The Countdown

Classes start in eleven days.
ELEVEN DAYS.

Meanwhile, painting "season" is coming to a close, there just won't be time (plus we'll have to deal with harvesting and preserving the garden!). Guess this means summer is coming to a close. <sad face>

{Meanwhile, check out the new website and domain for paintings at: www.graphicallyfrank.com}

The anticipation and anxiety have been churning up madness, and we've been doing the best balancing act possible. It feels like this brain is being crushed by the skull, all too often it feels a struggle to grasp a single line of thought and pull it out of the cloud. With only two semesters left before graduation it's the final countdown. The class load is heavier, the topics more focused...but for the forensic science class (yay!) and the class related to problems in political science. By the looks of the books for the POLSCI class, the problem being tackled this semester in the environment and energy in political policy. So...get ready to read a bunch of crap about that.

The mix of classes is really exciting this semester, and there are 12 books to plow through - some really interesting ones, like Smarter Than You Think by Clive Thompson, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr, Connecting Social Problems and Popular Culture: Why Media is Not the Answer by Karen Sternheimer, and Pop Culture Freaks: Identity, Mass Media, and Society by Dustin Kidd (don't worry, those links take you to Goodreads, not Amazon).

Oh, and there's another really cool nutritional study coming up that we'll be taking part in, which requires strict diet (set and provided by the scientists), heavy monitoring and staying at the facility (while still allowing for work and classes) twice, for eleven days at a time. Why would we do that, you ask?! It's going to cover just about all the remaining tuition costs for Fall semester, so, really...it's just logical. Plus it'll be a savings on
a) gas ($90 dollars for each eleven day stay)
b) groceries
c) alcohol
d) time (80+ minutes of travel a day).
It would almost be stupid not to do it. It would be. It would be totally stupid to pass it up just because of the inconvenience of not sleeping at home (and having all meals and liquids dictated by strangers).
But, we can have visitors. :-)

It feels like the summer went too fast and we didn't do enough writing. It's unfortunate because there were a lot of events some of us would have liked to cover, if only to keep our writing in check, because it feels like this semester is going to be heavy in essay writing, since there is only ONE actual textbook for one of the six classes, the others are destined to be springboards to further research and writing. Having not written all summer, suddenly it's hard to remember how to write anything, let alone in the style of essay, despite having written a stack of them last semester.
Surely just the most average of the anxiety creeping into the space between skull and skin.

So, eleven days and our schedule changes again (schedules are sort of a linchpin in our mental health)...we'll stay positive until proven otherwise.

As always, thanks for reading even though you probably had something better to do.