Mindless Monday...

It’s Monday morning and I’m sitting in the library. I think that sentence alone just explains how much of an off day this is. I don’t like sitting in libraries. At UConn when people want me to go there and study with them I will gladly apologize and explain to them that I can’t. There is something about being in the library that makes it impossible to focus, especially when there are other people around and they’re all doing their own thing. It just gets frustrating so I don’t go. Actually I’m getting pretty antsy just sitting here so I might go find the books for my classes soon and then leave. I’m not sure where I would go if I left now. It’s raining today and I have another 2.5 hours before my last class of the day and I don’t want to walk back to the apartment just to have to come back. Why I picked the library to spend my time in… when I can answer that I will.

Today has pretty much been a mess so far. For one thing the English department for some reason believes they are special enough to have their own class registration time that is completely separate from general class registration. Why? I have no clue. I feel so bad for the two ladies who were doing all of the registration stuff because I’m pretty sure that as soon as they started talking to me I just gave them a blank stare. For the most part it has been fairly easy to understand when Irish people talk to me, but this one lady had such a thick accent and she spoke really fast and I’m pretty sure she was getting slightly annoyed with me. Especially when she wanted to know what English classes I was planning on taking and I couldn’t even come up with the name of them. Every time I’ve had to fill forms out I can just check the classes off myself or see the class names and just point them out. She just asked me to tell her the names and I drew a blank. Of course the first thing I decide to say is that I’m taking three of them and she pretty much said that’s nice and rolled her eyes. I feel so bad but my mind was just not connecting this morning. Once that was done I had to go do the general class registration thing which was really funny because there were a bunch of us kind of lined up in this little hallway and we were standing pretty close to each other. Then this girl walks in, looks around, and then asks us all to move even closer together because there wasn’t room for her at the end of the line and no one moved for her. There were other people who opened the door, saw the line, and decided to wait outside. She was getting upset because there wasn’t room for her in the line so that she could stand inside. I was standing with Vanessa and the two of us just cracked up. Once we were done with that I had my first class.

So seeing how we had orientation on their first day of classes I obviously missed the usual review of the course and what not that happens on the first day. Apparently I also missed the first lectures of my classes. Their classes meet twice a week and last week most of my classes only had the chance to meet once. Well they certainly don’t wait to really get started with anything here. Day 1 of class and I’m already an entire book behind in one class and a play behind in the other one. They don’t really get specific assignments with their books. They’re kind of just told go read and we’ll talk about this book for this long and then move on. Granted they do only have 3 months to do everything in so I can see why they choose to move so quickly, but right now I don’t even know how I’m going to read an entire book in a week while also doing everything else for my other classes. The play isn’t so bad because it is fairly easy to get through a play in one sitting. In one class my mind was completely blown, the teacher went through and laid out the entire plot, explained the crucial themes, gave us key points to focus on while reading, and explained half the book. That doesn’t EVER happen. Those are usually things that the students are told to figure out as they read the book, but she just gave it to us. As much as that makes it a lot easier to know what I’m looking for in the book I also feel like it takes away so much from the reading experience. It’s so different to just be handed all of that within the first couple of days of the class.

I realize that I’m mindlessly rambling on about things right now. I should go find my books for class and start getting caught up on all of this reading. Hopefully my music class tonight will be a lot easier to get caught up with. Time to go wander the library, yay!

With Love Always