original powder-purple memory stick.  It still works, possibly like the day it was bought.  It has gotten some accessory upgrades, of sorts.  I gave it the biggest memory stick it can take (128MB--a joke by today's standards) and swapped the battery.  It is built like a tank.  It really feels like a block of aluminum--perhaps I should describe it more later, and share some stories with it.

So, yeah, after Christmas, I took a deep breath and bought a new digital camera.  I needed one.  I did have a Canon S5 for a short while, but I found it too big to carry around.

After much pondering and reading more reviews than I probably should, I settled on a camera.

So this is what I got--a Canon SD790 IS.

I did not want to carry around something heavy, and I have heard (read?) good things about it, and Amazon had it on sale (albeit for mere $10 less than usual) so I jumped on it.

So far, it feels okay.  It is about as heavy as DSC-P5, but somehow... it feels like there is more plastic involved in this camera.

I would also like to mention that the back buttons, while oddly shaped and feeling inspired by RAZR, works.  Problem, though, is that all but one buttons lack discernable feedbacks.  You know, the "click" feeling you get once you push a button.  The RAZR buttons have none.  Except one, to the lower right.  It feels like crap.  The wheel buttons feel excellent, though.

That's my first impression.  Expect me to talk more about it as I get more used to the camera.

This is the world's way of saying "it's not your time yet."

It keeps on raining lately.  Since last week, the rain comes and goes, and today there is even a flash flood warning, and the asphalt never really dried up for the past few days, which explains a lot of cars stopped along the shoulders of the road with headlights turned the wrong way.  Oh, that is nothing, as no casualty would be recorded in much of the cases, human or car.  But accidents were everywhere as well.  I have mentioned that college started yesterday; I probably also mentioned that traffic was hell.  Here is the reason.

As bitchy as I am about people not being able to drive well, I would have never guessed that I would be part of the rainy day scenery as well.

Oh, but I consider myself lucky compared to the examples I have mentioned.  I have not gotten into the accident, nor did I spin out and end up in a shoulder with car in opposite direction of where I should be going... oh, but I did spin out of control.  Quite violently, in fact.  I consider myself lucky that I drive a compact; if I drove, say, a Jeep, I would be writing a blog from heaven right now.

So this is what happened:  I went through the Spaghetti Junction (probably one of the landmarks here with pretty negative connotation here) to the southbound interstate.  There is a somewhat sharp curve--not very sharp, but sharp enough to warrant a slow approach, especially in wet weather--near the entrance to southbound interstate.  I did slow down, but apparently not enough.  So there I went, with the tires losing grip and car fishtailing into chaos.  The car was turning clockwise, so I counteracted, as I learned from what I think was a defensive driving course.  The car then commenced to fishtail to the left; I turned the other way.  I slipped out of the regular lane and onto the shoulder, but the rear wheel was caught in the grassy no-man's-land that separated the on-ramp from the lane; I was straightened out after the troubles of a few seconds.

After I got the car under control, I wanted to take a look at the extent of the damage; I did not want to drive in a car with parts falling apart.  Fortunately, it looked all right; but that was after looking at it in the parking lot at college campus.  I stopped at the shoulder of the interstate initially, but it was full of water and I did not put enough space between driver's side door and the highway lane.  So I stopped for no reason there at all.

Was it a life-changing moment?  I do not know.  The whole endeavor felt like a miracle, however.  I have essentially skid the car across at least three different lanes, not including the shoulder, going at some 40 to 50 miles per hour, and I have not hit a single car.  It does not merit an applause; it was a very dangerous driving.  If anything, that was a very lucky incident, or as I said earlier, a miracle.  My heart was not pounding after the experience, though.  I do not know what it was that kept me calm and perhaps a little detached.  Did I not fear death?  Did adrenaline not rush in?  Perhaps, just perhaps, I wanted things to end--with regrets, sure, but at least I do not have to suffer by toiling through the rest of life.

Oh, but I will not spend much time in negative thought.

At least the car is okay, right?  Aside from the rear wheel chewing up the grass...

"And will you post when you get home?"

Yes, I am back from the first day of college.

Of course, this is not my first day of college ever; my academic transcript even says I am a "returning student."  For someone who is so used to seeing "good standing" in the transcripts, such words are unfamiliar to me.  I have but taken just fall semester off, and this is what happens... I am pretty sure the bloody university, with its rolls of red tapes all over the campus (or whatever they call the areas of downtown with classroom buildings anyway), would have taken me off the roster and forced me to reapply to it.  Oh, I hate it.  Yet I am back to the same dreaded campus, probably for me to stick around a while longer.  They will rue the day I get my diploma and I am no more needed in the building.

For first day, though, today was a hell of a day.  I was still sick (and I still am) and woke up groggy.  I tried to register for a different class, but could not, as the school registration server went kaput--it happens at the beginning of every semester.  I hope the school would learn its lesson soon.  The website for registering classes also tells me that there has been a "break in attempt" and resets my login information whenever I try to browse with more than one tab for the registration page because it was so damn slow.  I gave up, and decided to go to class early and get things done.

You know, sometimes things just do not work out that way.

I was stuck in traffic, thanks to people not able to drive properly with some rain on the pavement.  Normally I would get to school from home in 30 minutes; today it took an hour and then some more minutes.  By the time I got to class, it has already started.  Bad start.

It was okay though, as I managed to get into just the classes I wanted later in the afternoon, after work.  But I digress.

The work was all right; a little slower than I hoped, but still all right.

But the hellish part was the evening class.  It was business and legal environment; 2 hours 30 minutes long, it was a three-day one-hour class shoved together into one huge block of class.  The professor was ridiculous, though; I was surprised that I even got to manage the class well enough.  I was barely prepared, with reading material, well, read a few minutes before class started.  Reading material, on first day!  Preposterous.  It is only one day of the week, though...

And that's it.  I'm tired.  Gotta wake up at 6:45.  Shit sucks.

One Step Forward, Tomorrow

Restarting school--it still feels surreal to me.  Am I going back, after months of absence, seemingly naked in intellect and older than others in the classroom yet no better in knowledge or wisdom?  Perhaps I could have been better off just staying out, wandering about and passing time while working in a lower-end job.

And here I am, rambling about while being still sick.

I will save you the pictures, as I can only take so many pictures of my room.  I am sure you are sick of it.  What else would you like, really?  I have not bought anything new, and I could review some things that I own--but I am no reviewer, and things will deviate.

Speaking of deviation, back to the topic at hand.

I have school tomorrow, with the classes I may not even want--heck, I am not sure if I should follow through with the whole business thing.  Do I loathe it?  No, but I have a hunch that I may not enjoy it.  But I am here, and I will keep my fingers crossed, hoping things will work out.

I am supposed to schedule an appointment with the career advisor that I mentioned earlier.  What time would be nice?  Have I done my homework and looked thoroughly enough at the things I am supposed to look at?  And... most importantly, am I making the right decision, seemingly putting everything on the line with the things the advisor had said?

Time will tell.

Backlash of Consumption

I have spent the better part of this evening perusing for a deal on something that I may or may not use.  It's an action figure, not a traditional one but one from a manga--and it appears to be popular with some people.  Being sick does that to you:  you do not want to do anything but just sit around and surf the web.

Here's a sample of what I was looking for, courtesy of ALTZERO:

I know, while it is cute, I may not be able to pull off some nice pictures.  I would never know if I did not try, sure, but I cannot count just how many different hobbies and interests I had during the past few years.  Oh, I start by thinking that I would put enough time to be good, and maybe, just maybe, it will help me somehow (hopefully in financial side).  Instead the parts and instruments and equipments get set aside, how-to books become a showcase on a bookshelf never to be opened, and I end up a few (or maybe a few hundred) dollars short.

To be honest, this blog, too, is a hobby of sort for me:  it is meant to track record of bettering myself, or so I told myself, but I also thought that I could generate traffic (how else do some select bloggers keep writing without any other jobs?) and wondered if I should put this on a hosting service.  It costs a few dollars a month, which is not much... but this is also a good time to tell you that this is not my first blog.  Quite the contrary:  I had quite a few, now most of them shut down, sometimes with hosting services or domains.  None of them worked, to be frank.

And what am I trying to say here?  Oh, a few things, really.  For one, I am terrible at decision-making, and that trickles down to spending patterns as well.  How else could one, for example, end up with a bass guitar that he cannot play, a 400 dollars' worth of computer equipment despite spending more than a grand (through repeat buying-and-selling-at-loss-on-eBay), and boatload of books and games and DVDs that sit on the bookshelf, likely never opened?  Oh, and do not get me started on take-outs and such. Eating out too often is, in fact, a big part of what dragged me down, financial-wise.

I am now in some $6000 of debt, all on credit card.  Good news is, all the debt is now in one card and will incur no interest for about seven months.  Bad news, though, is that no amount of balance transfer will get rid of debt altogether, and I only get about $10k from work per year, if I am lucky.  At least I have paid my tuition, although that was by taking some extra debt via balance transfer and draining all my savings.

At the end of the surfing spree of looking for merchandise and checking for stocks, I decided to hold off on the purchase for now.  It is only $20 or so, but I need to keep in mind:  two orders of Chinese takeout, too, cost $20 or so.  Will the figure go away when I change my mind?  It's possible.  But at least, later in time, I will know if I made a good decision or not just now.  For now, I will make do.  Somehow.

Reprieve (from restless nights) - Back To School

It is relieving in a way, seeing the end of the registration period and getting the printout of my tuition paid.  I am now a full-time college student (again), although I am still working at a sandwich shop.  Believe me, working there rings pretty low on the self-esteem-while-on-the-job scale, but the owners have been very nice to me and I would rather help them than a bunch of strangers.  Still, a sandwich shop... the hours are not as long as they used to be, thanks to the recession and everyone clenching tight to their wallets and not buying much of anything at all.  Before I started taking the unpaid vacation (that is what I have been doing since the 19th of December), I saw the money in the tip jar and the customers both dwindle.  Yeah, that kind of blew.

I have mentioned from earlier post (I think) that I planned to change my major.  I have not, yet, as the career advisor recommended against it.  For a while, I had set my mind on changing to CIS--computer information system.  It looked like a major with good enough field that could weather the recession (somewhat).  She recommended computer science instead, as I was not sociable enough for business field (or so the assessments say).  Is it true, is that right?  I would denounce that and just fill out the form for changing college to a business one.

Except, of course, I don't.

I have too much doubt in my mind.

I know the truth as well--I am not a sociable person, or I would not have ended up like this.

So here are what I have done, as far as registering classes go:

*Introductory computer science class (3 credits)
*Introductory accounting 1 (3 credits) (needed for core and both CS and CIS)
*Legal environment of business (3 credits) (will determine if I will be able to handle CIS)
*Managing IT projects (3 credits) (ditto)

I still think that not enough thought has gone into the process of choosing these classes. What am I to do?  Oh, there is one thing I need to do... research over the weekend and change courses as soon as the sun rises.

Oh boy.

Agenda? In Search of Major and Career

Here we are, in 2009. Do you feel any different? I did not think so, and neither do I. Oh, but it is only expected; even with a new year coming, nothing will really change just because the year changed. Chances are, though, you are in better situation than I (especially if you are able to sit in front of the computer for a few minutes to read what I am saying) so I ask you to stay optimistic, even though I am fishing for a reason to be so myself.

Currently, I am sick. I say this is about the worst time to plan out the futures and milestones for personal goals. Surfing the web and trying to choose what courses would be the best for me is one of the worse things (I can definitely think of worse things, hence not worst) I can do while being sick. My throat has swollen enough to block half the air passage, or so my mother tells me, and that was in the morning--it has gotten worse since then. I hope things get better tomorrow.

The sickness makes things tougher for me when choosing the courses last-minute. Tuition is due tomorrow at 5 PM--I have the money, albeit from a balance transfer offer by a credit card company. To be honest, I thought I would be working in spring as well, so I did not sign up for FAFSA, the tiring form that I have to fill out over and over again, often with same answers. I can probably just carbon-copy them and use the same thing year after year. Minus, arguably, the tax returns thing.

It is really hard to decide exactly which major to go for, though. The career advisor, I have a hunch, is a fluke--I thought she was quite helpful, and I do believe that she was genuinely trying to help, but I was not much in helping her helping me, if that's possible. No, I do not believe a magic method exists that lets me find my path in life (or--for god's sake, a major. I need guide in choosing a major, not career), but I honestly do not believe I am making much of a progress here.

My career advisor is against me switching college to CIS; she does not believe I am a good fit for CIS-based jobs, and wants me to shoot for CS instead, which would let me stay in Arts and Sciences College.

It will be good for me to think about things tomorrow morning. Hopefully, I will not be groggy or sickly enough to think things through.